Jimmy Buffett‘s brand was the island lifestyle that we inland folks so often long for. However, this was not just a brand; it was an authentic way of life that Buffett lived by. It was who he truly was. Consequently, he was a fan of fishing, sandbars, third-degree sunburns, and evidently, warm weather. The man hated cold weather. As a matter of fact, he hated cold weather so much that he once committed grand theft auto in order to get away from it. Subsequently, he wrote a killer song.
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Like a moth is attracted to a flame, Jimmy Buffett was attracted to islands. Seemingly, if he wasn’t on an island, he was thinking about how he was going to get to one as soon as humanly possible. Well, in the ’70s, Buffett found himself in the bitterly cold Boston, Massachusetts, and given his distaste for cold weather, he was going to stop at nothing to depart from there, even if it meant committing a pretty serious criminal offense.
How Jimmy Buffett’s Great Escape From Boston Led to the Song “Boat Drinks”
Fairly recently, Mac McAnally, a long-time collaborator of Buffett’s, appeared on the Drifting Cowboy Podcast and recalled Buffett’s great escape from Boston and how it led to his 1979 song, “Boat Drinks”. On the pod, McAnally started his story by stating, “He’s got a song called ‘Boat Drinks,’ and it’s about not wanting to be in cold weather, and he never wanted to be in cold weather.”
“But he was in Boston, and one of the Bruins had a sports bar, and he’s sitting in the sports bar, and it was freezing, and it was snowing,” said McAnally. “An ad came on about cheap flights to the Caribbean, and he’s just like, ‘I’m going.’ He went out to get a cab, there was a cab line right outside the bar, but the front cab, the driver wasn’t in, and the door was standing open. Jimmy stole the cab. He got he got in the cab, and he drove it to the Boston airport, got out of it, left it running with the keys in it just like he found it.”
As McAnally recalled, Buffett bought a ticket to “St. somewhere” and faced zero consequences for the stolen cab. According to Buffett himself on the 1992 box set Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads, he did leave some money in the seat after dropping off the cab. Regardless, Buffett, like all great storied musicians, has a life that is a never-ending series of page-turning stories. It has been roughly two years since Buffett’s death, and still, folkloric stories about him rise to the top water and get the air they deserve.
Photo of Jimmy Buffett Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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