Don Light’s phone rang one morning. It was Margie Buffett.
“Where is that son of a bitch?” she said.
Margie had gotten the Mercedes in the divorce. Buffett had taken it for one last drive. As Light recalled the story to Peter Cooper, Buffett pulled up in front of Light’s office just as Light was arriving. Jimmy waved, opened the door . . . and a passing truck folded that door to the fender. Jimmy and a friend drove the car to a nearby golf course and assessed the damage. Seeing no easy fix, they removed the door and put it in the backseat. The next assessment was of Buffett’s options. They figured that best done at a bar.
The next morning, when Margie left for work, she found the car where it was supposed to be, safe and sound. Backed into the driveway. Just like new. Until she walked around to the driver’s side and discovered her four-door was down to three.
“I later learned when I talked to Buffett that they’d pushed the car into the drive,” Light said. The plan they came up with over drinks had been to make as little noise as possible, face the damage away from the house, and get away without facing Margie. Buffett went straight to the airport and got the hell out of town.
“And Buffett could do that,” Light said.
Light had a receptionist and she had all the duties receptionists have, plus one. When Buffett walked through the door, she was to get his car keys. “Otherwise we’d be turning the building upside down looking for them,” Light said. Every time.
Buffett once borrowed Light’s car to get to a gig at Vanderbilt. Light went to the show separately, and later, as someone from the club read off the license plates of cars being towed, he knew. “I didn’t know my license number,” he said, “but I was sure it was being towed.” Buffett was dispatched the next morning to retrieve the car. Even God’s Own Truck eventually ended up impounded and crushed in Key West.
Then there was the night outside Roger Miller’s King of the Road Motor Inn in Nashville when Buffett couldn’t find his rental car but found plenty of trouble while he was looking around.
Four months after working Max’s Kansas City, Buffett was back recording in Nashville, this time at Woodland Sound Studios. “The deals back then were two albums a year and Jimmy kind of lived up to it,” Michael Utley says.
The basic tracks for White Sport Coat were cut in about a day and half, Buffett laying down scratch vocals and fine-tuning those when the band was done. The new record was tackled at a more leisurely pace. “We were doing two sessions a day for four days and then on Friday we’d all get together and have a listening session at the studio,” Doyle Grisham says.
The cast of musicians was largely unchanged from White Sport Coat. The songs, if they skewed any direction at all, skewed west. To Texas, Montana, and California as settings for songs about distance—between Buffett and Key West, between men and women, now and then.
Max’s Kansas City hadn’t been the sum of the White Sport Coat tour, not even close. The summer of 1973 kept Buffett on the run, sometimes with Fingers Taylor, sometimes with Vaughn Cochran and Taylor. A lot of the time it was Buffett and his guitar, a one-man band lighting out into the territory, as his old pal Huck Finn liked to say. The songs he took into Nashville for the new record reflected the disjointed sense of time and place that develops when you bounce from one end of this very large country to the other.
“Pencil Thin Mustache” threw back to the fifties and “the way that it used to be.” On a road trip from San Francisco, Buffett and writer Richard Brautigan stumbled upon Ringling, a “dying little town” about forty-five miles north of Livingston, Montana, that appears out of nowhere and disappears just as fast.
Ringling didn’t have much, but it had a bar, and across from that bar, Buffett spied beer cans piled like stories. “Imagine all the heartache and tears in twenty-seven years of beer,” he wrote in “Ringling, Ringling.”
He rescued “Livingston’s Gone to Texas” from the unreleased High Cumberland Jubilee and then, in “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown,” rescued a hitchhiker whose well-planned future in Nashville’s high society had been “cancelled with a swing of her dear father’s hand.”
“I’d like to ride the rodeo, but I’ve got Brahma fear,” he sang in “Brahma Fear,” a concession, perhaps, that while he was spending a lot of time in Texas, he wasn’t going to be mistaken for a Texan. He was more comfortable in that Whaler he’d managed to finally get, “somewhere below the sunlight, somewhere upon the sea.”
“Brand New Country Star” was another success story, one about a crossover singer—”he can either go country or pop”—who’d shed his sequined suits and dropped his custom “pearl-inlayed” guitar in favor of Japanese-made electric and a shot at the kind of money that lets you put your name on a chain of bowling alleys.
One of Buffett’s Austin acquaintances, Willis Alan Ramsey,I wrote “Ballad of Spider John.” Like “He Went to Paris” (and Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting for a Train”), its voice was an old man’s looking back on adventure, misadventure, and misbegotten love: “She thought I was a saint not a sinner gone astray.”
Buffett’s pen pushed memories of colorful and wild old New Orleans into “The Wino and I Know,” where dark bars full of “tattered and torn” old men willing to give a kid his first scar lurk just around the corner from the sweet delights of the Café du Monde. “It’s a strange situation,” he sang, “a wild occupation. Just living my life like a song.”
He’d prove himself against that final lyric time and again, but never more than after they’d knocked out one last New Orleans number, that old Lord Richard Buckley gem, “God’s Own Drunk.”
The band settled in, in front of a live studio audience in Nashville. Buffett picked at tipsy seventh-chords, adding little slides that slurred and hiccupped; Utley sprinkled tongue-in-cheek honky-tonk piano fills; Sammy Creason kept casual time on drums.
“Well, like I explained to y’all before, I ain’t no drinking man,” Buffett began. Laughter filled the studio, and for the next six minutes he played the part of a decent enough guy, one who’d promised his brother-in-law he’d watch his still for a few hours.
Like he said, he wasn’t a drinker, but who among us has not known temptation? So he took a drink, and then a few more, and then another until he was not just drunk, “but God’s own drunk and a fearless man.”
Then came the bear, “a Kodiak lookin’ fella about nineteen-feet tall.” He and the bear looked each other over carefully and came to a delicate détente. He offered the bear a drink. It was the polite thing to do. Not one to be rude, the bear accepted. Soon the new best friends were drunk and dancing in the moonlight until, exhausted, our man lays down for a restless sleep. When he wakes up, the bear’s gone and, along with him, the still.
“That’s a take!” Buffett shouted. The new album, Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, was finished. Champagne corks popped. Toasts were made. Buffett and Creason crawled into a bottle of tequila.
“And got real drunk,” Buffett said four months later at the Record Plant, in Sausalito, California. It was February 19, 1974. Buffett was taping a session for San Mateo’s KSAN.II Living and Dying in 3/4 Time was freshly released and Buffett was in good-but-ragged spirits after a big night in Los Angeles delayed his Bay Area arrival.
“I ran into some nice things in L.A.,” he said.
“Nice things in L.A.?” someone in the studio audience said.
“Yes,” Buffett said. “Can’t mention names, though. I was out stargazing. I wanted to buy a map to the stars. They have those maps, Homes of the Stars. I was in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. That’s the last of Hollywood, it really is.” He was wistful, as he always was when talking about the way things used to be.
Near the end of the taping, Buffett turned back east, to Nashville, to what happened after he and Creason opened that bottle of tequila, the mere mention of which drew an “Ooooooooh,” from his audience.
“Yeah, but it makes you real crazy,” Buffett said. “It’s like, you know, peyote and tequila come from the same plant and there has to be a little crossover there somewhere. The only thing worse than that is mescal, with the worm in it.”
Real drunk, Buffett and Creason headed to the King of the Road Motor Inn, worked their way to the club on the top floor of the hotel, took over the stage, and banged on a guitar and drums until they’d dismantled music. Then they got hungry and left. In the parking lot, they couldn’t find Buffett’s rented Gremlin because, of course, they couldn’t. He never could. He was lucky he had his keys.
Buffett was wearing a pair of shoes he’d picked up in a thrift store in Miami. They were golf shoes, and even though he’d pulled out the cleats, they clicked when he walked and sounded like tap shoes on the Cadillac he climbed atop. He was on the hood when a voice said, “You’re under arrest.”
“You can kiss my ass.”
(“I guess it was his car I was standing on,” Buffett said.)
Creason found the Gremlin and waved Buffett over, one ornery stranger in pursuit and threatening more than just arrest now. Creason apologized and said ABC-Dunhill would pay for any damage Buffett had done. “Which was awful generous of Sammy, because he didn’t have the authority to say so,” Buffett said. “Being a good company man, I took up for my company and said, ‘No they won’t and I’m still going to beat your ass if you don’t leave us alone.’ ”
At that, the gentleman reached into the car and yanked a handful of blond hair from Buffett’s head and punched Creason in the face. Creason slashed back with a BIC pen that was in no way mightier than a sword. Buffett tried to focus on his seatbelt, because he couldn’t start the car unless the seatbelt was fastened, and he was too drunk to perform the task. “So we sat there while this man pounded the hell out of both of us,” Buffett said, telling the tale again, this time to a Nashville crowd at the Exit/In. It’d been a month since Sausalito. He was coming off a week of one-nighters at colleges across the Midwest and the story had improved. “I looked over at Creason and I said, ‘Sammy, I don’t want to die in a Gremlin.’ ”
Buffett got his seatbelt fastened and they got away, got some barbecue, and on the way back to the hotel, hit a bridge. “But luckily there was nobody around, so we just backed up and headed for the hotel,” Buffett said. The lobby of the King of the Road was still buzzing from the parking lot confrontation. They hadn’t just aggravated any old guest. They’d aggravated Buford Pusser.
“Oh,” Buffett said.
The sound of Pusser’s name shook him sober. Pusser, the former sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, was the man who’d taken on the State Line Mob. His wife had been murdered, and he had survived numerous shootings and stabbings. Hollywood made a movie about Pusser, Walking Tall.
Buford Pusser was big and tough and mean. “He killed, like, twenty guys with a stick or something,” Buffett said. The stick even had a name: the Buford Stick. The Drive-By Truckers wrote a song by that name, framed through the eyes of the gangsters. “Ask him for a warrant, he’ll say, ‘I keep it in my shoe,’ ” Truckers cofounder Patterson Hood sings.
For his first fight since junior high school, Buffett had chosen to take on that guy. Buffett tangled with a tall tale come to life. Armed with this new information, he retreated to the safety of his room and locked the door tight and didn’t emerge until he had to leave for the airport and return the dented Gremlin.
After performing “God’s Own Drunk” for years, he’d finally met the bear and lived to tell the story—at length. Again and again. Light wasn’t kidding. The guy could talk, and people loved him for it. He was quick, and he was topical. “He was good about getting to town and finding a local newspaper,” Light said. Whatever Buffett might find in the Mattoon Journal Gazette, or the Dunkirk Evening Observer or any other little paper in any other little town where he was playing, was fair game.
Had he seen the February 26, 1974, edition of the Mattoon paper, where his upcoming show at Eastern Illinois University was announced (admission: twenty-five cents), he might still be talking onstage at the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. Above the page from “Buffett Sets EIU Concert” was this bit of breaking news: “Doctor claims puritanical views rob elderly of sex.”
He could have done twenty minutes on that and then segued directly to “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.” Putting that one on White Sport Coat hadn’t ruined him, as Don Gant had worried, or made him the star, as Buffett had hoped. Released as the B-side of “Great Filling Station Holdup,” the more liberal-minded FM stations dug it (a little), and the song became a jukebox hit, selling more than 50,000 copies by mid-1973, according to Billboard.
“I thought, My God, this is it,” Buffett said in Key West in 2015. “I’m going to get to buy a Boston Whaler or something . . . The thing about it was the mafia controlled the jukeboxes in those days and they didn’t pay royalties on jukebox plays. That’s true.
“I never made a dime off of the jukebox plays because they wouldn’t pay you and I wasn’t going to ask. Hey, Carlo, where’s my fucking money?” He flashed a finger gun. “Nope.”
For better or worse, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” became the first song Buffett couldn’t escape. Back in Sausalito, recording for KSAN for a second time in 1974, Buffett remarked how nice it was not to have a club full of drunks shouting “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw.” Near Philadelphia early that summer, amid a flurry of requests, someone shouted out “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”
“Nah,” Buffett said. “We don’t do that anymore. Tasteless song.”
Not that Buffett was onstage discussing the finer points of French Impressionism or adapting Bach for one man and a guitar. The artist drank. The artist was prone to tasteless asides.
“It lets my feelings show,” he said, referencing another Living and Dying track, “Brahma Fear.” “Boy they were showing all over last night. That’s not called showing your feelings, that’s called showing your ass.”
Or: “Last night? You can write that off. I did. Last thing I remember is being in Maloney’s and buttering my plate instead of my biscuits.”
Or, again referencing his prized Boston WhalerIII back in Key West: “I gotta scrape my bottom when I go home. I scraped it last night when I left here.” (Pause.) “Cut that out, Buffett.”
At the Exit/In, he poked another bear. Richard Nixon was headed to town to sing “God Bless America” and christen the new Grand Ole Opry House alongside Roy Acuff, who would give Nixon a yo-yo lesson on what had to be one of Nixon’s better nights of 1974. Dedicating it to the president, Buffett did stoop to play “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”
Onstage, Buffett had become part Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, part barstool philosopher, and everybody’s stoned best friend. He was a run-on sentence, punctuated by an occasional song. And he was busy.
He found himself far away from Key West for longer periods of time. And so he was far away from Jane for longer periods of time. He’d turned the distance he’d felt the summer of 1973 into one more song for Living and Dying in 3/4 Time.
At summer’s end, he’d found himself heading north toward San Francisco to play a show with Country Joe McDonald at the Lion’s Share in San Anselmo, California. “It’s one of those places where you feel real comfortable,” Buffett said at the Record Plant in early 1974. “You know you can fall down. The floor’s real dirty and they don’t care.”
Before catching up with Country Joe, he’d again been in Los Angeles, killing time at the Continental Hyatt House rather than the Polo Lounge. Originally the Gene Autry Hotel, the Hyatt House became known as the Riot House and earned its place in seventies Sunset Strip lore.
John Bonham drove his motorcycle up and down its hallways. Jim Morrison dangled from a balcony. Robert Plant stood on another, looking out on the city and a Led Zeppelin billboard, and declared himself a golden god. Various Rolling Stones would wreck the place for fun. In the middle of “freak city,” as he described it, sat Jimmy Buffett in a pair of comfortable Hush Puppies, feeling out of place. Buffett wrote “Come Monday” about “four lonely days in a brown L.A. haze,” and about being oh so close to heading back to see Jane.
“By the time we did ‘Come Monday,’ I thought that was an unbelievable song,” Utley says. He was sitting next to Doyle Grisham during playback at the studio. Utley remembers Grisham turning to him and saying, “This is going to be a hit.”
“People weren’t saying things like he was saying,” Grisham says of Buffett. “They weren’t writing the chord progressions. That song’s pretty intricate for the time it was written. And he was unique in that way. Some of his ideas were really fresh.”
He points to the song’s bridge, suspended by major seventh chords. “Those were almost jazz chords, what we’d call ’em at the time,” Grisham says. “Now they’re more commonplace.” On the other side of that bridge, Grisham played a sweeping pedal steel solo adrift with the loneliness and longing Buffett carried back on the road. There’d be no slowing down.
“Folksinger in Concert” read a nearly hidden headline on page nineteen of the third section of Dolton Pointer on February 28, 1974. Jimmy Buffett in concert at noon on a Monday in the Student Faculty Center on the campus of Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Indiana, read the story. Admission: free. That’s not a gig you play for fame. You play Hammond, Indiana, at noon on a Monday in early March because it’s your job.
In Commerce, Texas, in April, the ad read Jimmy Buffett, with the African Music Machine. Admission: $2, but that got you free pool and Ping-Pong. Any gig, anywhere that would have him. For every Lion’s Share or Quiet Knight, there was a college or coffeehouse that never earned a reputation.
It’s hard, even for those who were there, to remember when Buffett was in Key West in 1974. In May, he headed back to Montana where director Frank Perry was shooting a screenplay McGuane wrote. Buffett had agreed to do the soundtrack. Starring Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, and Elizabeth Ashley, Rancho Deluxe was a misfit cowboy picture set in and around Livingston, a railroad town sprung to life in the late 1800s.
In 1968, McGuane’s debut novel, The Sporting Club, made him enough money to buy fourteen acres in Paradise Valley, south of Livingston. Tom Corcoran remembers sitting in McGuane’s living room listening to Bridges, fresh from his costarring role with Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, singing and playing guitar. “I thought, That’s cute,” Corcoran says, “maybe singing isn’t in your future.”
Rancho Deluxe was one film project. Sometime that summer, Buffett and Jane went to Europe to work on another. Guy de la Valdene and his brother had been shooting a documentary about tarpon fishing in Key West, and Buffett was going to do the music for that while Jim Harrison handled narration. There wasn’t a lot of money, but there was a free trip to France. They’d stay in Guy’s family’s castle and work in Paris. The castle had a moat, and they had a key to the wine cellar, and as Buffett told Men’s Journal after Harrison’s death in 2016, they scored a bag of pot from Spain. So they were good.
While the filmmakers cut Tarpon down, the next studio over was editing the soft-core porn flick Emmanuelle. Harrison and Buffett were more excited about that than they were their own documentary.
New songs, meanwhile, kept pace with Buffett. A funny little tune about the benefits of “skinny tires and wires” called “Peddler Not a Pusher” was introduced in Sausalito as his meditation on the energy crisis, and dedicated to Walter Cronkite. It was funny, he said, because he couldn’t write serious or sad. Another nearly finished (and possibly never finished) song was called “I Bet Mel Blanc Has Money in the Bank.”
In Nashville, he played “You Never Used to Need a Reservation at the Preservation Hall,” an ode to Sweet Emma Barrett pounding the piano when Buffett would slip into the hall after playing the Bayou Room. He’d gone back and things had changed; there were paintings all over the walls and it had become an art studio.
“And that depressed me a whole bunch,” Buffett said. “Not in the fact that it was like that, but the fact that people let the past slip away, and the future looks so dull and crapped up we should go back to the past.”
Ben Jaffe, whose parents founded the Preservation Hall, says he and Buffett talked about that song in 2015 when Buffett played a late-night set alongside the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. They even ran through the song backstage, but didn’t play it. He told Buffett the hall had never been turned into an art gallery, and had always been as it remains. But Sweet Emma played out, there were other piano players who were regularly mistaken for Sweet Emma. Buffett figured he must have been somewhere else entirely. Those were blurry nights in New Orleans.
Another song new to the set was “Migration,” an ode to his favorite Texas songwriters (Michael Murphey, Jerry Jeff, and Willis Alan Ramsey), a punch at the trailer parks filling up the Keys (aluminum eyesores better off as beer cans), a recommendation against marrying too early, and a fantasy of one day sailing away to live out his years on Martinique as a make-believe Bogart with a parrot on his shoulder.
But by the chorus he’d cast his thoughts toward the people he passed on the road. The ones who weren’t going anywhere but to another day exactly like the last. Buffett wasn’t exactly sympathetic to their cause. With so much wonder in the world, he wondered, how was it so many had “never even seen a clue.” Well, not him. No way. No how. He could “travel and rhyme.” He had his “Caribbean soul,” with a little Texas tucked away in his heart.
Speaking of which, in May, before Montana and Paris, Buffett found himself back in Austin, at Castle Creek, working a three- or four-night run. No one quite remembers. Castle Creek was a good room for a solo set. It fit Buffett’s style. “It wasn’t a honky-tonk,” Ray Wylie Hubbard says. “You were there for the music.”
Roger Bartlett was there to open the show. He had been playing mandolin, bass, and guitar with Bill Callery, whose “Hands on the Wheel” would be recorded by both Willie Nelson (on Red Headed Stranger) and Jerry Jeff Walker.
Bartlett had hooked up with Callery (and his brother Will) in Nashville, and they’d headed to California and worked their way back to Texas. They got to Dallas, where Bartlett’s parents were living and then headed south to Austin. “It was like magic land down there,” he says, likening it to Paris in the twenties, the way everyone in Key West at the time likens it to Paris in the twenties.
By the time Bartlett got to Austin, he was in the throes of a Django Reinhardt crush and in possession of all the necessary sideman tools. When he first got into bands, he played trumpet. He picked up drums whenever the drummer was too drunk to play. He could write a song when inspiration struck. He could sing, but he was nobody’s front man. “I’m not a terrifically social guy,” he says. He wasn’t listening to pop or very much country. He was into “arcane shit nobody likes.”
But Bartlett knew the popular influences and could apply them on demand. He had grown up with the source material in Shreveport, Louisiana, home of KWKH and its tentpole program, Louisiana Hayride. Roger’s father, Ray, worked prominent positions for both the station and the show.
Powered by 50,000 watts, KWKH, “1130 on Your Dial,” celebrated twenty-five years of service in 1950 with a publication highlighting its staff and shows. Ray Bartlett, looking not unlike a young George McFly in Back to the Future, his smile bright and hair tight, hosted Groovie’s Boogie and was a Louisiana Hayride announcer.
“My dad was on the radio all the time,” Bartlett says. “And he played stuff like Muddy Waters and Johnny Otis and Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington.”
The Hayride was “the premier jamboree of folk music in the Southwest,” according to that KWKH anniversary publication. It was a barn dance, in semi-competition with the Opry, and hosted Hank Williams, a young Elvis, Johnny Horton, Tex Ritter, Moon Mullican, and hundreds of others over the years.
Groovie’s Boogie, starred Ray Bartlett as Groovie Boy, his jive-talking alter ego, who spun black music and pitched sponsor Stan’s Record Shop’s mail-order deals. The station was powerful enough to reach Minnesota, where a young Robert Zimmerman listened intently.
KWKH had reach, but it was a product of its immediate geography. It was close enough to New Orleans to catch all the sounds Buffett had picked up in Pascagoula and Mobile, but it was well above the salt line and just as influenced by the hard-dirt country and juke-joint blues buzzing about north Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
When the Bartletts moved to North Little Rock, Arkansas, Bartlett picked up the same Memphis R&B that had shaped Michael Utley’s world. Bartlett was eleven when his uncle taught him a few chords on the guitar. He was fourteen when the Beatles arrived. “When I was twelve, I went with my dad to the Opry,” Bartlett says, “and we went out and had dinner with Roy Orbison and Stonewall Jackson.” Hank Williams used to visit his house, though Bartlett was too young to remember.
By April 1974, Bartlett had left Callery’s band, but he was still living with Callery and another guitar player, Jeff Ragsdale. When Bartlett moved to Austin, he put the word out that he was giving guitar lessons. Ragsdale, looking for some flatpicking help, gave Bartlett a call. When Callery needed a new guitar player, he asked Ragsdale. When Callery was called on to open for Buffett, Bartlett asked if he could sit in. They were all still friends, so why not?
“And one night, might have been the second night, might have been the third, Bill and I had just finished playing and we went back into the green room,” Ragsdale says, “which was more a broom closet with a couch in it.”
Buffett came back and joined them in the break between his two sets. “And Roger all of a sudden pipes up,” Ragsdale says. With no shortage of confidence, Bartlett approached Buffett and said, “You need a lead guitar player—me.”
Buffett said no he didn’t. He was a solo act. All he needed was his guitar. It was working out. “Roger was very insistent,” Ragsdale says. “I was kind of taken aback. ‘I think it’d really help you out if I was playing guitar, and backing you up. Give me a try.’ And Buffett kind of relented and said, ‘Okay. Come up with me on the next set and it’ll be kind of an audition. We’ll see how you do.’ ”
Buffett returned to the stage and introduced Bartlett, who knew everyone in the club. He’d been playing there for two years. He kept an eye on Buffett’s hands so he could chase him through the songs. “Sang some harmony too without really knowing the words,” Bartlett says. “I just made sounds that matched the sound of the words he was singing.”
At the end of the night, Buffett hired him. It wasn’t an easy decision. Playing solo allowed Buffett his onstage wanderings and extended monologues. People liked those. They paid to hear him talk as much as sing.
Until then, Buffett’s band, which he’d nicknamed the Coral Reefer Band, was a collection of imaginary friends with tongue-in-cheek names like Kay Pasa, Al Vacado, Kitty Litter, and Marvin Gardens. Would a little magic be lost sacrificing Marvin for Roger?
Depends. Marvin was a good gag, but he wasn’t much of a foil, or musician, because he didn’t exist. Bartlett was funny. He could play a wry straight man to Buffett’s rambling stoner. He could sing harmony—even better once he learned the words. His guitar playing was instinctive: rhythmic when Buffett needed rhythm and melodic when a melody was called for. “It was the right place at the right time with the right thing,” Bartlett says.
Buffett wrapped up the Castle Creek run and hit the town at least once in the process. Boz Scaggs was in town as well, playing the Armadillo World Headquarters. Ragsdale remembers a big house with a grand piano, and the who’s who of Austin was there. Jerry Jeff brought a cooler full of sangria. Scaggs’s piano player took a seat at the grand. Ragsdale grabbed a guitar. Scaggs was playing harmonica and standing next to Buffett and they played old rock-and-roll songs for hours.
Bartlett told Ragsdale and Callery he’d continue to pay his rent, and then jumped on the road with Buffett. Their first gigs were in Los Angeles, at the Troubadour, opening Hoyt Axton’s five-night stand. Axton had written the Kingston Trio’s 1962 hit “Greenback Dollar” and Three Dog Night’s 1971 hit, “Joy to the World.” His mother cowrote “Heartbreak Hotel.” Then they headed across the country to open for Three Dog Night in the northeast. They flew on the band’s Douglas DC-3. In Boston, the local promoter with his local accent, kept telling Buffett and Bartlett, “the Dauugh has to be on by 10.” They taped a television show called Your Hit Parade with host Chuck Woolery.
Aside from the optimism of a full calendar, there was another reason Buffett felt he could afford a guitar player. Radio was loosening up. On May 19, “Come Monday” entered Billboard’s singles chart at number ninety-six. A week later, it inched up to number ninety-one. Then an eleven-spot jump, and it took off.
In Montana, Corcoran and his son, Sebastian, drove from Livingston to Bozeman to scoop Buffett from the airport. Buffett’s plane arrived on time, but he’d missed his flight. As the Corcorans were driving away, Tom somewhat annoyed, “Come Monday” came on the radio and Sebastian shouted that they needed to turn back, that Buffett was there. Tom couldn’t help but smile. Buffett arrived on a later flight.
Grisham was right about “Come Monday.” By the beginning of July, the song had cracked the top forty. By July 13, it was number thirty and a problem on the other side of the Atlantic for the BBC: “the BBC advised Dunhill executives in England they could not play the song, ‘Come Monday,’ because ‘Hush Puppies’ constitute a brand name,” Billboard reported. “Thus it was a commercial.” Buffett and Gant returned to Woodland for a twenty-minute recording session to change “Hush Puppies” to “hiking shoes.”
The song peaked at thirty, but spent fourteen weeks on the chart before being snagged in the northeast United States, which preferred Dave Loggins’s “Please Come to Boston,” another song about distant love that reached number five in August.
Living and Dying hadn’t exactly kicked down the door to Billboard’s album chart, but reaching number 176 had to at least qualify as a neighborly invitation in for a beer.
In Montana, Buffett filmed his big-screen debut in Rancho, sweating and hollering a song about bar fights, underage girls, and the “whorehouse on the edge of town where anybody’s able to screw.” Backing Buffett as they filmed the performance of “Livingston Saturday Night” in Livingston’s hippie bar, the Wrangler, was a band that included Tom McGuane pretending to play mandolin and Warren Oates faking Fingers Taylor’s harmonica runs. Across the bar, Harry Dean Stanton busied himself by beating Jeff Bridges at Pong and telling him he knew he was the one rustling the cattle owned by an ex–beauty parlor magnate from Schenectady, New York.
To record the film score, Buffett and his studio band, plus Bartlett, returned to Woodland in Nashville, this time surrounded by televisions for playback of the film. Bartlett took lead vocals on “Left Me with a Nail to Drive,” a low-down story of a man caught cheating and the woman who stole his truck. Working on a budget, they knocked the score out in one twenty-four-hour session.
“That’s a lot of coffee,” Buffett said during a show in Nashville in 2016.
“It wasn’t coffee,” Utley said. “Please.”
In the middle of the summer, just as “Come Monday” was hitting its stride, Buffett, Bartlett, and Fingers Taylor went back to Texas for more than a coffeehouse or college gig. This one was bigger than Castle Creek and it was bigger than the Armadillo.
Willie Nelson was having another festival. Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Picnic was set to go down over three days at the Texas World Speedway in College Station. Aside from Willie, Waylon was atop a guest list that included Leon Russell, Jerry Jeff, Michael Murphey, Doug Sahm, Tompall Glaser, Billy Joe Shaver, Ray Wylie, and Buffett.
The lineup and set times were adjusted on the fly. No one had a contract. Cars caught fireIV as shirtless stoners helped firefighters attack the blaze. Gary P. Nunn remembers a woman coming up in the middle of Jerry Jeff’s set and drunkenly slurring, “Thrbeenadth! Thrbeenadth!” What? “THRBEENADTH!” Finally someone figured out she was saying there’d been a death. Nunn never figured out if she was right or not. He’d gotten to sing his hit, “London Homesick Blues,” early in Jerry Jeff’s set. Most of Jerry Jeff’s songs were lost to the commotion.
When Ray Wylie Hubbard went to the hotel to pick up his credential, a Waylon Jennings record was playing and the promoter was on the phone doing a radio interview, pretending to be on-site and suggesting there was a chance some Beatles maybe might stop by, but who’s to say for sure? You’ll just have to come down to the speedway and find out for yourselves, kids. Tickets still available!
It was anything goes—especially where there was a buck or two involved. Outlaws before the outlaws had a name. And Willie Nelson knew who Jimmy Buffett was. Light stood on the side of the stage and saw a little more progress. “The audience, as deep as I could see, were singing the words to every song,” he said. “They didn’t hear those songs on the radio.”
They knew those songs because they’d bought a record, or a friend had bought a record and played it for them. They knew those songs because they’d caught a show. Then caught Buffett again the next time he was in town, and brought those friends. The music business ran on rules because those rules worked. Almost always. But . . .
“There’s an old axiom,” Light said, “that you can always find exceptions.”
I “Ballad of Spider John” appeared on Ramsay’s acclaimed, self-titled 1972 debut. He’s yet to release its follow-up.
II Two weeks earlier, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst. They’d use cassette tapes sent to KSAN to communicate their demands.
III Buffett’s style of onstage embellishment makes it difficult to figure out when, exactly, he got that damn boat. But he did get it.
IV Including one belonging to a Texas A&M student named Robert Earl Keen who’d one day write the classic, “The Road Goes on Forever.”