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This balancing of emotional accounts lends much needed heft to A Pirate Looks at Fifty, providing a gravitational tug that keeps the book from flying away on the wings of Buffett's endless enthusiasms--for saltwater fly-fishing, camaraderie in remote places and, of course, boats and seaplanes. ("Flying in the day is like being in the ultimate movie," he writes. "[But] when you're flying at night, you're not in an airplane. You're in a spaceship.") He builds the book around his 50th birthday present to himself, an air journey through Central America, the Amazon...
Reading A Pirate Looks at Fifty is like sitting with Buffett at a beachside bar, listening to him spin tales, repeat himself now and then, discourse on life and share nifty bits of geography and history. ("In the late '30s, Henry Ford...constructed a picture-perfect replica of a Michigan town to house 10,000 rubber workers" in the Amazonian jungle. "It didn't catch on.") He has a gift for equatorial observation but doesn't like to rough it. He wants his adventures to come with a four-star hotel and perhaps a chilled bottle of Puligny-Montrachet...
Impersonating a pirate was part of his marketing plan. Born on Christmas Day, 1946, in Pascagoula, Miss., Buffett was raised in Mobile, Ala., where his father worked in the shipyard. He was an altar boy who busted loose, discovering girls and guitars at Pearl River Junior College in Poplarville, Miss., playing acid rock in the clubs of New Orleans, moving to Nashville and working for Billboard, and failing in his first bid for folkie stardom (his debut album stiffed, and his second was put on the shelf). In 1971 he fled Tennessee and a bad first marriage and wound...
...Back then I was havin' such a good time bein' me," Buffett says. "I was like a flower in bloom." He wrote a satchelful of sparkling, finely detailed songs about life in the Keys and toured constantly, attracting a following and then a new record deal. Promoting himself, he liked to imply that he had smuggled marijuana to make ends meet. When stardom hit, Rolling Stone repeated the old tales in a 1979 cover story, and Buffett was detained by the authorities in St. Barts, where he was then living. "Me and my big mouth," he says. "I had never...
...ballad that is still a concert highlight. When its narrator, a pirate born "200 years too late," offers up a confession--"I've done a bit of smugglin'/ I've run my share of grass/ I made enough money to buy Miami but I pissed it away so fast"--Buffett's fans assumed he was singing about himself. In fact, he wrote the song about one of his disreputable friends. "I was never the damn pirate," says Buffett...