Jimmy Buffett
- At the Air Canada Centre
- in Toronto on Thursday
If Warren Buffett is a master of investment, Jimmy Buffett (no relation) is a master of time well wasted. Here's a man who has parlayed a modest talent for laid-back singing and simple songwriting into an empire, his coral-reef country-rock drawing super-loyal crowds, even though his "hits" are not numerous at all.
The 62-year-old entertainer works three nights a week - his concert album from 1999 is Buffett Live - Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays - and when he walks on stage he does so in bare feet and to an antihero's welcome. Warren Buffett's secret is of the buy-low-sell-high kind, but what is the formula of Jimmy?
Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes
The hockey arena is something of a wharf-side tiki hut with palm trees, patio lights and a bamboo bandstand for Buffett's 10-piece Coral Reefer Band.
Notice the steel-pan-drum player to the right: His balmy "tinging" provides the languid Caribbean vibe that lulls the near-full house into the logy state of beach-based hypnosis. Buffett wears shorts and a baby-blue T-shirt. "It might be raining outside," the Key West crooner suggests, "but we got a cloudless night inside the old Air Canada Centre."
Stars on the Water is lively Eagles-style rock, the new SummerZcool is spring-break frat-boy fun, the lively Cheeseburger in Paradise has an audience clapping along, and It's Five O'Clock Somewhere raises glasses at the happy hours of Nashville, you bet.
Licence to Chill
Buffett is amiable: Every song receives a shoot-the-breeze introduction, often with Canadian references. Before the mellow Tahiti-ness of Son of a Son of a Sailor , we learn that our man's grandfather was Newfoundland-bred. Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl wears a hula skirt (as do some of the jollier crowd members), and she fits right in with the songs that Parrot Heads (Buffett fanatics, some actually in beaky headdresses) know by heart. There's a comfort level at work here.
A Cheeseburger is Paradise
Before the encores, the second set ends with Margaritaville , an agreeable and breezily melodic radio hit from 1977 that concerns an epic search for a lost shaker of salt needed for the frozen concoction that helps Buffett hang on. We all need something; we all have pressures.
Buffett offers escape - a safe harbour, with a contented soundtrack. If the bird of paradise is elusive, a rum-based cocktail and a cheeseburger - "heaven on earth with an onion slice" - will have to do.
Meanwhile, at the Horseshoe …
- Andre Williams
- At the Horseshoe Tavern
- in Toronto on Thursday
While the Buffett bunch were still shaking the beach from their sandals, Andre Williams and the Sadies shook the 'Shoe a few blocks away. It was about midnight when the sleaze-rocking "Mr. Rhythm" got up to his R-rated rockabilly and rugged soul-rock shenanigans.
Looking right pimp-tastic in a cherry-red suit, hat and tie, sided by a pair of go-go girls and backed by the local legendary psychedelic-twang outfit the Sadies, the seventysomething Motown-era legend strutted imperially. Williams sang scandalously, if harmlessly, about primal impulses, salacious aromas, bacon fat and shaking his tail feather.
The highlight? Of course it was his notorious 1960 hit Jail Bait , a sly novelty rap about what the Alabama-bred bad boy perceives as a "rough temptation, but a common invitation, and a good association." And that, as they say, was that.
Brad Wheeler