God’s Own Truck was a beat-to-hell, semi-green, holes-in-the-floorboard-and-everywhere-else 1953 Chevy 3100 pickup. It got its name from humorist Lord Richard Buckley’s monologue “God’s Own Drunk,” a number Buffett had learned in his Bourbon Street days.
Tom Corcoran remembers how the fenders rattled and the muffler belched. You could hear Buffett coming long before you could see him. Chris Robinson recalls how those fenders were rusted so loose they’d “almost breathe” as the truck clamored down A1A, up Duval, or out to the Islander Drive-In Theater on Stock Island.
“It was a full-moon tide and half of the drive-in was underwater,” Buffett said from the Exit/In’s stage in 1974. Harold and Maude was playing. They set up nice and right: lawn chairs, blankets, fast food, and psychedelic mushrooms. “We’d wired in about eighteen speakers to the truck and were ready for the movie,” he said. “And then we saw the swing set.”
He was due in Houston the next day but figured if he was in by 2 a.m., he could pull six hours sleep and still make his flight. “So about 7:30, I’m looking for my toothpaste and my other pair of jeans, banging around the house, hadn’t been to bed yet,” he said. “And that’s when the taste hits your mouth from the night before . . . It’s really dragon-y, you know? Chewing gum’s the only thing that can get it out for me.”
From the maw of the night before came “Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit,” about hangover remedies, the soul-reviving power of mortal sin, road-weary loneliness, and that pickup truck “chuggin’ down the street.”
On January 8, 1972, the poet and painter Kenneth Patchen died in California. An inspiration to the Beat generation, Patchen was a 1936 Guggenheim Fellow. The National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities awarded him $10,000 in 1967 for his lifetime “contribution to American letters.” In the fifties, Patchen pioneered the live reading of poetry to jazz. Whether that’s good or bad depends on the listener—and the poet.
Patchen was accomplished, if not exactly appreciated. The New York Times Book Review wrote that many critics found Patchen naive and romantic: “Even the most generous praise was usually grudging, as if Patchen had somehow won his place through sheer wrongheaded persistence.” Sure of who he was and what he was doing, he kept at the job of being Kenneth Patchen until people came around—or didn’t. He didn’t worry about it.
None of that was in the obituary the New York Times ran on January 9, 1972, but Buffett saw the news—if not the foreshadowing of his own career, which barely existed at that point, anyway. Jerry Jeff had one of Patchen’s books on a shelf at his place in Coconut Grove. Buffett had gotten into it when he was first staying with Jerry Jeff.
If Down to Earth’s “Ain’t He a Genius” voiced Buffett’s ambition—to be the envy of all who’d once criticized—“Death of an Unpopular Poet” cut to a deepest fear, that the genius might not be recognized in this lifetime.
Best-selling books and poems turned into songs came too late for Buffett’s poet to enjoy the rewards of his work. By the time the world turned its attention and eyes toward him, he was in Florida “with a tombstone for a crown.” He never experienced his fame, and as for fortune, that was left to his dog, Spooner, to spend. “He was just a poet, who lived before his time,” Buffett softly sang.
Corcoran was at the Chart Room one night when Buffett wandered in. “Whatcha you doin’ for dinner tonight?” Buffett asked. Corcoran paused and realized Buffett needed a meal. Judy was making spaghetti. Buffett happily tagged along.
“He picked up my old Gibson J-45,” Corcoran says, “and he said, ‘I’ve been working on this song.’ ” Buffett began the story of a playboy “picking ’em up and laying ’em down” all over the Caribbean, but “when you get your kicks, Havana plays tricks,” Corcoran says, reading the original lyrics to “Cuban Crime of Passion.” And that’s when things go south, so to speak. A tropical love triangle leads to a murder, a suicide, and sensational headlines back in the States.
“He played the song and I was flabbergasted,” Corcoran says. “I thought it was really good.” A few nights later, when Corcoran couldn’t sleep, he got up and grabbed the same guitar and tried to remember Buffett’s song. He zeroed in on the chords but couldn’t recall the lyrics. No problem. He made up his own, lines like “half woman half child” and “in the tropics they come and they go.”
“It was kind of clicking for me,” Corcoran says. He called Buffett and read him what he’d come up with. “Hell, Corcoran,” Buffett said. “You just got half a song.” Corcoran went back to bed and forget all about it.
Buffett rewrote a line about “cheap rum,” replacing it with the more specific “añejo,” because that’s what the gang was drinking. The dearly departed, quickly forgotten, Shrimper Dan–killing piano player from America was originally Billy Nine Fingers, named after the piano player at the Sands Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge whom neither Buffett nor Corcoran had met or seen perform. They liked the name—until Buffett came up with a better one.
When Corcoran first heard the finished version, “I said, ‘Who the fuck is Billy Voltaire?’ ” But he never bothered to ask and didn’t figure it out until a few years ago while he was brushing up on Fitzgerald. Among “those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him” were the Willie Voltaires, and Key West had a little more in common with West Egg.
“He Went to Paris” took inspiration from the after-hours stories the Quiet Knight’s sweep-up artist in residence, Ed Balchowsky, told Buffett. Like Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting for a Train” gave voice to an old man who lived at his mother’s boarding house, Buffett weaved Balchowky’s stories into a poignant life full of love and loss across the decades. Until “after eighty-six years of perpetual motion” he smiles at “Jimmy” and says, “Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic, but I had a good life all the way.”
After a show at the Bistro one night in Atlanta, Buffett headed to the Marriott for a late-night bite, a little something to sponge up the booze. “A soaker,” as he likes to say. Over his burger, he overheard the romantic negotiations of a man and a woman at the bar and decided to finally write a country song. “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” sounded exactly like what Nashville might want—until Buffett finished his thought with, “and screw.” Two little words and he was no longer singing country music. He was satirizing country music.
“I remember Tompall Glaser saying, ‘I can’t believe you actually did this to a country song,’ ” Buffett said onstage in 2015. “And I said, ‘Well, Harlan Howard always said country music is three chords and the truth. So here’s the truth.’ ”
These were the songs he’d dreamed up in the hammock and worked over in notebooks at the Boca Chica Lounge as the sun rose. He’d written them on airplanes and in hotels and crashing with friends in Texas. He made them up while nobody was looking and played them for anyone who’d listen in coffee shops, student unions, and listening rooms.
“It was moving at such a pace that we had a catalog,” Don Light said. That meant they had choices to make when they traveled to Nashville, set up at Glaser Sound Studios, and made A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean for ABC-Dunhill. Don Gant couldn’t promise label support, but he’d do all he could as producer.
True to his word, Buffett brought in Doyle Grisham on pedal steel. “They very seldom told me anything to play,” Grisham says. “Just play. He had handpicked everybody. He knew what he wanted, and it was kind of a collage of different people.”
That was Austin’s influence. Grisham remembers being stumped by the bass player, who no one had met before, but who Buffett somehow knew. Ed “Lump” Williams played in a rock band called Jubal, one an Associated Press story from December 1972 suggested could expand the Nashville Sound into uncharted territory. Williams played bass, the story said, “with a rhythm and blues flair reminiscent of the Deep South black man’s music.” A year after working with Buffett, Williams worked on a jazz record, Earth Blossom, with drummer John Betsch. What Williams really brought to the studio was range.
Reggie Young—a guitar slinger from Memphis—took electric lead, and Goodman came down from Chicago to add some acoustic lead. Sammy Creason, the same “Sammy Creasy” Buffett had caught playing with Tony Joe White in the Billboard days, manned the drums. Fingers Taylor, the kid Buffett met in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, got the call on harmonica.
Then there was the piano player, the only musician in the room with a zoology degree. Michael Utley had planned on going into medicine—just like his father.
Utley was born in Blytheville, Arkansas. Stax and Sun country—Booker T., Elvis, and Cash. Early rock and roll was in the air. Utley first heard Roy Orbison’s “Ooby Dooby” at the public pool. He was riding to Memphis with a friend and his family when Booker T. and the MGs’ “Green Onions” hit the airwaves and pinned him to his seat. “I eventually got to play on one of Booker’s albums,” Utley says. “My whole musical career has been thrills.”
He formed a rockabilly band in high school, and then a horn band because the Mar-Kays had made “Last Night” and that hit Utley like “Green Onions.” But he was always planning on medical school, even when, as a senior in high school, his biology teacher told him a band in Memphis was looking for a piano player. It was Bill Black’s Combo. Black was Elvis’s original bassist. Along with guitarist Scotty Moore, and under the direction of Sam Phillips, they cracked the code that blew open the universe.
Utley headed to Memphis to audition. It was an instrumental outfit, and so the members were interchangeable. Black wasn’t even there when Utley played. But Reggie Young was in the band, and Creason was playing drums. Utley got the gig and made it a summer job for the next few years. His first summer included a tour of South Africa. “It was a great experience,” Utley says. “But I’m still going to college.” Still going to be a doctor.
Utley went to the University of Arkansas, and during his senior year, Bill Black’s Combo went into the studio to record an album for Columbia Records. It wasn’t summer, but it was spring break. At Creason’s urging, Utley wrote a couple of songs, but he was still going to school, still preparing for the MCAT.
Back at school, Utley’s phone rang again, this time with an offer to record with Tony Joe White. “It was during finals,” Utley says. The piano-playing son of a doctor on a pre-med track had a decision to make. He could stay in Fayetteville and take the test in his quantitative chemistry lab, or he could go play with Tony Joe. The lab was only one credit. Tony Joe had made “Polk Salad Annie.”
Utley skipped the final, played on Continued, which included “Rainy Night in Georgia,” and still passed the class. “I ended up with a B-plus,” he says. “I graduated.”
He graduated, but he wasn’t going to medical school. It wasn’t the easiest thing to tell his father, that if all he ever did was play juke joints and dive bars that’s what he was going to do, but his father handled it well. “Then it happened really quickly,” Utley says. “I pinch myself how quickly it happened.”
Jerry Wexler was one of the three most powerful executives at Atlantic Records, and he was looking for a rhythm section that would work out of Criteria Recording Studios in Miami. The Swampers, the studio crew he’d been working with in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, churning out soul hits for Atlantic, didn’t want to leave Muscle Shoals. Wexler didn’t want to keep commuting to northern Alabama. And he wanted some place warmer than New York in the winter.
Wexler turned to Memphis for a new group of players. Creason joined producer/piano player Jim Dickinson, guitarist Charlie Freeman, and bassist Tommy McClure in what became known as the Dixie Flyers. As they the prepared to sign the contract with Wexler, Creason and Dickinson mentioned they had an organ player who’d come in handy. “Fine,” Wexler said. By the time the summer of 1970 was over, Utley was working in Miami.
“A year before I’d been listening to Aretha and all the guys in Muscle Shoals,” Utley says. Now he was working with Aretha Franklin, who went to Miami to make Spirit of the Dark. Sam & Dave put the Flyers to work on “Knock It Out the Park,” which landed a Billboard new and notable mention alongside “The Christian?”
Utley played with Jimmy Cliff, and Taj Mahal. He jumped in on sessions with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, who were joined by Eric Clapton and Dr. John. But it was one of the first albums the Flyers made at Criteria that set the course of Utley’s life. They backed Jerry Jeff Walker on Bein’ Free. “That’s the album Jimmy heard when he started hanging with Jerry Jeff,” Utley says. That’s the reason Gant called and asked if Utley would come to Nashville and play on the first record of Buffett’s new ABC-Dunhill deal. By then, Utley had left Miami and joined Rita Coolidge’s band. Coolidge met Kristofferson, they became an item, and Utley joined Kristofferson’s band.
Utley blocked out some time and went to Nashville. In two or three days at Hillbilly Central, with an emphasis on spontaneity and feel, they completed the not-so-anxiously-awaited follow-up to Down to Earth.
Released in June 1973, A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean came with a title twisted from Marty Robbins’s 1957 country hit, “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation),” and blinked on Billboard’s country chart at number forty-three. True to every rejection Don Light received, Buffett didn’t get much radio play. But he did get a chance to reset his career and redefine the guy who’d made Down to Earth.
A bare foot sticking out from bellbottomed jeans and resting on a lobster trap, the new Jimmy Buffett appeared content instead of perplexed. A brightly colored shirt flared from under the white sport coat, his new backdrop was blue skies and shrimp boats. The pursed lips of the past were replaced—or shaded anyway—by a resplendent seventies mustache. The Thompson O’Neal Shrimp Co. supplied the pink crustaceans that, according to the liner notes, “made a great cover and a fine dinner.” Guy de la Valdene, a French count who’d found his way Key West in search of fish and adventure, shot the cover.
“Tin Cup Chalice,” “Pencil Thin Mustache,” and others would have to wait for another album. “The Great Filling Station Holdup” kicked off an eleven-song set anchored by the yin and yang of “Death of an Unpopular Poet” on one side and “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” on the other. The latter, perhaps, to Don Gant’s dismay.
“Let’s just say my producer was a little conservative at the time and he said, ‘This could destroy your career,’ ” Buffett said onstage in Key West in 2015. “And I said, ‘Why? I don’t even have one yet. How can it destroy it? This could make it.’ ”
Both sides of the album open with small-stakes larceny. Chronicling Hattiesburg-era hijinks, the sardines-and-peanut-butter heist of “Peanut Butter Conspiracy” made “The Great Filling Station Holdup” look like Ocean’s 11.
“They Don’t Dance Like Carmen No More” tipped a hat piled high with bananas and mangos in the direction of Carmen Miranda and Xavier Cugat “doin’ the rhumba as no one else dared.”
“I Have Found Me a Home” found one on side two, in front of “My Lovely Lady,” a catch-you-later Tennessee taunt from someone promising he’ll send a postcard just as soon as he’s done “sailing in those warm December breezes.”
McGuane, ol’ Captain Berserko himself, wrote some lines for the back cover of the album, and no one ever did figure out what it meant to be “among the first of the Sucking Chest Wound Singers to sleep on the yellow line,” but it sounded good. The “shadowy Club Mandible” lit the story with a little mysticism. Buffett’s duties to the club “have yet to be explained,” McGuane wrote. Was Jimmy as “dedicated as ever to certain indecencies and shall we say reversible brain damage”? Absolutely. “And of course he has never washed dishes or owned a puppet show.” Good to know.
Buffett was a kid from Mobile, Alabama, with a college degree and a good family. He’d gotten married and divorced, recorded one album nobody bought, and moved from Tennessee to Florida. And that’s fine. More interesting than most. But there’s a reason Robert Zimmerman invented Bob Dylan, and then kept reinventing him. It was more fun.
McGuane helped construct the foundation of a new Jimmy Buffett with sentences like: “And as a souvenir of some not so terrible times, this throwback altar boy of Mobile, Alabama brings spacey up-country tunes strewn with forgotten crab traps, Confederate memories, chemical daydreams, Ipana vulgarity, ukelele madness and, yes, Larry, a certain sweetness.”
Yes, Larry.
A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean was the first Jimmy Buffett record only Jimmy Buffett could have made. It wasn’t folk or country or rock. It wasn’t trying to satisfy anyone. It was well traveled and sentimental. It had a sense of humor and a suntan. It came from out on the edge, but a different edge than Kristofferson and Townes and the rest were walking.
“It was like a breath of fresh air,” Utley says. “In Nashville during that period, there were a lot of songs that were really dark. I was around a lot of people like that, trying to be as tragic as they could be, and it was nice to be around Jimmy. It really was.”
Only a few songs had anything directly to do with Key West, but that was enough to mark the album with a touch of the exotic. Wherever you were, it was an album from elsewhere. But it wasn’t alone.
At the same time Buffett gave us those two dopes at the filling station and all that fun-loving mortal sin at the drive-in, McGuane set a couple of fishing guides to war with each other in Ninety-two in the Shade. Thomas Skelton and Nichol Dance walked the same streets as Buffett’s characters. They passed the same old bikes resting near the same bars. They spoke the same language, and they’d all recognize Buffett’s winks and McGuane’s nods: the sign on the garbage truck that says WE CATER WEDDINGS or the nativity scene in the plumbing store featuring “a squat chromium faucet” as Mary’s head.
The heat that fueled comic antics in Buffett’s world, however, stoked violent madness in McGuane’s. Nashville didn’t have the market cornered on darkness yearning to be tragic. Key West still had Hemingway.
In Papa: Hemingway in Key West, James McLendon stakes out the “Hemingway Myth, a legend, a code of machismo,” argues it was established during his twelve years on the island, and that it “allowed Hemingway to move in an aura of self-created magnificence around the globe” for the rest of his life. McGuane, Harrison, Buffett (in his own way), and the rest were after that aura. They’d chase all the fish, drink all the booze, and romance all the women it took to get it.
To Have and Have Not was Hemingway’s Key West book, and charter captain Harry Morgan his Key West archetype. “Captain,” a client said to Morgan, “could you make me a highball?”
“I made him one without saying anything, and then made myself a real one,” Hemingway wrote for his captain.
Dance and Skelton at war, Harrison’s men in A Good Day to Die drugging, drinking and screwing their way west, the Buffett of McGuane’s album notes . . . they’re all some version of Morgan making himself a Man’s drink.
“You really got to be a little crazy to live on an island—especially this one,” Buffett once said. “But in my kind of work, being a little bit crazy helps.”
ABC-Dunhill had sent a film crew to Key West to make a short titled Introducing Jimmy Buffett. With limited time, less of a budget, and a drunk writer, Buffett quickly hatched a plan to use his pals.
“You know someone around here by the name of Buffett?” a narrator said.
“Sure, I know him,” Sheriff Bobby Brown said, leaning out his squad car. “Hell of a nice guy. Shouldn’t have any trouble finding him. Key West is not all that big of an island.”
When the crew arrives at the Waddell apartment, they find Buffett in bed, wrapped in sheets, curtains drawn. “Oh, the film crew, right,” Buffett said rolling over.
As he prepped for the day (or the midafternoon), he offered his thoughts on island life. “I guess we’re all here for about the same reason,” he said, turning to the camera. “Whatever that is.”
“You gotta remember what was going on in Key West at the time,” Buffett said on a stage a few steps from his old apartment in 2015. “Let’s just say, first of all, I’m way beyond the statute of limitations.”
What was going on? A lot of dope was moving into the United States, and the gentlemen of the ocean moving the supply weren’t all that secretive about their work.
“I was tempted occasionally to get into it,” Buffett said, “because in those days they actually unloaded in the middle of the day down at the shrimp docks. It was a whole different thing there that was going on.”
More often, loads would arrive under the cover of darkness. Sometimes people would get caught. Sometimes loads were lost. The bundles, square groupers as they were known, might wash up on the beach or get tangled in the mangroves. Someone who spent any time in the backcountry might find a stranger (or a friend) passing along a phone number in a bar. You ever find anything out there, just give a call and tell us where it is. Don’t touch it. Don’t move it. We pay cash. It’s a small island. No one was very hard to find.
Buffett recalled being pulled aside and told he could make twice what he’d made for the record with a single run. “It was kind of like Let’s Make a Deal, Key West style,” he said.
Corb Donohue talked Buffett down. In the summer of 1972, ABC-Dunhill in Los Angeles assigned Donohue, who’d been its publicity director, to a newly created job as the head of the department of creative services. Seven months later, he was back atop the publicity department as well as running artist relations.
Donohue was instrumental in another Jim’s career—Croce. Eventually, Donohue kicked the record business and moved to Costa Rica to surf. He later moved back to Southern California, got back in the record business, and opened his own communications company. But he was never far from waves—one reason he and Buffett remained connected over the years. When he died on October 5, 2007, two years after being diagnosed with skin cancer, Buffett dedicated that night’s show in Hawaii to Donohue.
Donohue held something similar to Don Light’s Philosophy of Separation. “Anything that rises above the mire is a success,”I Donohue said in R. Serge Denisoff’s 1975 music business study, Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry. “Anything that draws attention to itself and continues on without some sort of great preposterous hype involved is a success.”
Jimmy Buffett wasn’t going to be the recipient of any ABC-Dunhill–funded hype—preposterous, modest, or any adjective in between. “I don’t think anybody knew what niche to put him in, and even then Nashville liked clichés,” Grisham says. “They like to call you this or call you that and put you in a pocket. And he definitely couldn’t be put in any normal Nashville pocket.”
But Donohue liked White Sport Coat and told Buffett exactly that. “You really think so?” Buffett said. “I’d never heard from a record company before.” All Barnaby had done is release some demos and then not release the second album. Buffett was so new to the world of record company compliments he hedged. Thanks, but I’ve got this job offer, from this guy on a boat, and it’s going to pay big. I think maybe I’ll do that. He had his eye on a new boat, the Boston Whaler he’d been denied when a banker in Key West told him his musician’s income wasn’t stable enough for a $500 loan.
That’s fine, Donohue told Buffett, but go to New York anyway. Play Max’s Kansas City. Max’s was a big deal club and New York was nice in the summer and so sure, why not? All Buffett needed was a band. He called up Fingers Taylor, but felt he needed one more player.
“One of the first bands I had played in was a jug band here in St. Augustine,” Vaughn Cochran says. “It was called the Hydraulic Banana Jug and String Band and Kazoo Ensemble.”
Like Bill Black’s Combo, membership was fluid. Over the years, Cochran has run into plenty of musicians who, when they first meet and talk turns to music, say, “I was in the Hydraulic Banana Jug and String Band and Kazoo Ensemble, too.” Most he’s never met.
Vaughn and Cydall Cochran owned one of the couches Buffett first crashed on when he got to Key West. Their Stock Island home with the two-car-garage-turned-pottery-studio was right behind the Boca Chica Lounge. “We were all in the same boat at that time, struggling and playing music at night,” Vaughn says.
Buffett asked him if he wanted to go to New York and play some shows. Cochran’s was an easier decision than Buffett’s. Cochran didn’t have anything else to do and had never been to New York. They flew north and opened for Andy Pratt, who’d released a self-titled record on Columbia. ABC-Dunhill put them up in a Park Avenue hotel and picked up the tab.
The shows went well. A tight review (“Andy Pratt Is Heard At Max’s Kansas City”) landed in the New York Times on June 18, 1973. “The unknown-genius-of-the-week spot is always a rough one,” Ian Dove wrote, referring to Pratt, not Buffett, who hadn’t even ascended to flavor of the week. Pratt, Dove decided, was “self-indulgent” and “disjointed,” and his falsetto “reedy.” His sizable band: “flabby.”
“By contrast, the imagery of the country singer (and writer) Jimmy Buffett was clean, rooted firmly in Buffett’s own existence,” Dove wrote. Fingers was “good,” Cochran a “low-phosphate washboard scrubber.” In conclusion, while Pratt focused inward, “Buffett looks outside and takes notes.”
“We had great sets, great fun,” Cochran says. He remembers women would come over to the hotel and ask what kind of music they played. “I’m not sure what you call this,” he’d say. “Tropical rock? There just wasn’t a name for it.”
There was a fourth member of their traveling party, a woman from South Carolina, a student at the University of South Carolina who’d come to Key West on spring break. Buffett saw her from a distance one day—blonde, beautiful, and put together. He didn’t meet her that night, but he kept looking until he ran into her in the phone booth outside the Chart Room.
Buffett and Jane Slagsvol quickly became an item, and she brought a touch of professionalism and practicality to a touring operation that otherwise wouldn’t have been interested in much of either. Cochran remembers the final morning in New York. They were set to fly back to Florida, but Jane needed an iron. There wasn’t one in the room, and so she went across the street and bought one. “We were at breakfast and when we went to sign the check, they said, ‘Your room’s closed out,’ ” Cochran says.
They went around the table and pockets were empty. “Why none of us had any money, I’m not really sure,” Cochran says. Probably because they were all still broke. They were only playing rock star for the length of the stay.
Jane walked back across the street, returned the iron, took the cash, and paid for breakfast. Problem solved. They returned to Key West wrinkled, but victorious. Maybe Jimmy Buffett wouldn’t make that dope run after all.
I More true (and more difficult) in the Internet age than it was in 1975.