This may be my favorite Jimmy Buffett lyric, though I haven’t tended to perform it (unlike “Peanut Butter Conspiracy” and “Margaritaville,” both of which have edged into my repertoire at times, and which I’ve covered in previous posts). I’ve mostly played it for myself, remembering old guys I knew in bars, often in beach towns, back to when I was the house musician for a while in a bar called Maggie’s Farm in Torremolinos — which calls for a digression, because I thought I’d written more about that, but apparently didn’t.

Maggie’s Farm was owned by a big American biker named Bernie, who worked as an underwater demolition guy on the North Sea oil rigs in the summer and bought it for his English girlfriend, Maggie. Bernie tended bar in the winter, along with his Spanish “partner,” whose name I remember as Carlos — the “partner” is in quotation marks because Spanish law said all properties had to be half-owned by Spaniards, but his ownership didn’t extend beyond the official paperwork.

Bernie hired me and my washboard player, Rob Forbes as a house band, playing every other night, four or five hours, no amplification… but we were young and strong and he treated us well — one time he went to the free port in Ceuta and brought back a huge bottle of Johnny Walker Black, which sat behind the bar and was only for people drinking on the house, which included us till it was gone. The regular house drink was a Dirty Mother, which consisted of equal parts milk, cointreau, kahlua, tequila, and vodka. It tasted like a milkshake, and young women who came in for the first time were often served a pint of it on the house.

It was a nice gig for a couple of months, but we were playing a quirky mix of old jug band songs, Woody Guthrie songs, and blues, and eventually the customers got sick of us. Bernie was very nice about it. He asked me outside, explained that the other singers he’d hired lived in Torremolinos, hung out with the customers on the beach, and were part of the scene, but we were living in Malaga and weren’t, we played weird music, people were complaining, and… “I’ve never fired anybody in my life, so would you be willing to quit?”

I said, “Bernie, you know how much I like playing here, and I don’t want to let you down, but we’ve been thinking of going to Sevilla, and if it’s not too big a problem, would it be ok if we moved on after this week?”

He said, “I hate to see you go, but I’ll try to work something out.” Then we went inside and had some more whiskey.

So anyway… I spent a fair amount of time knocking around places like that and this song reminds me of various old guys I knew, generally artists or writers of one kind or another, who drank and hung out with the kids, and usually had some young woman or women who took care of them. Jack Belden, who wrote China Shakes the World, was one of them, in Paris, but I mostly associate them with warm places near the ocean, maybe partly because of this song.

Buffett said this song was inspired by a legendary figure in Chicago, Eddie Balchowsky, who worked as a janitor at a club called the Quiet Knight, and painted, and played classical piano, and sang songs of the Spanish Civil War. I got to hang out with Eddie for a few days in Vancouver, when Utah Phillips brought him there to play at the Folk Festival. He had lost the lower part of his right arm fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in that war, but could play plenty of music with his left, and he had endless stories. Utah wrote a fine song about him, “Eddie’s Song” — “One hand on the keyboard, moonlight fills the room/ One hand on the Ebro, no regrets…” There’s a nice piece about him by a writer named Jeannette Cooperman, called “The Beloved Poet King,” and you can see examples of his artwork on a couple of LP covers, for Loudon Wainwright and the Siegel-Schwall Band. I can still picture him, pounding out fierce one-handed piano and singing “Viva la Quince Brigada,” with all of us joining in on the “rumbala, rumbala, rumbala!” (You can see and hear him singing “Freiheit” in a documentary on the Lincoln Brigade.)

So that’s a bunch of memories… but these days, I hear this song differently, because I’m in my mid-sixties and the world is going to hell, and I sometimes think it would be nice to just quit everything, grow a beard, find a beach town, somewhere warm, with some relatively quiet bars and young people around who might enjoy my stories and music, and just be this guy… and who knows, maybe in twenty years I’ll be there, and the kids won’t have heard Buffett’s non-hit album tracks, and I’ll claim I wrote this song about myself and say I want the final words on my tombstone: “Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic, but I had a good life all the way.”