I got Jimmy Buffett's new album, Take the Weather with You. This is the album that Eli, Brad, Bob and I saw him tour on a few weeks back. His first song on there is called Bama Breeze, a tune about a place that I've been to - The Florabama (called so because it sits on the border of Florida and Alabama) I was down in Mobile, AL a few years ago working on a project with two good friends Greg Kandra and Glenn Anderson. Glenn's a native southern boy who takes a fair amount of flak for his love of NASCAR and roadkill, and he took Greg and I on a tour of the finest parts of Alabama. We drove for a while and pulled into this dive on the ocean that looked like a liquor store. We went in, both Greg and I pretty skeptical of where we were at, in the middle of nowhere. Behind the liquor store was a crazy set of disjointed bars, all of the looking like they'd been cobbled together in someone's spare time, complete with women's undergarments stapled to the ceiling. Greg and I still weren't convinced, but Glenn told us to trust him. On my way to the bathroom, I was looking at the memorabilia on the walls and it finally clicked where I was at. There were picture of Jimmy Buffett and a bunch of other famous people along with lyrics of all sorts of Buffett songs involving the Florabama. This was one of the bars where Jimmy Buffett had made it big and still comes pretty frequently to play and hang out. We hung out, had a few beers, and watched some great Carribean style musicians. The place was destroyed a couple of years ago during a hurricane and has since been re-built, but I'm not sure how it can have the same kind of character it originally did.
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