the first round
(16) jimmy buffett, “margaritaville”
out-chilled
(1) steve miller band, “abracadabra”
131-111
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 5.
Magic, Love, and the Steve Miller Band: Alysia Sawchyn on “abracadabra”
According to old magicks, the word “abracadabra” written repeatedly in diminishing form served as a charm to prevent disease and misfortune.
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
ABRACADABRA
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a witch. I spent my afternoons outdoors, picking wildflowers or piling dogwood berries into a red plastic colander, depending on the season. I stripped the forsythia switches of their yellow blossoms and looped their pliable green stems into lovers’ knots without any object of affection. In the spring, I climbed onto stacked bags of mulch, broom in hand, and jumped off. Flight! My fingers smelled of juniper berries.
ABRACADABR
It is December 2019 and I am in the woods on a self-made writing retreat and I am procrastinating on writing this essay because I am sharing a cabin with another woman and neither of us brought headphones. I cannot write this essay without listening to the song, and I cannot listen to the song without (probably) driving the other woman insane. This is less than ideal. I am besotted.
ABRACADAB
Magic’s appeal has always been based in control: To achieve X result, do Y. X is always the wild and unpredictable: rain, conception, love. We are a scared and a hopeful species. The Romans offered Venus mint, myrtle, and roses in exchange for sway over the heart and loins. In her Verticordia aspect, she represented chastity, engagement, marriage. The corresponding festival: April 1.
ABRACADA
If I am forced to choose the song’s worst aspect, I’d pick the lyrics. A spell to ensure a song stays in the top slot of the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks: rhyming phrases that are simultaneously mundane and inane paired with an earworm melody. Seventy-six listens later, I still only know the chorus.
ABRACAD
My fiancé left me on April Fool’s Day. I spent five days asking him to stay and five months convincing him to marry me. It worked—in a sense. I realized I shouldn’t marry someone who didn’t want me, and he re-proposed to stop me walking out the door.
ABRACA
My favorite sequence in the music video begins with a pan over a blonde woman’s body. She takes off her top hat to reveal a leopard-print headband. Pure 1982. Hearts are funny. I think she looks like the woman from the cabin.
ABRA
If I were a witch, I would’ve made my fiancé love me. If I were a goddess, perhaps worship would have been inevitable. But the greatest magic of all is the ability to forget pain.
ABR
“Keep me burning for your love // with the touch of a velvet glove. // Abra-abracadabra // I wanna reach out and grab ya.” Oh, pompatus of love!
AB
Driving out of the woods, I say, Sorry, I have to play this song.
A
The hurt disappears, just like the word.
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
Alysia Sawchyn is a features editor for The Rumpus and currently lives in Northern Virginia. Her debut essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs, is forthcoming in June 2020. Her writing has also appeared in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Twitter: @happiestwerther
denry winter willson on “margaritaville”
Jimmy Buffett will tell you that Margaritaville is more a state of mind than a geographic location, and his fans—the Parrotheads, of which there are chillingly many—have taken this message to heart.
“Margaritaville” seems mostly to be about the singer’s pursuit of a woman, a pursuit that’s placed him in some touristy and shrimp-ready location. Getting hammered is never explicitly mentioned, but if you listen carefully, it’s definitely there. It’s about drunken side notes like nibblin’ on sponge cake, looking for a lost salt shaker, getting tattoos in blackouts, and the blame that swirls around a woman for the singer’s tribulations.
The kind way to put it is that Jimmy Buffett brings the beach to folks who don’t have one, that Buffett offers a taste of the life well-lived with beaches, cocktails, and probably love, or at least a weekend’s worth of sex. That Jimmy Buffett is a bootstrap pulling American who made a hit record, realized he wasn’t going to get paid well for it, and beat his own path to success, all the while bringing his own brand of carefree joy into the homes and heads of millions of people.
The best thing I can tell you about Jimmy Buffett is that he’s one of Bob Dylan’s favorite musicians, for reasons best known to Bob Dylan. And in case you’re confused, I am talking about the Bob Dylan. Buffett is a bit of a mystery, someone who stumbled into success with a song he may or may not love, and has to live with the success even though he didn’t necessarily draw his life up that way.
Jimmy Buffett will tell you that he is in the business of escapism. What he never seems to tell people though—at least not in “Margaritaville”—is what to do once they’ve finally escaped whatever it is that they’re trying to escape from.
Parrotheads don’t care.
Parrotheads are like paisley doublet wearing Deadheads but for Jimmy Buffett, and Margaritaville is the paradise they buy into. They have, in fact, bought into Margaritaville for billions of dollars, with Forbes reporting in 2016 that Buffett’s personal fortune was on the level of, like, Beyoncé.
More even.
The real money comes not from the song, or even from Buffett’s busy touring schedule, but rather from the three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of integration that is the Margaritaville brand.
What happened was, is that in 1977, Jimmy Buffett found a pulse: a breezy kind of country rock with an island twist, a version of rock and roll that keeps things in first gear and embraces a form of sloppy abandon. A couple decades after he found that pulse, he found a way to finger the ever-living shit out of it, because apparently, people who might have already been in the market for low-gear rock and roll with steel drums also turned out to have islander escapist fantasies, disposable income, and a yearning for a place like Margaritaville.
Since the song’s release in 1977 (and more specifically following the success of the first Margaritaville restaurant a decade later), Buffett has turned “Margaritaville” into a multi-billion dollar hospitality empire. For a price, you can eat, drink, stay, and gamble at Margaritaville, all the while flexing your official Margaritaville merchandise and accoutrements. You could hit the slots in Margaritaville, Las Vegas, open carry your cocktail, and flaunt your “woman to blame” tattoo.
It’s how a “state of mind” turned into a Forbes juggernaut. You can buy Aloha shirts, trinkets, rum, footwear, flatware, microwaveable food stuffs, a retirement home, books (Buffett is on a short list of authors who have penned best sellers in both fiction and non-fiction), frozen concoction makers (essentially ice-shaver/blender combos), and officially licensed tailgating accessories.
I’ve now—for art—watched an impressive amount of Buffett tailgate parties. Picture large fields of Buffett concert goers who set up Margaritaville themed tailgates and booths, don their most ridiculous Margaritaville attire and custom made parrot/pirate/tequila themed hats, and go from booth to tailgate drinking margaritas and beer, consuming elaborately delivered shots of tequila (think tequila filled Super Soakers and spout-nippled mannequins), and letting their thin proverbial hair down.
There are even booths where you could potentially spin a prize wheel and win a prize like “SHOW YOUR BOOBS.”
All of the Buffett tailgate tours available on youtube feature people—Parrotheads—talking about what a great time it is that they’re having, and about the great time that everyone else is having too.
I have my doubts, though, about the fun time everyone is supposedly having.
I can tell you as a long-time drinker and bartender that whenever huge groups of friends and strangers get hammered together under the pretense of “having a great time,” there will inevitably follow some measure of morning-after fallout which can include one or more of the following side effects: bad headaches, shocking bank statements, inexplicable text messages, surprise puddles of vomit, regret for stuff you don’t remember doing, lost cell phones, broken hearts, and sometimes worse.
Whatever glory you might have lived last night will leave you feeling a bit sheepish when you finally wake up to the sun’s afternoon shine.
I’m not sure if I can explain myself or qualify my hunch in some way, but I also have the unshakeable feeling that few of the people I see in the videos of the tailgate parties will do anything other than get sloppy drunk before things turn into a bit of a shit show. Add to that all of the sexual frustration in the air at the Buffett tailgates (sexual frustration on the level of SHOW YOUR BOOBS that masquerades itself as sexual prowess), mix in a few jiggers of ex-boyfriends, a dash of insecurity, stir in the claustrophobic nature of spaces jammed with booths and rows of RVs and all of the people who showed up in them, salt your rim, garnish with a lime and a little paper umbrella, and you’re probably going to be in for one frozen concoction of an evening.
I’ve seen these scenes play out from both sides of the bar. At the end of the night, most of the sexual masquerading will have been for naught. Whatever higher, shot whipping, job-abandoning, let-your-hair-down type calling or virtue that “Margaritaville” might contain, probably gets lost in the mix.
It’s unclear from the youtube videos how many of the tailgating folks ever make it to the Buffett concert, whether they can hear it from the tailgate party, or if they even care. One thing that is clear is that most people only record and post videos of the good parts.
The sad thing is that the good parts seem to contain little other than maintaining the idea of the good times while unsavory looking gentlemen shoot long, golden streams of tequila into the mouths of those who have opened wide.
Even escape to the good times ends up being like a job, its own high-maintenance thing.
The reason why I selected “Margaritaville” as my song is that I find it to be like the Applebee’s of music. It’s like if Applebee’s put on an Aloha shirt. It drags. Buffett literally sounds drunk. The food? He offers the idea of a lifestyle, and even a few endearing specifics, but little else.
I think the real reason I picked “Margaritaville” as my song is that I too have envisioned a life for myself of cracking beers, drinking tequila off of peach-fuzzed bellies, fumbling around for my talismanic salt shaker, looking for the one that got away, and doing it all by the beach. It doesn’t sound like a bad life.
But I know from experience that all parties do eventually end, and that too many nights of the good times usually leaves me craving chamomile tea, quiet, a good book, and a little less “wastin’ away”—the song’s primary nod to its own darkness.
One thing I know for sure is that the more I think about officially licensed Margaritaville concoction makers and Aloha shirts, about the hilarious symbolic weight of blown-out flip flops, and big green fields littered with pop-tops and hordes of tourists getting spectacularly drunk, I mostly just sit around and wish I had a song, the right song, something to take me away from all of this.
Denry Willson lives in Tucson, Arizona. He has written for Territory, Essay Daily, March Xness, and Goodnight, Sweet Prince. Here he is having a bad hair day circa 2015.