Jimmy Buffett - American Storyteller & Best Of The Early Years (1998 & 2000)

Every major recording artist seems to have some juvenilia in the catalog that has gotten away somehow and gets repackaged endlessly, ripping off fans and making life hard for discographers. In Jimmy Buffett's case, that juvenilia consists of the recordings he made for Barnaby Records in the early '70s. Originally issued on the LPs Down to Earth (1970) and High Cumberland Jubilee (1976), they have also turned up on Before the Salt (1979) and Before the Beach (1993), and are available to any entity that wants to lease them from Celebrity Licensing, Inc., slap a current photograph on the cover, and put out a CD. That's what bottom-feeder bargain label LaserLight has done with American Storyteller, which draws eight tracks from Down to Earth and three from High Cumberland Jubilee, plus "Richard Frost," first released as a bonus track on Varèse Sarabande's 1998 reissue of Down to Earth. This is not the freewheeling Jimmy Buffett of "Margaritaville," but rather a thoughtful folk-rock singer/songwriter of the early '70s, earnestly strumming an acoustic guitar over a rhythm section and singing lyrics of social consciousness with sly references to drugs ("Ellis Dee," "A Mile High in Denver"). The most striking track is the leadoff song, "The Christian?" (the LaserLight album ignorantly drops the question mark from the title), an attack on religious hypocrisy that sounds like the sort of thing Kris Kristofferson was writing about the same time. Buffett may have hoped to tap into the same strain of mature songwriting that Kristofferson rode to fame at the time, but things worked out a little differently. There is some good work on this album, but it is not characteristic of the lighter tone Buffett took later, and potential buyers shouldn't buy it expecting his usual style.

Every major recording artist seems to have some juvenilia in the catalog that has gotten away somehow and gets repackaged endlessly, ripping off fans and making life hard for discographers. In Jimmy Buffett's case, that juvenilia is the recordings he made for Barnaby Records in the early 1970s. Originally issued on the LPs Down to Earth (1970) and High Cumberland Jubilee (1976), they have also turned up on Before the Salt (1979) and Before the Beach (1993), and are available to any entity that wants to lease them from Celebrity Licensing, Inc., slap a current photograph on the cover, and put out a CD. That's what bottom-feeder bargain label LaserLight did with American Storyteller in 1999, and a year later its sister label, Delta, came out with a companion volume, the oddly titled Best of the Early Years, which contains 11 of the 12 remaining Barnaby tracks. (Adding to the confusion, another Delta imprint, Legend, simultaneously released a two-CD version of Best of the Early Years that packages the two discs together.) The album starts with two songs from Down to Earth and ends with another track from that album, the eight in the middle coming from High Cumberland Jubilee. The Down to Earth songs are seriously minded, simple folk-rock songs expressing a distinct social conscience, while the High Cumberland Jubilee numbers are musically more ambitious, boasting a string section and some involved arrangements. They are also a little odder lyrically, containing hints of Buffett's light later style, but no more than that. The original albums do not benefit from being jumbled up in this way, and Best of the Early Years is a deceptive title for a disc that should have been called "Rest of the Barnaby Recordings" to be an accurate description of the contents.