Missing Margaritaville

This is a Sunday Story.  Not much politics here – just the impact of music on my life, and the loss of Jimmy Buffett this weekend.

Country

When I was growing up, Country music was “not cool”.  It was the sixties, and Country-Western was unavoidable.  It was on “regular”  TV twice a week!  The national Grand Ole Opry Show was on, and locally, WLW-T  had the Midwestern Hayride.   There were twangy fiddles and whiny singers, guitars and banjos.  It was early Saturday evening; us kids waited for it to finish so we could see “Saturday Night at the Movies”.  It was definitely not our kind of music.

Mom and Dad had an extensive record collection, though they really didn’t listen to that much music at home.  When they did, it was the singers from the Big Band Era; Sinatra, Williams, Como, and Tony Bennett.  Or it was the jazz pianists like Peter Nero, or Broadway show tunes.  What I didn’t know was that in their younger days, Mom and Dad loved going to the Big Band shows downtown and dancing; shows like the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and even our cousin, Tommy Lee (Levine).

Rock and Roll

But upstairs, my sisters were playing rock and roll.  I still have the “mono” version of “Meet the Beatles”, permanently borrowed from their collection. My own first record, a “45”, was James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” on one side, and “Anywhere Like Heaven” on the other.  Next came Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” album, then Blood Sweat and Tears.  They’re all still stacked on the shelf underneath a new turntable today (the band drive wore out on the old one). 

So I grew up in the folk rock of the late sixties, with some Beatles on the side, and a little jazz-rock mixed in.  Then I “discovered” Crosby-Stills-Nash and Young, wearing out two copies of their live album, Four Way Street.  They were acoustic and hard rock, a combination that opened me up to a lot more music.  What I didn’t realize was there was “country” in CSNY’s work as well.  One of their most popular songs, “Teach Your Children”, opened with a “country” pedal-guitar segment.  I later learned that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead sat-in to record it.  

And then there was the other California “rock” singers; the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Linda Rondstat. There was always a “country” element to their work.  And once you liked the Eagles, how could you not like “Alabama”, a real country group.  So “country” was working its way into my consciousness.

Southern Rock

But I still avoided “country”.  So when I first heard the Allman Brothers “Eat a Peach” album with their rock and country mix, the slide guitars from Opry fame and long instrumental sets like Blood Sweat and Tears, I had to overcome my “country fear”.  But those long sets fit right into driving through the night on empty highways, something I did a lot of in my twenties.  And my introduction into “Southern Rock” was furthered when I was working on the Carter Presidential campaign in 1976.  Carter  himself was an Allman Brothers and Charlie Daniels friend and fan, so of course, their songs became “themes” of the campaign offices.

So, like it or not, Southern Rock slipped into my playlists.  There was the Marshall Tucker Band (“Can’t You See”), and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s, “Sweet Home Alabama” (though the Neil Young reference always annoyed me).  And who in the world didn’t like “Free Bird”?  Crossing the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the dark, nothing got my 1967 Volkswagen Squareback moving like Skynyrd at full volume.

And somewhere in all of that, a country song from an “unknown” named Jimmy Buffett slipped in.  I doubt it was on the “Pirate Rock” stations I usually listened to on the radio, like WEBN in Cincinnati or WLVQ in Columbus.  But I heard “Come Monday”, and related to wearing Hush Puppies shoes.  And I got the theme:  get through this, and there will be a better day.  It will be all right.

Changes in Attitude

As an adult I went through phases.  There was the eighties, were I reverted to psychedelic rock:  the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, in response to the “Hair Metal” I heard from the kids I coached.  And, even though I grew up in a “Beatles” house, I also “discovered” a group called the Rolling Stones.  Then my brother-in-law introduced me to another side of “Country”, Bluegrass music.  All of a sudden, I was listening to the descendants of those “twangy” fiddles and “whiny” vocals I dodged as a kid.   Now I’ve heard folks like the Steep Canyon Rangers, Bela Fleck, and Sam Bush, live on stage.

But it wasn’t until I retired that I started listening to more from Jimmy Buffett. He was a “country” singer, who crossed out of country to create a whole new genre of music.  He first called his style “Drunken Caribbean” but later settled “Gulf-Western”.  It combined the typical country ballad, with the rhythms and instruments of the islands. 

 Jenn and I spent a “snowbird” winter in Florida, hanging out on beaches and in  “Tiki Bars”.  Buffett music poured over us like the afternoon sun on Wabasso Beach and the Atlantic waves lapping on the shore. Instead of the anguished protests of CSNY, or the frenzied “trips” down the rabbit hole with the Jefferson Airplane, Buffett was about laying back, “chillin’, with the next Corona (or Landshark) cold in your hand and sand under your feet.

His music symbolized a lifestyle “inverse” for me.  The eighty and ninety hour work weeks of decades turned into songs of the sea, and the beach, and the nearest bar with live music.  Just as the protest music in the early seventies fit my life, so did Buffett’s call to relax and enjoy fit in the twenty-teens.  

Jimmy Buffett passed away this weekend.  I can’t say I was a “Parrot Head”, and I never got to add him to my “bucket list” of live concerts.  But his music still themes this segment of my life.  We “raised a glass” to Jimmy last night.  It was a Margarita.

The Sunday Story Series

Author: Marty Dahlman

I'm Marty Dahlman. After forty years of teaching and coaching track and cross country, I've finally retired!!! I've also spent a lot of time in politics, working campaigns from local school elections to Presidential campaigns.