Author’s photo
Buffett’s first home base in the French Quarter. It was as easy a walk to the Café du Monde as it was to the Bayou Room.
Sometime in 1969, Milton Brown got a call from a panicked Jimmy Buffett. “Milton,” he said. “Buzz isn’t going to sign me unless you’ll tear up that agreement.” Milton was, and is, a songwriter in Mobile perhaps best known as the guy who wrote the theme song for Clint Eastwood’s Every Which Way but Loose. Buzz was, and is, Buzz Cason, founder of Nashville’s first rock-and-roll band, writer of hits, vocalist, producer, and doer of music business. “That agreement” made Brown something like Buffett’s first manager, a complicating contractual hang up for Cason as he worked to sign Buffett to a publishing deal in Nashville.
“I said, ‘Jimmy, consider it torn up,’ and I forgot about it,” Brown says.
He sat at his desk in his office—a small house where he operates a real estate and music production business. There was an old reel-to-reel recorder behind him on a shelf full of books that includes a copy of Buffett’s A Pirate Looks at Fifty. On a wall, above a comfortably worn couch, hangs a framed and autographed late-1970s photo of Jimmy. Laughing and wrapped in his sailboat’s furled mainsail like it was a hammock, Buffett wrote: “Milton, Would you buy a used car from this man? Love Jimmy.”
“Isn’t that funny?” Brown says.
True to his word, Brown forgot about Buffett’s old contract, but he didn’t tear it up. It went into a file, and that file was filled with other papers and then filed alongside more files in filing cabinets. The agreement was buried in the stacks and forgotten for thirty years until it finally worked its way back to the surface. It’s now neatly matted and framed and hangs above a filing cabinet stacked with phone books and papers and topped like a cake by a Betty Boop figurine.
“My wife is going through old files and shredding stuff and throwing things away and lo and behold, she comes upon this contract that Jimmy and I signed,” Brown says. “And I’m reading it, and it says, ten percent of everything.”
Well, it says ten percent of everything for a three-year period beginning May 28, 1969, and the artist could terminate the contract with fifteen days written notice should the agent not arrange for at least one release or a master recording in a twelve-month period. “It wasn’t like what the Colonel had with Elvis,” Brown says.
But it’s a neat piece of history on the wall and makes for a good story. Brown was talking to Jimmy’s mother one day, and he said, “Peets, let me tell you what I found.”
“What?” she said.
“I found a contract that says Jimmy owes me ten percent of everything he earns.”
Brown did the math and figured Jimmy had probably made $800 million. “This goes back,” he says. “He’s probably made a whole lot more now.”
Ten percent of his guesstimate was a lot of money then (and a lot of money now). Brown remembers that Peets looked at him and said, “Milton, please don’t tell him that. He’ll have a heart attack.”
“Fast forward now to fairly recently,” Brown says. “He was at the Grand Hotel and I had breakfast with him and I told him that story of my conversation with Peets, and he said, ‘I wouldn’t have had a heart attack. My lawyers would have had a heart attack.’
“So, anyway, there have been a whole lot of good times and he’s been a good friend for a lot of years.”
He and Buffett met because a beauty queen walked into Brown’s recording studio in the late 1960s. When Margie Washichek won Miss U.S.S. Alabama in 1967, the Panama City News put the story on its July 17 front page and described her as a “pert” Spring Hill College coed. Her father owned a marine junkyard in Mobile, and the recording studio Brown built above a dentist’s office with friends was partially operated by scraps salvaged from Marina Junk. When Margie came to see Brown, it was to ask a favor. Her fiancé was a singer. Would Brown maybe give him a listen?
“The first thing I noticed when Jimmy walked in the room was that persona,” Brown says. “The Jimmy persona. The smile lit up the entire room. Even though he wasn’t the Caribbean Cowboy yet—way before the sand-between-the-toes days—it was that glow. Even before I heard him sing, there was that presence.”
After Buffett graduated from the McGill Institute in 1964, he left the coast for the first time in his life, heading north to Auburn University because after graduation you went to college, and because college looked a whole lot safer than getting tangled in the increasingly complicated turmoil in Southeast Asia. Auburn it was, and if he was to follow the all-American template, college would be followed by a stable job to pay for a house, a nice wife with which to begin a family, a family to amuse on those two weeks of paid vacation every year, and good health care to help keep the household humming.
“When I discovered the guitar I went in an opposite direction,” Buffett said at the American Library in Paris in 2015, “which led me to New Orleans, because the French Quarter was there. Because I wanted to be a bohemian and I wanted to do that stuff.”
At Auburn, he met a few Sigma Pi guys he liked during rush week and they had rooms available; he rushed the fraternity and moved in. At one of their parties he saw a guy named Johnny Youngblood surrounded by girls. He was playing guitar and singing songs by the Drifters, the Tams, and Sam Cooke.
“It was black music sung by a bunch of drunken white college kids,” Buffett wrote in A Pirate Looks at Fifty. And everyone loved it. Buffett interrogated Youngblood about the guitar. Youngblood pulled a pint of Scotch, more than happy to answer Buffett’s questions but admitting he only knew three chords.
“Teach me those chords.”
He learned D, and then C, and once you get there, you’re two-thirds of the way to freedom, fun, and popularity with members of the opposite sex. Buffett quickly flunked out of Auburn, but he took those chords and that spark of inspiration when he left campus. How he came to attend Pearl River Junior College is, if not the stuff of legend, at least the stuff of halftime shows.
Narrating a 2013 Jimmy Buffett–themed football halftime show by Pearl River Community College’sI marching band, Buffett claimed to have found the school by accident on a return trip from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he’d been attempting to get into Louisiana State University. He was in the redneck Louisiana and Mississippi of his deepest, darkest fears—above the salt line—and stopped at a light in Poplarville wondering how he might redeem an academic career in tatters. Maybe he could fly helicopters in Vietnam. His father would respect that, and then . . . hello. He saw a woman walking to class, followed her onto campus, and registered.
It’s about seventy-five miles from Poplarville to New Orleans, and Buffett made that drive most every weekend in an oil-guzzling, smoke-belching Ford Falcon nicknamed the “Tan Hopper.” It’s almost twice as far from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to New Orleans. Hattiesburg, home to the University of Southern Mississippi, was stop number three on Jimmy Buffett’s sixties Southern college tour.
“Hattiesburg: Where tomorrow is yesterday,” Buffett said to big laughs during a 1992 taping of Jerry Jeff Walker’s television show The Texas Connection. “It’s not on the sign as you go into town.”
“I was really taking two night classes a week and living in New Orleans,” Buffett said, smirking. “Commuting to school.”
“That’s not a heavy load you were carrying,” Walker said.
“It was not a heavy load. I think it was photography and use of the library.”
Like Pearl River, Southern Miss wasn’t much more than an alibi. The action was in New Orleans and its scrappier Gulf Coast neighbor—Biloxi. There was open gambling in Biloxi long before gambling was legalized. There were bars with cheap drinks and liberal definitions of who should be allowed to consume them. Biloxi is where Elvis vacationed. It’s where Jayne Mansfield, on her way to New Orleans, died in a car crash in 1967 after leaving Gus Stevens’ Seafood Restaurant and Buccaneer Supper Club. Biloxi had scars and a temper and ill-considered tattoos.
Buffett began playing a pizza joint in Hattiesburg, and then bars in Biloxi. At the pizza joint, the Vietnam vets who held down the backroom reassured him his choice of a guitar over a gun or a pilot’s seat was the right decision. New Orleans took care of the rest.
New Orleans was voodoo and hoodoo and Elvis singing out to the Crawfish Lady from a balcony above French Quarter streets in the opening moments of King Creole.
Pirates haunted New Orleans. It’s where Jean Lafitte did business in a blacksmith’s shop full of dark corners and fire. And where, down Bourbon Street, rumor says Lafitte met with Andrew Jackson on the second floor of a bar (where Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain would later drink) to plan the same Battle of New Orleans that Buffett, his cousins, and their friends would one day reenact on the banks of Baptiste Bayou in Pascagoula.
New Orleans is where Huck’s river made its last mighty push toward the gulf, Buffett’s grandfather’s ships working north against the current coming home at the end of another adventure. The Buffetts would meet the captain when he’d arrive at the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf and then head to dinner at Tujague’s.
New Orleans is where, on one of those rendezvous, Buffett spied a banana palm in a French Quarter courtyard. Surrounded by slash pine and live oak, the palm was faintly out of sorts. It was a suggestion—of some exotic elsewhere out there on the wind. “It was a discovery as fascinating to a ten year old boy as the Galapagos must have been to Darwin,” Buffett would write in the notes to his 1996 album Banana Wind. “It was not the tree itself, but the place from which it had come that set me to daydreaming and thinking about the tropics.” After all, he noted, the night sky in Pascagoula isn’t much different than the night sky in Martinique.
In the New Orleans of 1967, the Bayou Room, surrounded by Bourbon Street strip joints, was Carnegie Hall for the Gulf Coast’s bohemians, hippies, and freaks. The Gunga Den, a nearby burlesque club was pretty great, too. Both had stages Buffett aspired to play.
New Orleans was school. He studied the way musicians and friends like Bob Cook, Brent Webster, and Gene Marshall worked the French Quarter crowds. Buffett dreamed of a Martin D-28 like Marshall’s and would take his not-a-Martin, set up on a street corner and do what musicians have been doing in New Orleans since the beginning of time. He worked for tips along that fine line between Big Easy work and Big Easy play.
“Well, we’ve been having a good time for a long time,” Allen Toussaint told me a few months before his death in 2015. “It took us longer to see the big picture than anywhere in else in America. We were just so localized. We were having a good time with each other, and whoever came to town saw what was going on.
“And Jimmy, of course, he’d view something like that and he’d see it for all it is, whereas some would just see circuses, he’d see all there is, the ingredients.”
The recipe included stand-up basses, long after the rest of the world was plugging in, acoustic guitars, pianos, second lines and brass bands. Laissez le bon temps roulez.
Trends, Mr. Toussaint noted, move east and west in America. New York makes something hip and then Chicago jumps on board and by the time it lands in Los Angeles, New York has moved on with a backward glance, smirking at the beach bums. Or Los Angeles develops a little laid-back cool and off it heads toward the Big Apple.
“You have to take a left turn to come down to this boot and there we are,” Toussaint said. “So geographically, as well as soulfully, we have been sort of off the beaten path of a certain kind of progress. And whenever you find that, I don’t care how primitive or how modern it is, you kind of like that.”
Buffett put together a band, the Upstairs Alliance, which included friends from his new fraternity at Southern Miss, Kappa Sigma. They played campus; they played parties; they auditioned at the Bayou Room and actually got the gig. They had Upstairs Alliance business cards made. Address: 616 Ursulines Street, Apt. 6C. Slogan: The Sound at the Top. Contact: Jim Buffett or Rick Bennett.
At the Gunga Den, a red curtain with gold tassels framed the stage. At the Bayou Room, hats woven from palm fronds hung on a bare brick wall behind the band as they played hits like the Byrds’ “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,”II and Stones and Beatles covers.
Author’s photo
Buffett’s first home base in the French Quarter. It was as easy a walk to the Café du Monde as it was to the Bayou Room.
When their set was done, Jim Buffett might swing by the Preservation Hall to hear Sweet Emma Barrett hammer on the piano out in front of her band. Then he’d hit the street corners, playing all night. He’d watch the sun rise from the bank of the Mississippi River then get coffee and beignets. He’d wanted to be a bohemian and do all that stuff, and he did. As detailed in A Pirate Looks at Fifty, Buffett got into Eskatrol, an amphetamine marketed for weight loss. He had a high-priced call girl girlfriend.
The apartment on Ursulines, in a townhouse built in the 1830s, was rumored to be the “House of the Rising Sun”—making it one of dozens of houses of rising suns in and around New Orleans. Whatever its past, it was a perfectly located clubhouse, a place to while away an oppressively hot afternoon with a nap before the sun set, the temperature cooled, and the night glowed bright.
The Upstairs Alliance didn’t last. First bands never do. But Buffett learned a few stage tricks and got a feel for working a crowd, be it at the Bayou Room or on the corner of Conti and Chartres Streets, where he’d work out songs like the Toussaint-penned Benny Spellman hit, “Fortune Teller,” about a guy falling in love with the woman who tells him he’ll fall in love. Is it magic? Is it about being in the right place at the right time and recognizing an opportunity? Is there much of a difference between the two?
Buffett had lucked into his encounter with Johnny Youngblood and the unnamed Siren of Pearl River Community College. He was bold enough to aim for the Bayou Room and brave enough to dream beyond the business world his peers were zeroing in on. And Buffett was smart enough to see a street corner and a Bourbon Street bar as but another departure point with as much potential as the old crab pier on Baptiste Bayou. Start there.
Buffett caught his next break in 1969 after graduating from Southern Mississippi on May 24 with a Bachelor of Science in history and, fittingly, public address. He flunked his draft physical. Free to chase a career in music, he pointed himself farther north.
He had a PA system (because he’d been the Upstairs Alliance member able to get a line of credit), and a few contacts, including Brent Webster. Buffett set out alone—a one-man touring operation handling booking, transportation, setup, set lists, and payout.
He was doing fine until the sight of a tornado ripping up a trailer park in South Dakota pointed him back toward the Gulf Coast. “I had been behaving rather badly for several years,” he wrote in A Pirate Looks at Fifty. The pangs he felt could have been good old-fashioned Catholic guilt programmed by years of parochial school. Or it could have been fear, a moment’s hesitation at the window.
Buffett turned the car around, asked his girlfriend Margie to marry him, and they moved back to Mobile. He stuck a toe in the mainstream, but didn’t dive in. He didn’t quit music. Instead, he got a gig in the bar in the corner of a hotel named after Raphael Semmes, who’d commanded the U.S.S. Somers in the Gulf of Mexico during the Mexican-American War, moved to Mobile, and during the Civil War, captained the CSS Alabama.
The Admiral’s Corner, in the Admiral Semmes Hotel, sat on the edge of the town’s 1711 city limit, and it was there Buffett developed his first dedicated audience. Then, with Margie’s introduction, he went to see Milton Brown.
By then, Brown had heard some singers and seen some stars. Near as he can figure, his family settled in the Mobile area in the 1860s—1870s at the latest. He probably wasn’t conceived under an azalea tree, but he’s the one who made that joke.
Brown’s mother was into show tunes, and so he was into show tunes. When he got to the University of Alabama—like Buffett at Auburn—he discovered black music in a white environment. “Like Odetta, like Josh White,” Brown says. “But they couldn’t come play here because of segregation.”
However, Eastern Air Lines was running nonstop weekend flights from Alabama to Chicago. Tickets were cheap. Brown would fly up and hit the Rush Street clubs. He saw Odetta. He saw Josh White. “Goose-bump time,” he says.
Then he got into bluegrass. After that, he got into the army, heading to Germany around the same time as Elvis. Brown came home, went to work for his dad, but held on to a tenor guitar he bought overseas.
Once a week, Brown would play a folk song on the television morning show Alabama Jubilee. Don Davis hosted; he would eventually run Harlan Howard’s publishing operation, Wilderness Music. Davis was married to Anita Carter—of those Carters, the only Carters who matter in country music.
The youngest daughter of Ezra and Mother Maybelle, Anita would sing background for Brown. “And I’m so ignorant of it, I don’t even realize who I’ve got singing backup when I’m singing these folk songs,” he says.
Every week he’d gather the band for about fifteen minutes before they went on the air, teach them the song, and then they’d go live. No overdubs. No do-overs. He’d ask the viewers for requests, and they’d mail the titles of songs they’d like to hear. He’d learn those and play them. He aimed to please.
“I’d begun to write country music by then, and one of the people I really liked was Ernest Tubb,” Brown says. Davis knew Tubb and said he’d pitch a song Brown had written with “E. T.” in mind. Tubb passed.
Disheartened but undeterred, Brown took a shot writing a duet for Tubb and Loretta Lynn. Brown cut the demo and, right before his wedding, sent Tubb a song titled “I Won’t Cheat Again on You (If You Won’t Cheat on Me).”
Brown and his new wife honeymooned in Nashville, and when they returned to Brown’s 660-square-foot former bachelor pad, the phone rang. His wife picked up the phone. “It was the first time she’d answered the phone as Mrs. Milton Brown,” Brown says. “And she said, ‘Milton, it’s someone who says she’s Mrs. Ernest Tubb.’ ”
If “E. T.” could have the publishing, he’d record Milton’s we-each-done-each-other-wrong song. “E. T.” was in luck. Publishing was open. On February 18, 1969, at Bradley’s Barn in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, Ernest Tubb and Loretta Lynn cut “I Won’t Cheat Again on You (If You Won’t Cheat on Me)” with Brown watching from behind the board.
Brown’s own studio in Mobile, Product Sound Studio, opened in 1967. A Billboard item from July 1, 1967, announced Honeycomb Records, “a label featuring country music product.” Sound Investment Inc. owned Honeycomb and had been formed in January 1967. Travis Turk, a sound engineer and DJ, was president. John Edd Thompson, a songwriter and soon-to-be beloved TV meteorologist, was vice president. Brown was secretary. Nick Panayiotou, who dabbled in radio and whose father owned a Greek restaurant called Constantine’s, rounded out the team.
Brown was sufficiently impressed with Buffett to invite him to record. Working the soundboard at Product Sound—a board he’d rigged from scrap—Turk helped Buffett get both sides of a 45 to tape. The A-side, “Abandoned on Tuesday,” seemed as incongruous to the soon-to-be-married Buffett as “I Won’t Cheat Again on You (If You Won’t Cheat On Me)” was to the recently married Brown. There’s no happy ending in “Abandoned on Tuesday,” just a guy left standing glum and alone “with a dream in my hand”—and that’s just the first verse.
The B-side, “Don’t Bring Me Candy,” would prefer its romantic partner bring herself instead, and not play games, not even Monopoly, because someone is going to land on Boardwalk, and “the one who lands on Boardwalk has to pay.” In love, life, and real estate, location has always been everything. Be honest and true is all the singer asks.
They were standard-for-the-late-sixties folk tunes. Simple song structures and straightforward sentiments. They weren’t complicated, and there were plenty more where those came from—with more arriving all the time—and so Brown invited Buffett to join him up in Nashville for a session at Spar Recording Studios.
Brown could get Spar at a discounted late-night price, and the players hanging around the studio were ace. Junior Huskey might be on bass. Lloyd Green could be on pedal steel. Brown could polish the production of his songs better in Nashville than he could in Mobile, and the market was right outside the door.
Nashville was where you went to do business if you weren’t going to Los Angeles or New York. Whenever Brown had ten songs ready, he’d drive north and knock them out in three hours at Spar—almost always first takes. Then came the day he only had seven songs, but studio time booked. He asked Buffett if he’d like to cut a few of his songs. Buffett recorded three and then raced back to Mobile for his regular Admiral’s Corner gig. He could have stayed and spent a night in Nashville, but he wouldn’t.
“He didn’t want to lose that job,” Brown says. “And he asked me, ‘Would you run these songs, would you pitch them for me?’ ”
The first to bite was Jack Grady, who ran the Nashville office of CBS’s publishing wing, April-Blackwood. “I forget, it was a nominal amount, something like a hundred dollars per week,” Brown says. Plus an album and a single, and all Grady needed was approval from his boss—who was in Europe. He’d call the next day.
“I go back the next day, he keeps me waiting an hour,” Brown says. “Never a good sign.” When Grady finally emerged, it was with half the deal. If it had been $100 per week, the new one was $50. They’d do an album, but no single. Brown explained to Grady that Buffett had just gotten married. He wanted to move to Nashville and give songwriting a serious shot. He needed more than they were offering. There wasn’t any more, Grady said. “Well I’ll get back to him,” Brown told Grady, “but I just don’t think he can take that.”
Brown went back to the Holiday Inn where he always stayed—even on his honeymoon—the one nearest Music Row, which is Nashville’s Wall Street. The guest elevator was broken so he took the service elevator to his room and arrived to another ringing phone. It was Buzz Cason, the aforementioned musician, songwriter, producer, and East Nashville native. Cason was assembling his own publishing company and he’d heard Buffett’s April-Blackwood deal had fallen through. It hadn’t been an hour, and Brown hadn’t even had time to call Buffett, much less anyone else.
“You remember when Jimmy wrote that song called ‘Coconut Telegraph’?” Brown says. That was after his feet had found the sand, but it was recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and captured the free-and-easy flow of information on a tiny island. “I’ve thought of it many times over the years. It must have been the Nashville Telegraph,” Brown says.
Cason was willing to make the deal Grady couldn’t, or wouldn’t. It wasn’t fame and piles of cash, but it was a job in a town that, with a little luck, could give you both. It was better than no deal. For the second time in his life, Jimmy Buffett packed his bags and headed north from sweet lunacy’s county seat.
I In 1960, Pearl River Junior College and Agricultural High School changed its name to Pearl River Junior College. It became Pearl River Community College in 1988.
II Audio of this is available on YouTube. They did right by the Byrds.