From AL.com: ‘So much joy:’ Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band coming to Alabama
“There’s no replacing him,” said Mac McAnally. “But I feel like we had, in most of our cases, a three-decade-plus tutorial in how to help people be happy.”
There you have it, a perfectly neat summary of what the Coral Reefer Band has to offer as it tests the waters nearly a year after Jimmy Buffett’s death. The ensemble played one star-studded tribute at the Hollywood Bowl in April and then helped fans bid a fond farewell to Buffett at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in May. Now it’s kicking off a three-city mini-tour at the Wharf Amphitheater in Orange Beach on Thursday, Aug. 1.
They’ve got a lot of history. They’ve got a lot of songs. But underneath all that, what they’ve got is the belief that they hold the keys to a sense of joy and communal escape that the world still needs.
“We got specific instructions from Jimmy to keep that going, and we intend to,” said McNally. “Coming to the part of the world where Jimmy cut his teeth seems like a good way to get the ball rolling.”
The star-studded tribute at the Hollywood Bowl was “cathartic,” said McNally, who has worked closed with Buffett for years as a co-writer, producer and musician. “We were sort of loaded for bear as far as the lineup goes. … I got a little bit of practice as the de facto M.C. of that because I was introducing and helping people pick out which songs to sing and that sort of stuff. And I didn’t know for sure if I was qualified to do that, but that really came off — not due to me, just due to Jimmy’s friends and the body of work that he left us to choose from.
“Jazz Fest … that was just us,” he said. “I mean, we were lucky to have Irma Thomas get up, and Sonny Landreth, our buddies that usually get up with us in New Orleans. But that was the band, really, minus Jimmy, as headliners. And we had a massive crowd that sang from the beginning to the end.
“There was so much joy,” he said. “And it meant so much to folks that, that, you know, that may have thought that wasn’t ever going to get to happen again. It made us all think that it’s possible to keep celebrating and, for so many of his fans that come every year and tailgate, it’s a chance for them to come and have a reunion with the folks that they meet up with out in the parking lot and come in and, you know, sing and be joyous together. There’s no better, no better joyful noise than Jimmy Buffett.”
The Hollywood Bowl tribute was, by design, about saying goodbye. So was the Jazz Fest appearance, to an extent. But the upcoming Orange Beach concert is more about carrying on, keeping that joyful noise going. There’s no replacing Buffett, but the band isn’t short of people who can carry his tunes.
“We’re blessed with a bunch of really fine singers in the band,” said McAnally. “During the last year that we were on the road with Jimmy, we had Scotty Emerick out with us, who grew up listening to Jimmy, and they just hit it off really big. And as Jimmy realized what was happening, last year, he made it a point that we knew that he definitely wanted Scotty to be involved in what goes forward. He’s a fine singer and Pete’s a fine singer [guitarist Peter Mayer] and Nadirah [Shakoor] is a fine singer and I can sing on a given day.”
There’s more to capturing that Margaritaville vibe, of course.
“We got to watch one of the best ever to entertain a crowd, you know, for a long, long time,” said McAnally. “And I’m not saying we’re as good as Jimmy at it. But you know, you can’t stand there next to them that long and not learn a few things. We’re also really bolstered by the fact that his fan base has embraced us over the years.
“Everybody in the band, Jimmy picked because he loved them,” said McAnally. “And he never asked us to do anything other than be who we are. I don’t think any of us feel the burden of being somebody else besides who we are. … We’re gonna feel like he’s there.”
“You know, I’m going to miss him rewriting the second verse of ‘Volcano’ because of some sign somebody holds up at the front,” he said. “I don’t know if I can do that but I can sort of be essentially like we were in church, growing up, be a song leader. Because everybody knows these songs and I think it’s going to be a good thing for the crowd and for us to, to sing these songs at the same time and celebrate what it is [that] we got to be a part of for all these years.”
That said, McAnally wants the shows to be more about keeping something alive in the present, rather than echoing pleasant memories from the past.
“The thing that you could count on with Jimmy, you know, his tours were not ever based on, ‘I’ve got a new album, so I have to tour.’ He wanted to tour, he toured every year, and it was never based on something that was on the radio at a given time.”
“Particularly when you look at acts that were around as long as Jimmy, almost everybody else in their mid-70s, like we were for the last few years with Jimmy, is a nostalgia act. Jimmy Buffett was never a nostalgia act,” said McAnally. “We always had grandparents and parents and kids and grandkids. Sometimes we had four generations of people at our shows, people that grew up singing those songs. And maybe it’s nostalgic for the grandparents, but those kids are singing because that’s what they want to sing.”
“The thing you could count on no matter what generation you were,” said McAnally, “is that Jimmy Buffett was gonna be the happiest guy in the building or the amphitheater or wherever it was we were playing. There was nobody more tickled than him to be there. And it was always that way. It didn’t matter if he had a cold, it didn’t matter if it was going to rain. He was so happy to get up there and play those songs and sing them along with folks.”
“If we learned anything from him, it’s how important that is,” said McAnally. “And, and we are that way too. It’s a celebration for us and the fact that we get to continue to do it, you never know how long, but this run of shows is essentially a reunion for all of us.”