O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Buffett Is the Perfect Party Host : Parrot Heads surface out of season to see laid-back hero preach Spring Break ethos with no intrusion from real world.

Like the recently evacuated Biosphere, the Buffettsphere is a hermetically sealed environment whose inhabitants cut themselves off from the outside world and its turbulence and change.

It is a carefree zone where people tend to dress absurdly in Hawaiian shirts, grass skirts and headgear that Carmen Miranda wouldn’t touch. Some slurp margaritas at $4.50 a pop, and all go bananas for a singer-songwriter whose singing is featureless and whose songwriting is lightweight. If James Taylor is still the classic Cadillac among male soft-rockers from the early ‘70s, Jimmy Buffett remains a Chevy with an engine rattle.

The Buffettsphere is a well-populated place. Its proprietor may be zero for his past 10 years when it comes to placing albums in the Top 40, but he continues to draw sell-out crowds at amphitheaters across the land.

Buffett has dubbed his fans the Parrot Heads, and Friday night at Irvine Meadows there were 15,000 of them on hand for a sold-out, out-of-season Buffett concert (except in summer touring season, this bird, who went barefoot on stage, usually nests in warmer climes, such as his home base of Key West, Fla.). The show was a makeup date for a June 5 concert that was postponed because of flooding on the amphitheater grounds.

This time around, Buffett regaled the Parrot Heads with Parrot Vision--two video screens that allowed the fans to watch home movies and snapshots from their hero’s past, or to observe themselves having silly fun. Thus, hedonism was multiplied by narcissism. Nothing depicted on screen, and little that was sung about, had to do with life outside the Buffettsphere.

Buffett’s fans have been compared to the Dead Heads, that other hard-to-explain massive pop cult following that allows its idol to remain a huge concert draw even though its records are seldom hot sellers. Dead Heads often are attracted by an ethos of Sixties communitarianism that surrounds the band. Parrot Heads are attracted by the ethos of Spring Break that surrounds Buffett.

The 46-year-old singer’s own laid-back insouciance sets the tone.

On stage Friday, he was an always-amiable party host who joshed with and flattered his guests, and didn’t seem to be merely going through the motions while doing it. Buffett had a good time, although he didn’t break a sweat doing it.

In many of his songs, he celebrated adventure and travel, recoiling from the strait-laced life and the Puritan ethic. But Buffett wants his adventures and travel to be free-and-easy rounds of familiar pleasures, not challenging or life-changing risks of the unknown. His world is an insulated fantasy island where struggle and strife don’t enter, where equilibriums are easily restored. It’s a place where you can probably overcome little tragedies like that lost shaker of salt we hear about in his signature song, “Margaritaville.”

The best music about escaping from care--Cajun music and New Orleans R & B, for example--takes on a wild zest because it allows the shadow of hardship and tragedy to linger in the background, the way it so often does in real life. One is aware of the reason for the partying, the strong need that gives rise to the search for escape. In Buffett’s universe, tragedy and pain are banished, and so is any chance to make the music more than a diversion for people looking for that taste of spring break.

“I don’t know where I’m a-gonna go when the volcano blows,” Buffett sang in one lively refrain. Of course not; his music doesn’t really concern itself with life’s volcanic possibilities.

“Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic,” Buffett sang in one of the set’s more contemplative numbers, “He Went to Paris.” But that song’s account of a man who experiences disappointments and loss reached for an easy equanimity. No wild mood swings allowed in the Buffettsphere, even when some of the outside world’s possibilities are momentarily broached.

Most of what Buffett and his bright-sounding, 14-piece Coral Reefer Band played kept a loose, touristy-sounding affiliation to Caribbean music, with a lot of emphasis on steel drums. There also were occasional references to country, blues and mild forms of rock ‘n’ roll.

The show’s best moments were the energetic peaks of partydom. Even for someone who gladly would live an entire life outside the Buffettsphere, it was fun to watch 15,000 people press their hands together above their heads to approximate a shark fin, then genuflect feverishly to the left and to the right in response to the chorus of “Fins.”

Buffett achieved a fair number of those moments early on, before letting the show sag in the middle. The chief culprits were a draggy talking blues involving moonshine whiskey and a large bear, and “In the Shelter,” an uncharacteristically serious song culled from “Before the Beach,” a recent reissue of two obscure early-’70s Buffett albums. That early material betrays a sensitive-folkie side that predated the now-familiar persona that made him a star.

Of the 20-odd songs Buffett played, only the love song, “Come Monday,” and the closing encores, “Margaritaville” and “A Pirate Looks at 40,” would deserve much attention from pop fans whose heads are other than Parrot. He fleshed out his repertoire with covers: Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” a cheesy, tropical transformation of the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon,” and “Another Saturday Night” by Sam Cooke. The original versions of all three covers offer wry or poignant portraits of people trying to cope with changes in their lives. In the Buffettsphere, they were just played as party fodder.

Overall the show was lively and innocuous, except for the idiotic “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw,” which Buffett made even more tasteless by dedicating it to the late Conway Twitty, a country balladeer who prided himself on a fervent romanticism that had no place for crudeness.