31 August 2024
By Matt Luna

Jimmy Buffett had a lot going on, and he had a good time giving back to the world while making it fun for those around him. He sang about water, and helped out in an unconventional water resources project. Now one year since he passed, the following are glimpses of Jimmy as I knew him, with the humanity and humor he brought to the party.

“I’ll give you five bucks for that hat,” is one of the first things I said to Jimmy backstage at the Olympia concert hall in Paris in 2010. “Hey, Matt! I’ll give it to you,” Jimmy said taking off the New Orleans Saints team cap and handing it to me. I still held out a 5-euro bill. He smiled and took the money. It was drizzling rain that night as I left wearing my new cap, and I thought about Jimmy’s bald head in the wet Paris weather. He reminded me several times over the next years to “take care of that lucky cap.”

I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1970s as a second-generation Buffett listener. His “Changes in Latitudes” 8-track tape would warm up our ’77 Cadillac on family trips to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Jimmy was like a mythical figure in the South, bringing to life dreams of escaping to “Banana Republics” saltwater locations for four-minutes in songs, or with no return ticket. This was when “Margaritaville” was still only a song.

In 2007, a journalist colleague told me that he heard Jimmy was coming to play his first-ever show in Paris. I began hounding Jimmy’s PR agency requesting an interview, with no luck. Then Jimmy unexpectedly visited our International Herald Tribune (International New York Times) newsroom in Paris one day, but was gone before I arrived for my evening newsroom shift. I barged into the office of the executive editor on the verge of shouting that I HAD to interview Jimmy Buffett. He gave me Jimmy’s Paris phone number, even though this was not really my normal area, probably so I would get out of his office more quickly.

Jimmy returned my call later, and I heard a familiar voice say, “Matt, this is Jimmy Buffett.” I told Jimmy, who was also born in Mississippi, that I was from Jackson, and he replied loudly, “Get outta here!” Jimmy would later say “I’ve always kept one foot in the South, even as I’ve travelled around the world. New Orleans was our Paris,” when he agreed to join by Skype to speak about culture and writing to a class on a Southern Gothic Literature I was teaching in Amsterdam in 2012 at the John Adams Institute.

Jimmy and I agreed to meet the next day for the interview, after I got an IHT business editor on board for the idea. I would write an article on his growing Margaritaville “empire,” also featuring comments by phone from Warren Buffett, not knowing this was the beginning of what would turn into an unlikely friendship with Jimmy, one of the nicest people I have known – famous or not.

I moved to Paris in 2001 with my young French wife and a baby, after quickly falling in love outside a 7-11 where we met in Orlando, Florida, in 1993. I had charted my course to Florida earlier that year from a bar in Oxford, Mississippi. I sold what would not fit in my 1970 Pontiac convertible and escaped south with non-stop Buffett music playing on cassette tapes. By the time I reached the Florida State line, I finally had to change the music.

Jimmy and I met at the luxurious George V hotel in Paris for the interview, where he greeted us in an old short-sleeve shirt, faded jeans and a St. Barth Film Festival cap. “I still like being a bar singer, and I wanted to be a French cabaret singer for one day of my life,” he said in the NYT blog about his first concert in Paris, at the New Morning Jazz Club for a crowd of only 400.

Jimmy invited me and my IHT colleague to stroll with him along the Champs-Élysées after the interview. Leaving the hotel, I noticed a crowd of photographers that looked like they were ready to pounce. I looked anxiously to Jimmy, and he said with a grin, “Don’t worry; they’re not here from me,” somehow happy about his lack of fame in France, a country with which he had a long love. The local Parisians would sound quite funny to us pronouncing his name “Jeemee Boofay.”

Returning to play in Paris in 2008, Jimmy’s concerts became sort of an annual pilgrimage for Parrotheads from all over.  The fans would dress up outlandishly tropical, which was especially odd to old-guard Parisians, and party from early hours outside his new Paris venue “home” at the La Cigale concert hall. The first time my wife, Maylis, met Jimmy backstage after one of his concerts, he said “Hey darlin, is this the first time you’ve seen my show?” She replied in her French accent, nervously not knowing what to say, “Yes, for me you just play pancake music.” (I had told Jimmy that I would listen to his CDs when making pancakes on weekends.) After she said that, I waited for a disastrous reaction…but instead, Jimmy threw his head back laughing and said, “I guess that’s my destiny: pancake music!” Through the following years when we would meet, Jimmy would often ask, “Where is Maylis?”

“Je sues très excité a jouer Rue de la guitare à Paris.” Jimmy wrote to me in 2013, in French as he often did, by email before one of his shows there. He was referring the Rue de Doaui near La Cigale with numerous guitar stores – and his song that year about the street. This may be a glimpse of Jimmy’s “best business advice” to me which was “never lose the Peter Pan inside you,” meaning to remain full of curiosity, wonder and energy in what you do. I always saw him as a youthful kind of person: funny and inquisitive, and surprisingly one of the least laid-back people I ever met. His attention would jump multiple times from subject-to-subject, story-to-story, idea-to-idea, within a minute of conversation.

Jimmy told me over drinks in 2008 he wanted to take the Vélib Paris city rental bikes for a ride together, and I later published a slide show from the ride experience in a travel blog. We biked, we laughed, we nearly crashed a few times, and Jimmy said while examining all the parts of the Vélib, that there should be “warning labels on these bikes” to not be distracted while riding and looking at the beautiful women on the streets of Paris.

In 2016 – as he was often intrigued by far-fetched and environmental ideas – Jimmy quietly supported the prototype of a solar-powered machine project I was working with designed to extract drinking water from the air, based in an artistic structure. On request, the project creator-artist, a pretty far-out Dutch visionary himself, sketched some solar panel-equipped palm-fin tree sort of structures that could feasibly produce electricity and “run an ice machine” at a future resort. “I like a challenge,” Jimmy wrote by email – also wanting to make the designs hurricane-proof – as he gave the project a needed push. The artist was able to build and launch a prototype that would erupt water from air on visitors at a Dutch sculpture museum, aimed at inspiring more ideas and cooperation on climate adaptation.

“Bonjour Matt, Je suis à Nouvelle Orleans aussi,” Jimmy wrote to me in 2021, just before the last time I saw him, as I was passing through New Orleans with a friend from Mississippi. Jimmy invited us to watch his tour rehearsal with the Coral Reefer band at the Smoothie King Center, and then to have dinner. This was just as the world was recovering from Covid-19.

An event staffer told us when entering not to hug or shake Jimmy’s hand, for social distancing, but Jimmy quickly hugged us when we met before we could react . Later as we were watching the rehearsal, a crew member came over to a couch on which my friend and I were sitting in front of the stage, “You guys are vaccinated, right?” I confirmed, and then my friend said he was not. Security came over minutes later and told my friend he would need to go outside. In reluctant solidarity, I made my way to the exit with my friend (who later got vaccinated) to head to my Jackson destination. I waved to Jimmy on stage, mouthing that we had to drive back. He looked confused for about a second, and then smiled his famous smile and waved goodbye.

We were at home in The Hague last year when the New York Times breaking news email came in announcing Jimmy’s death. At that very moment, music from an outdoor festival wafted in on a breeze through an open window. It felt like Jimmy greeted us one last time.

There are so many stories, which are more like illustrations of how Jimmy could bend the universe around him just a bit to make the world more fun. Merci pour tout, Jimmy! C’était une bonne balade!