Rolling Obituary Thread 2023

If people find the persona odious, though, that's going to discourage them from pursuing the music.

...which you say, but relatively few people are so interested in songwriting craft that they'll study songs whose subjects have no appeal for them. Even more so when the songs are so dependant on writing/performing persona.

I've never done a deep dive, but wasn't he integrated or associated with that same 70s Nashville scene as someone like Jerry Jeff Walker?

RIP Jimmy

He had some nice songs - I even quite like Margaritaville as a song in and of itself. The associated margaritaverse, not so much lol

chaki otm

xps Lol yeah i had to look up "jamaica mistaica" after reading the story behind it on wikipedia. The lyrics are incredible throughout.

From the title it sounds like it should be "Dreadlock Holiday" dreadful.

I don't like Buffett (oh no)

lol

Xxxpost Yes, his earliest albums were very much in the progressive country style.

There once was a terrible movie called "Club Dread," where the running joke is that protagonist wrote a song called "Pina Coladaburg" before "Margaritaville," and it is a very sore point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPn33kAtdLU

I think it's in the film Rancho Deluxe (1975) where he pops up as a singer in a western-type bar, and it's interesting to see him in pre-Margaritaville days. I know he was good friends with novelist Thomas McGuane who wrote that film.

imdb says he starred in a 1973 documentary about tarpon fishing, alongside Richard Brautigan (!)

McGuane married Buffett's sister Laurie!

Right! And Peter Fonda was in the mix of that crowd, and he married McGuane's ex-wife

don't worry, his name will live on: https://scitechdaily.com/gnathia-jimmybuffetti-scientists-discover-new-isopod-species-in-the-florida-keys/

he has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in ‘repo man’

if they ever find a new species of coconut shrimp, they should also name it after him

Josefa sandwich of posts is 😳

former NM governor bill richardson, 75

To the best of my memory: he was the first big name (and longtime Clinton friend) to publically support Obama in 2008, and for a while was thought of as the likely VP pick.

lol thought that was still about Buffet for a sec

In 2019 it was revealed that Richardson was among those named in court documents from a civil suit between Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The documents were unsealed on August 9, 2019, a day before Epstein's suicide.[83][84] Giuffre alleges that she was sexually trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell to several high-profile individuals, including Richardson, while she was underage in the early 2000s.[85][83] 2015 court documents that were unsealed in 2019 alleged Richardson's possible involvement with the Jeffrey Epstein child trafficking ring, which allegations he denied.[86] A spokesperson for Richardson also denied the claims, stating that he did not know Giuffre and had never seen Epstein in the presence of young or underage girls

I was talking about Buffett--did I miss something?

(Funny.)

God, I didn't know any of that about Richardson.

Buffett was the first big name to publicly support manatees

Oh, the huge manatee

Ha, just got it now!

Yeah jokes about the Hindenburg don't fly very well.

Kinda like the Hindenburg

Wow, this is the biggest tribute I've seen McCartney write for anyone

It seems that so many wonderful people are leaving this world, and now Jimmy Buffett is one of them. I’ve known Jimmy for some time and found him to be one of the kindest and most generous people. 

I remember once on holiday when I had forgotten to bring my guitar and was… pic.twitter.com/k5B6xgpAh7

— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) September 2, 2023

That's very touching.

Wow. I'm not used to Effusive Paul.

that’s lovely

I would have thought that Jimmy's love for cheeseburgers would give Paul some pause.

I love Jimmy Buffett's music. I think that I "got"it pretty early on— a dear friend (and former love interest) put it on a mix CD for me, in between Cat Power's cover of Satisfaction and "Holiday in Cambodia," back in 2002 or so. the joie de vivre and the palpable sense of doom that defines so much of his music is not matched by many other artists. (I'm being utterly serious).

RIP

i had never heard Jimmy Buffet’s music in Australia - i only encountered his music when I moved to the US in my 20’s. my father in law liked him, and i heard a few songs here & there. Right away I loved his voice & the vibe, the lyrics were quirky but had a great flow & natural rhyme etc seemed like country music to me … and then a year or two later the office where I worked had a parrothead-themed social event & I was like “WTF is this shit”.
it’s almost like the fan culture is designed as a deliberate off-putting camoflage to deter you from appreciating him lol

cf: this is also almost identical to my experience of the Grateful Dead, lol

in between Cat Power's cover of Satisfaction and "Holiday in Cambodia,"

incredible sequencing

a friend's mother worked for the buffett organization, as it were, and between them and everything else i ever heard he sounded like a great guy

I never paid much attention to him despite a friend’s earnest mixtape efforts to interest me. But it’s always interesting to hear tributes and memorials and realize the significance someone had and hear stories about them as people. He sounds like a lot of people liked him as a person and respected him as an artist.

(So I will MOSTLY hold my tongue about the Margaritaville chain’s inability to make a decent margarita.)

That's the best thing I've heard from Paul McCartney in a long while.

Wiki update, so take with a (lost) shaker of salt:

On the night of September 1, 2023, at the age of 76, Buffett died from lymphoma resulting from skin cancer, which he had been reportedly diagnosed with four years earlier.

An on-brand death! Big, if true.

i went to a margaritaville with coworkers literally last week and thought the margs were pretty solid tbh? like maybe not the best ones i’ve had but i’ve def had worse

My sister and her husband are diehard parrotheads - they met in college when one of them was a wearing a Buffett t-shirt, they went and saw him at least once a year for the last 25 years, I had to wear a Hawaiian shirt when I stood in their wedding, and my mom actually wrote him a letter and invited him to said wedding, which he sadly declined but did send s signed photo. I’ve had a couple of friends text me today to ask (semi tongue in cheek) how my sister is doing.

I’m very indifferent to his work but am kind of sad I never saw him live, almost just to compare it to the crowds at the Phish and Dead shows I’ve seen, and he seemed like the kind of dude who’d be fun to hang out with.

I am legitimately surprised by the outpouring of Buffet love I've seen all day. Not just here but from my entire personal orbit.

And some of it's coming from people who I thought would have fronted like they were too cool for his cornball schtick two days ago.

This is making me love humanity even more than I already did. Even the cool people were harboring a secret soft spot for the goofiest, corniest crowd-pleasing shit. People are sometimes just a wonderful sebtimental blubbery mess. Rock on, Parrotheads.

someone suggested that he was in the 99th percentile of white guys born in mississippi in 1946 and i don't doubt it

I grew up in a 70s California beach town so Buffett was big even before "Margaritaville" was a hit. Junior high school kids knew some of the bits from "God's Own Drunk" as well as whatever was on SNL over the weekend.

Weird associative memory: for awhile in the early 90s, I had an IT job that took me to ~6-8 tech trade shows a year: both MacWorlds, Comdex, DigitalWorld, Seybold, etc. doing set-up and take down. There were a couple of Parrotheads that worked for Pinnacle MicroOptical and when the Buffett Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads box set was released, during teardown they would call out on their PA "WHAT WILL IT BE? BOATS? BEACHES? BARS? OR MAYYYYBE BALLADS?" and then play whatever was shouted back the loudest.

Zimbabwean cricketer (and Great Real Name), Heath Streak, 49.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/03/heath-streak-former-zimbabwe-cricket-captain-dies-aged-49

i went to a margaritaville with coworkers literally last week and thought the margs were pretty solid tbh? like maybe not the best ones i’ve had but i’ve def had worse

Made from a mix — presumably the house brand mix they sell.

Some years ago Buffett himself published his own recipe for the perfect margarita, and it called for Rose's lime juice as well as regular lime juice. I wonder if that was more of a '70s taste, I don't see Rose's in margs nowadays. Ofc the margs he's making in his song are FROZEN, but we're not ready for that discussion.

Yeah, frozen margs are their own thing and I don't hold them to the same standard. But a regular margarita on the rocks should always always always use fresh lime juice, never mix or Rose's or any such abomination.

Gayle Hunnicutt, actress, 80.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/03/gayle-hunnicutt-obituary

Fun Gayle Hunnicutt horror film: Eye of the Cat (1969), about scary house cats.