The story may be apocryphal but it goes something like this: Jimmy Buffett was flying his personal seaplane near the coast of Jamaica when the country’s government, mistakenly thinking the plane was smuggling drugs, tried to shoot it down. The passengers aboard the beleaguered aircraft included Jimmy, his copilot, and – fascinatingly – U2’s Bono and his entire family. Whenever I remember this story, I mostly think about how incredible the conversation between Buffett and Bono must have been. What did they talk about? Songwriting? Middle East politics? New types of rimless sunglasses only accessible to the Weird ‘90s Rich Guy community? For all we know they may have solved world hunger right then and there, had they not been so rudely interrupted.
Thankfully the plane landed safely with minimal structural damage, the confusion was sorted out, and nobody was hurt. As an artist Jimmy Buffett has always gone against the grain, so it’s no surprise he decided to eschew the timeworn rock n’ roll tradition of dying in a plane crash. He used his new lease on life to write a song about the ordeal called “Jamaica Mistaica,” which became the second track on 1996’s Banana Wind. It’s generally representative of the album as a whole – a little half-baked but just pleasant and charming enough to make it worthwhile. From the insipid steel-drum-focused instrumental title track to the perfunctory beach vacation ode “Holiday,” most of the album is pretty phoned-in. With the exception of the latter-day Coral Reefer live show staple “School Boy Heart,” nothing here approximates the highs of his previous output, or even really tries to.
Banana Wind, like several other works we’ll talk about on Buffett Buffet, is simply not very good, and that’s OK. In fact, the existence of a relative dud like this is in its own way a testament to the strength of the Buffett catalog. Artists can only afford to put out whole albums of filler or embarrassing nonsense (see “Bob Roberts Society Band”) once they’ve built up enough goodwill to gamble on their more questionable creative impulses, and Banana Wind is a symbol of Buffett’s ascension to that level. Maybe it’s a disappointment, but you can’t disappoint unless you’ve already established a reputation for greatness. You can’t get shot out of the sky unless you first pull off the miracle of flight.