Not-Terribly-Poetic License

Album Review: License to Chill by Jimmy Buffett

This review, the first posted in this space, will likely end up with far more backstory than actual critique of the record – which might be a good thing. It’s just that my evaluation of this album is unavoidably tied to Jimmy Buffett’s 30+ years of music-making and its relative worth by comparison. No artist wants to be hamstrung by his or her past works, but in this case Buffett’s ancient history is much more of a standard for these new tunes than, say, other new music of any genre. Additionally, since music reviews, despite having the pretense of being objective analyses, are merely an individual’s personal opinion of some music, a bit of background on the formation of the reviewer’s tastes can only enhance the reader’s sense of the music without actually listening to it. (A huge i.e., Whitney’s going to inundate us with way more than we ever needed to know.)

License to Chill, besides being a distant, mega-distant, extremely distant second to another album whose title is a play on the “license to kill” expression, represents an overt change of direction for Jimmy Buffett. “Bubba” has gone Country, which sounds almost as silly as it really is. Let me explain.

Jimmy Buffett has spent his last 15 years moving further from the category of legitimate music-maker and closer to commercial entertainer, catapulting himself to superstardom in the cartoonish persona of the tropical party guy in the Hawaiian shirt with a parrot in his hand and a margarita on his shoulder. (He’s wacky like that.) What music he did put out, though not completely void of a highlight here and there, was largely bland fare set to steel drums and congas, reinforcing his Caribbean theme. So when JB released License to Chill, which features a half-dozen contemporary country music stars chiming in on tunes destined for airplay on your local “Today’s Hottest New Country” stations, it took many Parrot Heads aback. It shouldn’t have, for a number of reasons.

The most obvious clue to what was coming from Jimmy Buffett was the duet he sang last year with Alan Jackson, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.” The song was neo-country in its sound and neo-Buffett in its lyrics, right down to the witty, woo-hoo party train title – which might have been considered clever had it not been used by the venerable Slash’s Snakepit nearly a decade prior. Despite the fact that “duet” could be used fairly liberally to describe the tune, since Jimmy only adds one run-through of the chorus at the end (plus some of the nitwitted conversational chatter that has gradually become his signature style, much to my extreme chagrin) the song was a hit for Jackson and reunited Buffett and the Billboard charts (see below for some lunatic’s rant on those) for the first time in eons. Jimmy Buffett, Inc. had to see the dollar signs coming from an entire album featuring more of the same. To be cynical about Buffett’s commercialism these days is merely a reaction to its ubiquitous ugly head-rearing – defenders of the man point to his dearth of chartings (and presumably profits) by his latter-day releases, but the following statistics tell another tale:

a 11 live albums, including eight in the last two years
a 16 (!) compilation albums
a A Christmas album, a soundtrack re-release, a kids’ album, a musical, and several Margaritaville Café albums in the last decade

All that and he has yet to re-release his catalogue in remastered form with the full liners, the one commercial recycle that the music companies do that's often worth the repeat buy! Now, to be fair, of that ludicrous number of compilations, four are imports and six are cheap, rehashed issuances of his first two minor label (and minor quality) albums, so it’s questionable whether he has control over or receives financial benefit from every one of these shameful shams. But everything else seems to be coming from the King of the Parrot Heads himself, bilking bucks out of his “phlock” with repeated releases of the same material when all semi-casual fans really need is the box set and the first live one.

So the financial benefit from this new country bent for Buffett is clear; what the bellyaching Parrot Heads fail to grasp, and what few reviewers acknowledge, however, is that beyond that, Jimmy Buffett really was a country musician once upon a time. Some reviews have noted that Buffett recorded in Nashville early on, or that he grew up in Mississippi, but they seem ignorant of the man’s foundation in music – one that, if you had to classify it, could fall under both kinds (country and western). By now, one of JB’s frequent shticks is that his music has never lent itself to categorization, despite frequent attempts by stuffed shirts to do so. He’s gone so far as to address the notion on License, singing, “Am I country, pop, or rock and roll / I know they are related / So I'll just let you be the judge / It's simply complicated.” Well, he was pretty damn country back in 1974, and if you don’t think so, give a listen to his first few albums. (Actually, give a listen even if you do believe it.) Listed below are ten dandies from Buffett’s first four major-label records from 1973-75 (omitting those tracks you’ve probably heard on Songs You Know By Heart) that leave little question:

“The Great Filling Station Holdup”
“Cuban Crime of Passion”
“The Wino and I Know”
“Ballad of Spider John”
“God’s Own Drunk”
“Life Is Just a Tire Swing”
“Trying to Reason with the Hurricane Season”
“Tin Cup Chalice”
“My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don’t Love Jesus”
“This Hotel Room”

Like License to Chill, Buffett’s early tunes fit into the country pattern, but unlike today’s formulaic country-by-numbers takes, they only had some loose qualifiers: a little acoustic guitar, harmonica, and a little twang, some tales of wild nights, long-lost women, and oceans of booze. Buffett’s songs had his own, fairly unique slant on it all, though – relocating the yarns to south Florida, to the Caribbean, and beyond, usually via his ragged sailboat. Island life and a humor-soaked bemoaning/celebrating of his own hard living filled his lyric sheets. So many songs still make me a little jealous – of his audacity to drop it all and head to Key West, of his good fortune (not his wealth but his timely entry into a world destined for extinction), and the legendary times we can only hear about from the outside listening in now. (Hell, his live album was called You Had to Be There; perfect.)

That I chose to highlight the first four records wasn’t an arbitrary dividing line. There’s an entire organization and accompanying website called The Church of Buffett, Orthodox dedicated to the premise that these four releases are gospel, that the next one is “the most troubling part of scripture; some advocates believe it belongs in [the previous category], while others believe that, since it contains the apostasy of “Margaritaville,” it does not belong with those other enlightened works,” and that everything subsequent is sub par in comparison. Years ago I used to think these guys were a little hardcore, since I enjoyed a lot of what Jimmy did in the late seventies and early- to mid-eighties, even if not quite as much. Somewhere along the way, however, I swapped sides of the fence with the CoB,O; I’m finding myself far more exclusively interested in his early stuff, while the Orthodoxers are sporting Amazon links to License to Chill, hocking gear, and embracing what they used to curse. It’s bad enough that one of Buffett’s good early tunes, “Makin’ Music for Money,” stands in total ironic contrast to everything he’s about now. (He hasn’t played it live, for obvious reasons, since 1977 – CoB,O’s turning point – save an inexplicable tour set in 1995 that I guess he hoped would fly under the radar.) But when the self-appointed committee formed to celebrate what Jimmy Buffett was rather than is, or what he did rather than does, abandons its mission and spirals into the abyss of rah-rah Buffett groupies, it’s beyond annoying – it’s weird on a Body Snatchers/Stepford Wives level. I’m a little worried that I’ll be jumping aboard this conga line very soon, so it’s critical I get these thoughts down before the lobotomy. (Utter concession: CoB,O is still the tip-top website in the world for old-time Buffett fans.)

I need to keep reminding myself that this is supposed to be a review of the new album, not The Rise and Fall of James W. Buffett. The Cliffs Notes version of what happened after “Margaritaville” changed everything: country faded into pop/rock, steel guitars played alongside steel drums, and JB even occasionally approached the dreaded “soft rock” milieu I loathe, but the melodies and lyrics were still good, so it was forgiven. By the end of the 80’s, though (my personal CoB,O end line comes right before the out-and-out weak Hot Water), the music changed considerably. Tropical and topical like never before, he tackled issues like ATM’s, MTV, and jogging between five and 20 years after they were pertinent. He issued song titles like “Smart Woman (In A Real Short Skirt),” “Don’t Chu-Know,” “What If The Hokey Pokey Is All It Really Is About?,” and “Math Suks” (sic, unfortunately). Yikes. He really did once have something interesting to say.

And the cover tunes, oh my! Far, far worse than those indicted in articles below, Jimmy began a habit in the 1990’s of recording at least one sacrilege, blasphemy, heresy, or desecration per album. He’d take a massively popular track and Buffettize it, adding Coral Reefer band instrumentation and his own increasingly nasal, talky vocals. This is probably overly harsh, but Jimmy Buffett punched me in the gut several times with dreadful renditions of some of my favorite songs. Over three decades, he has done many good things with other people’s songs; that said, the successful ones were always the relatively unknown tunes by Steve Goodman, Jesse Winchester, or an array of other collaborators. After a solid (though inferior to the Van Man) stab at “Brown-Eyed Girl” in 1983, Buffett must have realized that covering an enormous hit took a lot of the work out of things. Fortunately, another decade passed before he decided to rest on other folks’ laurels as much as he was resting on his own. Beginning in 1994, however, JB has churned out a wretched version of the Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band,” a de-harmonized cover of CSN’s “Southern Cross,” an even more tepid facsimile of James Taylor’s “Mexico,” a feeble turn at Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone,” an I-can’t-believe-he-even-tried-it cover of Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary,” and a there-oughta-be-a-law rendition of the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon.”

That last one particularly irked me for a couple of reasons: first, because it was one of my favorite songs of one of my favorite bands; second, because he edited Ray Davies’ lyrics to be more P.C. If you’re going to cover a song, cover it, dammit, I always remember Evan Lloyd saying. Old Ev used to bristle at Manfred Mann’s revision of Springsteen’s “For You,” one in which Mann clipped a dozen lines, then morphed “lick my sores” into “fight my wars,” presumably to be more radio-friendly. Buffett didn’t like the bad boy Kink image of “My girlfriend’s run off with my car / And gone back to her ma and pa / Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty,” so he softened the last phrase as “Parrot Heads and parties.” It’s pathetic that he’d even need to edit those 30-year-old lyrics, and even worse that he did. If you can’t handle mildly abrasive lines (not exactly 2 Live Crew), just take a pass on the whole thing. Drove me nuts, as you can see.

I guess that wasn’t the Cliffs Notes version after all. More like the Cliff Clavin version. As I have painstakingly – painfully for you, by now – chronicled, the career of Jimmy Buffett has seen inversely proportional skyrocketing and bottoming out in commercial success and artistic value. (I swear, he’s only a year or two from being a Vegas act.) Everything he does these days seems almost comically hypocritical when you hear the words of old tunes like “Brand New Country Star” and “My Lovely Lady.” (CoB,O has the lyrics.) For his family, the results of all of this have been ideal; for the masses of part-time Parrot Heads, they have proven inconsequential; for Buffett . . . purists, for lack of a term without such stigmatic baggage these days, they’ve been incredibly disappointing. Taking it so personally is silly, except that JB has always endeared fans on a personal level, despite a relative shortage of fan-friendly gestures. [His online retort telling Parrot Heads to “get a life” after they defended longtime harmonica maestro “Fingers” Taylor’s ideals after he quit the band because (a) Jimmy barred his musicians from playing side gigs, (b) Jimmy started making bandmembers’ families buy tickets, and (c) Fingers wasn’t too keen on the direction of the band’s music (God love him) – had all the alienation of Shatner’s plea to Trekkies in the SNL skit without the comedic lighter side.] Plus, you just hate to see a musician you admired become someone you loathe. And boy, it pains me to type that.

The most obvious comment on the content of Jimmy Buffett’s output over these years is that he simply ran out of things to say. He told us everything that was on his mind and shared all of his escapades in the 70’s. He recounted his more extensive world travels and gave more of his ever-tiring viewpoint on the world in the 80’s. By the 90’s, he was down to “Hey, look where else I went” and relaying other people’s lines. He even penned an autobiography, but by then it was mostly a rehash of his songbook in prose. Ticket prices soared along with concert predictability, chasing even this former die-hard away from shows. Into the new century, he’s had even less to share and has seemed to be scrambling even more desperately for material. The outlook has grown dim nearly beyond hope for resurgence. Other not-quite-languishing artists such as Bruce Springsteen have recently recaptured a little of the glory of their past primes (even artistically speaking), but Buffett’s road would be a bit tougher to hoe. With all sense of reality blurred with green-colored glasses, his creative tank emptied in the energy crisis of the late 70’s, and his melodies usually armed with one hook less than a certain other pirate, there may not be much likelihood in the belief that the JB of old might return someday. But we’re still searching for signs of life, like maybe . . . this new album?

License to Chill (you thought I’d forgotten about it, didn’t you?) may, in fact, provide such positive signs, even amid the usual cringes, winces, and head shakes. You have to dig a little, but they’re there.

In a juxtaposition that is becoming a motif, the worst aspects of the record are the ones that will ultimately draw the masses the most (and sell the most units). The pop-country songs, each guest-warbled by singers with Billboard familiarity, are the crossover bait that stand out the most from the slate of 16 tracks. And they’re mostly dreck. They’re either Buffett-penned throwaways like “Conky Tonkin’” and the title track, or fine songs marred in their cover form by JB and pop sensations Toby Keith, Alan Jackson, et al, like “Boats to Build” and “Piece of Work.” Only five of the 16 songs were actually written by the Chief Parrot Head, though you wouldn’t know it from the liners, which forgo all writing credits in an at-best disingenuous and at-worst plagiaristic omission. Several of the five self-authored tunes represent the worst writing on the album. In addition to the two mentioned above, “Simply Complicated” has been trashed by even the most complimentary reviewer, though in truth it’s no worse than the others. The title cut is painful enough to warrant further scrutiny. The opening lines are “Work, work, work / Big pile of it and the boss is a jerk.” This from the songwriter who once boastfully mused upon his own work that “Anybody can rhyme cat and rat. I look for things beyond two syllables – like attitudes and latitudes.” In a non-scientific search, “work” and “jerk” have unofficially been rhymed in song lyrics 11,898 times, most often by middle school garage bands and acts singing in English as a second language. There is plenty on this record for the Orthodox Buffettite to despise. Still, it’s not without a bright side.

The positives begin with the songs Jimmy wrote that didn’t fall into the pit of neo-country duets: “Coast of Carolina” and “Coastal Confessions.” Both of these songs are strong enough to both provide hope for the future and insist that Jimmy include “coast” in every song title from here on out (to join the solid “Coast of Marseilles” and “When the Coast Is Clear” off older albums). The second ray of light is the choice of covers. With 11 works lifted from other artists, he could have gone down main street for his choices, but he largely stayed away from hits, employing the use of singer/songwriter types like John Hiatt and Bruce Cockburn from whom to swipe tunes. He’s banking on you never having heard Hiatt’s and Cockburn’s voices on the originals, as their pipes dwarf his own – and that’ll be the case for most listeners. Sure, the lead track is “Hey Good Lookin’,” but if you can manage to put aside Hank Sr.’s classic, JB’s jazzed-up rendition has more spirit than anything he’s thrown together in a long time. And then there’s “Scarlet Begonias,” for which it’s a minor miracle that I mention this in this paragraph and not the one prior. It’s my all-time favorite Grateful Dead song, and when I saw it printed on the track list, I cursed Buffett like the sailor he used to be. The reason I praise it, though, is that it didn’t make me vomit uncontrollably when I heard it, a moral victory to be sure. It’s actually quite true to the original, which garners no favor for dead-horse reasons, but which somehow impressed me. The difference comes in Buffett’s vocals, which went south on him 20 years ago and come across as more than a bit geeky. In enunciating every syllable, he dorks up Jerry’s smooth slurs. (Example: “Grosvenor” gets so over-pronounced that “Grosvenerd Square” inevitably comes to mind.) Other than that, though, there’s little as disastrous as in earlier tries at covering my favorites.

Also of note is Jimmy’s startling recruitment of Bill Withers – stunning, since Withers retired years ago and it seemed unlikely that someone as far removed from his work as Jimmy Buffett could lure him back out. Withers, for the unfamiliar, you know as the guy who originally did “Lean On Me,” though I dig him for the most soulful two minutes of the 1970’s in “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Withers wrote and co-crooned “Playin’ the Loser Again” off this album, an imminently listenable tune by comparison with some of the other collaborations. Kudos to Buffett for that move, and whatever you’ve got on old Bill, keep twisting the knife for future work.

So License to Chill, despite the witless title, is not without its merits, though it seems every one of them comes with a few bowlines attached. Ever the optimist (you can’t have purchased every Jimmy Buffett studio album without being either an optimist, an idiot, or both), I choose to see the upside of this release as a re-launching of Jimmy B’s recording career in a brighter vein than we’ve seen in many years. After his early solid work and his extended second period of crap, this will be the third door, with Jimmy excavating his old line, “I'll be back just wait and see / 'Cause my whole world lies waiting behind door number three.” For the longtime fans who’ve endured a torturous stretch, I’d say give this one a shot. It doesn’t hark back to those vintage years, but it’s a step in the right direction after miles and miles traveled the wrong way for so long.

Oh, yeah – for the average listener, though, I’ll give it a more brutally honest grade. Sorry, but I don’t want anyone other than a maniacal Parrot Head wasting their money on this record. For you people, go buy A1A and thank me later.

Musical Musings Review: C-

[Future reviews need not -- and probably should not -- be this long. But I think it was cathartic for me to vent on this subject. I promise to keep it more brief in subsequent critiques.]