Where did Jimmy Buffett go when he left Key West? With the freedom to go anywhere, he seemed to be everywhere at once and nowhere very long.
He was at the Bistro, in Atlanta. Deborah McColl sang and played Wurlitzer piano in a group there called Silverman and remembers him sitting in with them sometime in 1972. “Jimmy actually hitchhiked up from Florida,” she says.
He was in Chicago, at the Quiet Knight, where the janitor was so much more than a janitor; he was a poet, a mentor, a painter, a one-armed piano player and natural storyteller who’d fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
He was working New Orleans or Biloxi. He was playing colleges across the South. He was in Texas—Dallas or Houston or lighting up a night in Austin with a new scene of songwriters developing, in part, on the strength of Jerry Jeff’s personality (and constitution).
He was on the highways, the railways, and the airways in between. He was here there and even back in Nashville, because however closed, incompetent, and nepotistic it felt—Nashville mattered. He might have found himself a home in Key West, but the people willing to assist in his anything-but-laid-back ambitions were in Tennessee.
“Jimmy came to me and he said, ‘Man, I’ve got to get booked,’ ” Buzz Cason says. Buffett had spent countless hours honing his chops in the sweltering attic of the cabin he and Margie had rented in East Nashville. He still had the old Bourbon Street arrows in his stage quiver. Songs were stacking up. He needed to play live. He needed to hit the road. He needed to perform. He could earn enough of a living doing that. He was sure of that.
“I said, ‘The only guy I know who books the kind of stuff you do is Don Light,’ ” Cason says. “And so I called Don. There are a couple different stories about that.”
When Light died in June 2014, the Tennessean newspaper’s celebration of his life leaned on a few of Light’s favorite aphorisms: “If you can find a need and fill it,” Light liked to say, “you’ve got a job,” and, “There’s no substitute for experience, and only one way to get it.”
He was quotable, yes, but neither of those were things Don Light just said. He embodied those ideas. His was a well-earned wisdom. After leaving the marines in 1961, Light worked as a DJ and played drums at the Grand Ole Opry. When he began writing at Billboard in 1962, covering the gospel music industry, he discovered there wasn’t a gospel music industry. So in 1965, he cofounded the Gospel Music Association and opened Don Light Talent. He had no experience booking acts, but he saw a need and so he learned to book gospel acts. Light built a gospel music business that had previously been based on handshake deals. Let there be contracts, he said. And there were.
He had his own style, too. For example, he also liked to keep a can of Budweiser in his shirt pocket. Just in case.
“He had this unique eye for talent, unlike anyone else in this town,” Buffett told the Tennessean. “Don Light was an honest guy that took an interest in me . . . I was lucky to have him in my life.”
In 2006, when the Nashville Songwriters Association inducted Buffett into its Hall of Fame, Light gave a speech and said it was his Billboard successor, Bill Williams, who sent Buffett his way. The chart-topping, millions-selling country duo Big & Rich sang “Margaritaville” and Cason, also onstage that night, says while they were all posing for photos, he leaned over to Light and said, “Man, I sent Jimmy Buffett to you. It wasn’t Bill Williams.”
“It’s funny at this age,” Cason says. “You go and get three, four different stories. You just gotta average them out.” No matter the exact equation, the sum is always going to be equal to Don Light joining the small but committed group of People Who Believed In Jimmy Buffett.
“He was a guy I felt could do this,” Light told writer Peter Cooper in 2013. “I’ve been right about that more than I’ve been wrong. Early in our relationship, he went to visit Jerry Jeff Walker. He went for a week and stayed three.”
When Buffett returned to Nashville, he put some of his stuff in storage, left a guitar at Light’s office, and headed right back to the island. Before fax machines, before email, before Buffett had a phone of his own, Light would call the Chart Room. “That’s where we did business,” Light said. “I’d call, leave word for Buffett to call. He’d be there in the afternoon.”
Cooper wrote for the Tennessean at the time he interviewed Light. He works for the Country Music Hall of Fame now, teaches at Vanderbilt, and writes and records excellent songs, often alongside pal Eric Brace. Cooper’s conversation with Light reinforces Bill Williams’s importance without diminishing Cason’s.
Williams asked Light if he’d listen to Buffett and sent him to Light’s office that night. “A little frame house,” Light said. Not far from Vanderbilt’s campus, just off Chet Atkins Place on the edge of Music Row. Buffett brought over a demo tape, 71/2-inch reel-to-reel, and punched Play.
Good humor and petty crime filled the air as “The Great Filling Station Holdup” introduced a couple of not-too-bright good ol’ boys who pull a pellet gun on a gas station attendant and speed off with $15, a can of oil, “a big ole jar of cashew nuts and a Japanese TV.” They’d have gotten away with it, too, if not for beer. They were drunk in a burger joint when the sheriff put an end to the crime spree before it could pick up any real momentum, leaving them with nothing but regrets: “No picture on a poster, no reward and no bail.”
“Pencil Thin Mustache” introduced itself with nostalgic wordplay about how “now they make new movies in old black and white.” Buffett had constructed a collection of memories from his favorite television shows of the fifties. He tapped his adolescent crush on Sky King’s niece Penny. He successfully coupled “bawana” (attaching it to Ramar of the Jungle) with “marijuana” (smoked only by jazz musicians). He wished he had the same pencil thin mustache that defined detective Boston Blackie’s cool. Buffett was only in his mid-twenties and already had a well-developed sense of what used to be.
Light remembered “a couple of the slower songs” on the tape. “Railroad Lady” could have been written by then. In the spring of 1971, months before they’d blitzed Key West, Buffett and Jerry Jeff hopped a train from New Orleans to Nashville and wrote a song inspired by a woman they encountered in the dining car along the way.
“She saved our life,” Buffett said in 1974, pausing for a beat. “She read us the menu.”
He was at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, recording a set for radio station KSAN. The singers had worked up quite an appetite, Buffett said, by opening windows between railcars and howling into the Southern night. On 1999’s Gypsy Songman: A Life in Song, Jerry Jeff pegged the ride as the final run of the L&N’s Pan American, a contemporary of the Illinois Central’s City of New Orleans.
“Riding through the night,” Jerry Jeff said, “was one Jimmy Buffett, one Jerry Jeff Walker and one bottle of Wild Turkey”—if you’re wondering why howling into the night from a speeding train seemed like a good idea.
“Railroad Lady” wasn’t about any of that, however. It was about the slow, inevitable decay of what once was elegant and romantic. Of a woman, “just a little bit shady,” who’d lived high on the generosity of men, and of the railroad itself, both done in by progress and by time. The rails are left rusting. The dining car is covered in dust. And the woman, she’s on a bus, headed home to Kentucky.
The tape spun from one reel to the other while Light listened and wondered what to make of the shaggy-haired, good-humored, in-need-of-a-break singer Bill Williams and/or Buzz Cason had sent his way.
Light must have seen the spark Milton Brown first saw, the spotlight smile and easy charm. He saw Buffett was smart. He’d soon witness a lifestyle that would assure Buffett never ran out of songs, but he also recognized the work ethic to get them written. “I told him, ‘I think I can get you a record deal, and if I do, I’d like to be your manager,’ ” Light said. Had Light managed anyone before? Not really. There’s only one way to get experience, and Don Light saw another job no one else was doing.
“I believe in separation from the pack,” Light told Cooper. When Buffett signed his publishing deal with Cason, that was more than a lot of other songwriters had. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was bigger than no deal. Now he had a manager. The next step was a record deal and that . . . that took a while.
The thing about Nashville that was absolutely true is that it was conservative. It was careful. The cultural upheaval of the sixties, the tension between the Baby Boomers and their Greatest Generation parents, mostly missed Music Row. Chet Atkins earned his name on a street sign as not only an artist, but as a producer and a businessman. He perfected, polished, and sold what became known as the Nashville Sound.
Glossy and lush, carefully orchestrated—calculated—for crossover appeal, the formula, executed perfectly by million-dollar voices like George Jones and Patsy Cline, proved so profitable that when interviewers asked Atkins to define the Nashville Sound, he’d jingle the change in his pocket.
Light took Buffett’s songs for a walk along Music Row, to Atkins and those who would be him. He was met by polite rejection. I like him, but I’m not sure I can get him on the radio. Light would wait a few months, there’d be turnover at this label or that label, and he’d take the songs out again. I like him, but . . .
Radio was what record executives knew. To establish an artist, to build a fan base and sell records, you had to get airplay. Goofball pellet-gun holdups, and songs with lines like “now I’m getting old, I don’t wear underwear” were . . . different, and different was a risk. Risk was a hard sell.
In 1972, country radio liked Dolly Parton’s duets with Porter Wagoner, and Merle Haggard (recently pardoned by California governor Ronald Reagan). Tammy Wynette, Conway Twitty, Buck Owens, Charley Pride, Loretta Lynn, and Ray Price all had number-one country hits. Buffett wasn’t like any of them. He wasn’t any more like Neil Young, who released Harvest. He didn’t have Chicago’s horns or hooks. Jimmy Buffett certainly wasn’t going to be confused for Mick and Keith in Exile on Main Street. Buffett couldn’t even be pegged a Next Dylan; that albatross was waiting on a kid named Bruce Springsteen, who’d release Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. in January 1973.
Light collected “no thanks” after “no thanks,” and then another label would play a new round of executive come-and-go, and Light would go knock on that door again. I like him, but I’m not sure I can get him on the radio. “They weren’t off base on that,” Light said.
No, but they were wrong just the same. They were wrong even when Light showed them how to be right, when he took them to see Buffett at the Exit/In in Nashville, or the time he talked Macon, Georgia–based Capricorn Records cofounder Phil Walden into checking out a gig at Mercer University. Walden and Capricorn helped make Southern rock a genre by signing the Allman Brothers Band and the Marshall Tucker Band.
Walden called Light the morning after Buffett’s show and said he thought Buffett was great, but that he already had enough artist/writers who weren’t selling any records. Walden needed more hit records. Radio made those. I like him, but . . .
“I ran into that a lot,” Light said.
Labels looked to the past, and to what had worked. Light was pretty sure he was watching the future take shape. Kids were sitting in front of Buffett in increasing numbers. The receipts were adding up.
“The people liked him,” Light said. Not just the songs, they liked the singer. Onstage, Buffett wasn’t beholden to a set list. He was barely beholden to songs. “If it was him and a guitar, he could talk all evening,” Light said. He sent Buffett to a booking showcase one time, a matchmaking event where colleges and coffeehouses gathered to meet talent and send out offers. If an act was good, an act got jobs. Buffett opened with an apology. “My manager said we had to sing and play more, but I’ve only got twenty minutes,” he said.
It worked. He got jobs, and if Light could book Buffett somewhere once, he’d play there twice. After that, he might play multiple nights. Eventually he’d move to a bigger room.
Buffett could feel out a crowd and win it over. At the Quiet Knight, he might spend a month opening shows. “And the headliners would change every week,” he said onstage in Key West in November 2015. “In the space of one month, the first person I opened for was Jerry Jeff. The second was Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. The third was the Siegel-Schwall blues band out of Chicago. And the fourth was Neil Sedaka making a comeback tour.
“Let’s say the first three were cool.”
Buffett knew Sedaka’s work—classic Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley stuff. His set was one more thing unlike anything Buffett was playing. “I’m folk-singing away up there going, Holy Mother of God, what am I going to do?” he said. “So, they booed me sufficiently for the first thirty minutes and then Neil came on and he did his first set and this place exploded.”
From the other side of the room, Buffett watched and thought they’d kill him when he returned to open the second set. Between shows, a woman who worked at the Quiet Knight grabbed Buffett’s arm and said, “C’mon.” They threw back a couple of drinks, ran down to a thrift shop and found him some quality fifties wear. They slicked his hair back and then had a few more drinks. “Got real drunk,” Buffett said, “and I did Elvis impersonations and had them on the tables.”
At the end of the night, Buffett told Dave Hoekstra on WGN Radio, Quiet Knight owner Richard Harding pulled him aside and said, “See? You found a way.”
A few miles south of the Quiet Knight was another folk club, the Earl of Old Town. Steve Goodman and John Prine were sharpening their songs there. Goodman caught Buffett at the Quiet Knight, invited him over to the Earl to hang. “They were so great to me in those early days,” Buffett told Hoekstra.
Goodman was a Chicago native, a Cubs fan, and a former high school classmate of Hillary Clinton. He kept trying college, only to keep dropping out to write songs. He went to New York to play the Cafe Wha? He wrote “The City of New Orleans,” and played it for Arlo Guthrie after securing Guthrie’s attention for the cost of a beer. Guthrie, who figured to only get a beer out of the deal, got a hit in 1972, and the American songbook got another page. Two years later, a roughneck ex-con from Ohio named David Allan Coe would make another Goodman song, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” a country classic.
Prine was ex-army, ex–United States Postal Service. Opening for Kris Kristofferson in 1971, Goodman covered one of Prine’s songs. After the show, Goodman brought Kristofferson to see Prine, who, because it was after hours, was sleeping on a table at the Earl. He was staying at the club. They woke Prine and stuck a guitar in his hand. He stunned Kristofferson. “John Prine is so good we may just have to break his thumbs,” he famously told Rolling Stone. Prine went on to prove Kristofferson right time and time again. Today he’s John Prine, national treasure.
“The music business is not hard,” Light said. “It moves too slow to be hard. If you’re talented enough to do this, and go about it right, and do it long enough, it works. I know of no exceptions.”
When Kristofferson arrived in Nashville and started pushing a broom around Columbia Recording Studios, there wasn’t any reason to see the guy as anything but a scruffy janitor. When he landed a helicopter in Johnny Cash’s yard? Scruffy janitor who could fly a helicopter. Then Johnny Cash made Kristofferson famous when he performed “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on The Johnny Cash show in 1970.
Cash was one of the few who didn’t have to play by Nashville’s rules. He’d won that fight the hard way, by nearly destroying everything. He could wear all black and use his band. He had his television show, taped at the Ryman Auditorium, same as the Grand Ole Opry, but the Opry didn’t invite Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. The Opry wasn’t singing duets with Bob Dylan or sitting next to Tony Joe White and growling “Polk Salad Annie.”
After a 1954 appearance, the Opry pulled Elvis aside and told him he wasn’t a good fit for the show. As late as 1968, the Opry crowd booed Gram Parsons and the Byrds, damn longhairs—all of them. The Opry audience was the Nashville Sound’s target demographic, and no one’s ever eager to fix a cash machine that isn’t broken. But threads wear, imperceptibly at first, before they rip.
Roger Miller had covered Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” in 1969. Gordon Lightfoot did the same in 1970. But Cash giving voice to Kristofferson’s lonely hangover was a genuine moment. Things would be different after that. Attention had to be paid.
Kristofferson’s songs were jagged. He wore his “cleanest dirty shirt.” He was “as faded as” his jeans. His dark nights were darker and he wasn’t just drunk, he was stoned. He was stoned and he wrote that he was stoned and Cash sang it—on national television. Right there, “wishin’ Lord that I was stoned,” for the world to hear. To the fainting couches, Mom and Dad.
Sharing a stage with Kristofferson once, Merle Haggard said, “Kris is going to sing a song that changed the world.”
“Changed my world, anyway,” Kristofferson said.
“I was there when you got an award for this song and were too drunk to accept it,” Haggard said. Everyone got a good laugh at that—because history by then had proven Kristofferson right.
“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” won the Country Music Association’s song of the year in 1970, and the establishment wasn’t overly thrilled with Kristofferson’s award-show performance, mumbling into the microphone while Roy Clark whispered he should say thanks and move on. “When I got to my seat, Merle Haggard was the only one who would shake my hand,” Kristofferson told the Chicago Tribune in 1973.
Kristofferson’s voice sounded like a tobacco farm drowned in a distillery and buried in a car wreck. He’d been a Golden Gloves boxer and a Rhodes scholar who’d studied at Oxford. He was sharp as his jawline, and even if he didn’t beat the devil, he drank the devil’s beer for free, and stole a song. Then he told the story.
“Kris came to town and created the illusion of literacy,” Tom T. Hall told John Spong for a 2012 Texas Monthly story. “Somebody once said he and I were the only guys in Nashville who could describe Dolly Parton without using our hands.”
In 1966, Bob Dylan went to Nashville to finish Blonde on Blonde. He returned for John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline (1969) and made Nashville a destination for more than just country music. Kristofferson, born in Brownsville, Texas, was Nashville in Dylan’s wake.
A couple more Texans, Guy and Susanna Clark, moved to Nashville in 1971, and that meant Townes Van Zandt (Texan) and his parakeets would be by regularly. A who’s-who of who-wasn’t-yet—pickers like Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle—lined up to sit in Guy and Susanna’s kitchen and learn to craft truth into music. Generations of writers followed, right up until Clark’s death in 2016. Van Zandt gave every one of them a mission statement when he titled his 1968 debut For the Sake of the Song. You do it all for that.
Meanwhile, Willie Nelson’s house in Nashville burned down, and by the time it was rebuilt, he’d about had his fill of the Nashville Sound. Looking for a move, he booked a three-day country music festival in Dripping Springs, Texas, the Dripping Springs Reunion. The festival was a financial disaster, but was a historic event. Waylon Jennings met Billy Joe Shaver, who’d write some of Waylon’s biggest hits. And Willie convinced himself to leave Nashville for Texas.
Meanwhile, Jerry Jeff Walker, on his way from Florida to Los Angeles with a big-money deal from MCA Records that gave him creative control, stopped in Austin and stayed. Doug Sahm, once an East Texas country and western prodigy, returned from five years in San Francisco, where he’d tuned out and turned on. Michael Murphey returned to Texas from California, where he’d gone to UCLA, established himself in the folk scene, and had a song (“What Am I Doing Hangin’ ’Round?”) recorded by the Monkees.
Austin was filling with musicians, and many found their way to an old property on North Lamar. “A funky little ol’ farmhouse the city had grown around,” says Gary P. Nunn, who lived there with Michael Murphey. Small efficiency cabins dotted the lot. It was $50 or $75 a month for a cabin, and so it became home to a constantly changing cast of characters. “I called it Public Domain Incorporated, a Home for Runaway Fathers,” Nunn says. Others called it Outlaw Cove. There was a police station across the street. Surprisingly, the police mostly left them alone.
Nunn and the rest of Murphey’s band, the Cosmic Cowboy Orchestra, lived there. That same group of musicians became Jerry Jeff’s Lost Gonzo Band.
There was no genre, no codified (or commodified) Texas Sound. Blues players sat in with folkies; the folkies courted the rockers. Gram Parsons and Buffalo Springfield were bigger influences than Glen Campbell and Tammy Wynette. When Willie played the Armadillo World Headquarters, the beer-bellied shirtless rednecks stood happily alongside the barefooted hippies and famously everyone got along.
“Texas has such an incredible ego,” Ray Wylie Hubbard says, “but also an incredible sense of independence.”
You could hear it in Dallas at Mother Blues, at the Rubiayat, at the Abbey Inn. In Houston at the Old Quarter. In Austin at the Saxon Pub, the Vulcan Gas Company, Castle Creek, and the Armadillo.
“Jerry Jeff would just kind of show up there,” Hubbard says of Castle Creek. “And there were times he’d show up in a bathing suit and cowboy boots and be too drunk to play, but he could get away with it.”
Today, Hubbard lives southwest of Austin in Wimberley, Texas, and he writes country blues songs in the key of long black Cadillacs, empty roads, bottleneck slides, open tunings, pistols, philosophers, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. He’s long sober and determined, but Hubbard began as a hard-partying folkie in Dallas who first ran into Jerry Jeff in the mid-sixties at the Rubaiyat.
“They had this little Pan statue,” Hubbard says. Pan: the Greek god of the wild. Chased nymphs. Played the flute. The statue was across the room from the stage. Jerry Jeff began strumming offstage, walked on, stopped, tossed his hat across the room and onto Pan before falling back into the song in perfect time. “One of the best stage entrances I’ve ever seen,” Hubbard says.
That night, Jerry Jeff was still a folk singer working with his birth name, Ronald Crosby, and playing Dylan and other New York standards. Hubbard remembers an old Hungarian named Andre who told Mr. Crosby he should write some songs of his own. He wrote “Gypsy Songman” and “Travelin’ Way of Life.” He made himself into Jerry Jeff Walker, vagabond poet.
Hubbard put together a folk group and they played some originals and a bunch of Michael Murphey’s songs. “He was kind of the established guy doing all original material,” Hubbard says. Murphey had cowritten a double-album Kenny Rogers & the First Edition recorded in Nashville. The Ballad of Calico sketched the stories of the town of Calico, California, and before the tape had barely run out on that one, Dylan’s producer, Bob Johnson, got Murphey into another Nashville studio to record Geronimo’s Cadillac, the title track inspired by a photo of the Apache chief in full white man costume sitting at the wheel of an automobile in 1905. He was a prisoner at the time. “But there’s an intensity in his eyes that says, ‘I may be in a denigrating position, but I survived,’ ” Murphey told Texas Monthly. “So I wrote the song.”
Soon everyone was writing songs. They had to. You couldn’t get away with someone else’s material. “It wasn’t like open mic,” Hubbard says. “You had to get onstage and prove it.”
If you wanted to be a Texas Songwriter, you had to earn the badge, because it meant something. As Hubbard wrote in his 2015 memoir, A Life . . . Well, Lived, it meant “you were a reinforced-steel-concrete-honest-to-god-walking-badass-songwriting-son-of-a-bitch who wasn’t metaphor deficient, had read Grapes of Wrath and knew that Townes Van Zandt believed song lyrics should stand on their own without music and no matter how bad your twang was, you were literate.”
Austin was the Chart Room with more musicians. What emerged was something Key West was too small to develop—a music scene capable of sustaining those musicians. There were clubs, there was camaraderie, and there was an eager audience. Light could keep Buffett alive in Texas. “Once you got on that circuit,” Light said, “you could grow that.”
Buffett would play Castle Creek in Austin and then crash at Outlaw Cove. Up in Dallas he’d play Mother Blues and then play poker in the back room with the staff and Freddie King until dawn. One night the woman who worked the door at Mother Blues introduced Buffett to Hubbard. Hubbard remembers it mostly because he eventually married the door girl. They’re still married today. The rest of the night’s fuzzy. “I remember we were drinking,” Hubbard says. “You know, a lot.”
Let’s say they sang “Redneck Mother,” because Hubbard figures they probably sang that song. It is, in a sense, his “Margaritaville.” It’s the reason that when songwriters ask him for advice, he tells them to be prepared for the possibility they might write a song they have to sing for the rest of their life.
He wrote “Redneck Mother” after a harrowing beer purchase in the wrong Red River, New Mexico, bar. Red River wasn’t Austin. The hippies and the rednecks weren’t getting along. The right bar would have been the one farther way, the one that liked hippies. Instead he went to the wrong one, the one full of guys waiting to play Stomp the Hippie.
“Technically, I’m a musician rather than a hippie,” Hubbard said.
That didn’t help the situation. But he got out alive and wrote the song, and when Jerry Jeff recorded it live at the Luckenbach Dancehall in Luckenbach, Texas, in 1973, “Redneck Mother” (also known as “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother”) became an anthem. To everyone’s surprise—and especially Hubbard’s—it’s still an anthem.
“This song probably should never have been written, let alone recorded, let alone recorded again,” he’ll say onstage. “But the way I look at it is, careers have been built on less.” And twice a year, a check arrives in the mailbox. It’s usually a pretty nice check.
Texas was as important to Buffett in those years as Key West, but he wasn’t a Texas Songwriter. He’d fly in from Florida and then fly home, or head to Nashville for a run at the Exit/In or to take a meeting or sit in on a session. Tompall Glaser and his brothers Chuck and Jim had opened Glaser Sound Studios not far from Light’s office.
“They had about the second sixteen-track recording studio in Nashville,” pedal steel player Doyle Grisham says. While the scene in Austin came together, opening one front in the war against Music Row’s conservatism, Tompall took the fight to the old guard in its own backyard.
Kenny Rogers & the First Edition had recorded The Ballad of Calico there. Waylon, Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Jessi Colter, Shel Silverstein—they all recorded at what would become known as Hillbilly Central.
Enter Grisham. Born in 1942, Grisham grew up outside Temple, Texas, picked up the guitar when he was eight or nine, and never quit. He got to Nashville in 1966 and made it to the Opry stage before moving to Maine in the fall of 1967. That wasn’t a career decision. He was in the navy. Discharged from active duty in late 1968, he hit the road with David Houston, whose “Almost Persuaded” had been a number-one country hit in 1966. Houston had a top-ten hit in 1968 with “Already It’s Heaven.”
In 1970, Grisham went to work for the Glaser Brothers. “That’s when I got into doing studio work real heavily,” he says. Tompall and the Glaser Brothers had a publishing business, and so demos of songs had to be produced and shopped. Then they’d work on their own albums. That’s how Grisham met Buffett.I The Glaser Brothers were recording “The Christian?” and “Tin Cup Chalice”—probably the second song Buffett wrote after getting a look at Key West.
West of Key West was Tank Island, so named because the navy had once planned a fuel depot to be marked by a dozen hulking green fuel tanks. Only two were ever built, the depot was never finished, and today it’s a private island where you can buy or rent homes with enormous price tags. Fuel tanks or millionaires, the sun sets beyond it just the same, night after night, indifferent to anyone’s story, troubles, or plans.
The best view is from Mallory Square, which fills with tourists and the performers and artists looking to separate the tourists from a few bucks. It’s a production, organized and choreographed. When Buffett arrived in Key West, sunset was for locals. An old man sold conch salad from his bike. A tourist or two might materialize, but just as likely it’d be a few friends, a joint or two, and tin cups filled with wine.
“Tin Cup Chalice” is a memory of that one perfect evening we should all be so lucky to have. The thick salt air, the oysters and beer, the sailboats chasing the breeze as the sun slips toward the horizon—they’re a daydream as Buffett concludes they should “get that Packard running” and get back to the island before the day’s last light. Wherever he was when he put pen to paper, he knew exactly where he wanted to be.
When Norman Wood, captain of the fishing yacht Petticoat III and an early Buffett supporter, first heard the song he said, “But Jimmy, there’s no honeysuckle in the Keys.” Details. Details. Who cared? Someone was cutting a Buffett song. Based on Don Light’s theory of separation, that was another small step from the pack. If it made one of Tompall’s records, Buffett might find a little money in his mailbox back home.
“He was just hanging out ’cause he wrote the song,” Grisham says. “That was kind of the norm in those days. The writer would show up to watch the session.”
During a break, they were sitting around and Buffett asked Grisham if he’d play on his record when the time came. “I said, ‘Sure,’ ” Grisham says. “What the hell? I didn’t know him from Adam and everyone was always telling you things, but that came true.”
Eventually.
When the break Buffett was working for came, it wasn’t front-page news. It was page-three news—in Billboard, on November 11, 1972. “ABC Buys Cartwheel Records; Hires Gant,” read the headline. Followed by: “NASHVILLE—In its strong move into country music, ABC-Dunhill has purchased Cartwheel Records ‘lock, stock and barrel,’ hired Acuff-Rose executive Don Gant to run the operation here, and announced other activities.” The story announced Gant as “one of the most talented producers in the business.” Unnamed “insiders” told Billboard that using Nashville people was the best decision ABC-Dunhill could have made.
“Don Gant was one of the greatest music men,” Buzz Cason says. “He was a heck of a singer.” Like Cason, Gant was an East Nashville kid. He ran out a string of 45s in the early sixties, putting a jukebox-perfect voice (and clean-cut, parent-friendly look) to songs like Roy Orbison’s “Sad Eyes” and “Daydream (Of You).” Gant went to work for Acuff-Rose Music as a writer and earned a cowriting credit on a minor Orbison hit, 1967’s “Cry Softly Lonely One.” By the time he left to run ABC-Dunhill’s Nashville operation, he’d worked his way to Acuff-Rose’s executive offices.
Nothing about that résumé suggests outsider, and Gant, as Billboard noted, wasn’t one. He was Nashville people. But he had also formed the Neon Philharmonic. In the late sixties, Gant teamed with writer-producer Tupper Saussy to make two trippy country-pop records. But for the Oompa-Loompas, the Neon Philharmonic could have been Willy Wonka’s house band.
The Moth Confesses, released in early 1969, spawned a top-twenty hit, “Morning Girl.” The Neon Philharmonic was released later that year. Warner Brothers promoted it with an ad in Billboard calling “Morning Girl” a rare “hands-across-the-formats phenomena” and promising to put enough promotional push behind the new record to assure “America’ll soon know Tupper Saussy is not the name of a sticky fish dish.”
Also in a busy 1969, Gant produced and the Neon Philharmonic backed Orbison on “Southbound Jericho Parkway,” a multi-act, seven-minute work of melodic fatalism that stands out even among Orbison’s fatalism as especially fatalistic.
Gant wasn’t risk-averse, in other words. “Gant called me and said, ‘Tell me if I’m crazy or not,’ ” Cason says. “I said, ‘What?’ ”
“I’m thinking about signing Buffett,” Gant said.
“Do it,” Cason said. “He’s getting a following in colleges. He’s the future of what’s going to be happening.”
Gant signed Buffett and then took the deal and Buffett’s demo tape to Los Angeles for a show-and-tell session with the label’s top executives. ABC-Dunhill was hoping for the next Waylon Jennings. Buffett, whatever he was, definitely wasn’t that. Gant called Light and said it didn’t look like he could get the label behind a Buffett record, and without their support, they wouldn’t get Buffett on the radio. He offered Light a chance to get out of the contract free and clear. Light said thanks, but no. They’d stick with the deal. Worst-case scenario: they get new, better sounding demos to shop to someone else.
“If it wasn’t for Don Gant, there wouldn’t have been a Jimmy Buffett,” Light told Peter Cooper. Jimmy Buffett had his second record contract and it was time to reintroduce the guy who’d once so glumly looked out from a pile of junk buried along a river in Tennessee.
I Michael Ruppli and Ed Novitsky’s The MGM Labels: A Discography, Vol. 2; Volumes 1961–1982 tags the date of the recording session as December 16, 1971.