A Pirate Looks at Fifty

by Jimmy Buffett

Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This is the ultimate Jimmy Buffett philosophy on life and how to live it, “like sitting with Buffett at a beachside bar, listening to him spin tales” (Time).

“Buffett took his family on a three-week trek around the Caribbean. . . . His colorful travelogue is interspersed with memoirs of his youth and music career—both of which revolve around his continuing search for the perfect fishing spot.”—USA Today

For Parrotheads, armchair adventurers, and anyone who appreciates a good yarn and a hearty laugh, here is the ultimate backstage pass. You’ll read the kind of stories Jimmy usually reserves for his closest friends and you'll see a wonderful, wacky life through the eyes of the man who's lived it.
 
Jimmy takes us from the legendary pirate coves of the Florida Keys to the ruins of ancient Cartegena. Along the way, we hear a tale or two of how he got his start in New Orleans, how he discovered his passion for flying planes, and how he almost died in a watery crash in Nantucket harbor. We follow Jimmy to jungle outposts in Costa Rica and on a meandering trip down the Amazon, through hair-raising negotiations with gun-toting customs officials and a three-year-old aspiring co-pilot. And he is the inimitable Jimmy Buffett through it all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780449005866
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/28/2000
Edition description:	1 BALLANTI
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	19,643
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.24(h) x 0.93(d)

About the Author

Jimmy Buffett was a legend of popular culture as the composer of such classic songs as “Margaritaville,” “Come Monday,” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He recorded more than thirty albums, most of which went gold, platinum, or multiplatinum, and his sold-out concert tours were an annual rite of summer for his fans. In addition to his musical credits, Buffett is one of only seven authors with #1 New York Times bestsellers in both fiction (Where Is Joe Merchant?) and nonfiction (A Pirate Looks at Fifty). He had another New York Times bestseller with the short story collection Tales from Margaritaville. Jimmy Buffett died in 2023.

Read an Excerpt

Time on the Water

My Life
(In Four Hundred Words or Less)

When I was growing up in Alabama, the beginning of the new school year was a bad time. It meant the end of summer, which is my season. I packed away my shorts and T-shirts, put on socks, shoes, and my parochial—school uniform, and dragged my ass to class. To make matters worse, the first thing the nuns would make us all do on the first day back was to write about what we had done that summer. Having to recall it all while sitting in the antiseptic atmosphere of a classroom was like staring at the goodies in a bakery window with no money in your pocket. However, the bright side to the ordeal was that it reminded me of what lay ahead the next summer, and I carried those longings through the winter and spring until the last bell of the school year rang and I charged back to the beach. I don't know why the idea of trying to put fifty years of living into the same format occurred to me, but it did, and since I am way too familiar with the format, here it is. In four hundred words or less, this is what has happened from early adolescence until now.

I broke out of the grip of Catholicism and made it through adolescence without killing myself in a car. I flunked out of college. I learned to play the guitar, lived on the beach, lived in the French Quarter, finally got laid, and didn't go to Vietnam. I got back into school, started a band, got a job on Bourbon Street, graduated from college, flunked my draft physical, broke up my band, and went out on the road solo. I signed a record deal, got married, moved to Nashville, had my guitars stolen, bought a Mercedes, worked at Billboard magazine, put out my first album, went broke, met Jerry Jeff Walker, wrecked the Mercedes, got divorced, and moved to Key West. I sang and worked on a fishing boat, went totally crazy, did a lot of dope, met the right girl, made another record, had a hit, bought a boat, and sailed away to the Caribbean.

I started another band, worked the road, had my second and last hit, bought a house in Aspen, started spending summers in New England, got married, broke my leg three times in one year, had a baby girl, made more records, bought a bigger boat, and sailed away to St. Barts.
I got separated from the right girl, sold the boat, sold the house in Aspen, moved back to Key West, worked the road, and made more records. I rented an apartment in Paris, went to Brazil for Carnival, learned to fly, went into therapy, quit doing dope, bought my first seaplane, flew all over the Caribbean, almost got a second divorce, moved to Malibu for more therapy, and got back with the right girl.

I worked the road, moved back to Nashville, took off in an F-14 from an aircraft carrier, bought a summer home on Long Island, had another baby girl. I found the perfect seaplane and moved back to Florida. Cameron Marley joined me in the house of women. I built a home on Long Island, crashed the perfect seaplane in Nantucket, lived through it thanks to Navy training, tried to slow down a little, woke up one morning and I was looking at fifty, trying to figure out what comes next.

That might be all some of you want to hear, but for those who want to read a little more, continue on, for though I got most of it all into four hundred words, there is a lot more meat on the bone.

Time on the Water

We sailed from the port of indecision
Young and wild with oh so much to learn
The days turned into years
As we tried to fool our fears
But to the port of indecision I returned
—"Under the Lone Palm"

I wasn't born in a trunk, I was born in a suitcase. But a trunk is where I've kept the scraps of my life for the past fifty years. My many attempts to begin a journal have all fizzled out after a few pages of notes. I have a considerable collection of notebooks, cocktail napkins, memo pads, legal tablets, sparsely filled binders, and mildew-spotted pages that sit in a cedar-lined steamer trunk in my basement on Long Island.

Almost five years ago, when I had the harebrained idea of doing a musical version of my friend Herman Wouk's Don't Stop the Carnival, Herman would send me pages of thoughts on the matter from his journal. He had kept a daily journal since 1946. To say the least, I was quite impressed. I envy those who have the discipline to keep a chronological record of events. I do not.

My plan has always been to keep adding to that mess in the trunk and, if I make it to my eighties and am still functioning in the brain-cell department, to retire to a tropical island, buy an old beach house, hire several lovely native girls as assistants, ship in a good supply of rum and red burgundy, and then spend my golden years making a complete picture out of the puzzle pieces in the old steamer trunk. That to me is the way any good romantic would look at his life: Live it first, then write it down before you go.

Any attempts at autobiography before the age of eighty seem pretty self-involved to me. There are a lot of smart middle-aged people but not many wise ones. That comes with "time on the water," as the fisherman says. So the following pages are another stab at completing a journal inspired by the trip that my wife planned for me to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, on December 25, 1996. I am glad to report that my first fifty years were, overall, a lot of goddamn fun. I just followed my instincts and kept my sense of humor. This journal narrates the trip itself as well as stories that the trip dredged up out of my past. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Questions and Answers

Now he lives in the islands
Fishes the pilin's
And drinks his Green Label each day
Writing his memoirs, losing his hearing
But he don't care what most people say
Cause through eighty-six years of perpetual motion
If he likes you, he'll smile and he'll say
Jimmy, some of it's magic, some of it's tragic
But I had a good life all the way
—"He Went to Paris"

Fifty. A mind-boggling thought for a war baby like me. Fifty is not "just another birthday." It is a reluctant milepost on the way to wherever it is we are meant to wind up. It can be approached in only two ways. First, it can be a ball of snakes that conjures up immediate thoughts of mortality and accountability. ("What have I done with my life?") Or, it can be a great excuse to reward yourself for just getting there. ("He who dies with the most toys wins.") I instinctively choose door number two.

I am not the kind of person to spend my fiftieth birthday in the self-help section of Borders bookstore looking for answers to questions that "have bothered me so," as somebody wrote once—those questions that somehow got taken off the multiple-choice quiz of life. It seems that here in America, in our presumably evolved "what about me" capitalistic culture, too many of us choose the wrong goals for the wrong reasons. Today spirituality and the search for deeper meaning are as confusing as the DNA evidence in the O. J. Simpson case. There is a labyrinth of choices, none of which seem to suit me. Granted, I have been too warped by Catholicism not to be cynical, but there are still too many men behind too many curtains for my taste. The creation, marketing, and selling of spirituality is as organized as a bingo game. By the time most of us war babies reached high school, we were pretty much derailed from the natural order of things. We were supposed to grow up, and that's where my problems started. Parents, teachers, coaches, and guidance counselors bombarded me with the same question: "What are you going to do with your life?" I didn't even want to think about that when I was fourteen. My teachers called me a daydreamer. They would write comments on my report card like, "He seems to live in a fantasy world and prefers that to paying serious attention to serious subject matters that will prepare him for life."

The life they were so hell-bent on preparing me for bored the living shit out of me. It seemed way too serious. I saw more meaning in the mysteries of the ocean and the planets than in theology or religion. I was too busy figuring out ways to skip school, go diving, and get laid. My heroes were not presidents; they were pirates. Emerging from adolescence with a healthy "lack of respect for the proper authorities,"x and a head full of romanticism and hero worship, I was able to come up with an answer.

Q. What are you going to do with your life?
A. Live a pretty interesting one.

I have been called a lot of things in these fifty years on the good old planet Earth, but the thing I believe I am the most is lucky. I have always looked at life as a voyage, mostly wonderful, sometimes frightening. In my family and friends I have discovered treasure more valuable than gold. I have seen and done things that I read about as a kid. I have dodged many storms and bounced across the bottom on occasion, but so far Lady Luck and the stars by which I steer have kept me off the rocks. I have paid attention when I had to and have made more right tacks than wrong ones to end up at this moment—with a thousand ports of call behind me and, I hope, a thousand more to see. My voyage was never a well-conceived plan, nor will it ever be. I have made it up as I went along.

The Fifty-Year Reality Check

A List of Things to Do by Fifty

Learn to play the guitar or the piano
Learn to cook
Play tennis
Learn another language
Surf
Read
Take flying lessons
Travel
Swim with dolphins
Start therapy
Go to New Orleans and Paris
Learn celestial navigation (or at least how to find the planets in your solar system)
Go to the library
Floss

Editorial Reviews

Jimmy Buffett "has gregarious charm . . . and a bottomless well of stories to tell. . . . Reading A Pirate Looks at Fifty is like sitting with Buffett at a beachside bar, listening to him spin tales . . . discourse on life . . . and share nifty bits of geography and history."
—Time

"Fulfilling his peripatetic pirate lifestyle fantasies, rocker Jimmy Buffett took his family on a three-week trek around the Caribbean in celebration of his 50th. His colorful travelogue is interspersed with memoirs of his youth and music career—both of which revolve around his continuing search for the perfect fishing spot. But Buffett also imparts useful understandings gained from childhood through parenthood, and a valuable account of what it was like growing up in the '50s."
—USA Today

"The fun-loving Man from Margaritaville parses his hell-bent half-century."
—People

"Buffett takes the occasion of his fiftieth birthday to tell us about himself, and he does so with candor and modesty. The person who emerges is not the sort of rock star who trashes hotel rooms and slugs paparazzi, but a charming, decent, wry, kind, and contemplative man . . . . Buffett's evocation of the languid, louche Key West of the 1970's draws on the same well of affection as his best songs."
—The New York Times Book Review

"America's . . . good-time guy joins Hemingway, Dr. Seuss, and Steinbeck as one of the few who have topped both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists."
—Rolling Stone

From the Publisher

"Fun is about as good a habit as there is," writes Jimmy Buffett, and boy, he ought to know. Our author is well acquainted with bliss, chemical and otherwise. He "never gets tired of watching a wave breaking on the shore," for instance, and throws out section headings like "Blame It on the Bong." Here is a man who re(e?)fers to his Joseph Campbell tapes as "mental tiger balm." A dad whose daughter Sarah's first word is "Bob," as in Marley. A man who has pots of money. Someone who revels in flying the skies and fishing the seas. "Water is my real religion," this lapsed Catholic declares. His boat, for God's sake, is named the Euphoria.

OK, so A Pirate Looks at Fifty should have been half as long; heck, it should've been a magazine article. ("I don't know when to stop telling the story," he admits up front.) Knopf clearly wanted a follow-up to Buffett's engaging mystery Where is Joe Merchant? But this maker of more than 30 albums and writer of two bestsellers couldn't pick up the story. "Unsavory legumes and watery fiction are both offensive to the palate," is how he puts it. Hence this alternative effort. It's a meandering memoir/travelogue (47,000 Caribbean miles in three weeks) that needs a good bilge pump. Only a Parrothead could really care to learn, at length, what Jimmy puts in his flight bag. And while one fish-that-got-away story is fine, maybe even three, a dozen begs you to skim the pages like a waterbug.

Still, Buffett is ever-likable, even humble. "I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers," he writes, meaning his heroes such as Eudora Welty and Gabriel García Márquez. But so what? His prose extends from his lyrics; it's catchy, funny and offers up a decent image every once in a while. A stormy sea is "shaken like salad dressing." He's drawn to navigation because "it is both mysterious and explainable at the same time."

The best passages -- and there aren't nearly enough of them -- pivot on his youth. His evocation of the Mobile, Ala., Mardi Gras of his boyhood is fine, and so are the affectionate portraits of his Naval officer grandfather and shipyard designer father. My favorite parts of the book tack to Buffett's rough-hewed musical beginnings, especially a dive he played in his lackluster college days. The place was nicknamed "Vietnam, Miss.," since vets and soldiers from the nearby base lurked there. When Jimmy turns off the jukebox one night so he can perform, he's pelted with beer bottles. "I felt like a yellowtail snapper suddenly surrounded by a school of hungry sharks," Mr. Cheeseburger-in-Paradise recalls. Nice.

Sure the man rambles, but he knows how to have -- and winningly, even artfully, describe -- fun. -- Salon

Katherine Whittemore

The breezy pop craftsman of "Margaritaville" and "Cheeseburger in Paradise" famously spends most of his time sailing, trotting out 1970s chestnuts on the summer tour circuit -- and writing. Buffett's bestselling Tales From Margaritaville (1989) and Where Is Joe Merchant? (1992), among other books, created a world of sun-baked characters whose doings bore some resemblance to those of their author. This memoir draws back the curtain between fact and fiction, and genially takes stock in a manner likely to appeal to the Me generation. Though he rambles, repeats himself and may even raise hackles ("I have been too warped by Catholicism not to be cynical"), Buffett is earnest and unapologetic in his hedonism, seeing his mock pirate's life as the antithesis of the conformity foisted on him as a child in Alabama. In a series of loosely chronological vignettes, Buffett quickly takes us from his bar-band beginnings to a brush with death when he crashes one of his fleet of seaplanes. A lower-latitude voyage with his family (in a newer, bigger plane) to celebrate his 50th birthday makes up the bulk of the book, and takes them from Florida to the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Colombia and the Amazon. The diaristic logbook that Buffett keeps along the way provides endless opportunities to muse on the music business; his older, wilder ways; navigation and, on the horizon, approaching mortality. Buffett's prose won't itself win him more "parrotheads" (as his fans are called), but those with enough patience or reverence to wade through long descriptions of beloved gear, favorite books or "fucking tikki pukki drinks" will find beneath these amblings a disarmingly direct character.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mellow singer-songwriter Buffett's previous best-selling books -- the essay-and-story collection Tales From Margaritaville and the novel Where Is Joe Merchant? -- were sometimes reviewed as 'laidback' and 'perilously close to sloppy.' With this autobiographical journal, even his most devoted fans may feel he has stepped over that line. Eleven sections offer 66 chapters, many consisting of multiple vignettes. Some of these are entertaining -- Buffett never takes himself or others too seriously -- but the more one reads the more superficial the writer appears to be. Genuinely sentimental memories are treated with the same slapdash attitude as a fishing story. This approach is partly justified in the introduction, where Buffett explains that the impetus for this 'journal' was that he had signed a book deal and could not make any of his other ideas work.

These intertwined, meandering recollections would make a nice column in the local paper, but as the memoirs of a creative talent they are deeply disappointing. -- Eric Bryant

Library Journal

Among the number of bookish conventions with which A Pirate Looks at Fifty seems to have dispensed are continuity, structure and editing. . . .There is no story as such. . . .everything seems to be of about the same importance. . . . -- The New York Times

Thomas McNamee

[Jimmy Buffet] has gregarious charm...and a bottomless well of stories to tell.

Time

Buffet is the literary version of the best barstool buddy you ever ran into...He's been to all theright places, known all the cool people [and] puts a premium on fun.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

This first non-fiction outing from singer/songwriter Buffett (Where Is Joe Merchant?) is more food for his Parrothead fans, but there is some fine writing along with the self-revelation. Half autobiography and half travelogue, this volume recounts a trip by Buffett and his family to the Caribbean over one Christmas holiday to celebrate the writer's 50th birthday. Buffett is a licensed pilot, and his personal weakness is for seaplanes, so it's primarily in this sort of craft that the family's journey takes place. While giving beautiful descriptions of the locales to which he travels (including a very attractive portrait of Key West, from which he sets out), Buffett intersperses recollections of his first, short-lived marriage, his experiences in college and avoiding the Vietnam draft, and his brief employment at Billboard magazine's Nashville bureau before becoming a professional musician. In the meantime, he carries his reader seamlessly through the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Amazon basin, and Trinidad and Tobago. Buffett shows that he is a keen observer of Latin American culture and also that he can 'pass' in these surroundings when he needs to.

It's perhaps on this latter point that this book finds its principal weakness. Buffett tends toward preachiness in addressing his mostly landlubber readers, as when he decries the seeming American inability to learn a second language while most Caribbeans can speak English; elsewhere he attacks 'ugly Americans out there making it harder for us more-connected-to-the-local-culture types.' On the other hand, he seems right on the money when he observes that the drug war of the '80s did little to stop trafficking in the areaand that turning wetlands into helicopter pads for drug agents isn't going to offer any additional help. Both Parrotheads and those with a taste for the Caribbean find something for their palates here.

Kirkus Reviews