Someone Just Might Take a Swing at You

Album: Jimmy Buffett, Havana Daydreamin', 1975

Acquired: Purchased at the Roses at Pembroke Mall, circa 1986. This is the second half of a double-album reissue on cassette that was produced in 1982. This format cum marketing ploy was popular in the mid-1980s; I have similar products featuring the early works of Dire Straits and Van Halen. As near as I can tell without actually, you know, doing the minute and a half of Internet research that would be required to find out whether I was correct or just typing out of the side of my neck, double-album cassette reissues were cheap ways for record companies to profit on established artists' back catalogs when they lost said artists. Does anybody know when Buffett started records under his own label? Does anyone other than Buffett and his accountant care?

Best Track: "Woman Goin' Crazy Down on Caroline Street" (words by Steve Goodman)

Lasting Memory: I can relate all too well to the experiences described and the sentiments expressed in this album's "My Feet Stink, My Head Hurts, and I Don't Love Jesus." Especially when Buffett sings, "Try to tell myself my condition is improving/ And if I don't die by Thursday, I'll be roaring Friday night."

Of course, everyone has had those nights and those morning like the ones Buffett describes, when you go down to the Snake pit just to drink a little beer and wind up throwing down a fifth or more of cheap liquor. Life is funny like that, but in the "odd but relatable and kind of sad" kind of way rather than the "ha ha" kind of way.

Buffett, as with most any singer-songwriter worth his or her saltwater, is good at capturing and conveying the first kind of funny moments. Even when he does score a legitimate laugh line like "She had a ballpark figure/ And he had a ballpoint pen," he does so in the context of a song titled "Cliches" that is about a married couple who travel the well-worn path from happy and partying despite having nothing to show to unhappy and marking time despite finally having achieved some of what society considers success.

Mr. Buffett, if you're nasty, also earns his bona fides as the better sort of singer-songwriter by creating and performing many songs about drinking and its discontents. Havana Daydreamin' even concludes with a lament of the bar band titled "Kick It in Second Wind" in which Buffett wonders how he and mates will make it through the second, third, and fourth sets when "there isn't anymore hope of scoring any more coke." In Buffett's defense, he was recording this particular album in 1975, when cocaine wasn't bad for you.

The absolute divine-ish comedy of drinking is revealed in "Woman Goin' Crazy on Caroline Street":

[Chorus]
There's a woman goin' crazy on Caroline Street
Stoppin' every man that she does meet
Sayin' if you'll be gentle if you'll be sweet
I'll show you my place on Caroline Street

She claimed in a loud voice to be a dancer
But I don't think she's cut a rug in years
Listens to the jukebox for her answers
Slowly guzzles twenty-five cent beers

Talks about the men she's known and then some
She's seen them in her dreams and on the street
She slides her dapper legs from beneath the table
As if to reveal some kind of treat

[Repeat chorus]

Her lover left her stranded in Jamaica
Just right now she can't recall his name
Perceiving she's the center of attention
And all the lurking eyes they look the same

Weather's got the shrimpers in a frenzy
They're horny and don't need a good excuse
Someone yells and things just start erupting
And in a flash all hell has broken loose

[Repeat chorus]

When I woke up and looked around the barroom
She was gone and I was black and blue
So be careful when you go to swing your partner
Someone just might take a swing at you

[Repeat chorus]

Sad, drunk woman? Check. Horny, angry fishermen? Check. A well-meaning if not entirely innocent victim of a bar brawl? Check. A punchline that actually involves a punch and acts as it's own moral? Check? Is this a Bukowski poem or a rock song? Does it matter?

Listen to a clip for "Woman Goin' Crazy Down on Caroline Street"

Up Next: The Byrds, Greatest Hits, 1983 casette reissue of 1967 album (I do look some stuff up)

Word Count to Date: 17,264