Their first album together, Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes, is still the quintessential Buffett album, containing his only Top 10 hit, the classic of tropical dissipation and wavering self-deception, "Margaritaville."

"Margaritaville" represents Buffett at his most appealing and insightful. The song's story takes place in Mexico, always a refuge for Americans at odds with the American Dream - a dream hung on the twin hooks of individual opportunity and individual responsibility. Some people need to escape the responsibility hook for a while to facilitate soul exploration or just to decompress. Where would you rather be? Basking in the perpetual summer of a snow white playa sipping margaritas and chuckling at the tourists, or huddled around a short-circuiting space heater in a Buffalo hovel? Fictional characters including Fred C. Dobbs, Augie March, and Buffet's semiautobiographical persona have chosen the Mexican alternative.

"Margaritaville's" Caribbean/mariachi/country melody is cheerful yet reflective, its lilt tempered with an aftertaste of regret. The song's power lies in its acknowledgment that the life of dissipation must be the shadow against which real life shines, not the screen that real life is shown upon. Responsibility can be an awesome weight, but ultimately we must accept responsibility for what it is: the internal demand to live up to our own values. Clearly, the character's lifestyle here doesn't coincide with his values. Rather than living a life of ease, he is living a life of intense internal conflict - a life he can only perpetuate with liberal applications of alcohol. Buffet doesn't even want to face up to the fact that he is drinking alcohol, which he disguises with mixes and rituals - rituals that are wearing thin.

Buffet's character's acceptance of the possibility that he bears culpability ("Some
people claim that there's a woman to blame, Now I think, Hell, it could be my fault") for his actions is the great turning point. This reckoning requires such an effort that Buffet needs an instrumental break to contemplate it, where we are again reminded by the music's languid splendor how pleasant this dissipation can be; and we are reminded why an army of weekend sailors, beach bums and dissipants have retreated into Buffett's world for 30 years, but it was under Putnam's watch that the archetype was perfected and found its finest expression.