Inner southeast Portland, Oregon, isn’t much to look at, just blocks of squat warehouses packed alongside each other. The streets are narrow and cracked. Freight trains rumble through and back up traffic. Noisy and claustrophobic, the tropics it ain’t. But there used to be a pretty good rock club there called the Euphoria Tavern.
The Euphoria fell nicely into a West Coast tour, either on the way to or from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. It was a good room. High ceilings and wood beams gave it a warm sound. There was a big dance floor and an L-shaped stage. George Stevenson was a regular. He was in law school the summer of 1975 and had just wrapped up a summer job with the Yamhill County District Attorney’s Office when he figured he’d head to the Euphoria to celebrate.
When he got there, he found a tour bus parked alongside the club and a pack of musicians outside the back door. Their leader—compact, with a flop of blond hair and a droopy mustache—was pounding on the door.
“I walked up and suggested I could lead him to the front door,” Stevenson says. Before Jimmy Buffett had a chance to respond, the back swung open and the Coral Reefer Band was in the building to set up and get to work. It could have been any other night on the road—it was just another night on the road—until time made it something slightly more.
The contract for that show, August 23, 1975, resides in Gainesville, Florida, filed away in a quiet room in a library named after former United States Senator George A. Smathers, the same Smathers Key West named a beach after.
The money wasn’t bad. The deal for the Euphoria was a flat guarantee, $1,250 (half up front, half before the show, “cash or cashier’s check only”) for two shows (“T/B/A”), “artist to receive 100% headline billing.” The club’s responsibility was a professional sound system at no cost to the artist. Signed, Jimmy Buffett, local number 257, care of Don Light. Buffett’s name was spelled correctly; the club’s wasn’t. “Europhia,” it read.
David Leiken signed the deal for his Double Tee Promotions, and he still has Double Tee Promotions. He operates it out of a corner office behind another venue in another part of town.
“That was a crossroads show,” Leiken says. He remembers the tickets went on sale on a Saturday, and when he arrived at his office on Monday and casually asked how the show was selling, he was shocked to hear both shows had sold out. They added another night.
The new Coral Reefer Band was finding its sound. Earlier in August, they’d been in North Carolina to open for the Eagles, “the best American band of my generation and many to follow,” Buffett wrote online in 2016 after Eagles cofounder Glenn Frey died. “No band worth their salt didn’t start out as an opener for somebody. Opening for the right band at the right time could be your stairway to heaven.”
One of the Eagles road managers invited Buffett and the Reefers to sound check. Wandering back to their dressing room after, Buffett turned “and I said to my band, ‘That is the kind of band we want to become,’ ” he wrote. Later, Frey popped into the dressing room, wished them luck, thanked them for being there, and told Buffett he liked “A Pirate Looks at Forty.”
“It wasn’t your ordinary gig by any stretch of the imagination,” Buffett wrote. By that standard, the Euphoria was an ordinary gig, but a good one. Good ones, actually. Four shows in two nights and another market outside Buffett’s Southern stronghold conquered, a new front opened. One more reason to celebrate—beyond all the usual reasons to celebrate, which, to be honest, were any reasons at all.
There was ongoing competition for the D&O Award—Drunk and Outrageous. “If you threw up, it was an automatic win,” Roger Bartlett says. He was still drinking like he was trying to drown stage fright, and the scene around Buffett had only grown wilder.
“I’d bring a girl backstage and go out to get us drinks,” he says. By the time he got back, she’d be with somebody else. “And I had two drinks to get rid of,” he says. “That’s how I ended up with a drinking problem.”
At least there was plenty of cocaine to pick them up and kick them on down the road to the next city. Bartlett half remembers someone gifting a garbage bag full of blow in the Northwest, maybe Seattle, but possibly at the Euphoria Tavern. The party (and the party people) gravitated toward Buffett.
“Nobody thought about anyone having a drug problem, because everyone thought you could do this with impunity,” Bartlett says. “Everybody had a problem.”
On the tour bus, driven for a while by a guy named Hack, valuables were kept under bunks, visitors were kept in the main lounge, and Buffett had the stateroom in back. They used the buddy system in truck stops, lest some amped up redneck on the long haul from Knoxville or Cincinnati decide he was bored enough to pick a fight with a longhair. Bob Seger wasn’t making anything up when he wrote “Turn the Page.”
“One of the trips we made, we were in Portland and had to drive to Houston, and we drove it straight,” drummer Phillip Fajardo says. “I had to learn how to drive the bus. There was a lot of speed.”
Buffett soon upgraded from the first bus to a Silver Eagle, dispatching Fajardo and his freshly acquired skills behind the wheel, and another driver, Curly Jones (who also drove the Oak Ridge Boys), to Brownsville, Texas, to pick the bus up. “It was just an empty shell,” Fajardo says. “It was a big aluminum box.” They got a mattress, threw it down in the back, drove straight to Nashville in shifts, and delivered the bus to Hemphill Brothers Coach Company, where it was built out with a nautical theme. “Driftwood and barn lumber,” Buffett told High Times in December 1976. “It’s just a cruiser. You get in there and it’s like being on the moon.”
“We had every episode of Star Trek ever,” Steve Vaughn, one of the roadies, says. They played those videos constantly, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and the rest of the crew booming from a top-of-the-line sound system.
Given the option of custom destination markers, Buffett opted for Key West, Havana, Teens for Christ, Governor’s Staff, Loretta Lynn, and Enterprise. “Loretta Lynn” would get them more latitude at a truck stop than the buddy system; “Teens for Christ” drew the occasional missionary to the door hoping to discuss the good book with partners in service of the Lord.
The D&O Award changed hands with regularity, and Buffett was riding in style, or at least a style, one befitting the screwballs and misfits in his band, in his crew, and in songs they’d bring to life each night like never before.
“Okay. If we can get the lights out in the kitchen, we’ll get going with a little bit of Florida right here in San Diego,” came the introduction in September 1975. “Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band!”
The miles between Logan’s Lobster House and the Backdoor, on the campus of San Diego State University, had built that first Coral Reefer Band into a stoned wrecking crew. Midnight juke-joint hot-shit blues? They could play it. They could make “God’s Own Drunk” sound like Hendrix burning down “Red House,” Fingers Taylor and Bartlett trading harmonica and guitar licks like dirty jokes. But when they needed a lighter touch, say on “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season,” they could take you and put you right on the beach behind Buffett’s apartment.
“Jimmy sort of had to feel his way into the thing, because he wasn’t used to playing with a band,” Bartlett says. “There was no such a thing as a musical director. I was the de facto musical director at the time.”
Bartlett’s leanings became the band’s arrangements, and his leanings (with apologies to his Django crush) were blues and rock, perfect for Fajardo, who could throw in a country beat when necessary. Harry Dailey brought a folkie’s touch to the low end. Fingers could do it all, do it better than anyone else, and then step offstage and keep going until sunrise. One of Steve Vaughn’s jobs each morning was to check on Taylor. “He had, like, a makeup kit, and that was full of his feel goods,” Vaughn says. “He knew people everywhere.”
They all made friends easily. “We were living our lives like the song we recorded, ‘Kick It in Second Wind,’ ” Fajardo says. At San Diego State, they parked that one near the end of the set, closest to the 1 a.m. barroom scene the song opens on, where the crowd is screaming, the booze is flowing, Buffett’s “belly hummin’,” and some poor soul is locked in what had to be an unpleasant bathroom. “I pity that man but from where I stand, it’s looking like the prisoner is me,” Buffett figured. His mind wanders from his perch to the ocean and a boat where it’s just him and Jane (who cowrote the song). That fantasy is broken by shouts of last call and the bass player tipping over. Improbably, they’re out of coke, and as 3 a.m. rolls around, they’re left with adrenaline and one certainty: “tomorrow’s a day and we’ve got to do it over again.”
“Here for a good time not a long time,” Buffett liked to say onstage. “Every night’s a Friday night, every day’s Saturday. Been wrong so long we gotta try it one more time.”
Night after night, cities and stages blurred together like landscapes out the tour bus window until Buffett and band could get back into the studio to work out the last album on his ABC-Dunhill contract. With the chart success of A1A, and three albums under his belt, he felt his footing solid enough to push back against one of Don Gant’s more traditional Nashville beliefs: Thou shall use studio musicians. Buffett had a road-tested band and he wanted to use it. He had a title for the new record, Kick It in Second Wind, and a collection of songs for every hour of his endless days.
“My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don’t Love Jesus” remains an all-time hangover song, the story of an escalating night at the Snake Pit, the next morning’s checklist of cures (Darvon, orange juice, chocolate milk from Fausto’s), and the inevitable broken promises that follow: “Trying to convince myself my condition is improving, and if I don’t die by Thursday, I’ll be roaring Friday night.”
Buffett talked the Oak Ridge Boys, who also worked with Don Light, into singing background vocals, their gospel background making a funny song funnier when William Lee Golden dropped his down-so-low baritone on the line, “Oh my Lordy it’s bad.”
“Woman Goin’ Crazy on Caroline Street” was set in another bar about a block up Duval, its troubled and lonely star desperately trying to convince a crowd that she’d once been a dancer. “But I don’t think she’s cut a rug in years,” Buffett sang, looking on as she drinks cheap beer, sways to the jukebox among “lurking eyes,” and promises a trip to her place for the first guy who shows some small kindness. But it isn’t that kind of bar, or at least that kind of night, and “in a flash” a fight breaks out. “Be careful when you go to swing your partner,” Buffett warned, because “someone just might take a swing at you.” On the test pressing, the song was credited to Buffett, Steve Goodman, and Shel Silverstein, another famous pen who’d found Key West.
Goodman wrote “This Hotel,” an accounting of every item in a hotel room by a guy who’d been gone so long that when he finally glanced in the mirror he couldn’t believe what he saw: “That couldn’t be me in that gorilla disguise.”
“Big Rig,” written by Fingers, was all amphetamines and fifth-gear grooves, Buffett singing about how “drinking and snortin’ ” wasn’t really who he was, and that if he had his way, he’d be headed home to Alabama and then . . . hello. Who’s that? “It’s a good lookin’ blonde with a bottle of scotch and she wants to go home with me.” Been wrong so long . . .
“Please Take Your Girlfriend Home” was about a fifteen-year-old, not exactly new territory for Buffett, who’d noted in “Livingston Saturday Night” that “fifteen may get you twenty.” Not wishing to risk it, his new request was straightforward: “Please take your drunken fifteen-year-old girlfriend home.” Backstage at a rock show was no place for anyone that young. The punch line lands when she tells him she likes the harmonica player more, and Jethro Tull puts on a better show.
Buffett cut Keith Sykes’s “Train to Dixie” and powered it with horns and fiddles chasing lightning-quick guitar fills that couldn’t outrace time any more than the railroad lady: “The years are passing faster than that train could ever run.”
For emotional depth, Buffett lifted “The Captain and the Kid” from the obscurity of Down to Earth, and another ballad, “Wonder Why You Ever Go Home,” from Rancho Deluxe, reorienting a song written for McGuane’s characters into a universal lament set in the conflicted headspace between youth and maturity. Not that anyone who saw the movie would have known. The lyrics were left out of the final cut.
Kick It in Second Wind was finished with a combination of Coral Reefers and studio pros (including Utley and Grisham), and then never released. Summer turned to fall, fall turned to the holidays, and even without a new release, the Coral Reefer Band returned to Key West to play Mallory Square.
For the many who’d missed the Logan’s Lobster House debut, it was their first chance to see Buffett with a full band. Just in time for the show, the weather turned, the temperature plummeted, and the wind whipped up out of the northwest, blowing onshore. Situated as Mallory Square is, on the northwest corner of the island, the show took a beating.
“That was the Christmas I moved here,” Cindy Thompson says. “It was soooo cold, and my boyfriend at the time, out at Stock Island, he said, ‘You gotta hear this guy; he’s pretty good.’ So we went in to hear him and, ‘Yeah, this is amazing.’ But it was so unbelievably cold. There were puddles everywhere. It was so dark and it was so windy and it was so cold. I couldn’t believe he played, really.”
“I got a cold that night that hung for three weeks,” Tom Corcoran says.
“I do remember that one,” Bartlett says.
Buffett bundled up in an Irish sweater, threw on the old white sport coat, and according to Corcoran, drank a bottle of Chivas Regal during the set and was still so cold he walked off stage sober.
“You know, it doesn’t work that way,” Bartlett says, chuckling.
When the calendar flipped to 1976, the follow-up to A1A was finally released not as Kick It in Second Wind, but Havana Daydreamin’. The cover illustration found Buffett squinting into the sun, smiling wide with blue skies blending into the blue of the ocean behind him. Things were good.
“Train to Dixie,” “Wonder Why You Ever Go Home,” and “Please Take Your Girlfriend Home” had disappeared. As, with his consent, had Shel Silverstein’s name from the writing credits for “Woman Goin’ Crazy on Caroline Street.”
Taking one of those spots was “Cliches,” the third-person story of his relationship with the one person who was always on his mind—Jane. She’d been the far-off inspiration for “Come Monday,” and made appearances in “Presents to Send You” and “Saxophones,” but “Cliches” was the first song where she was present.
“She’s got a ballpark figure, he’s got a ball point pen,” Buffett sang. She played a little guitar, but just for fun. He wondered where he could get a cheap cigar. He watched Star Trek while she watched him. “Hiding his cookies when he gets the munchies, trying hard just to keep the boy slim.”
In A Pirate Looks at Fifty, Buffett called Jane a “compassionate Vulcan,” which is something like a practical dreamer. “Jane,” he wrote, “is an amazingly adaptable woman.” Over the years, he’d seen her as comfortable in rooms full of the rich and the famous—say Milan, for fashion shows, or every year in Hollywood at the Vanity Fair Oscar party—as she was in the galley of a sailboat whipping up a meal. “She’s a great road manager and operates with a lot more patience and common sense than I ever could,” Buffett wrote. On the trip that framed that book, for example, he wanted to go to the Amazon, and she found the luxury hotel that made it work for the whole family. And she’d been like that from the start of their relationship.
“Jane grew up well off,” Corcoran says. “And it probably didn’t take her too many months in Key West to realize she didn’t want to live the hippie life.”
Her father, Thomas Slagsvol, founded an insurance company, Greater South, in the 1940s. As its website proudly declares, it’s now the country’s “#1 insurance brokerage for poultry processors.” They do the everyday insurance work as well: home, life, auto, etc.
She’d arrived in Key West on spring break from the University of South Carolina and never went back. The guys at Outlaw Cove in Austin remember her accompanying Buffett on one trip. Corcoran remembers them returning from Nashville once with a Mercedes she’d talked Buffett into leasing. “So suddenly he’s driving a Mercedes,” Corcoran says. “He could barely make the payment, and he was making money.”
When Jane got the idea to spend some time in Provincetown, Massachussetts, because that’s where the influential spent time, Corcoran and Gordon Larry “Groovy” Gray, another South Carolina expat doing this and that on Key West, were enlisted to drive that Mercedes north from Key West. “I don’t even want to talk about that,” Corcoran says.I
Jane saw the big picture, and was making a few of her own. Havana Daydreamin’s gatefold featured a few of her photos—shots beyond the barely-in-focus Poloroids Buffett mentions in “Cliches.”
Havana Daydreamin’ also included “Something So Feminine About a Mandolin,” a tune Jane and Jimmy cowrote about a sweet night in a “pasture somewhere near Austin” where a woman picks gently on a mandolin. It carried with it a wish, that Buffett might one day have a daughter who could learn to play with the same subtle charm.
“Defying Gravity” filled another spot on the finished record. Written by Jesse Winchester, a Southern gentleman working in Montreal because he’d chosen Canada over Vietnam, the song was a sweet, simple ode to life on a big spinning ball.
The new title track set Buffett’s imagination loose on mythical Havana, where his father had taken his first steps and where so many of his grandfather’s stories were set. For added inspiration, Buffett turned to Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga “and fell in love with the description of the men on that turtle boat,” he wrote in The Parrot Head Handbook.
Buffett’s protagonist, Jesus, was working product more profitable (and dangerous) than turtles as he moved from Ecuador to Mexico in a sharp suit and carrying big plans. Waiting for a “mystery man” to arrive with hard-earned cash, his mind drifts to his father, who’d dropped dead chopping sugar cane, and then to a hotel room where the ceiling fan swirled cigar smoke and the pillow held the fragrance of a beautiful woman and the memories of an evening of spilled wine and laughter that would last long after he’d moved on—and he’d be moving on soon enough.
There’s some Phil Clark in Jesus, and in them both a little of McGuane’s rustlers from Rancho Deluxe and countless other dreamers. Two hundred years ago or tomorrow, someone’s always going to wish themselves away from wherever, and what kept Clark and company restless wasn’t a yearning for lawless seas. It was plain old fear—of becoming just like everyone else. “Same occupations and same obligations,” as Buffett wrote in “Wonder Why You Ever Go Home.” And there he was, sneaking up on thirty, feeling all the clichés that come with the end of one’s twenties.
Havana Daydreamin’ peaked at number sixty-five, forty spots below A1A. But by then the label had come to understand that chart performance and radio plays alone didn’t define Buffett’s success. Costs remained manageable. Buffett didn’t have to sell that many records to make money for ABC-Dunhill, because ABC-Dunhill wasn’t spending any money on him.
“We’d had some action with him,” Jerry Rubinstein says. Rubinstein moved into the president’s office at ABC Records early in 1975, and had begun to negotiate Buffett’s next deal. That action was “Come Monday,” two albums earlier, but promising enough. “We’d already had that. I liked it and it did enough business that we thought he was an artist. We wanted him. We felt he was both good and a good investment.”
And Buffett had been a semi-loyal employee. He hadn’t always been pleased with the promotion of his records, but when Sammy Creason told Buford Pusser the label would pay for any damage to his car, Buffett said, “No they won’t.” When Corb Donohue suggested Buffett hit the road and work, Buffett got out on the road and worked. He’d pretty much stayed on the road, jamming more hours and miles into each day than the laws of time and space would seem to allow. He’d proven himself capable of writing and recording, putting together a band, keeping that band on the road and getting it onstage each night no matter what.
“There’s a lot of shit that goes on in life,” says Michael Utley, who was touring with Kris Kristofferson by then. “A lot of curveballs. The road’s not an easy place. You’re cramped up with a lot of people. And no matter how much you respect them as musicians, we’re different.
“As easy, as luxurious as we have it now, it’s still travel. And it still has its moments when it’s testing you. As far as Jimmy, I’ve never known him not to have a positive attitude toward life.”
Which doesn’t mean there weren’t times when he was ornery or demanding. That came with the job of being in charge and being detail oriented. “He is the benevolent dictator when he needs to be,” Utley says. “When it needs to happen, that’s what he calls himself. The benevolent dictator. I think I can say that.”
Steve Vaughn was eighteen when he signed onto the road crew. The ground rules, as explained by Buffett were simple: “I don’t give a shit what happens 221/2 hours of the day,” Vaughn remembers. “The only thing that matters is the ninety minutes we’re onstage. If you had a shitty load-in day or shitty load-out and you’re just dragging ass, don’t want to hear about it. Don’t complain. What matters is the ninety minutes onstage.
“That’s what made Buffett tick. That’s what made him good.”
As luxurious as they have it now, as Utley says, they didn’t back then. The bus had its charms, but the road, the pace, the lifestyle they were living, it wasn’t for everyone—at least not for very long. “I really wanted to change,” Fajardo says. There was too much booze and too much dope. “I had to reexamine the whole thing,” he says. “Why am I doing this?” he wondered. When he couldn’t come up with a decent answer, he was out of the band.
He took eighteen months off, got married, found God, and then went on the road with his old teammate from the University of Houston, Larry Gatlin. Fajardo had been with Buffett about a year. Looking back, he says, he’s reminded of something Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong in the broken places.”
Michael Gardner replaced Fajardo and in May 1976, Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band returned to the West Coast for a tour that began at the Backroom then moved north to Los Angeles for two nights at the Roxy.
Don Light flew from Nashville to Los Angeles to continue negotiations with ABC. Light landed, went straight to the Roxy, and ran right into Buffett. “Coming down the hall in shorts, no shoes, T-shirt, guitar, and lyrics,” Light told Peter Cooper. “Yellow notebook.”
In the notebook was a song Buffett began in Austin after drinking away an afternoon in a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall near a freeway. With hours to kill before a flight, he’d wounded a few of them with a friend and some margaritas. “She drove me to the plane and I thought, Those tasted good,” Buffett said at the American Library in Paris in 2015. “I started it, and I’d get off the plane in Miami and I’d drive the Overseas Highway to Key West and on the Seven Mile Bridge there was a traffic accident and I sat there for an hour and a half and I finished the song.”
In three minutes, he told the audience in Paris. Added to the three minutesII he spent on it in Austin, he’d made quick work of “Margaritaville.” And then the song sat in the notebook for a while, which was typical. “Tin Cup Chalice” hadn’t arrived on record until 1974. “Pencil Thin Mustache” got bumped from the first record to the second. Another ballad about the push-and-pull between home and the road—home in this case being Alabama, where he just wanted to “feel that southern sun upon my arms”—has, disappointingly, never made any record. Tom Corcoran has a demo on his computer.
That night at the Roxy, with Rubinstein in attendance, Buffett played “Margaritaville.” By Light’s recollection, it was the song’s debut. “It wasn’t then,” Utley says. “It was at San Diego State.” Utley was living in Laguna Beach, and since he was home from touring, he sat in with the Coral Reefers at all those Southern Californian shows.
Light remembered Buffett playing the song solo. By the second night at the Roxy, the band had worked it out. “None of the songs were that complex,” Bartlett says, though to the specifics of that particular song, he was at a loss. He didn’t recall ever playing it and didn’t think he was in the band when Buffett added “Margaritaville” to the arsenal. But Bartlett was drinking a lot. There were plenty of drugs. It’s foggy. He was wrong.
“Harry Dailey always said I came up with the melody at the top,” Bartlett says. Dailey, who died in 2003 at the age of 51, might have been right. A bootleg of the second Roxy show captures Buffett introducing the band right before “Margaritaville,” and the first Reefer he turns to is “Mr. Humble, Roger Bartlett.” Bartlett was as surprised as anyone to hear that.
The song was fully formed that night, the lyrical differences between stage and studio small. After cutting his foot on the pop-top in the final verse, Buffett was “bleeding so bad” he had to limp on back home. Instead of blenders and frozen concoctions in the final verse, it’s pain and cocaine that’s been gone since early in the morning (huge applause at the mention of cocaine, too).
In the years to come, Buffett would reprise that version of the final verse, playing it like drug-addled, outlaw stagecraft set in contrast of the recorded version. But cocaine was probably the original lyric. At the Roxy, he introduced the song as “Wastin’ Away Again in Margaritaville,” an insignificant difference that would prove to be of some future consequence.
“Yeah, we knew it was hit,” Light said.
If that’s true, that they knew they had a hit song, what happened next was neatly timed and expertly executed. “I went backstage to do my mandatory thing,” Jerry Rubinstein says. “Security stopped me and told me I wasn’t allowed in.”
The rest of the ABC Records staff passed through to the party. The president of the label turned and left. He wasn’t happy about it, either. “I knew exactly what he was doing,” Rubinstein says. “It was a negotiation. It was very interesting. No one ever did anything like that—to me anyway. Sometime after that, I got a call from Don that Jimmy said it was okay for the attorneys to continue work on the agreements.”
Three weeks later, outside Missoula, Montana, Buffett and the band caught up with Jerry Jeff and the Lost Gonzo Band to play a festival with Heart at the K-O Rodeo Grounds.
William “Daddy” Aber, a professor of Greek at the University of Montana from 1895–1919, had long ago begun a day of on-campus service. Students and faculty would plant trees and clean the place up and chip in for the common good. They called it Aber Day. In the 1970s, someone had the bright idea to raise money for the library by hiring some bands and ordering some kegs of beer. In 1974, the Aber Day Kegger was born.
“The Guinness Book of World Records Beer Drinking Contest” Bartlett says. For a small amount of money, everyone in attendance was given what was essentially a plastic beer pitcher. Not a mug, a pitcher. “And so you went around to the kegs and filled up your pitcher and people were totally blitzed and we’d been on the road for six or eight weeks straight without a break,” Bartlett says. Then the wind kicked up. “A quarter inch of dust on everything we owned,” Steve Vaughn says. Then it rained. Tempers flared.
Buffett and the Coral Reefers stepped onstage and Bartlett, in his role as quasi-musical director, counted off the opening number and Gardner,III the still relatively new drummer, said, “Wait a minute.” He was having trouble with his bass drum pedal. Bartlett counted off the song a second time. “Wait a minute,” Gardner said.
From Gardner’s perspective, he needed the pedal. From Bartlett’s, there were thousands of extremely drunk people in front of them so, you know, play. There is no “wait a minute” in that or any other situation. “We almost got into a fistfight onstage then later back at the hotel,” Bartlett says.
When the tour turned toward Canada, Buffett and Bartlett flew to Portland to appear with Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter as he campaigned for president. News of the Euphoria Tavern sellouts had made its way to Carter’s people. “He invited me to go out on the campaign plane, which I did for a day,” Buffett said in a December 1976 High Times interview. “I thought I worked hard.”
Bartlett remembers walking offstage with Buffett and straight into a conversation with CBS News’s Ed Bradley, who’d soon become the first African American to cover the White House for a television network. When Buffett and Bartlett returned to the tour in Vancouver, British Columbia, Bartlett had an apology to make. He’d left a hash pipe under his mattress. It’d been discovered at the border.
Like Fajardo before him, Bartlett took a look around, took a look in the mirror, and then compared notes. They’d been working a circuit, and so they’d see the same people every few months. Those faces, he’d noticed, were getting “crispier and crispier,” he says. An honest self-evaluation revealed he was getting “crispier and crispier,” too.
Soon he’d find himself in New York, in a club, watching a guitar player burn the place down. After the set, after lifting his jaw from the floor, Bartlett introduced himself.
“I’m working for this guy named Jimmy Buffett and you’re amazing,” Bartlett said. “I could recommend you for the job. It’s like $250-a-week.”
“I’m sorry,” the guitarist said, “I’m working for a guy named Herbie Mann and making $1,000 a week.”
So Bartlett had to pick his jaw off the floor again. The mystery guitarist introduced himself as Elliott Randall, who’d played on a bunch of Steely Dan records; was indeed working with Mann, a jazz flautist; and would, somewhat incongruously, become a touring member of Sha Na Na for a while.
“Big, big studio guy,” Bartlett says.
Whether he found his own replacement or not, Bartlett wasn’t long from making his move. He wanted them to say, “Roger went to New York to be a jazz guy.” There was style in that, sophistication and cool. Jazz Guy. Perfect for a guy who liked all the arcane stuff he liked. There was one last adventure with Buffett before that, however, and it was back down in Tampa, Florida.
Joe Nuzzo was surfing Florida’s Gulf Coast before anyone knew that was a thing that could be done. In 1954, his mother scooped up four kids, left her husband on Long Island, and headed to Florida. Nuzzo went into the military, got out and went to California to surf. In ’62 or ’63, he returned to Florida for a visit.
“And I went for a paddle one day from our house and went out to the Gulf and there were waist-high waves and I was surfing,” he says. Until that moment he’d never considered it a possibility. He moved back to Florida and got a job fixing airplanes. He was asked to cut his hair, so he quit that job and went to work for a surf shop. They asked him to cut his hair, and that was just life in the early sixties. “The city wanted to get rid of us because we were surfers and we drank wine and smoked pot and they banned surfing here for a while,” Nuzzo says. Police would stand on the beach with rifles and megaphones and order surfers out of the water.
Organizing against such injustice, he and some friends formed the Suncoast Surfing Syndicate and sold T-shirts (“I PROMISE TO BE A GOOD SURFER GUY”) to raise the money to hire a lawyer to challenge the surfing ban. Nuzzo figured the city didn’t own the waves, and he was right. They won. In 1966, he opened Suncoast Surf Shop in Treasure Island, Florida. “Surfing flourished from there,” he says. “I never made a lot of money. You know, you make enough for the next surf trip.”
In the early seventies, at the beginning of the surf industry, when everyone knew everyone, he’d run up to New Jersey to see a surfboard maker named Tinker West, a literal rocket scientist who worked out of a warehouse that was home to his board-making business and a rock band he was managing. At day’s end, West would shout at Bruce Springsteen to come help clean up the shop. That was part of the deal.
Down in Florida, time on and around the water meant an almost unavoidable familiarity with the Trade, as Buffett termed it on Radio Margaritaville before a 2015 show near Tampa.
“Can you explain what the Trade is?” Utley said, knowing full well what Buffett meant.
“They were dope dealers,” Buffett said. “These guys liked to party, and they paid in cash.”
“There was a lot of marijuana dealings going on here,” Nuzzo says. “This was the headquarters, I think, in the state of Florida. I went to jail for a couple years.”
He says it the way you might say it rained last Tuesday. Wasn’t the nicest day, but it happened and now the sun’s out. Suncoast celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2016. Nuzzo threw a party and John Prine came and played a few songs.
The shop’s original location burned down in 1995, but Nuzzo reopened and the new shop is stacked with surf gear. No space is wasted. Florida still isn’t anyone’s first thought as a surf destination, but the recent popularity of stand-up paddleboards has been good for business. A book about the rich local history of dope smuggling was displayed on the counter. The wall alongside the stairs was packed with framed photos, a few with Nuzzo and Buffett on different boats at different times. “I’ve got photos of Jane and Buffett on the boat,” he says, adding somewhat apologetically, “but he’s in a Speedo.”
What you won’t find advertised, but you will find hidden among the racks of T-shirts, is a piece of Buffett history, shirts marking the July 9, 1976, Wine & Dine Under the Stars cruise aboard the Tom Sawyer. Departing from St. Petersburg with Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band headlining. Cost: $75 per person or $125 per couple.
The T-shirt design is nearly identical to the original poster, but the T-shirts spell Buffett correctly. The original misspelled poster is framed on a wall in the little house next to the shop. “We’re not going to dinner!” Buffett shouted at Nuzzo when he saw the poster.
They were kind of going to dinner. Wine and dine, it said. It’s been a while since Nuzzo saw Buffett. He stopped by the shop not long ago, but Nuzzo wasn’t there. He eventually lost backstage privileges (he blames tour managers, not Buffett), but Buffett will still dedicate a song to him when he’s in Tampa. Buffett and Nuzzo go back. The details of how they met, when they met, and who introduced them? Less than clear. Nuzzo starts those stories and then ends them, saying, “Let someone else tell you that story.”
A few work through the filter. There was the time Nuzzo picked up a new twenty-three-foot SeaCraft and Buffett was in town. He was supposed to fly back to Key West. Nuzzo talked him into taking the boat instead. Midway, they stopped on Cabbage Key for margaritas and cheeseburgers.
Referring to “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” the Naples Herald asked in a 2016 headline, “Was Cabbage Key Truly Jimmy Buffett’s Inspiration?” It wasn’t, but Buffett’s photo and a dollar bill are framed on the wall. “We wound up spending the whole afternoon there,” Nuzzo says, “because we went up to the top of the fire tower and did our things, whatever, and looked out at the world, got our minds a little bit better for the rest of the trip.”
Which would have been a nice, fine, and good—certainly in keeping with the times if not coast guard regulations—but they forgot to fuel up and ran out of gas before they made Key West.
They were close enough for the radio to pick up WKWF’s limited signal. Corcoran was on the air. He played “Nautical Wheelers” for an audience that had no idea the song’s author was stranded at sea. They got a kick out of that on the boat.
The hell of it was, Nuzzo had extra cans of gas. He’d left them home. There was no way they’d need those. The bag filled with fifty outdated flares on the other hand, that he’d brought along. “We shot off every flare in the bag,” he says. “We lit up the sky.”
When the coast guard arrived, there were questions. Such as, “Why isn’t this boat registered?” Buffett got a lift into Key West, went to Captain Tony’s, hopped onstage, and played damn near until dawn. The authorities looked at Nuzzo and said, “You’re in a world of shit, boy.”
It was a good line, delivered with the menace of authority, but being with Buffett in Key West meant, at worst, a neighborhood of shit.
Keith Sykes had his guitars stolen from a van on Key West once. Nice guitars, a 1968 Fender Telecaster and a 1966 Martin D-28. “Somehow Jimmy found out about it and made some calls for me,” Sykes says. Buffett found them. Sykes had to buy them back, but he got them. “The thing is, the Telecaster at that time was worth two hundred dollars soaking wet with rocks in its pockets,” Sykes says. “The Martin was more expensive, but I paid fifty dollars for it and sixty dollars for the Tele—because it was electric.”
Nuzzo was put through the motions once or twice and then sent on his way. “So I showed up late,” Nuzzo says, “and Jimmy was singing and playing on the stage. It was crazy . . . but the Wine & Dine cruise . . .”
Nuzzo had some friends (in the Trade) and they had this idea to hold a cruise, with Buffett and the Coral Reefers on the Tom Sawyer, an old paddle wheeler. “Tampa Bay can be a treacherous body of water,” Buffett reminded Utley, who wasn’t a part of that show. “This was a riverboat, packed.”
The idea was solid, if not the funding. When Nuzzo’s pals encountered a capital shortage, Nuzzo became an investor and tickets were sold through Suncoast. He also knew Buffett, which didn’t hurt in securing Buffett. For his effort, Nuzzo got three front row center seats, which he used to bring two female friends. In fact most of his stories involve two female friends. “Just to have fun,” he says, shrugging.
Playing in Florida in 2016, Bartlett had a chance to catch up with Nuzzo and try to relive that night. “We were all so artificially inspired we had to piece little memories from this one and that one into a whole memory,” Bartlett says. “And whether that memory is the truth is up for debate.”
With certainty, Nuzzo remembers a pig and cow—may they rest in peace. Both were butchered on a pier the night before the cruise. The pig had spent the previous night in a bathroom, and might have gotten loose. The police might have been involved in the roundup.
Buffett was right about the conditions on the bay the night of the cruise. A squall blew in and tossed the Tom Sawyer like it was the S.S. Minnow. Depending on the level of inebriation, the crowd aboard either had no idea they were in a storm, or were convinced they were going to die. Someone pitched down the stairs with a full case of Cutty Sark. No one remembers the show. “There was,” Buffett told Utley, “a moment we thought the Tom Sawyer might go down.”
Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band continued to be as dedicated as ever to those “certain indecencies” McGuane alluded to in the liner notes to A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean. Buffett was still sleeping on that yellow line. When he slept, anyway. Then he’d wake up, dust himself off, and carry on. The boat didn’t sink, because Buffett’s boat never sank. Things had a way of working out for Jimmy Buffett.
Don Light and Jerry Rubinstein hammered out a new contract, and Rubinstein delivered two checks. The first, for $100,000, was to start work on the next record. The other, for $132,000, was to renew. Light met Buffett for breakfast, thinking about the banker in Key West who’d told Buffett he needed to stabilize his work schedule before he could get a $500 loan for the Boston Whaler. “You want to take this check and say, ‘Is this stable enough for your ass?’ ” Light told Peter Cooper. “He didn’t want to do it, which surprised me.”
Rubinstein knows the one thing Buffett did want. After refusing backstage access to the man who was, technically, his boss, Buffett asked Rubinstein to come sign the paperwork aboard Buffett’s new boat. It wasn’t a Whaler.
“I flew into Miami with the contracts, with the signature copies,” Rubinstein says. “And we went for a great Cuban dinner and on a beautiful moonlit night we were sailing on his boat and we signed the agreement. We’ve always gotten along since then.”
On October 18, 1976, Buffett and Corcoran met at the Flagler Marina in Palm Beach, where a broker handed Buffett the keys to his new sailboat, a thirty-three-foot Cheoy Lee ketch. Buffett was wearing the lime-green shirt he’d taken as a souvenir from the Euphoria Tavern. Corcoran, who’d added photography to his résumé, snapped the shot. “There was a look of contentment like no one had ever seen before,” Buffett wrote at the beginning of his first book, Tales from Margaritaville. That look, and the T-shirt, named the boat.
On the first page of the Euphoria’s logbook, Buffett kept it simple. He and Corcoran departed the marina at 4:30 p.m. with forty-five gallons of fuel. Corcoran says the plan was to cruise the Intracoastal Waterway south to the Boynton Inlet and then head out into the Atlantic Ocean for the rest of the trip to Coconut Grove—where Buffett’s Floridian adventure had begun almost exactly five years earlier.
There he’d found his gig at the Flick delayed long enough to go to Key West. Key West had inspired the songs that put him back on the road. The road had given him a chaotic, exhausting, and yes, euphoric living. Against the backdrop of bus tires on asphalt and rock band histrionics, the Euphoria was thirty-three feet of serenity.
He and Corcoran were headed to Coconut Grove instead of Key West because Buffett was due in the studio in November and he wasn’t going back to Nashville. They’d record at Criteria. They had a budget three times what they’d spent on the last record and nearly fifty times what he’d spent to make Down to Earth.
The Atlantic was angry, and so they sailed past Boynton Inlet and kept to the Intracoastal. They sailed all night, stuck waiting for drawbridges to open, left screaming at the top of their lungs to get the attention of other operators. To their west, U.S. 1 pointed toward the Keys. To the east, A1A pulled drivers to the beach. They watched the sun set off toward the Gulf of Mexico and saw it rise over the Atlantic.
“I live on audience response and intuition, and I react to it,” Buffett told High Times. “Have all my life . . . You gotta be calculating, you gotta bust your ass if you want to do anything. For me, it’s like I can’t just be a sensitive artist and still be out here surviving. Certain things have got to be done in order to get where you want to go.”
He was talking about why he was supporting Jimmy Carter, about how he saw those things he valued in the candidate. Usually when the High Times interview is written about, the attention is on Buffett threatening to kick the writer’s ass if he’s misquoted.
It’s the least interesting moment of the conversation, tough-guy posturing for no good reason. Comfortable in the pages of a magazine celebrating a subculture, his words surrounded by ads for bongs and pipes and “POTenizers”—“For the Blast that Lasts”—Buffett was more introspective than he’d been to date.
On his past conflicts with ABC Records, he said all he wanted was his fair share of attention. “I think some people at ABC are coming around to that now,” he said. Did he want to be a number one artist? “Shit, no,” he said.
“What do you think about artists who pretty well shun their followers?” High Times asked.
“I don’t think they’ll be long-lived,” Buffett said.
He knew what his fans wanted. On page nineteen, below an ad for another bong, one that asks “What goes Chugga Chugga?” there’s an ad for Jimmy Buffett T-shirts. Out on the ocean, there’s a darkened boat—no running lights. On shore, a topless woman holds a signal light.
“Our fans are listening to the songs,” he said. “And that’s the satisfaction I get out of it. As long as I can do this, and as long as I know that I’m doing it, I’m going to be content to stay at a certain level.
“I’m not going out there to try and sell my lifestyle to America. Because they ain’t going to buy it. They never have.”
I “All I know is, we made it all the way from Key West,” Corcoran says.“We got a letter from the sheriff saying these two guys really do belong in this car. We made it all the way to Richmond drinking beer. I don’t know how. And I finally, we were in a gas station, I said, ‘We haven’t eaten.’ Richmond, Virginia. Groovy said, ‘Oh yeah.’ So he went in and he was gone, like, ten minutes. I went, ‘all right, good. He’s getting some sandwiches made.’ No. He walked out with a Smithfield ham, a smoked ham. He put it on the console, got a knife out of his pocket, sliced it open, and we used the knife to feed ourselves dried Smithfield ham.”
II Six minutes is the low end of Buffett’s estimates of how long it took to write “Margaritaville.” Usually it’s in the neighborhood of fifteen, never more than twenty.
III Gardner died in 1991 at the age of 44 from what his obituary in the Memphis Commercial Appeal called “complications resulting from dental problems.”