Paul McCartney was the obvious headliner of the bill Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl. But it was Buffett-mania that was in full sway, as a cast of dozens of singers and celebrity presenters — from Jane Fonda to Snoop Dogg — saluted or parroted a fallen musical hero for the three-and-a-half-hour “Keep The Party Going: A Tribute to Jimmy Buffett.”
Most of the night’s entertainers covered Buffett classics or obscurities, although McCartney, the Eagles and Snoop Dogg broke with that to regale the full Bowl house with their own material, while Zac Brown and (sending in a video contribution) Dave Matthews debuted brand new songs saluting Buffett.
The all-star cast of musicians was mostly known in advance, although a few, like Snoop and guest drummer Dave Grohl, were unannounced surprises. Less expected was the lineup of presenters, which besides Fonda included Harrison Ford, Will Arnett, Don Johnson, Woody Harrelson, John McEnroe and the pairing of Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann.
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The cast of singers and musicians bringing a sometimes elegiac, sometimes anything-but-sober tone to the proceedings included Brandi Carlile, Sheryl Crow, Kenny Chesney, Jackson Browne, Eric Church, J.D. Souther, Angelique Kidjo, Zac Brown, Jake Shimabukuro, Jake Owen, Jack Johnson, Scotty Emerick, Mac McAnally, Caroline Jones and the unlikely cross-genre pairing of Pitbull with Jon Bon Jovi.
“Hollywood-fucking-Bowl, come on!” exhorted McCartney, no stranger to the venue. Settling down, the former Beatle said: “I had the great pleasure of knowing Jimmy, and like everyone else on the bill has said, this was one great man. He was generous; he was funny; he had done just about everything in his life. I say he was so generous: I was on holiday with him and I forgot to bring my guitar, so he had his own guitar strung left-handed for me. And then the next time I saw him, he had one custom-made, left-handed, for me.
“In the last week of his life,” McCartney continued, “I was invited up to his house by Janey… to sing a couple of songs for Jimmy. And he was in a pretty bad way, but he still had that twinkle in his eye. So I thought I’d sing one of those songs I sang for him tonight.” After “Let It Be,” McCartney returned to the stage with the rest of the ensemble, conspicuously carrying a margarita.
If anyone was wondering what Buffett covers he, the Eagles or Snoop were going to work up for the evening, there were no rules about having to interpret his catalog. The Eagles did a mini-greatest-hits set, without speaking about Buffett (Joe Walsh’s “How ya doin'” was the sum total of their dialogue), although some meaning may have been intended in the choice of songs, if we can consider Buffett to have been a boy of summer who took it to the limit.
However, Timothy B. Schmit did get his own number earlier in the evening, recalling the three years that he spent as a member of the Coral Reefer Band at Buffett’s behest in the ’80s, after the Eagles broke up. He sang the cheerful potential-disaster anthem “Volcano,” after bragging to the crowd that it was during that run as a Buffett sideman that he coined the term “parrothead.”
As for Snoop, he was not about to work up his own version of “A Pirate Looks at 40,” but did pipe in with a shared love of recreational whatever. As Apatow said a little later, “I must’ve gotten stoned on Jimmy’s gummies backstage, because I swear to God, I thought I just saw Snoop Dogg sing ‘Gin and Juice’ with the Coral Reefer Band.”
Most of the rest of the night consisted of interpretations Buffett chestnuts. Befitting her status as rock’s perennial saluter-with-the-mostest, Carlile was the only performer of the night other than Coral Reefer Mac McAnally to sing two Buffett covers. She hit both his partying and contemplative modes with back-to-back renditions of “Come Monday” and “Tin Cup Chalice.”
Carlile got some of the loudest roars of the night with her personal recollections of the honoree. “Our language that we spoke to one another was the language of fishing, which is a huge part of my life,” she explained. “I could call Jimmy up, it didn’t matter where I was, and he had some salty dog come out and take me fishing, even if he couldn’t be there… He just treated me like gold. And he used to go out on the water and make friends with lesbian fisherwomen by telling them he knew Brandi Carlile and that we were fishing buddies. He’d text me and say, ‘Hey Brandi, I met some more lesbians. I gave ‘em your phone number. I told ‘em you’re out on the Cape… they’re gonna call you.’ Thanks, Jimmy.”
But, she continued, “he was so good to me, and I feel like he was good to me mostly because he knew how much I loved his wife, Jane, who is one of my most precious, precious friends. He would text me and he’d say, ‘This is Jimmy, Jane’s husband, Brandi. I need a favor. I’ve got some lesbians that want to go fishing with you.”… Jane used to call him ‘dude.’ I just so deeply admired the beauty and timelessness and the power of their love story. Jimmy and Jane’s love story is one for the ages.”
Carlile was introduced by Jane Fonda as “a woman that I admire from the bottom of my heart, one of the great American singers who never ceases to surprise us with her style and range, it’s so vast.” But she mostly came to praise Buffett, saying, “Even now, Jimmy has the ability to, like Tinkerbell spread happiness all over. … He was such a generous man, generous of heart, generous of spirit. He loved people and that’s why we love him, because … even through his music, you could feel that.” On the lighter side, she insisted at the top of her speech that “I was actually the one that smoked a bowl with Jimmy on the roof of the Vatican,” and she comically ended it with: “Just remember that about the Vatican roof and everything.”
Harrison Ford got one of the most rousing receptions from the crowd, which led him to playfully snark, “Simmer down,” before getting into his own Buffett story. “Jimmy Buffett was a cool guy,” he said. “I remember one day I had a long, some might say boozy lunch with Jimmy and Ed Bradley for Bradley’s birthday. I saw both of ’em had earrings. So right after lunch, I got my ear pierced. That’s just how infectious Jimmy’s coolness was — infectious enough for a 40-year-old man to spontaneously get his fucking ear pierced.
“And,” Ford continued, “infectious enough to create an entire culture around his music. There is no other way to say it. There will never be another like Jimmy. Usually cool guys ae not that nice. Jimmy was more than nice: He was kind. He was beloved by his family, by his friends, by his crew and his collaborators, and he loved them all back.”
Don Johnson got a bit saltier still in his introduction of the Eagles. As the brother of Jane Buffett, he recalled a special night “when Jimmy was cooking and he made some of the most delicious duck I’ve ever had. The flavors were so strong they were able to break through the insane amount of cocaine that we had done.” After a long laugh, he added, “Aspen in the ’80s.” With a bit more tenderness, Johnson noted, “Jimmy was a great host, but he was an even better friend. He always made sure that everyone was having the best possible time. He lit up the room with his stories. Some of ’em fact, and most of them fiction — and he turned those stories into bestselling books,” Johnson added, before getting emotional as he read an excerpt from a prose passage Buffett wrote at 50, in which he said, “I have always looked at life as a voyage, mostly wonderful, sometimes frightening…”
Speaking of frightening, Will Arnett told a story about not being quite as bold as his friend. “Jimmy and Jane have been so good to me over the years, and I was staying with them down in the Caribbean. And I woke up one morning and Jimmy was getting ready to go somewhere, and if you knew Jimmy, you knew that he was either coming from somewhere or going somewhere — often at the same time.
“And I said, ‘Jimmy, where are you going?’ And he said, ‘I gotta go get certified for the takeoff and landing at the St. Barts airport.’ Now, the St. Barts airport is death-defying. It’s like a controlled crash, and it’s scary. And he said, ‘I gotta go and I gotta get certified; I gotta go do a bunch of takeoff and landings, like 30 of them… You want to go?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, of course I want to go!’ He said, ‘Great, I’ll just go get my stuff.’ And he left the room. And Jane turned to me and she said, ‘Dude, Jimmy has been in like three plane crashes. You’re not going with him.’ So I bailed.”
Later, Apatow got a dig in. “He and Jane, they’re the most generous, wonderful people ever,” said the comic/filmmaker. “I remember once we were in St. Barts and Jimmy said, ‘Do you wanna fly with me? I have to practice landing at the airport 30 times.’ And I said, yeah — and it was fine. He did a good job. The moral of the story is: Will Arnett is a pussy. Get in the plane, be a man.”
Jon Bon Jovi amplified the flying motif. “He’s the only guy I’ve ever met that used to show up to a picnic or a rock show dressed in the same clothes. And each one of us, you know, we walk around and we go, ‘No, I’m a rock star. I’m a rock star.’ Then Jimmy Buffett walks in the room — he flies his own plane to his own show. That’s a rock star.”
Bon Jovi was on hand to do a duet with Pitbull on the latter’s “Thank God and Jimmy Buffett,” a paean that beat the newly minted tribute songs by Matthews and Brown to the punch by decades. Pitbull told the story of how he let Buffett know he’d written a song about him. They ended up at the same event, and he recalls Buffett asking him, “‘What the fuck are you doing in Nascar?’ I said, ‘Jimmy, man, I’m just taking the page outta your book. But crazy enough, Jimmy, I got this song on my phone I’ve been working on for years at this point, which is called “Thank God and Jimmy Buffett.”‘ And Jimmy looked at me with that little shit-eating grin and he said, ‘Now you’re fucking with me.’ So I played it for him right there off of my phone, being one of the only people at that time to have a Blackberry in the whole world.”
Brown debuted his own “Pirates and Parrots,” which he said will be coming out April 19, in addition to performing a cover of “Knee Deep.”
Crow won the crowd interaction award of the night by performing “Fins,” and doing the overhead shark-fin motions that were a peculiar staple of Buffett shows. She did not have to do a lot of research for the routine: As she explained, she had been a member of the Coral Reefer Band for a spell in the 1980s, prior to signing her recording contract.
McAnally and the Coral Reefer Band still managed to be stars of the show, despite all the starpower on hand. Among the choices McAnally turned in were a song he said he had to keep convincing the boss to keep in the touring setlist, which surprised Buffett, since he considered McAnally to be “the Southern Baptist of the band”: “Why Don’t We Just Get Drunk and Screw.” But McAnally said he knew it to just be a great country song, morality aside, “and if he hadn’t become an icon, he could’ve played college frat gigs the rest of his life off that one song.” In honoring the even more irreverent path not quite taken, McAnally did his comrade proud.
“Keep The Party Going: A Tribute to Jimmy Buffett“ setlist, April 11, 2024:
“It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere” – Mac McAnally & Scotty Emerick
“Grapefruit / Juicy Fruit” – Jake Owen
“Pencil Thin Mustache” – Scotty Emerick
“Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” – Kenny Chesney
“Back Where I Come From” – Kenny Chesney & Mac McAnally
“One Particular Harbour” – Angelique Kidjo
“Pirates and Parrots” – Zac Brown
“Knee Deep” – Zac Brown
“Son of a Son of a Sailor” – Eric Church
“Volcano” – Timothy B. Schmidt
“Tin Cup Chalice” – Brandi Carlile
“Come Monday” — Brandi Carlile
“Cheeseburger in Paradise” – Scotty Emerick
“He Went to Paris” – Jackson Browne
“Bubbles Up” – Mac McAnally and Caroline Jones
“Southern Cross” – J.D. Souther
“Why Don’t We Get Drunk” – Mac McAnally
“Gin and Juice” – Snoop Dogg
“We Will Rock You/While My Guitar Gently Weeps” – Jake Shimabukuro
“Don’t Stop the Party” – Pitbull
“Thank God and Jimmy Buffett” – Pitbull and Jon Bon Jovi
“Fins” – Sheryl Crow
“A Pirate Looks at 40” – Jack Johnson and Caroline Jones
“Brown Eyed Girl” – Zac Brown (Dave Grohl on drums)
“Lovely Cruise” – Dave Matthews (video)
“The Boys of Summer” – Eagles
“Take it to the Limit” – Eagles
“In the City” – Eagles
“Let It Be” – Paul McCartney with the Eagles
“Margaritaville” – Full cast
