Buffett’s crash pad on Waddell Avenue, above Chris and Sonia Robinson and next door to Louie’s Backyard, had an owner—the Spottswood family. Unless you’re spending sunken treasure, Spottswood money is as old as money gets in Key West.
Colonel Walter C. Maloney, of the “July 4, 1876, speech so boring the town was happy to watch a bar burn down” Maloneys, is the Spottswood patriarch. His great granddaughter married Colonel Robert F. Spottswood, a descendant of Alexander Spottswood, the first colonial governor of Virginia, in the early 1900s. In 1940, Maloney’s great-great grandson, John Maloney Spottswood founded Key West’s first radio station, WKWF. In the sixties, Spottswood bought the Casa Marina and La Concha hotels. In 1962, Spottswood coaxed the Warner Bros. production of the film PT 109 to his private retreat, Little Munson Island. Like nearly everywhere else, there’s resort there now, and the Spottswoods still have a law firm and a lot of real estate.
WKWF didn’t have 50,000 watts, but it could get a signal to Cuba and, in favorable conditions, as far north as Tallahassee. What it needed in the seventies was a jolt, an identity. For that, the Spottswoods turned to a former taco cart operator turned bartender.
“I was there to change the format,” Tom Corcoran says. “There was a well-established country DJ who I didn’t mess with that would play from seven until noon, and so to ease into it I had to pay homage to the country guy, Old Duke, who wasn’t old and he was not a Duke.”
Corcoran would play Flying Burrito Brothers, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Dan Fogelberg, and Paul Simon. “Mid-seventies,” Corcoran says. “James Taylor and some unknown folks like J. D. Souther. It was a pretty good radio station.”
He played plenty of Buffett, too, who’d show his appreciation by stopping by the studio and saying whatever came to mind in whatever shape he was in. “I interviewed Jimmy one time when he’d been out in the boat all day long,” Corcoran says. “I said, ‘Obviously you’ve got a great career in front of you with all this creativity and music. What if it all goes to hell?’ ”
“I’m going to open up some sidelines,” Buffett said. “I’m already thinking about one. I’m going to open up a plant on Stock Island and make guitar picks out of pressed plankton.”
Corcoran ushered Buffett off the air, saying they had to get him to dinner with friends. “I wish I’d taped that one,” he says.
By the sixties, World War II—and the depression that preceded it—was still in America’s side-view, closer than it appeared to the boomer kids, but not their parents. “Those beach blanket movies, those were fiction,” Corcoran says. Nobody was spending all that money it took to go play in the sand. Remembering the icy winters of a childhood in Michigan, Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die narrator described the few who could afford a trip to Florida “vaguely decadent.”
Even as the middle class rapidly expanded, there were worries within as to whether or not it would hold. Better be safe and save a little than be sorry, right? Anyone who’d experienced before was cautious after. The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Annette and Frankie—they were for the kids. Then the kids grew up and paradise seemed within reach. The little towns along the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Ocean began to grow: Pensacola, in the Florida panhandle (the Redneck Riviera), Daytona Beach, Tampa, and St. Pete, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miami. Orlando had Mickey Mouse. South Florida had Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald’s tanned and capable “salvage consultant.”
But Key West was still a haul, and then came the gas shortage. If you’re going to drive more than a hundred miles to the end of a string of islands, best to know you’ll be able to fuel up and get home. All the billboards in the world near Disney weren’t going to solve that riddle. “The joke in seventy-three and seventy-four was the chamber of commerce had someone stationed on the Seven Mile Bridge to call ahead when a car was coming,” Corcoran says. “Then everyone would race down Duval Street and open their stores.”
On March 29, 1974, Admiral John Maurer lowered the American flag at the Key West naval station and 151 years of military operations in Key West came to a close. The economic impact trickled down and the streets soon were emptier still. To illustrate the point, historian Tom Hambright flipped through a stack of photos in his office in the back of the Monroe County Public Library on Fleming Street. He settled on one snapped at the corner of Fleming and Duval on December 8, 1974. There are two people in the shot, a mother pushing a child in a stroller across Duval. What’s now a Banana Republic was an empty storefront. All the storefronts in the photo are empty, save for a single bar, the Boat Bar, which Hambright recalled as a risky proposition. It grew up to be a T-shirt shop.
Steve Thompson drove from Seattle to South Florida in 1971 and got a bartending job, where he met Chris Robinson. He’d always planned on returning to the West Coast, but figured he should get a look at Key West before he left. He arrived late in 1973 with $500 in his pocket.
“It was so quiet,” he says. Lost among the stories of smugglers and boozy nights, the heat-fueled, drug-fueled, youth-fueled craziness of that time is the fact that Key West was peaceful. “Deserted might not be the right word,” Thompson says, but it’s close. He pulled his car onto Duval Street and parked anywhere. On a half-deserted misfit island in 1973, $500 went a long way. It got him settled. “It wouldn’t last a day now,” Thompson says.
It might not even last a night in the wine bar where he’d grabbed a table as powerboats paraded down Duval toward the marina, the annual ceremonial kickoff of another race week. At the other end of the table, Thompson’s wife, Cindy, told the story of her Key West arrival. She’d come to the island a little more than a year after Steve, setting south from Wisconsin.
She’d already seen the world, been to India and back and was living in Denver when she began to miss the water. After a trip to the library, she settled on two options: Savannah, Georgia, or Astoria, Oregon. Key West only entered the mix when a friend mentioned the island. “I didn’t even know there were islands in the United States,” she says.
She tossed a backpack into the backseat of her Volkswagen and drove home to Wisconsin to see her parents. The windchill was forty-five-below when she turned south from Milwaukee, and she didn’t stop until somewhere in Kentucky, out of fear her car wouldn’t start back up in the cold.
She still has the backpack she arrived with, and she and Steve go to the Chart Room every Thursday night, as they have for decades. And they recall their arrivals in fairy-tale terms. “Couldn’t believe it when I got here,” Cindy says. “Could not believe it. It was magical.”
“It changed real fast,” Steve says. “Overnight, almost.”
“Right when Jimmy started to get famous,” Cindy says.
Before Cindy arrived, and well before the two met, Steve had settled in on the island and opened a business, Key West Taco Company and got ahead of the T-shirt curve on Duval.
He hadn’t been around town long when he walked into a party at Vic Latham’s house. Buffett was there and everyone wanted Thompson to meet the musician. Elizabeth Ashley, who’d been in Rancho Deluxe and would star in the Tom McGuane–directed adaptation of his novel Ninety-Two in the Shade, was also at the party. Steve wanted to meet her.
“I was more impressed with that,” he says. “They were just people to me, short people, and I had no idea who they were.”
Buffett got Thompson’s attention when he picked up a guitar and played a song about a bartender they all knew. “I’m not sure if Phil was there or not,” Steve says, “but he was one of the few people I knew.”
“Did you know it was about him when you heard it?” Cindy says.
“I did,” Steve says, “because my first thought was, Nobody’s going to know who you’re talking about. I thought this was a local thing for the local bars. Nobody was going to buy it. Thirty years later, I go back to Seattle and everyone knows it.”
Buffett wrote “A Pirate Looks at Forty” for Phil Clark, who was indeed a smuggler. Or at least he had smuggled. He had made money and lost money. He had married and divorced. Married and divorced. Married and divorced. Maybe married and divorced again? No one’s quite sure of the number. He was smart and savvy, well traveled, and he told a good enough story that even his friends weren’t sure where fact separated into fiction.
“Had a big toothy smile and a big voice and I want to say one time he captained the sailboat the Ticonderoga,” says Chris Robinson, who’d fallen into his Chart Room job because Clark was leaving town. “These are just stories I heard. When I got here, he’d already gotten caught for smuggling. He was working on a shrimp boat.
“He had cowboy boots on with the silver toes and he could stand at the bar and almost pass out and then he would get up and stomp that heel down.”
In Clark, Buffett saw an anachronism, and he loved those. Two hundred years earlier, and Phil Clark would have been an honest-to-god pirate. Instead he was a guy who couldn’t quite fit his times—or wouldn’t.
When Buffett returned to Woodland in Nashville in August 1974, “A Pirate Looks at Forty” went to wax, sequenced to introduce the second side of A1A—his second album of 1974. “A1A is the beach access road that runs occasionally on and off U.S. 1,” Buffett wrote, taking over liner notes for the first time in his career, which, after “Come Monday,” looked a little more like an actual career.
A1A, he noted, could take you to some of Florida’s best beaches and “right through the middle of ‘Wrinkle City,’ better known as Miami Beach and ending suddenly 90 miles north of Havana and four blocks from my house.”
ABC-Dunhill sent photographer Peter Whorf to Florida to work out concepts for what wouldn’t be Whorf’s most famous photograph. He shot the cover of Whipped Cream & Other Delights,I the 1965 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album that featured an alluring Dolores Erickson wearing nothing but whipped cream and a come-hither stare. That she wasn’t really naked under the whipped cream, and that the whipped cream was really shaving cream, did not matter. The illusion, as is often the case, was the appeal.
“After several hard skull sessions at Louie’s Backyard,” Buffett wrote, “we started up A1A to Miami. So the cover was the trip and the trip was a cover.”
Jimmy Buffett as not just another entertaining singer and songwriter, but as a laid-back ideal began on the cover of A1A. He’s slouched in a white rocking chair in the shade of his backyard. Dressed in his own cleanest dirty clothes—a yellow T-shirt and cutoff shorts—he’s got a bottle of Michelob on his right and beyond his beer there’s nothing but blue sky and blue water.
“We had the whole Pacific Ocean in front of us, with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable,” Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, and there was Buffett, living Twain’s words in lazy defiance of Watergate, the energy crisis, the recession, work obligations, family frustrations, rush hours, long lines, bills, and to-do lists.
The gatefold was built from a nautical chart of the Keys—the kind tacked to the Chart Room’s ceiling. More than a dozen photos of a beach bum in inaction highlighted the path back to the mainland: Buffett lounging in a hammock; Buffett gnawing on a chicken wing; Buffett at a picnic table with a Budweiser outside a crab shack; Buffett sitting in the back of God’s Own Truck set against a backdrop of palm trees and blue skies he’d replicate for decades onstage. He could just as easily have titled the album Wish You Were Here.
Side A of A1A was another collection of road-dog songs, the exception being “Door Number Three,” a cowrite with Steve Goodman and the kind of song you stumble on when you’re road weary enough to be inspired by Monty Hall and the costumed contestants of Let’s Make a Deal. “The man was dressed like a cucumber,” Buffett said, back at the Record Plant with Roger Bartlett in October 1974. “The lady was an oil and vinegar setting.” And they traded down, lost their television and refrigerator. It was all so tragic.
“Makin’ Music for Money,” was an Alex Harvey song about not doing that. “I’m gonna make my music for me” was the promise. Bartlett wrote “Dallas” as a warning: stay away lest you end up mentally imbalanced and talking to chairs. He’d written it in Dallas when he was in the band Baccus. Influenced by the Band and Crosby, Stills & Nash, Baccus was named for Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and drunkenness. “We spelled it wrong,” Bartlett says.
“I was living with a girl there who was sort of my high school sweetheart,” he says. When that fell apart, he got a song, and that song turned out to be his second big credit of 1974. In October, when the low-budget slasher classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released it featured Bartlett working out his Django jones on “Fool for a Blonde.”
John Sebastian wrote “Stories We Could Tell,” but Buffett got his hands on the song through an Everly Brothers record he borrowed from Corcoran. “Never saw that record again,” Corcoran says.
“Presents to Send You” was written by a busy mind. Buffett packed it with thoughts of Jane (a “fast moving angel who dresses like the city girls do”), distant love, the ever-present danger of tequila (including an allusion to the Buford Pusser Incident), and the thought of sailing away to Barbados, a plan that fell through when he “smoked the whole lid” and went exactly nowhere. He’d no doubt earned a stoned day in the hammock.
Another rental car had to die to make “Life Is Like a Tire Swing,” but so it went. “It’s a really weird story,” Buffett said at the Exit/In in 1974. “I guess that’s how you write ’em.”
He’d been working on a song about childhood trips to see his aunt and uncle and cousin Baxter in Gautier, Mississippi. They lived in a big antebellum house with a tire swing. “I’d written about two verses of the song and I was in Illinois doing a bunch of one-nighters . . . college dates,” he said. He flew into Peoria, picked up a car, and drove to Macomb, cruising at sixty-five miles per hour and listening to Hall & Oates’s “When the Morning Comes,” when he looked over and saw a house with a tire swing out front. What a coincidence.
The next morning, he was racing back to Peoria for a 6 a.m. flight when he fell asleep at the wheel and hit a telephone pole in front of that same house. “I had the ending of my song,” he said. “It was a hard way to do it.”
The flip to Side B finally brought Buffett’s music fully in line with the image he’d been fashioning and featured some of his best writing. “A Pirate Looks at Forty” was about Phil Clark, yes, but Steve Thompson’s friends in Seattle would eventually memorize it because it was just as much about feeling out of sorts. “My occupational hazard being, my occupation’s just not around,” Buffett sang. You needn’t have dreamed of being Blackbeard to feel like you missed your shot, in one way or another.
“Migration” was next, followed by “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season,” Grisham’s pedal steel dancing sweetly through the palm fronds, a storm building over the Gulf Stream, and Buffett passed out again in that hammock before coming to sometime after noon and heading over to Louie’s for a drink. “I must confess, I could use some rest,” he sang. “I can’t run at this pace very long.”
In “Nautical Wheelers,” Buffett finally told the story of the great Tequila Regatta, pairing it with the imagery of a square dancing group who’d play “fiddle tunes under the stars” at the old city hall in Key West on Friday nights. “Square dancing’s fun,” Buffett said during a show near Philadelphia in 1974. “You can do-si-do your ass off.” He dropped in one night, found his kind of people, old island folks who were “more than contented to be living and dying in three-quarters time.”
“I was real stupid,” Buffett said. “I named the second album after a line in a song I did on the new one.” Stupid? Possibly. Or he was on island time. As he added, “The pace of life slows the farther south you go in the Caribbean. It really does.
“Oh, I’ve been here five years,” Buffett said, mimicking conversation.
“What do you do?”
“Nothing.”
Sit and watch the sunset like everyone else, maybe with a cup of wine. “Tin Cup Chalice” finally found its home at the end of A1A.
In a little more than a year and a half, Jimmy Buffett had recorded A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, A1A, and the Rancho Deluxe soundtrack and scored Tarpon. He’d played every coffeehouse, beer joint, and student assembly room from Boston to the Keys to San Francisco and back. He continued to work Nashville, whether Nashville liked it or not. He could make a living in Texas. He had a beat-up truck, a nice little boat, and a minor hit. He’d grown his one-man band to two. He had his wit and his charm and went right back to work.
In October 1974, Buffett and Bartlett played a Don Light–sponsored showcase in Nashville. They hit another booking conference in Commerce, Texas, arriving to the news that the Commodores were coming.
“Now, the Commodores in that time were moving in style,” Buffett said in 2012, telling the story onstage in Seattle. They released their debut album in 1974. They played Soul Train. “They had a bus that looked like the Starship Enterprise,” Buffett said. “They had outfits that would put Parliament-Funkadelic to shame. And they could play.”
The last thing anyone wanted was to have to follow the Commodores. Straws were drawn, and Buffett and Bartlett had to follow the Commodores, who walked in from their space ship and threw down for fifteen minutes exactly as everyone knew they would.
“What are we going to do?” Bartlett said.
“First, we’re going to start drinking heavily,” Buffett said, “and I’ll figure this out.”
Here’s what they did: They took the stage, Buffett took a swig of tequila, and for twelve minutes he talked about the brilliant performance they’d all been lucky enough to witness. For the last three minutes, they played “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”
“And got just as many goddamn bookings as they did,” Buffett said.
By the end of October they’d worked back to the Record Plant to record another KSAN session. This time the audience was Jerry Jeff and the Lost Gonzo Band and the microphones captured bags of beer rustling, bags of beer falling off stools, and shorter bursts of entertaining but random thoughts:
“We’re doing a national phlebitis campaign here. For anyone’s leg that puffs up!
“We’re going to do a rope trick later on . . .
“But the main purpose of our business is music . . .”
He paused for a beat, then broke up laughing.
“What a thing to say,” Bartlett said.
An hour later, they were on their way to the next town. “We sort of did a circuit for about a year,” Bartlett says. Up to Boston, down to New York. “I think we opened for Bo Diddley at Max’s Kansas City,” he says. Down to Atlanta. Over to Nashville. Up to Chicago. Out to Los Angeles. Up to San Francisco and back again.
The rooms got bigger, two-night stands turned into four-night stands. Buffett handled every challenge the way he handled having to follow the Commodores, with ease. When things got too wild or went awry entirely, he invented a scapegoat, an alter ego named Freddy Buffett.
It was only in the quiet moments, in the car between gigs when Bartlett would try to talk to Buffett about his past that Buffett seemed almost shy. For whatever reason, Bartlett doesn’t recall him ever opening up much. But put him on a stage and he could own a room.
“I had more of a musician kind of background, and he had more of a performer kind of background,” Bartlett says. “That whole folk thing where they’re kind of stand-up comics.” Buffett liked the spotlight. So much so that Steve Vaughn, who’d later join the touring cast as a roadie, says the running joke was that if Buffett opened a refrigerator, he’d stand there for ten minutes just because the light was on.
Not that he shut down when the light went off. He couldn’t. “Jimmy did everything,” Light said. Buffett didn’t necessarily think the art department could present his music better than he could. Buffett didn’t think someone else should write the liner notes. He had a case file full of evidence the record company didn’t get him, or couldn’t figure him out.
“At that point, there’s nobody out there but you,” Buffett said in Key West in 2015, defending himself against charges of narcissism. “Yes I’m a confirmed narcissist because there was nobody back there who gave a shit at the time. You were on your own, and you better be good.”
Said Light: “He was the most take-control artist I’ve ever been around.”
The magic was making the world believe Buffett was barely in control, that he wasn’t anything more than the semisober performer they saw onstage. And he could do that as easily as he could wreck a rental car. What he couldn’t do, as “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season” so plainly admitted, was continue to run at the pace he was keeping. There was physical toll, but the creative cost was the tricky one.
Light described a natural attrition to the songbook that occurs when an artist has a hint of success. You’ve got a stack of songs, Light said, throwing out fifty as a working number. You make your first album and cut maybe fifteen of those. “It’s going to surprise you how quickly they’re going to ask for another record,” Light said. But you’re busy promoting the first record and you haven’t refilled the tank. Then the label wants a third record. You’re touring. You’re doing press. You’re taking meetings. You’re managing business. Life has changed. The songs don’t come as fast or as easy. The stack gets smaller and smaller again.
“A Pirate Looks at Forty” stalled out a spot below cracking the top one hundred. “Door Number Three” pushed its way to number eighty-eight on the country singles chart. Neither came close to replicating the success of “Come Monday.”
The album, however, did well. A1A worked its way to number twenty-five on Billboard’s albums chart, and did so without radio. For ABC-Dunhill, Jimmy Buffett had become a small profit center. “We were in the third album before we ever spent $25,000 on a record,” Light said.
There was opportunity there. In Los Angeles, a label rep named Dennis Lavinthal was pushing for an expansion of the Coral Reefer Band. The risk when Bartlett joined the band hadn’t changed. Light remembered how fans took a while to warm up to Bartlett after having seen Buffett play solo. Fans seemed to like Buffett best however they’d first experienced him, and there’d be pushback to a full band. “Because he had to have a smaller percentage of talking,” Light said. “They missed those stories and the funny things. He lost some comedic content. Quite a bit of it. They resented it—until he got it to be a pretty rocking band.”
There’s a natural resistance to change. “We should go back to the past.” Buffett said it himself when he thought the Preservation Hall had been lost for good. But he had to make a change. “At a certain point, we decided the venues were getting too big,” Bartlett says. “We did one festival as a duo in Oklahoma and it was 135,000 people. So I’m really glad I drank. You talk about stage fright.”
When the next album, Havana Daydreamin’, was released early in 1976, Buffett would write of a night in Raleigh, North Carolina, when he and Bartlett were trapped in a dressing room by a horde of fans looking to party: “I turned to Roger (the mono-Reefer then), and calmly screamed, ‘I can’t do this shit much longer. If I don’t get a band I’ll go crazy.’ ”
In March 1975, the Coral Reefer Band convened for rehearsals in Key West. To Corcoran’s many professions, he’d added proprietor of a leather shop, F. T. Sebastian’s Leather Co. He made hats and bags.
Located at 531 Fleming Street, near Fausto’s market and down the street from the Monroe County Public Library, Corcoran set up shop in what had once been a gas station. He told Buffett his new band could rehearse in one of the old repair bays.
“When we got down there, we didn’t really know each other,” Bartlett says. He knew Fingers Taylor a little, because they’d played some shows as a trio. Gove Scrivenor, an autoharp player who’d spent time in Key West (jamming with Vaughn Cochran, among others) and who was also managed by Don Light, recommended bassist Harry Dailey. Bartlett had a passing acquaintance and the phone number for the drummer from Texas. “I’d been playing an acoustic duo,” Bartlett says. “He was one of the three drummers I knew.”
Phillip Fajardo was hooked into the blues scene. Growing up in Amarillo, he’d started on the drums early and then set them aside in favor of Texas’s national pastime: football. As a senior halfback at Amarillo Palo Duro in 1966, his announcement he’d play his college ball at the University of Houston made the newspapers.
After college, Fajardo arrived in Austin in 1970 and found a suitable replacement for football: drugs. “Dropped in and dropped out,” he says. “I was kind of in search of the truth.” He played a little with Waylon Jennings and in a pickup band full of other starving musicians who liked to play the blues. He found some work in the studios around town. He set out for Key West as soon as Bartlett called.
“It was a week before we even picked up any instruments,” Fajardo says. “We just partied. It was just a big party. Rolling thunder.” Bartlett says they got right to work, but he also remembers they got down there at different times. Both remember the sound of a band-in-progress ricocheting off the repair bay’s concrete floors and colliding with acoustically unfriendly walls.
“But the truth was, we could rehearse all afternoon and into the early evening and then we’d go out and get totally plotzed,” Bartlett says. “The sound problem was irksome, but it didn’t really bother us.”
Why would it? Bartlett and Fingers knew the scene. Bartlett had once even been in possession of keys to an apartment in Key West. It took him a month to realize the keys weren’t worth the rent he was paying on an apartment he’d never occupy. But they’d met the people. They knew the dance around Duval. For Fajardo, it was nothing like anyplace he’d been.
He and Buffett took the Whaler out snorkeling and spearfishing. “I went down into a shallow coral reef canal and as I turned the bend in the canal, I ran headlong into a small sharpnose shark,” Fajardo says. “We both did immediate 180s. That was my first and last encounter with a shark.”
Fajardo decided to get his ear pierced—left ear, as was the pirate’s fashion—and since earrings came in pairs, Buffett joined him. They chose a fourteen-karat-gold option. They hung out in the apartment on Waddell, at the Chart Room, Captain Tony’s, and anywhere else they could get a drink. “It was really loose,” Fajardo says. “Getting to meet the locals and hanging out, and, boy, that was quite a time. Unbelievable.”
Rehearsals wrapped, they played a debut show at Logan’s Lobster House, and nobody recalls a thing about it other than it happened. Vic Latham was managing the restaurant. There was an open bar for the band. Things went sideways, probably. Then they hit the road. “After we finally did get down to business,” Fajardo says, “our lives were like a hurricane.”
In their rearview, Key West continued on quiet and peaceful and weird. But just as Jimmy’s fame was growing, the island and island life were changing in ways that wouldn’t surface for a few months.
In 1973, Florida Governor Reubin Askew asked his law enforcement officials to look into Key West’s open secret: all those drugs. Askew didn’t think much of local law enforcement, and so he asked Broward County, not Monroe, to take lead on Operation Conch. “Marijuana in their mindset is no different than shrimping,” Ken Jenne, a former assistant Broward County prosecutor told local historian Stuart McIver in a 1996 South Florida Sun-Sentinel piece. “Theirs is simply a different moral and legal system.”
If it had just been marijuana, Key West might have continued to fly under Tallahassee’s radar, though coming in by boat was still the most common approach.
“They’re going sixty miles per hour and they’re only drawing a few inches and they’d have a flashlight at a certain time at a certain place,” Steve Thompson says.
“They have no running lights,” Cindy Thompson adds.
The runners knew those waters better than anyone trying to catch them. Everyone else knew the score. So no one could have been that surprised when, on September 9, 1975, the agents of Operation Conch swept into town and arrested nineteen suspected drug dealers. Included in the indictments was one Joseph “Bum” Farto, Key West’s fire chief, aka El Jefe.
Bum Farto’s father had owned a restaurant on the corner of Greene and Duval. He sold the building to Sloppy Joe Russell in 1937. Bum picked up his nickname hanging around firehouses as a kid. As an adult, he drove a lime-green Cadillac, preferred fire-engine-red clothing, and saw the world through literal rose-colored glasses. A baseball fan and a voodoo practitioner, he’d drive his car up to the field when Key West’s high school team was playing and light a candle for good luck.
He also liked to move drugs from fire stations: marijuana first, and then cocaine. Ask around, and the same people who knew who was running what are in agreement about when things changed.
“Nobody shot anybody over marijuana,” Chris Robinson says. Cocaine piled bodies. Bodies brought attention. In 1971, Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. In 1973, he backed that up with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Mandatory minimum sentences came into vogue. Gerald Ford was slightly more pragmatic about addiction than Nixon, and Jimmy Carter would eventually run for office with decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana as part of his platform, but there was no sympathy for smugglers and dealers. The game got way more dangerous. Between 1975 and 1977, the Monroe County sheriff’s department seized more than 207,000 pounds of narcotics worth more than $82 million.
Bum was run up on charges of moving both marijuana and coke and found guilty by a Key West jury after thirty minutes of deliberation. He disappeared before he could be sentenced. Farto had rented a car from a gas station in Key West, told his wife he was going to Miami, and was never seen again. Was he killed? Obviously that was one theory. Did he run off with a pile of money he’d stashed away? That was the romantic’s hope, that Bum skipped south and was spending freely on a beach, fishing all day and lighting candles for Key West High’s starting pitcher at night.
Whatever happened to Bum Farto, his story became part of what Key West was before the dopers unloading at the shrimp docks gave way to civic improvements aimed directly at the wallets and purses of tourists. The Downtown ’76 revitalization project was designed, the Citizen wrote, to “capture the precious essence of what it once was, tempered with the taste and dignity of modern life.” And it was underway as Farto went on trial, and he was a ghost by January 1977 when the Citizen declared the project a success: “The proof is found in a casual stroll down Duval Street as it is in the faces of thousands of tourists flocking to the island in ever increasing numbers. It’s in the new charm of Old Key West which lured them here; it’s in the new face of Old Key West which intrigues them.”
Finally, people were going there, doing that and buying the T-shirt—sometimes the same T-shirt being worn onstage by Key West’s most visible ambassador. “Where’s Bum Farto?” it said.
I The album’s title track, “Whipped Cream,” was written by Allen Toussaint (though credited to Naomi Neville, his mother’s maiden name) and first recorded in 1964 while he was still in the military. He went into the studio with his army band under the name the Stokes. “Whipped Cream” played an integral role in The Dating Game when it debuted in late-1965. Alpert’s record also included a cover of the Leiber and Stoller hit “Love Potion No. 9,” which Buffett would throw into his solo sets.