In Their Own Words…
In Their Own Words…
• “It’s important to have as much fun as possible while we’re here. It balances out the times when the minefield of life explodes.”
– Buffett facebook post from 2022.
• “If I were a very religious person, I would say that constitutes the redneck Riviera rapture.”
– Buffett, Wharf Amphitheater, April 24, 2015
• “At the Bama Breeze. You’re one of our own down there. You never drink alone down there. Good God I feel at home down there.”
– Bama Breeze, Buffett’s ode to the Flora-Bama.
• “Jimmy Buffett, Roguish Bard of Island Escapism, Is Dead at 76.”
– New York Times headline.
“I blew out my flip-flop. Stepped on a pop-top. Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home. But there’s booze in the blender. And soon it will render. That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”
– Verse from Buffett’s only top 10 hit.
• “Buffett has been regaling audiences for over five decades with songs about the faces and places he’s seen during his journey along the road less travelled. With Hemingway’s eye for detail and Mark Twain’s inclination for mischievous humor, his music tells the stories of hustlers, beach bums and pirates he has encountered while traveling to all corners of the world.’’
– Mullet Wrapper preview of 2021 Buffett Wharf concert.
• “Sweet Home Flora-Bama.’’
– Buffett tweaking the Skynard song on stage at The Wharf.
• “I’ve done a bit of smugglin’, and I’ve run my share of grass. I made enough money to buy Miami. But I pissed it away so fast. Never meant to last. Never meant to last.”
– A Pirate Looks at Forty, maybe Buffett’s most enduring song.
• “Jimmy painted pictures and short stories in all the songs he wrote. He taught a lot of people about the poetry in just living, especially this kid from East Tennessee.”
– Kenny Chesney in a statement to Rolling Stone.
• “The way I understand it growing up, Mardi Gras was a time for partying, and partying at Mardi Gras took on a whole other definition. “To most people, it was allowing themselves to disregard many of the rules by which they lived most of their lives.”
– Excerpt from Buffett’s book, A Pirate Looks At Fifty.
• “It was still a Navy town. It was a gay town. It was a hippie town. It was a local fisherman’s town. You want a melting pot? It was just that. It never ceased to give me ideas or hear stories from which those first songs came.”
– Buffett describing Key West in the early 1970’s.
• ‘’The audiences are so much fun for me to look at they are as entertaining to me as hopefully I am to them.’’
– Jimmy Buffett.
• “It’s always a sad day when we lose a beloved artist and musician and so sad for me personally to lose a dear friend.”
– Paul Simon.
• “It’s pure escapism is all it is. I’m not the first one to do it, nor shall I probably be the last. But I think it’s really a part of the human condition that you’ve got to have some fun. You’ve got to get away from whatever you do to make a living or other parts of life that stress you out. I try to make it at least 50/50 fun to work and so far it’s worked out.”
– Jimmy Buffett.
• Two weeks out of the year, it’s all about sin … count me in.”
– Lyrics to Serpentine, one of Buffett’s odes to Carnival season.
• “That’s a very interesting question. I don’t think there would have been.’’
– Would there by a Jimmy Buffett, if he didn’t go to New Orleans.
• “You learn on the streets, and you learn it playin’ in bars, and you learn how to get along with people, and you learn what it takes psychologically to A, start a band, B, keep it together, and C, if you hit, deal with the success. It eats up a lot of people.’’
– Buffett in a 1993 interview with Offbeat.