Outside the Beltway

Jimmy Buffett at 60

James Joyner · Wednesday, January 10, 2007 · 2 comments

Slate music critic Jody Rosen sums up the career of Jimmy Buffett, who turned 60! this past Christmas:

Buffett is one of the music business’ singular success stories. He has parlayed an unlikely subject—getting shitfaced while cruising the Gulf Coast in your power boat, basically—into a multimillion-dollar industry, a perennial place on Forbes‘ list of highest-grossing entertainers, and the most passionate concert audience this side of the Deadheads. (He also has written a couple of New York Times best sellers, operates a chain of seaside bars, and has his own seaplane airport, Lone Palm. Take that, Mick Jagger.) Buffett has done all this without altering his music one iota—indeed, without any evident effort at all.

She says that like it’s a bad thing. Indeed, combined with the ridiculously prolific production of Christopher Hitchens, who, according to a recent New Yorker profile, manages to crank out first-draft-equals-final-copy columns in between cocktails while hosting dinner parties, Abraham Lincoln’s (perhaps apocryphal) retort to his complaints about his commanding general’s alcohol problem: “I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”