Summer’s over, all right. Jimmy Buffett, who founded a billion-dollar fortune with a humorous break-up song featuring a popular cocktail, died yesterday at age 76. Along the way he founded two restaurant chains, wrote two novels and a memoir, topping both the fiction and nonfiction New York Times best-seller lists, and lent the Margaritaville moniker to everything from beer to video games to a housing development in Florida.
Buffett started out in Nashville, but after a trip he made to Key West with Jerry Jeff Walker in 1971 he relocated there, where he developed his blend of folk, country, calypso and New Orleans boogie-woogie and the beach-bum persona he never relinquished.
Health problems caused him to cancel concerts last fall and again this spring and summer. His last time performing in public was an unannounced appearance in June, when he took the stage at a bar in Amagansett, N.Y., and sang three songs before about 100 people. This was the last one he played.
It’s hard to remember now, when his legion of Parrothead fans (the name was coined by then-bassist for the Coral Reefer Band, Timothy B. Schmit) are a Boomer caricature, but for a little while Buffett cooler than you might think. How many other guys had cameos in the cult classic “Repo Man” …
…and “Jurassic World”? (At IMDB, the uncredited role is listed as “Running Park Visitor with Margarita Drinks.”)
He also got to perform “Livingston Saturday Night” in the 1978 comedy “FM.”
