He died on Labor Day, the end of summer,
And left us going back to work or school.
The days are shorter, now, the parties glummer,
Less heat and light, less beat and life, less cool.
We fall back on our favorite expressions
Of what it means to be young, tan, and free,
And weigh the anchors of adult discretions
Imagining we sail a sapphire sea.
The songs he sang, those figurative vacations,
Have turned our water into stronger stuff.
We toast each other, changing our frustrations
With dailiness to fantasizing fluff,
And drink the happy liquor we distil
From metaphoric Margaritaville.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “My favorite Jimmy Buffett songs are ‘A Pirate Looks At Forty‘ and ‘Tin Cup Chalice‘, but I think his best song is ‘Margaritaville.’ I’m not as fond of ‘He Went To Paris‘ or ‘Death of an Unpopular Poet‘ as other celebrants of his work, and ‘Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw‘ is certainly the best of the more raucous end of his oeuvre.

Like many other singer-songwriters Buffett seemed to me to work without an editor, possibly because the music business is such that even when you find a peer-group that you trust to say this or that just ain’t right, it’s hard to get the group together often enough, and for long enough, for the trust to re-blossom so that real reflection and re-working of lyrics can happen.

Those circumstances lead a lot of singer-songwriters, I think, to something that is not exactly laziness, and not quite smugness, but rather perhaps more like a sense that they’re the only ones whose taste they trust to judge their own work. Then they slide into a state where they are not themselves as critical of their own work as they once were. They get a good idea and a good line or two in the chorus, and the rest of it gets sort of clamped and glued together without a final planing, sanding, and paint job. The music is well-arranged and well-performed because you can’t fool musicians about music, but the lyrics tend to seem a little hasty, a little down-at-heels, a little scratch-and-dent. It’s too bad because their early work is almost always lyrically inventive and musically simple, while their later work is musically slick and lyrically spotty.

When I first heard A1A in 1978 I was entranced. No one else that I knew of was trying to sketch people and places from the point of view of a sort of scruffily aimless charmer. Oh, there was Tom Waits, but that was more noir and Bukowski than charming. Buffett’s work was entrancing, a refreshing way to write songs and perform them. A lot gets forgiven in the enchantment of the charm, but eventually the clanker lines and the narratives that don’t quite hold together accumulated, and I started to notice the tarnish more than the shine.

So the later work did not grip me as the early work had, and for most of the last 40 years, as the work drifted into crowd-pleasing medium-tempo rockers with a cheery tale told by a richer, more self-congratulatory narrator offering a smoother sail in a bigger boat crewed by professionals, I became less and less interested in what I had come to view as a pervasive sloppiness in the contemporary singer-songwriter tradition. It seemed to affect them all as they worked longer in the business, except perhaps for Paul Simon. But Buffett, Diamond, Prine, Browne, just to name a few, seemed all to become more facile than artful And Buffett in particular seemed to have decided to pursue sing-along music for the car instead of headphone music for the chair, and it started him on the path to wealth. And good for him.

But what I celebrate overall, and I hope in this poem, is the work that tried to be more than a pop song, that was striving, even if slyly and beneath the listener’s first perceptions, to be art. That’s what entranced me at the beginning, and that’s what I want to remember most fondly.”

Editor’s note: Jimmy Buffett died on the night of September 1st, and the news came out over the Labor Day weekend.

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).