Trip To Las Vegas

Jimmy Buffett has long subscribed to that tenet of capitalism that it isn’t necessary to come up with great ideas yourself as long as you can recognize someone else’s great ideas and use them. The Grateful Dead’s rabid following of self-dubbed Deadheads may have developed on its own with only gradual recognition by the band, but Buffett’s fans, the Parrot Heads, were named by Timothy B. Schmidt when the erstwhile Eagles member was playing in the singer’s backup group in the early ’80s, and Buffett has cultivated them carefully. The Dead’s stream of self-released concert recordings may be a response to the Deadheads’ interest in taping their shows; Buffett’s series, which began in October 2003 with six releases and continues here, is another deliberate borrowing from the Dead playbook. (Of course, he’s hardly the only one, with Pearl Jam, Phish, the Allman Brothers Band, and others doing the same thing.) But with the Dead, it’s a little different. The Deadheads started taping because the Dead’s shows were performed without a set list; no two were alike, and you never knew what song the band would play next, or how it would be played. The same things cannot be said of a Jimmy Buffett show, which, like most concerts, tends to be pretty carefully planned out. This 28-song set performed August 26, 2003, in Cincinnati differs in only five selections from the September 16 show heard on Live in Auburn, WA, and while nine of the 29 songs on September 20’s Live in Las Vegas are different, the structure of the show is the same; the differences (really just substitutions) mostly come in a brief acoustic set and in the encores. Buffett’s warhorses, starting with “Margaritaville,” of course, and also including “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “Come Monday,” “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” “A Pirate Looks at 40,” “Volcano,” and “Fins,” are always played in the same way and in the same places in the set. So, Buffett live recordings do not have the same kind..

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