Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way begins in Key West at the dawn of the â70sâwhere, Portland author Ryan White notes, âthe drugs were plentiful, and the sex wouldnât kill you,â and where a bar called the Chart Room, with its âdark wood, scuffed floors, thumbtacked navigational charts, and Mos Eisley charmâ was âwhere the sheriff who ran Jerry Jeff to Coconut Grove would drink alongside treasure hunters who hung out with dope smugglers who knew the shrimpers who didnât kick the shit out of the artists.â
The Chart Room served as a makeshift HQ for a young singer-songwriter named Jimmy Buffett, whoâd go on to invent a low-key genre of music best described as âgulf and western,â scraping by for years before finding success. Once found, success encompassed restaurants, casinos, trademarked tequila, and $300 Margaritaville Key West Frozen Concoction Makers.
Buffettâs is a strange storyâone that involves a fateful visit to Portlandâs long-gone Euphoria Tavernâand White, it turns out, is the perfect guy to tell it. (Full disclosure: White has written for the Mercury, including a piece about Buffett and the Euphoria.) Itâs also a contentious story: Just ask any member of the Church of Buffett, Orthodox, a possibly imaginary institution that reveres only four of Buffettâs âenlightened worksâ that predate his âslide towards commercialism.â (To be fair, they are the best albums.)
Making full use of charming, in-depth interviews with those whoâve worked with Buffett, White gives the man his oft-overlooked due as a songwriter, charting his path from a bar musician with a hell of a work ethic to a corporate overlord with a hell of a work ethic. But the best parts of A Good Life are the unexpected detoursâthe half-faded recollections of those in Buffettâs formerly hard-partying circle of musicians, producers, and writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Jim Harrison.
Like any good Buffett song, A Good Life is entertaining and wittyâand like any great Buffett song, it has a shadow of melancholy. Towards the end, White finds himself at a parrothead convention in a cleaned-up Key West, where Buffett plays a deep cut: âDeath of an Unpopular Poet,â his somber 1973 ballad inspired by the passing of writer Kenneth Patchen. âI donât get to play this song enough,â Buffett tells the crowd. âI love this song. I really do.â
âHe makes the set lists,â White points out. âHe could play it more, but then maybe he canât. Whatâs worse, after all, not playing a song you love, or watching a basketball arena get up and go for more beer while you play the song you love?â
Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All The Way
by Ryan White
(Touchstone)