Spar Recording Studios, in a basement near Vanderbilt University, was home to a little sleight of hand.
Hit Records made hit records, but not the hit records. It was a sound-alike operation. Each week they’d check the charts, record covers of the two most popular songs (cuts from Elvis and Dion, for example), package the 45s, rush them to the racks, and undercut the competition—the actual hit makers—by as much as half.
“And they had salesmen all over the country,” Cason says, his leg up and an ice pack on his knee—one of those injuries that results from nothing more than time. He’d limped into Creative Workshop, the first studio in Berry Hill, a neighborhood south of downtown Nashville that had been a bedroom community when he built in 1970. Now it’s a swarm of music studios and publishing houses (usually both in the same building). House of Blues has a studio up the street. Past that, Brent Maher, who helped Cason build Creative Workshop and then discovered the Judds, has his own shop with gold and platinum records on the walls. Next door to Creative, another studio Cason built and then sold has been turned into a recording palace, a complex of nine studios called Blackbird that’s owned by Martina McBride and her husband John.
Creative Workshop was the first, though. Travis Turk, who’d help Milton Brown build the studio in Mobile, came to Nashville to help Cason and became the new studio’s chief engineer. Turk had the technical chops. Cason had music business experience.
He grew up in East Nashville—trendy now, not then—and formed the town’s first rock band, the Casuals. The Casuals became Brenda Lee’s backing band and Cason can pepper a story with the big names: Elvis, Sammy Davis Jr., Ricky Nelson.
Hanging on a wall in Creative Workshop’s lobby is a red, white, and blue show poster from July 5, 2014. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum presented Poets and Prophets, a salute to “legendary” songwriter Buzz Cason. Writer of “Everlasting Love” and “Soldier of Love.” Producer of “She Shot a Hole in My Soul.”
Robert Knight’s take on “Everlasting Love,” cowritten with Mac Gayden, hit number thirteen on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1967 and featured the rhythm section of drummer Kenneth Buttrey and, on bass, Norbert Putnam, a studio player with a growing reputation who’d come up from Muscle Shoals just as that small north Alabama town was beginning to grow its reputation as “The Hit Recording Capital of the World.”
Framed on another wall are the cover of Cason’s 2012 autobiography, Everlasting Love, and the first page of a chapter titled “Jimmy Buffett, Down to Earth.” Next to a photo of Buffett sitting on a suitcase in an empty Union Station in New York in 1971, and written in Buffett’s CAPS-LOCK scrawl, are two endorsements: “Buzz, I love reliving my past. You got it right,” and “This book makes me want to quit my day gig and go off and join a rock ’n’ roll band.”
Other signs point to the blurb’s redundancy. Above the door heading to the studio, still wrapped in cellophane, is a street sign announcing JIMMY BUFFETT DRIVE. On the opposite wall, a platinum award for Buffett’s 1992 box set, Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads.
There has, over the years, been some small controversy as to whether or not Buffett sang on any of those Hit Records knockoff sessions at Spar. Cason says no. Turk says no. Buffett appeared on a cover, because he was hanging out and they were shooting a cover. That’s it. Nothing more. Spar was, however, where Buffett cut what became his first album, Down to Earth—as apropos a title as that box set’s would later prove.
Nashville might have been the land of possibility, but opportunity was a harder proposition than hope. They made records, and hits, and hit records in Nashville, but there weren’t a lot of places to play live music in those days. The stage tricks Buffett picked up in New Orleans weren’t much help in Tennessee, because there weren’t many stages. Compounding the problem, he wasn’t selling his songs to other singers and producers, because his songs weren’t Nashville songs. He’d probably have been better served working alongside the folkies in New York’s Greenwich Village, or falling into the Laurel Canyon scene in Southern California. But he and his new wife had a Nashville budget, and so Nashville it was.
Buffett signed with Russell-Cason Music Co. in July 1969, a moment marked by the Mobile Press-Register on July 21. Buffett told his hometown paper his music was “contemporary,” citing John Hartford and Joni Mitchell. “I would like to project a message people would listen to and think about,” he said. Margie, the story said, was Buffett’s biggest fan.
“With Jimmy’s talent and Margie’s enthusiasm, it’s hard to doubt that some day soon Mobile will see his face and name on record album covers and perhaps even watch him perform on television.” He and Margie buttressed the future’s promise by posing for a photo that looked exactly like happily ever after in the making.
In Tennessee, however, it cost more than his wife’s enthusiasm to pay the bills. Margie got a job with ASCAP,I but that wasn’t enough, either. “So I had to get a real job,” Buffett said in Paris in 2015.
He found it in the Help Wanted section of the Nashville Banner. Billboard needed a writer. “I went from one week knocking on doors getting rejection after rejection for songs I was trying to pitch, to working for Billboard magazine where people sent me free records and I had an expense account,” he said.
His real job was covering Nashville’s bold-faced comings and goings.
Kris Kristofferson has written three songs which will be featured in the new movie by the Rolling Stones. He also has his first album out which is on Monument . . . David Allen Coe’s long awaited Penitentiary Blues on the SSS label has just been released. Coe wrote all of the songs while in prison . . . Al Mair, general manager of Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Morning Productions was in town for several days from Toronto . . .
So read the scoop from Nashville in Billboard’s May 30, 1970, edition. Buffett, under various spellings of his name, wrote reviews, too. In that same May 30 issue, Jimmy Buffet declared Ronnie Millsaps’s set at Roger Miller’s King of the Road Motor Inn to be “professionally tight.” Presumably that was Ronnie Milsap.
Earlier that year, on January 17, Jim Buffett raved about Tony Joe White’s performance at Municipal Auditorium, saying he “showed the crowd what ‘swamp rock’ was all about,” and with minimalist flair—just Tony Joe’s electric guitar and a drummer, “Sammy Creasy.” (Sammy Creason, probably.)
“I kind of looked for little stories around town . . . and I had a great time doing it,” Buffett told Dave Hoekstra on WGN Radio in 2015. “Plus, it opened a number of doors.”
Doors to executive offices, studio floors, and publishing houses. Buffett would run into Chet Atkins or Jerry Jeff Walker. He might kill a few minutes chatting up musicians between sessions. Or he could shoot the shit with his boss.
Bill Williams was Billboard’s Nashville editor. He knew the town and the business that turned its gears. A hit song was nice, but owning the publishing on a hit song was even better. At night over beers, Williams would impart wisdom. Foremost: take care of your end of the deal, because all anyone else cares about is their end.
“Artists are a disposable commodity,” Buffett told Hoekstra. There’s always another kid who can sing. They roll into Nashville every day. And they know—every one of them knows—that all they need is a shot, someone to offer a stage, or listen to a song. All they need is someone to believe enough to pass a contract across a desk.
Buffett wasn’t any different. He wanted was his name in lights, his photo on an album cover, exactly as had been foretold in the Mobile Press-Register. Once that album became a hit, and he became a star, the second record would take care of itself. The money spigot would open. Eventually he wouldn’t have to pull his albums from the Misc. B section to the front of a record store’s “B” bin. He’d have his own section. After a couple number ones, maybe they’d even spell his name right. Two T’s, always, and everyone who’d ever laughed would look up at him onstage “spellbound, with lumps caught in their throats,” exactly as he imagined in one of his “contemporary” folk songs, “Ain’t He a Genius.”
“So I’m working at Billboard,” Buffett told Hoekstra, “but I’m singing at anti-Vietnam rallies in my fringe jacket in Nashville, and that was risky business in those days.” It was antiestablishment, and Nashville liked establishment. Establishment meant order. Order meant money. A lot of people were making money in Nashville, and they’d prefer to continue making at least as much money, and more if at all possible.
Buffett didn’t write to script. He wasn’t really writing country music. He was, as he said, trying to make people think. Tucked in his ode to the all-American superhero “Captain America,” Buffett took a poke at Spiro Agnew and a swipe at Merle Haggard’s anti-anti-Vietnam protest hit. Buffett’s Captain America, “hip” as he is, “just can’t dig the Okie from Muskogee,” Buffett sang.
“Ellis Dee (He Ain’t Free)” took up the cause of a poor black man who got nothing but grief from a world that never tried to see things through his eyes. “There’s Nothing Soft About Hard Times” gave voice to the hopeless, its dirt-poor narrator separated from his family and whiling away his days on a bench in New Orleans’s Jackson Square, drinking wine and waiting to “bum another dime.”
In “Richard Frost,” a singer leaves Alabama, changes his name, and instead of bright lights, finds himself frustrated, stuck in a roadhouse bar in Oklahoma. “Is every song a routine chore?” Buffett wondered.
On January 2, 1970, Captain James Delaney Buffett died. Jimmy and his cousin Baxter were among the pallbearers at his funeral, and a few weeks later, Buffett wrote “The Captain and the Kid,” capturing his grandfather’s restlessness on land, and Jimmy’s eternal admiration. “He’s somewhere on the ocean now, that’s where he ought to be,” Buffett sang. “One hand on the starboard rail, he’s waving back at me.”
At Spar, with Turk producing, Buffett recorded most everything he’d written. Twenty or thirty songsII knocked out and punched up with the band, Buffett’s voice arriving upright, like he was trying to sound older than he was, and as much like Gordon Lightfoot and Fred Neil as he could. He sounded . . . serious. And it was serious business, this topical folk music of the times.
Consider “The Missionary,” about a true believer, a far-away salesman pitching the virtues of home: peace and prosperity and goodness. “I told them how we’d learn to change our sword blades into plows,” and doesn’t that sound like something you’d want, too, folks? Who wouldn’t? Upon closer inspection, however, he discovers his country at war, its “brave and strong” leaders murdered. Disillusioned, he realizes he’d been preaching a lie.
Buffett and Brown teamed up to write “The Christian?”—a protest song about religion and hypocrisy. “That was the era,” Brown says, “and it basically was: Mom and Dad, you messed it up and it’s going to be our generation that has to fix it.” Buffett and Brown built a lyric simple enough to connect, yet clever enough to catch your ear: “You picked a hell of a time to be thinking about Heaven.”
Country music has always done better business with faith than crisis of faith, and without question the question mark on the song’s title—“The Christian?”—came with enough power to unnerve radio programmers, and that was enough to terrify executives, neither of which were sure what to make of the singer or his songs. Nashville didn’t line up outside Cason’s door to bid on the new kid in town.
But Cason and Buffett played tennis in nearby Oak Hill with a guy named Mike Shepherd and a DJ named Roger Schutt. Schutt was best known as Captain Midnight. When he died in 2005, his CMT.com obituary pegged him as “confidant, guru and pinball-playing partner” to Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, Tompall Glaser, and the rest of what became country music’s outlaw wing. Kinky Friedman called Schutt the “patron saint of sleepless nights.”
Shepherd ran Andy Williams’s Barnaby Records and was the only one who was any good at tennis. “The rest of us couldn’t play for nothing,” Cason says.
“I’ve been hitting balls for seventy years,” Shepherd says. Since he was nine years old. He still plays tennis every Tuesday night. Cason remembers mentioning Buffett’s work to Shepherd while they were playing. Shepherd remembers Buffett coming to see him to pitch songs.
“Barnaby was owned by Andy and distributed by Columbia Records,” Shepherd says. He was running the label with Ray Stevens from an office on Seventeenth Avenue in Nashville. Most of what they did was manage the catalog Williams had purchased from Archie Bleyer’s Cadence Records. Cadence had released Williams’s early hits, as well as the Everly Brothers, the Chordettes, and others. A jazz and blues subsidiary, Candid Records, worked with Lightnin’ Hopkins and Charles Mingus.
The back catalog was nice, but in Nashville everyone wanted publishing on what was, and a hand in discovering what will be next. “Guys started to come in,” Shepherd says. Pitching songs and singers. “Guy comes in with a dub. He worked for Billboard. He came up from Alabama. He was running around Nashville trying to get songs published.”
The guy played Shepherd a song called “The Christian?” Shepherd thought it was great. Told the guy, “You know what, we’ll put this out.” Shepherd took Buffett to New York, made the introductions, and the deal was signed.
“I said, ‘Man, Mike let us recut it. It’s at that funky Spar studio over there,’ ” Cason says. He hadn’t built Creative Workshop yet, but he was sure they could get into a better studio than Spar. They’d handed him demos, after all. Nothing more. Shepherd thought the record was fine as it was. Cason took the proposition to Buffett.
“Do you want to let them put out those demos?” Cason asked.
“I guess they’ll get us started,” Buffett said.
In the June 6, 1970, edition of Billboard, instead of a byline, Jimmy Buffett was himself a bold name, one of twenty-eight songwriters elected to ASCAP membership. Among the new singles Billboard felt deserving of attention from the commercial gatekeepers were the latest from Frankie Valli (“Circles in the Sand”) and Perry Como (“Love Is Spreading Over the World”), Sam & Dave (“Knock It Out the Park”), and Buffett.
Of “The Christian?” Buffett’s employer wrote: “Strong debut out of the Nashville scene is a potent piece of material with a biting lyric and a top vocal workout. Could make it big!” A week later, Billboard’s next Jimmy Buffett mention included the news he’d left Billboard—along with a reminder “The Christian?” was widely available.
“And it didn’t do anything,” Cason says. “The album didn’t do anything either, much.”
“Nothing happened,” Shepherd says. “Completely stiffed.”
Down to Earth was about people who had nothing but a belief about how things should be. It was idealistic and certain and hard-edged. It was, as its title suggests, grounded in day-to-day struggles. Even the album cover—“The cover!” Shepherd says, laughing—was a weather vane. The sixties were over and the hippies had been dispatched to the backseat of a rusted car buried in Cumberland River silt and shale.
Gerry Wood, who worked at ASCAP with Margie Buffett (and later also wrote for Billboard), took the photo as he and Jimmy cruised the river in Wood’s ten-foot rowboat. For Island Life, in September 1992, Wood wrote they were looking for the cover of an album that was going to be titled Jimmy Buffett Drives Religion and Politics into the Ground.
That junked-out automobile was almost too perfect. Buffett climbed in the back, and Wood said, “If you feel or hear anything slithering in there, it’s probably just a water moccasin.”
Wood worked fast to capture Buffett in a faded floral shirt, his lips pursed and his hands folded and resting on the seat in front of him. The photo rightly sighs. The title changed, but the photo fit all the same.
Cason remembers (and Shepherd confirms) a $2,500 advance for Down to Earth. They scored $4,000 for the next Jimmy Buffett record, because they needed Bergen White to arrange strings. “We thought we really had pulled something off,” Cason says.
High Cumberland Jubilee was cut at Creative Workshop and picked up where Down to Earth left off. Specifically, Down to Earth ended with “Truck Stop Salvation,” the story of a rock star ripping through an ultraconservative backwater, the kind of place where the sheriff comes armed with “self-inflicted grammar” and the locals are whipped into a frenzy by a guy “who’s not weird, just a man who’s bein’ free.”
Cason cowrote six of the High Cumberland Jubilee’s eleven songs. Most of the album was about loners and losers and outcasts out on the road. Like “Ace,” out in the street, “never knowing what he’s going to find.” Like the woman “In the Shelter” of New Orleans, “the city where she knows she might lose it all,” and probably will. So she sits by the river and cries, wondering what life means.
The tears in “Livingston’s Gone to Texas” are Holly’s, cried for her man who just had to leave and see the world. “It’s crazy and it’s different, but it’s really being free,” remarks the song’s narrator (while putting the moves on Holly in her time of sorrow).
“Rockefeller Square” sneered at another kind of freedom—to play the outcast—enjoyed by the rich kid safe in the knowledge “there’ll still be a piece of Daddy’s kingdom” when he’s ready to come home.
A young professional couple, Buffett and Margie weren’t immune to a little acting of their own. They’d leveraged themselves and bought a Mercedes, crafting German engineering into a symbol of American adulthood.
The finer things were nice, but Buffett’s sympathies were clear. He stood with the hippies wearing dime-store clothes and driving beat-up trucks.
Two years into Nixon’s America, Buffett had aligned his songs and their characters with the outsiders. And on the second side of High Cumberland Jubilee, he took a few of them out of town and put them in a cabin in the Tennessee hills. He called them the Hang-Out Gang and, showing off on the album closing “High Cumberland Jubilee/Comin’ Down Slow,” they could swing from a Beatlesesque piano ballad to a wild blue grass stomp quicker than any program director could say “We won’t play that.”
So Buffett wanted his star to shine bright and wide, but he continued to want it with his songs, no one else’s. The sheriff’s lousy grammar was the sheriff’s problem, not Buffett’s.
In his 2009 memoir, Moon River and Me, Andy Williams wrote, “Barnaby was never more than a sideline for me.” Others referred to it as a vanity label. The difference between the descriptions is slight. Williams had enough interest in its business, however, to want it closer to his home. Shepherd says he was told he needed to move to Los Angeles, a move he didn’t want to make because he’d gotten married the year before and had an eight-month-old child.
Of course, when you’re married and have a baby, you also don’t want to lose a perfectly good job, and so Shepherd moved to Los Angeles and Jimmy Buffett’s career got lost along the way. Literally, according to Barnaby, which never released High Cumberland Jubilee and claimed the master tapes had gone missing. Cason, shaking his head, still calls it “the Barnaby fiasco.” As for Shepherd, his concerns regarding his move west were prescient. A year after he and his family arrived in Los Angeles, Shepherd was divorced and his wife had moved back to Nashville.
Cason took Buffett to New York to try to get him a new record deal. “And we got turned down by every label in New York,” Cason says. “Paul Colby at the Bitter End was one of the only people who liked him.”
Colby, who died in 2014 at the age of 96, managed the Greenwich Village club for a decade before he bought it in 1974. The Bitter End was, in the words of Kris Kristofferson, speaking to the New York Times in 1992, a place where “people like me and Bob Dylan didn’t just perform, we came to hang out.” It was a songwriters’ room, and its tables were reserved for people who liked songs.
Cason took Jimmy to see Colby and Colby tossed him onstage. “After he made it, I remember Colby telling me, ‘I knew that kid was going to make it,’ ” Cason says. “And there were several people who later regretted it, labels that turned me down.”
Even Buffett’s biggest fan, Margie, had something of a change of heart. They both did. They were young and it was hard, money was tight and nothing was going right. The world is full of couples in love, couples with good and true reasons to get married. Those reasons don’t always hold against pressure and time. Jimmy and Margie split, and it was enough to sour even a generally good-natured guy.
“I hated Nashville,” Buffett told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It’s too closed and incompetent, and there’s a lot of nepotism. I was sick of it, so I moved to Key West.”
I The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers protects (and collects on behalf of) the people who write the songs. Margie didn’t stay there long. By October 1970, she’d moved to assistant director of talent and tickets for The Johnny Cash Show. In 1974, she was hired by Capitol Records as national artist relations coordinator in Los Angeles.
II Many of those early songs remain unreleased through no fault of Turk’s. He has been working for years to get them out, and been close a few times before Jimmy’s interest waned and the project fell from favor. Cason said one idea was a collection titled Uncovered Treasure. Another plan called for Jimmy to pen extensive liner notes. Turk holds out hope something will happen.
