An explanation of why an anecdote falls flat. Suggests that at the time the event happened, it was really, really interesting or funny.

When context is more important than text.

"Well, he said, 'If that's your wife, where's your pen? Youshka, youshka, youshka!'... ah, you had to be there."

1978 Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band live double album, recorded in August 1978 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, (Aug. 8-10) and the Maurice Gusman Cultural Center in Miami, Florida (Aug. 14-16).

Jimmy Buffett is a lot of fun live, and this, his first live album, shows off the talk and alterations to his song lyrics that make the shows so fun. One Amazon.com review complains that you hear more talk than music on this album, but I'd have to agree with the other reviews that Buffett's later live albums never quite reach this one's height. It's difficult to stop this man from playing, or playing around; Buffett played at least part of this tour with a cast on one leg, as photos in the liner notes show, and one example of his in-concert lyric rewriting is in the song "Margaritaville," where he changes "cut my heel, had to cruise on back home," to "I broke my leg TWICE, I had to limp on back home." In the liner notes, Buffett attributes these changes to "an over-indulgence in Mount Gay rum and an over-abuse of poetic license," but really, it's one of the things that make the live albums worth buying if you already have the studio recordings.

There are other reasons: "Perrier Blues," "Morris' Nightmare," and "Dixie Diner" (this last a cover of a song by Larry Raspberry) are songs that don't appear on any Buffett studio albums, and the difference between the version of "God's Own Drunk" (originally by "Lord" Richard Buckley) on the album "Livin' and Dyin' in 3/4 Time" and the greatly-expanded, twice-as-long live version is like night and day. Buffett was sued by Buckley's son who claimed that "Buffett had not paid for the rights and even more, had recorded a perverse version of God's Own Drunk," presumably this live version. (The studio version sticks to the words that Buckley used, if online transcriptions of Buckley can be trusted.) So this was not a song that you could hear at Buffett shows for a long time. (In 1986 when I saw Buffett, he replaced it in his set list with a song which instructed the lawyers to "kiss my ass.") Apparently the lawsuit was settled eventually and Buffett has occasionally played the song in the 1990s, according to several discussion threads on buffettnews.com.

The album has its dated moments (the clothes in the photographs; the use of 1970s Saturday Night Live catchphrases) but they don't subtract anything from the enjoyment a Buffett fan will get from this album.

Track listing:
(original Side 1)
Son of a Son of a Sailor
Pencil Thin Mustache
Wonder Why We Ever Go Home
Landfall
Miss you So Badly

(original Side 2)
Havana Daydreamin'
Margaritaville
Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes
Come Monday
Perrier Blues

(original Side 3)
Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit
God's Own Drunk
He Went To Paris
The Captain and the Kid

(original Side 4)
Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw
A Pirate Looks at Forty
Tampico Trauma
Morris' Nightmare
Dixie Diner

Sources:
The cover and liner notes of the vinyl copy of You Had To Be There.
http://www.cobo.org/knowledge/faq/miscellaneous.html
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/parrotheads.uk/covers.htm
http://www.columbia.edu/~tdk3/drunk.html

A phrase used to let someone know that the "humorous" story they just told was actually pretty lame. Either they left something out of the story that was vital to conveying how funny it was, or it just wasn't funny in the first place.

Also used after you tell a lame story and nobody laughs. Sometimes, using this line after a really crappy story will actually be more humorous than the story itself.

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