Why We Ever Go Home

Album: Jimmy Buffett, Changes in Attitude, 1977

Acquired: Purchased at Roses at Pembroke Mall in Virginia Beach, circa 1986. I miss the old-school discount department stores. Sure, you can buy everything to make a meal at a reasonable price at a Wal-Mart -- from the gun and ammo needed to shoot it and the Sunday-go-to-meeting Dickies to wear to the table to the dishwasher needed to do the dishes afterwards -- but where is the grime and depression that add the necessary edge to real bargain hunting?

Best Track: "Banana Republics"

Lasting Memory: I worked as a bouncer in a long-out-of-business sports bar called Champs in Blacksburg for most of the 1990-1991 school year. It had a jukebox. One of the CDs on that jukebox was Jimmy Buffett's greatest hits collection Song(s) You Know by Heart, which features a live version of Changes in Attitudes' "Margaritaville." I figure I work about 100 shifts on the door at Champs. That would mean, at 11 times a night, I heard "Margaritaville" at least 1,100 times in a nine-month period. I could kill Jimmy Buffett fans. I do believe if I had a time machine, I would use it only to prevent the writing, recording, and performance of "Margaritaville."

But Buffett I'm okay with. Especially after giving his early work a fair listen many years removed from the smoke-filled aquarium fully stocked with drunken Phi Sigs and Tri Delts that was Champs.

I fully realized for the first time how sad, forlorn really, most of Buffett's songs are. "Margaritaville" is about a drunk who knows he's responsible for ruining his life. "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" is built around the not-so-original observation that we have to laugh lest we cry. My favorite song off Changes, which is not titled the same as the song in the copy I own, is Hemingway-esque in its debunking of the romance of romanticism:

Down to the Banana Republics
Down to the tropical sun
Go the expatriated Americans
Hopin' to find some fun
Some of them go for the sailing,
Caught by the lure of the sea
Tryin' to find what is ailing
Livin' in the land of the free

Some of them are running from lovers
Leaving no forward address
Some of them are running tons of ganja
Some are running from the I.R.S.

[Chorus]
Late at night you will find them
In the cheap hotels and bars
Hustling the senioritas while they dance beneath the stars
Spending those renegade pesos on a bottle of rum and a lime
Singin' 'Give me some words I can dance to
Or a melody that rhymes'

First you learn the native customs
Soon a word of Spanish or two
You know that you cannot trust them
'Cause they know they can't trust you
Expatriated Americans feelin' so all alone
Telling themselves the same lies
That they told themselves back home

Down to the Banana Republics,
Things aren't as warm as they seem
None of the natives are buying
Any second-hand American dreams

[Repeat chorus]

Down to the Banana Republics, down to the tropical sun
Go the expatriated Americans hopin' to find some fun

(Words by Steve Goodman, who looks like someone I should learn more about.)

These are not the kind of sentiments that should inspire middle-aged white people to call themselves Parrott Heads and party like its 1979. I call it the "Bruce Springsteen phenomenon." Who doesn't love that patriotic anthem "Born in the U.S.A.," or that ode to life just getting better and better as we get older "Glory Days"? With Buffett, people hear "margarita" and stop thinking.

Since Buffett recognizes that running and boozing and alienating are no solutions to one's troubles-- even if his fans don't -- it makes little sense that he ponders in another excellent song off Changes, "I wonder why we ever go home?" He knows exactly why, and he even sings the answer in "Wonder," admitting "The years get shorter, not longer/ The more you've been on your own."

Here's to everybody finding a home tomorrow where their years grow long. Happy Thanksgiving.

Listen to a clip from "Banana Republics"

Up Next: Jimmy Buffett, Havana Daydreamin', 1975

Word Count to Date: 16,514