Maybe we shouldn’t tell you this, but there just might be a way to get to see Jimmy Buffett on his downtime.
He’ll be in the region for a concert that has become something of a Labor Day tradition here, but what does he do in those sagging hours between arriving here and getting to the arena? Well, it’s all in his online journal.
“As a road dog for a good number of years, even though I do possess a few computer skills, I don’t do a lot of shopping online. Eating up the idle hours between getting up and going to the gig in every major city in America has turned me into a shopper,” he writes. “I tend to spend those hours in real retail stores like marine hardware suppliers, bookstores, tackle and surf shops, where you can actually handle things before you buy them.”
Buffett is one of the few entertainers out there whose star just continues to rise. He plays hundreds of concerts, releases new music regularly (his last album was 2009’s “Buffet Hotel”), and has a whole line of products bearing his name (“Want to be a product tester for a Margaritaville Liquor Chiller?” one announcement on his Web site asks).
He also is a guest artist on what may become one of the biggest albums of the year — “You Get What You Give,” the just-released album by the ultrahot Zac Brown Band.
Tough to believe that just another musician from Mississippi with a guitar and a dream went on to become a country singer-songwriter in the early 1970s and altered his music to reflect his adopted Key West lifestyle.
Coral Reefer Band member Mac McAnally, a lauded singer-songwriter and producer, said Buffett’s persona is not a facade. After meeting him in the mid-’70s, Buffet — who had just released the album “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” which includes his trademark song “Margaritaville” — invited him to collaborate. They work together to this day.
“That was a big positive for me in the music business,” McAnally said. “A lot of folks in this business don’t mean what they say, but [Buffett] does and we are just as loyal to him.”
