East Troy - Critiquing the music at a Jimmy Buffett concert is kinda like analyzing the thespian skills on display in a Vin Diesel movie.
You can do it, but you'd be missing the point.
By all appearances, for the 35,000 or so people who filled the Alpine Valley Music Theatre to capacity Saturday, Buffett's annual visit was a chance to get out the old Hawaiian shirt, grass skirt and shark-finned hat, bat a beach ball around, drink, dance and get lei'ed.
Buffett's show is equal parts luau and lounge act, with the genial host himself looking like Paul Simon's older surfer dude brother. Barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt, the 55-year-old Buffett and his Coral Reefer Band offered the mostly middle-aged crowd a three-hour escape from mortgage payments, lawn mowing and trips to the kids' orthodontist.
The closest Buffett got to topical commentary during his show came during his introduction to "Why Don't We Get Drunk," when he mentioned he'd been "a Catholic altar boy."
"No, they didn't get me," quipped the singer. "I lettered in track for four years."
Buffett's 13-piece backing band, including guitarist Mac McAnally, was competent enough, but performed with the frozen smiles and unobtrusive professionalism of the house band on the Lido Deck. Even Buffett himself was occasionally lost in the blizzard of flying beach balls and boozy crowd singalongs.
The three-hour show featured a number of songs off Buffett's recent "Far Side of the World" album, notably the title track, "Blue Guitar," and "Autour du Rocher," which the ever-smiling front man penned as a eulogy to a doomed hotel he briefly owned in the French West Indies.
Buffett introduced another new song, "What If the Hokey Pokey Is Really All It Is About?" as being inspired by post-Sept. 11 uncertainties, but the song itself - like the majority of his show - was a party-ready, upbeat number that went down with the crowd as easily as that fourth beer.
Even Buffett's more substantive material, notably the wistful midlife crisis "Pirate Looks at Forty" and "Son of a Son of a Sailor," had a built-in sway-with-lighters-aloft quality that kept the crowd on its feet.
Buffett mingled longtime crowd favorites - "Fins," "Jolly Mon," "Boat Drinks," "Cheeseburger in Paradise," "Margaritaville" and "Fruitcakes," among them - with universal standards such as "Hot, Hot, Hot" and Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl."