Jimmy Buffett Was Not That Great a Musician

He was, however, an incredible businessman.

The author of "Margaritaville" died today, at the age of 76. By his own admission, he wasn't a particularly great musician or songwriter. He wrote one really, really good pop song, several mediocre ones, and a lot of what was basically filler.

His huge hit depicted a blissful, ultra-relaxed life on the beach. I LIVED in a beach town -- Santa Cruz, California -- for several years. People would travel from all over the country to visit our beaches, and our beach town. Hell, we're even referenced in a Beach Boys song. But you know what? In the end, it's no different from anywhere else. The beach is nice, but in the real world, it brings with it traffic, pollution, drugs, sky-high prices, obnoxious tourists and so on.

But what Bufett did offer, which is arguably as important as a sunny day at the beach, was a fantasy, a dream, of not just the lifestyle itself, but how it would make you feel. Everyone has had the feeling of a sunny, relaxed day, when nothing goes wrong, when life seems like a wonderful, peaceful, simple and above all, humane thing. It feels so easy.

What Jimmy Buffett did was package all that up, and market it. By the end of his life, he was worth a billion dollars, had twenty operating hotels and resorts, twenty more in the pipeline, and was world-famous. He had taken the simple, basic joy of a day at the beach, and built it into an enormous, highly profitable business.

This is genuis, and brilliant marketing. Nike did it with "Just do it" which sold the joy and the power of sports. But it's not real. Athletes never, ever just do it. I know something about this, and to be any kind of decent athlete tkes years of grinding, often tedious, sometimes painful effort. For that amazing one hour of playing perfect soccer, you have to spend hundreds of hours working out and practicing. They don't mention that. It doesn't matter.

Taylor Swift does it right now with her sold-out concerts. She delivers the fantasy of a carefree, sensitive, absolutely gorgeous tall blonde young woman singing songs that her audience believes they can relate to. In fact, they have no idea whatsoever what it takes to deliver those concerts -- an army of labor, trucks, planes, endless organization and management. I saw an absolutely fascinating video lately of what happens when, in front of seventy thousand people, Tay-Tay's in-ear monitor malfunctions. That's reality.

It turns out that when she performs, what she hears is a very carefully, professionally supervised mix that sounds nothing at all like what the audience hears. She hears a click track, the music director counting her into the song, and some of the backup singers and one or two instruments. Without any effects, she hears her own singing, which is often off-key, rushed or kind of sloppy. Why? Because she's doing it live, while dancing, and because she's human.

Jimmy Buffett, Taylor Swift and Nike all were immensely successful because they were selling a fantasy, and really good at it. But here's my point -- you were wondering when I'd get to it, weren't you?

People need fantasies. So much of life is a product, I've learned, of your mindset, of your belief system, of the preservation of optimism and hope. My dog, Koda, doesn't have hope. He doesn't need to. He cannot envision the future, plan for it, or wish for anything that isn't right in front of him. Right now, as I type this, he's lying under my desk and he doesn't think any further than that. Everything is fine. The end.

However, that's not how humans operate. Uniquely, we can plan and dream and wish and hope and remember. These things are incredibly powerful, and supremely important. They're the gravity well of our lives. These emotions shape who we think we are, what we do, why we value it. Connecting with these dreams is also extraordinarily tricky. It's easy to get wrong, and unimaginably hard to sustain for days, weeks, months. For every Taylor Swift, who absolutely nails it, there are thousands of singers who don't get it quite right, and go nowhere. Running the Margaritaville Resort in Palm Springs is fiendishly difficult, and Jimmy Buffett figured out how to do it. And did it.

And in the process, allowed hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, to have the feeling of a day at the beach, even if it was manufactured, even if it wasn't real, even if he wasn't that great a songwriter, and maybe even if they've never been near a beach. He made it happen. He allowed a tired mother from Dayton, Ohio, to sit next to a pool, working on a blender drink, and imagining that she would be right at home on a Key West beach, without a care in the world.

What he really delivered, then, was a kind of hope. Steven King perfectly described this in The Shawshank Redemption: ""I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope."

Jimmy Buffet gave people hope. RIP.