Jimmy Buffett: A Pirate Dies at 76

Buffett in a pot-leaf-motif jacket with Jenny Lewis at a 2016 concert in Nashville.

UPDATE: Paul McCartney has posted about playing bass on Buffett's song, "My Gummy Just Kicked In," which was inspired by a phrase uttered by McCartney's wife Nancy. "Then the 60s came alive and she yelled 'Let's Rock!'"

Jimmy Buffett's Parrothead fans are more known for enjoying their margaritas than their marijuana, but Buffett, who died this week at 76, was a Pothead too who named his son for Bob Marley and launched a marijuana brand named "Coral Reefer" after his band in 2018.

In his autobiography A Pirate Looks at 50, Buffett describes himself as a hippie and tells tales of hanging out in various parts of the world (Key West, Cuba, Jamaica, Costa Rica, etc.) with drug smugglers and other interesting characters. 

In the beginning of the book where he writes about his traveling toolkit, he discusses backpacks and bags:

There has been a lot written about the good and the bad effects of the revolutionary sixties, but no one ever mentions the destigmatization of men carrying shoulder bags. Along with the emotional baggage of being a flower child, you had to carry around to the love-ins a lot of shit that just wouldn't fit in a wallet or the pockets of bell-bottom jeans. There were necessary items for the hip and infamous—rolling papers, pot, Richard Farina and Richard Brautigan paperbacks, bags of granola, extra headbands, bandanas, hash pipe, patchouli oil, fruit, and that damn Swiss Army knife. My bag of choice was a woven straw Guatemalan original that I bought at the local head shop in New Orleans. It definitely was cool, and served me well right up until the day I had some kind of a short circuit in my thinking patterns and decided that I had to get married and settle down. 

In his book, Buffett recounts that when he went to France in 1974 to write a soundtrack for a film about tarpon fishing, it was "with an incredible sense of wonder, two hundred bucks, and a Glad bag full of Colombian pot that I first set foot on French soil." 

Speaking of his song "Growing Older But Not Up," Buffett wrote, "I have carried my childish ways with me from altar boy to hippie, from hippie to husband and father. More than the music and the politics of the sixties, I think what made Woodstock the legendary event that it became was the fact that a whole generation was able to act like kids again. That's what I think happens at our [Coral Reefer Band] shows as well. They've always been known as  opportunities to escape for the evening and just has fun, but you should see what happens when it rains."