Author’s photo
Norbert Putnam and an award for a record he produced. Florence, Alabama, 2015.
W. C. Handy, the father of the blues, was born in Florence, Alabama. There’s a statue of him playing trumpet there in Wilson Park. Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records, was born in Florence and grew up picking cotton before moving to Memphis and setting Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and rock and roll loose on the world.
“When I was a kid I went to school here in the city because we had a house out in the north flats area,” Norbert Putnam says. “And my father had been a musician. My father’s family, he was one of eight children, and the youngest one always had to play the bass.”
Putnam’s father’s bass became his bass, and that instrument took him around the world and brought him back to Florence, where he lives in a dignified two-story home built in the 1830s and set on four acres, a short walk from Handy’s statue. The walls, which stretch to especially high ceilings, are fitted with fine art and memories. There’s a poster from the time he played a show with the Beatles in 1964 at the Washington Sports Arena. There are photos, of late-night recording and bullshit sessions with Elvis, of a black-tie night Kris Kristofferson decided was black tie optional. A platinum record for Joan Baez’s Blessed Are . . . hangs by the front door. A gold record for Buffett’s Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes is in the kitchen. Another gold, also for Changes, sat on the floor of his office next to a drill.
In that office, the shelves are full of books about art, and about music, including a copy of A Pirate Looks at Fifty. In one corner, near the bathroom, a bouquet of cables and cords loop over a coatrack. Next to a computer, a black bass rested on a stand next to a Fender amp and a stack of recording gear. Putnam is semiretired, but someone had sent him a new singer, and he punched up her record, excited, and hit PLAY. No one ever really quits music.
Author’s photo
Norbert Putnam and an award for a record he produced. Florence, Alabama, 2015.
In 1976, with a new ABC Records deal on the way and a bigger budget, Buffett won his creative-control. He could unleash the Coral Reefer Band—and only the Coral Reefer Band—in the studio. Gant agreed to step out of the producer’s role, and Don Light called Putnam.
“Jimmy wants to talk to you,” he said.
Putnam’s pretty sure he’d met Buffett once before, when Buffett was a Billboard writer poking around studios. Their paths had to have crossed. Putnam’s equally certain he saw Buffett play the Exit/In a time or two. He was charming, but background music. “I was there on other business,” Putnam says. He noticed A1A and Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, but hadn’t paid them much attention. Like most people in town, he’d heard “Come Monday,” liked the song, but wasn’t sure what to make of the singer.
At Light’s request, Buffett and Putnam met at Julian’s, an upscale French restaurant with a basement fireplace. It was August in Nashville, but Putnam says they sat by the fire as Buffett talked up the Reefers. “He says, ‘My band, we’re more Rolling Stones than Nashville,’ ” Putnam says. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he said. He may deny it now, but why would he?”
They had a gig in Nashville in a week. So Putnam didn’t have to take Buffett’s word for it. He could hear for himself. “Sure,” Putnam said reflexively, but his mind had drifted. He was trying to imagine the Rolling Stones playing “Come Monday.”
“It’s not computing,” he says. “And so the next weekend, I had a couple of cocktails and went out there.”
A few years earlier, Putnam had produced New Riders of the Purple Sage in San Francisco. They were . . . unruly. As he tells it, they did all the drugs, drank all the Jack Daniel’s, and chased that with all the beer—and then they tried to make a record. “And when Buffett’s band came out I thought, My God, these guys are like the New Riders,” Putnam says. “They’re all half-stoned and they’re jumping around and their amps are too loud. I thought Jimmy Buffett was this folk singer, and here he is with this band and the people are jumping up and down.”
Putnam was an interesting choice to produce a road band. He was a studio pro. In high school, he’d picked up his father’s bass with a partial blessing from his old man, who taught him how to tune it and left the rest to his son to figure out. From there, Putnam set out to learn Bill Black’s bass lines on Elvis’s Sun recordings for a high school band that began to tour colleges in the South. Years later, Putnam would tell Elvis that story and Elvis would say, “That was only three chords. If it had been Sinatra you’d never have figured your way out the first verse.”
Rick Hall began producing soul singers in Muscle Shoals, and Putnam began playing on the sessions that gave the small river town in north Alabama an international reputation. He played on hits by Arthur Alexander, and the Tams—the songs Johnny Youngblood was playing on the guitar when he taught Buffett those first three chords.
In the studio in Muscle Shoals, Putnam was making $5 an hour. In Nashville, there was a musician’s union and the union dictated $57 every three hours, and you could work four sessions a day if you were in demand. He moved to Nashville with his friend David Briggs, a piano player, and within a year they were making $100,000 and working with J. J. Cale, Tony Joe White, Kristofferson, and, a little farther down the road, Elvis. He did Hee Haw with Ray Charles. Post-Dylan, everyone was coming to Nashville to record. The Nashville Cats, as Putnam and the other studio aces became known, profited.
Putnam and Briggs took some of their money and opened Quadraphonic Sound Studios and started a publishing company. Putnam began producing, and when he helped Baez go platinum in 1971, his phone lit up with managers hoping he’d work with their clients.
Putnam left Buffett’s gig thinking about the songs, and the band he’d seen onstage. Then Putnam thought about Dan Fogelberg. He’d worked a lot with Fogelberg. They shared a love of classical music. So much so that when they were working on Fogelberg’s 1972 album, Home Free, they swiped a chord from Aaron Copland and used it on the opening track, “To the Morning.”
“It became obvious to me that I could probably succeed with Dan Fogelberg with symphonic rock,” Putnam says. But he’d noticed something else about Fogelberg’s work—it was better when he was at home in the mountains of Colorado as opposed to the concrete sprawl of Los Angeles.
“I’m now going to apply that to Jimmy Buffett—only we’re going to use Trinidad steel drums, and wooden flutes and anything else I could think of that was nautical,” Putnam says. And they were going to get away from Nashville. They’d go to Miami and Criteria Recording Studios. It’d be November. The weather would be lousy in Tennessee anyway. “He didn’t immediately jump at this,” Putnam says. “I could tell he was hedging. I said, ‘We need to.’ ”
A few days later, Buffett called back. He said he got it. He got it, and he’d written a new song inspired by it, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.”
“Then I said, ‘Jimmy, I’m not one of those guys who works fourteen-, fifteen-hour days anymore,’ ” Putnam says. Experience told him people got sloppy after six or seven hours. They’d work from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and they’d try to get two tracks done each day. At 5 p.m., the workday would end and they’d take the tapes to the marina, climb aboard the Euphoria, and check the day’s work.
Putnam booked two weeks at Criteria, and Buffett’s people booked a mansion where everyone would stay. Finally afforded the opportunity to take his band into the studio, Buffett was taking the whole team. The road crew was going as well. It took one phone call to find a mansion for a rock band in Miami.
Cindy Johnson and Jeri Jenkins had been best friends since they were eight years old. They were going to school together at Miami-Dade Junior College in the mid-seventies and living in a funky, cool little frame house surrounded by twenty other funky, cool little houses originally built to house circus performers in the offseason.
The college didn’t have a cafeteria. It had a vending machine. To make a little money on the side, Johnson and Jenkins would make sandwiches and sell them next to the vending machine, undercutting on cost and greatly improving the quality. One of their classmates was Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler’s nephew.
Atlantic had Stephen Stills in town recording, and they needed a couple of people to do some cooking and cleaning. “We went in and we interviewed with twenty guys in the kitchen in this old house on N. Bay Road,” Cindy O’Dare (formerly Johnson) says. “An old 1926 house with a beautiful courtyard, and we literally walked in on twenty men: Nils Lofgren, the Memphis Horns, Stephen Stills, Dr. John, Boz Scaggs.”
They held their own and got the job. For $1.25 an hour, they’d get to the house at 3 p.m., make breakfast, wake everyone up, and get them to the studio by 6 p.m. Later, they’d go to the studio and bring dinner. Sometimes they cooked. Sometimes they bought takeout, repackaged it, and passed it off as homemade.
“I drove this little beat-up Volkswagen and lived in a little wooden house and then I’d drive over to this sparkling Biscayne Bay mansion,” O’Dare says. She was a junior college student hanging out with rock stars. It was surreal.
When the record was done, the band packed up and left. Jeri and Cindy returned to making sandwiches to sell at school and working at a health food store in their spare time. That’s where the phone rang one day—because they didn’t have a phone at the circus house. Eric Clapton’s manager was on the line. Clapton had heard good things from Stephen Stills. Were they available, and could they help find a house? They were, and they could, and to pull it off they borrowed money from their parents and leased a mansion. They moved Clapton into 461 Ocean Blvd.
Next came the Bee Gees. “After the Bee Gees, I don’t even remember,” O’Dare says. Home At Last, as their new company was called, grew to nine houses and eighteen employees. They housed the Eagles while they made Hotel California. They took care of David Sanborn, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joe Cocker, and, naturally, Andy Gibb.
For Buffett, they set aside 5242 N. Bay Road. O’Dare remembers she and Jenkins standing behind the house, waiting for Buffett when he arrived aboard the Euphoria. “Jimmy taught us all how to make shrimp creole that first night,” she says.
“So we’ve got everybody living in this big ol’ mansion, and we’ve got a chef and a maid,” Putnam says. “And the roadies have set up a bar at the studio—a complete bar at the house and the studio. And when I say complete, I’m not talking about six bottles of gin, vodka, whiskey. There are forty bottles up there. Fully stocked.”
“Studio B,” Utley says. “The small room.”
He knew it well. Criteria had been home base in the Dixie Flyer days. Putnam says Utley was like a second producer when they got to work, and they kept to schedule. They’d hit the studio at 11 a.m. At 5 p.m., Buffett and Putnam would grab the day’s tapes, head to Coconut Grove, and board the Euphoria. They’d open a couple of beers and check the work.
“You know, this stuff is sounding really good on a sailboat,” Buffett said to Putnam after one of the earliest sessions.
“I said, ‘It is, isn’t it?’ ” Putnam says. “And Jimmy says, ‘You know, if we could make a record that was good to put on boats, how many records could we sell?’ ” Putnam leaned back, took a sip of his beer, surveyed the harbor, and saw dollar signs flying like signal flags above each and every boat between them and the horizon.
On about the second or third morning, before heading to the studio, Buffett dropped “Margaritaville” on Putnam. “It’s sort of a day and night in Key West,” Putnam recalls Buffett saying. “It’s semiautobiographical. I’m going to call it ‘Margaritaville.’ I cut my foot one night leaving the bar, and there’s some other stuff in it.”
“Margaritaville?” Putnam said.
“Yeah, ‘Margaritaville,’ ” Buffett replied.
“I wasn’t that excited about the title,” Putnam says. “A part of me sort of hoped he’d come up with a better song idea.”
They tackled other songs first, songs about people and places that were fraying. In “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” Buffett wished he “could jump on a plane,” and dreamed again of the ocean, and of Paris and other faraway places. “If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.”
“Wonder Why We Ever Go Home,” its feeling for moving growing even stronger since Rancho Deluxe, found a new home (and a pronoun shift from “you” to “we”). In 1976, after Buffett had earned a little name recognition, those “lost” High Cumberland Jubilee tapes were found and released by Janus Records. Buffett reclaimed “In the Shelter” and rerecorded it in Miami, giving the new album another song about another untethered soul.
Steve Goodman always seemed to know when Buffet was going into the studio and, coincidentally, would be ready with something to pitch. “He was a voracious song plugger,” Buffett told Dave Hoekstra on WGN Radio in 2015. “And the thing of it was, every time he did it, they were great songs.”
Then again, Buffett was always rushing back into the studio, and Goodman was a great songwriter. Alignment was inevitable. “Banana Republics” was an ex-pat’s lament from somewhere south of the border where try all you want to fake it, but “none of the natives are buying any second-hand American dreams.”
“Tampico Trauma” was about wearing out your welcome in the same Mexican town where a down-on-his-luck Humphrey Bogart kicked around for a little spare change in the beginning of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Even “Lovely Cruise,” about exactly that, is really about the end of that ride. “We’ll bid our farewell much too soon,” Buffett sang.
“Biloxi” was the second Jesse Winchester song in as many records. Buffett’s Biloxi was lit by neon and illicit possibility. Winchester’s was warm, gentle, and sweet, a place where the stars look down and “see their faces in the sea,” where children dig in the sand, and a couple sneaks a naked swim in the ocean. And where the sun sets and the storms build in the direction of New Orleans. Winchester’s “Biloxi” was touched by melancholy, like it was written on a cold, exiled Canadian morning, and by a guy longing for home. It might have been.
“Landfall,” on the other hand, was hot—a rocker asking an open-ended question: “What would they do if I just sailed away?”
The Euphoria gave Buffett the option. She was insurance against an industry that hadn’t ever fully figured him out and didn’t offer any long-term assurances. He set the sound of the tour bus’s “big diesel boom” against “the smell of fresh snapper fried light,” and that doesn’t seem like much competition, though, for Buffett, they weren’t in competition. The road made him appreciate his time off; his time off readied him for the road. “It just makes my whole life come alive,” Buffett sang.
Straightforward as it was, there was a mystery hidden in “Landfall,” and it involved old Bum Farto. Bum, according to the handwritten lyrics that accompanied the album, was down in “Queros,” having a ball. Buffett’s handwriting was difficult enough to decipher that Euphoria was turned into Eudaurm in the liner notes, and so it’s possible he put Bum in Quepos, Costa Rica. Corcoran, running around Criteria snapping photos, remembers a version of the song that found Bum down in Caicos. Buffett told Corcoran someone—and Buffett wouldn’t say whom—pulled him aside and said he needed to keep ol’ Bum out of it altogether. Wherever he was, Buffett definitely wondered what he’d do on another landfall.
Buffett and Fingers Taylor wrote “Miss You So Badly” about that time “it all blew up in Missoula,” and the other time the Holiday Inn was filled with stripper-loving surgeons, and all those times aggressive hotel maids knocked on doors, and the rolls and rolls of Rolaids consumed while “losing track of the long days since I’ve been home.”
“We’re two or three days from finishing when he walks in one day to Criteria with his legal pad,” Putnam says, he being Buffett. “And he puts it on the music stand and he says ‘I’ve got that song.’ ”
“Margaritaville.”
Buffett sat down with his guitar and began playing eighth notes, not his usual finger picking, more like an approach the Eagles might take. Putnam’s ears perked. “And when he started the story, wow,” Putnam says. “It’d be a wonderful short film. A night and the morning after with Jimmy Buffett. I remember when I was in high school. A literature test. I missed the question: What is the most important aspect of every great story? I don’t know what I wrote, but the answer was conflict.”
He dug where Buffett was going, a lazy afternoon on the front porch swing, shrimp boiling, tourists baking in the sunshine. But where was the conflict? It’s great that you’re drunk. It’s too bad that you can’t find your saltshaker. Where’s the conflict?
“Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame . . .”
There it was.
“And then he admits his guilt and we have to let him off the hook for great humility,” Putnam says. “This is textbook stuff, you know what I’m saying? Now I’m saying, ‘This is a hit song.’ ”
But it wasn’t a happy song, not exactly. It came with a dispirited note; it was disillusioned, its narrator unsure why he’d stayed around town as long as he had. What was there to show for the time—besides the tattoo? Had he accomplished anything at all? Well, had you, Jimmy Buffett?
And then there was the verse about “old men in tank tops” ogling younger women and wishing they had more control over their lives. Buffett had tossed that one in when he’d played the song for friends in Key West.
“That was about the transition period of Key West,” Buffett told Rolling Stone in 1977. “I could see it changing from the funky little town I loved into something touristy. I was thinkin’, ‘Was I a part of that?’ So I was tryin’ to justify it to myself.”
Putnam was on board and all they had to do was get the song they’d been working on the road for months down on tape. They cut the verse with the old men, “because it didn’t make sense musically,” Utley says. It took the verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure and doubled up verses at the end of the song. Also, they wanted to shorten it for radio.
Utley, having played the song a few times live had an idea how he’d work into the song. “I played the Wurlitzer, because that was kind of a happening thing at the time,” he says.
There was one snag. “I remember the rhythm tracks not working,” Steve Vaughn says. As a roadie in the studio, he didn’t have a lot to do once things were set up. They kept the bar stocked, mixed a few drinks, lent a hand with an instrument when needed, but more or less they watched everyone else work. “And I remember Norbert,” Vaughn continues, “Norbert had his shit together.”
Putnam had been wise enough to bring an insurance policy disguised as a percussion player. Kenneth Buttrey was one of the best session drummers in Nashville. He played on Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” He played on Neil Young’s Harvest. Buffett wondered right away why Putnam wanted to bring a famous drummer along when they’d already agreed this record belonged to the Coral Reefer Band. Putnam told Buffett it was because Buttrey was multitalented. “I didn’t want to tell him that there’s one guy in the band, if he can’t perform, you’re dead,” Putnam says. “And that’s the drummer.”
Sure enough, they get into “Margaritaville,” and Michael Gardner couldn’t find the song. For whatever reason, maybe inexperience in the studio, maybe just a bad day, but it wasn’t working. Putnam turned to Buffett and convinced him to let the seasoned pro give it a try. “We stick Buttrey in, and I think the second take is the one you’ve heard all these years,” Putnam says.
They had a record. Utley helped Putnam arrange some strings and flutes, and when that was finished, Putnam told Buffett they needed to go to Los Angeles and present it to the promotions department at ABC, because if they didn’t, everyone else with a record coming out would, and Changes would get lost in the pile. They flew west and played the album for Charlie Minor. “Charlie Minor?” Putnam says, pausing. “Put a question mark next to that.”
“Charlie was one of the great promotion people of all time,” says Steve Resnik, who worked side by side with Minor in ABC’s promotions department. In the free-spending golden age of the record industry, Minor was also a fantastic character, living larger than even his professional reputation. “Every Saturday night for years, rock ’n’ roll blared from the outdoor speakers of Charlie Minor’s rented Malibu beach house,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1995.I
If Putnam and Buffett flew to Los Angeles for a meeting, it would have been with Minor, and Resnik would have been there—unless he was on the road. He doesn’t recall being at that meeting, and so he probably was out of town. “There were meetings every twenty minutes,” Resnik says.
The previous three years had been frustrating for everyone. Resnik thought A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean was great. “If he’d have been a James Taylor name at that time, he’d have had three or four hits off that record,” Resnik says. “Second album was also terrific. We just couldn’t get him arrested. It was tough going.”
That summer, Buffett had come across a news story where Resnik had been interviewed about ABC’s plans to promote Whistling Down the Wire, the second record from David Crosby and Graham Nash. Resnik hadn’t talked about the promotional budget (he says he wouldn’t have known it), but the dollar amount found its way into print anyway and caught Buffett’s attention. He wrote Resnik a quick note, on personalized stationery, suggesting the Crosby-Nash backing was the kind of backing he deserved. Buffett believed in his songs and his work.
That was in August 1976—before Buffett re-signed with ABC. The risk, as he and Putnam flew to Los Angeles, was that it was too late. Program directors aren’t much different from record executives. They’re risk-averse. However tentatively, they’d tried Buffett, and no matter how much they might like him, or the songs, there hadn’t been a hit. And each miss lessened the likelihood of a breakthrough. “Usually radio stations won’t touch it because they’re scared,” Resnik says.
Usually, but not always. The meeting in Los Angeles went well. There was reason to be encouraged. Putnam went home to Nashville, and Buffett flew back to Key West reflecting on five years of perpetual motion.
His instincts, that ability to read a crowd or a situation, had always worked. He’d been proven right more often than wrong. However dire any day might have seemed, he always came out smiling by the end of the week. He’d been flat-ass busted more than once. He’d played to nearly empty rooms and done multiple sold-out nights. He’d built a loyal little following around the country. He was a cult act and he was perfectly happy about it. Should it change, well, what would they do if he just sailed away?
Sitting aboard the Euphoria in Coconut Grove in December 1976, days away from his thirtieth birthday and scribbling the liner notes to a new album, there wasn’t much to say. When was the last time Jimmy Buffett didn’t have much to say?
Thanks, then, to the fans who enjoy the music and the people who helped make the records. “This album is dedicated to the Coral Reefer Band. Boys, it’s been a long time comin’ —Popps.”
I On March 19, 1995, Minor was shot and killed by a Suzette McClure, a twenty-seven-year-old stripper with whom he’d had an affair. There’s an E! True Hollywood Story about the case.