Maybe four people actually wore flowers in their hair before Scott McKenzie sang “San Francisco.” Afterwards, the place looked like a botanical exhibit. Now people are drinking margaritas like it’s been a tradition.
—Tom Corcoran, Crawdaddy, December 1977
The tour kicked off in Savannah, Georgia, in the middle of February. Shortly thereafter, “Margaritaville” cracked Billboard’s Hot 100 and began a slow climb into a long hot summer—the summer of Star Wars, of rolling blackouts, of the Son of Sam.
“Margaritaville” crept into the top fifty by the end of April, and on May 21, while Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” held the top spot, “Margaritaville,” broke into the top thirty. That made it bigger than “Come Monday.”
“Hotel California” was a monster for the Eagles that year. Glen Campbell made a hit of Allen Toussaint’s “Southern Nights” despite turning the original, so otherworldly, into something Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear might sing on a road trip. On June 11, “Margaritaville” moved into the top twenty while KC and the Sunshine Band hit number one with, “I’m Your Boogie Man.” On July 2, “Margaritaville” moved to number ten, followed by two weeks at number nine and two more at number eight.
In the top spot those weeks: Shaun Cassidy’s saccharine cover of the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” Barry Manilow’s saccharine “Looks Like We Made It,” and Andy Gibb’s saccharine “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.” Interesting summer.
The tour put Buffett back in front of the Eagles’ audience in some of the biggest venues in the country. Buffett visited the White House for a little face time with another Southern boy done good, President Carter, and few of the roadies got high in a bathroom next to the Oval Office.
One day Buffett walked on the bus with a wad of cash. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” roadie Steve Vaughn remembers Buffett saying, as bonuses were distributed.
At an after-party somewhere in the South, maybe Memphis, they got off the bus, walked through an alley, into a backyard, “and there’s this huge swimming pool,” lighting director Clint Gilbert says. “Pristine. Right out of picture books.” There was a bar along one side of the pool and it was waiting for them, lined with margaritas. “I don’t know who it was; it might have been Fingers,” Gilbert says, “who just walked in ahead of everybody, walked in with his arm stuck out knocking them all into the pool. And nobody said a word.”
Corcoran was called to duty to take photos, and then put behind the wheel of an auxiliary vehicle, an RV nicknamed the Green Weenie.
“How’s that smell?” Buffett asked him one day.
“How do you think it smells?” Corcoran said.
Buffett pulled fifty bucks in petty cash and gave it to tour manager Mike Wheeler with instructions to buy Odor-Eaters for everyone. First two pairs on the house, but required from then on. Like J. D. checking boxes for Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding, Jimmy was down in the details. While he took care of the smell, Jane took care of the look.
“When it hit,” Corcoran says, “when we realized things were going to change overnight and there was going to be a stream of income, Jane dictated no more Levi’s with holes in the knees, and no more shirts without collars. Jane said, ‘You gotta look a bit like you’re important.’ ”
Corcoran shares that not to suggest micromanagement, but to assure credit where it’s due. “She kept him clean,” he says. As sure as she hid his cookies when he had the munchies.
Older systems, meanwhile, had been fine-tuned. Vaughn, who had T-shirt duty on top of his other jobs, says they had a distributor in Hawaii who’d stack the merchandise on top of bags of Hawaiian weed and ship them to wherever they needed to go to catch the band, which had a few new faces.
After stepping in for Gardner on “Margaritaville,” Buttrey took over road duties as well. “And we went through guitar players like shit through a goose,” Vaughn says. Michael Jeffry had been hired to replace Bartlett, and fired while they were recording Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes. Bartlett flew down to Miami to chip in on a couple of tracks and help finish the album. Tim KrekelI took over the touring gig.
In North Carolina, the Holiday Inn marquee read WELCOME TO MARGARITAVILLE. In South Carolina, like she’d stepped out of “Big Rig,” a good-looking blonde walked into the party not with a bottle of Scotch, but with a Buck knife and a bag of white powder, and only after everyone had taken a hit off the blade did they realize it was PCP.
“We’ve been through a horrendous tour,” Buffett said comically, introducing the Coral Reefer Band in Central Park on August 2 before launching them into a song about “a little crazy town called Margaritaville” that was in its last days as a top-ten single, but would spend twenty-two weeks in the Hot 100. Changes hit number twelve on the albums chart, number two on the country chart, sold more than a million copies, and made Buffett a star.
In the middle of Manhattan, a day later than scheduled thanks to rain, and at the height of his success, Buffett sounded . . . grateful, and energized. Even at the end of a long tour. “I’m going to have a good time in the Apple tonight,” he said introducing “Wonder Why We Ever Go Home.”
Kiki Dee opened the show, and was joined by Elton John on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Reviewing the set for the New York Times, John Rockwell noted that Buffett, despite a big hit, didn’t pack the place, but the Coral Reefers played with “jumpy, infectious spirit.” And of Buffett: “He has a lively sense of humor. And he has a sensitivity usually reserved for that awkward hybrid, the singer-songwriter.”
Buffett had returned the cocaine reference to his hit’s final verse—to loud applause—and reinserted the “lost verse” about the sad old men and their three-day vacations. Into “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” he added “a little good Columbian gold” and “after all of that shit,” if anyone could move, well, you know.
But when Buffett stepped out front alone with just his guitar and “He Went to Paris,” he found the weight of all eighty-six of his character’s years. “Thank you very much for being so nice,” Buffett said.
The tour (briefly) over, he pointed himself not south, but west to Aspen and another gig with the Eagles—who were going to play his wedding. For the occasion, he and Jane had booked Redstone Castle, a 42-room, 24,000-square-foot home built in 1897. The invitations said simply there’d be a party, and, at some point during that party, Jimmy and Jane would get married. Then the party would go “until it is over.”
Why Colorado? They’d bought property in Snowmass, a quiet cabin near Glenn Frey’s. They had to walk across a covered bridge to get home. There was room to breathe in the mountains, in part because the area was filling with celebrities.
Members of the Byrds had moved to the area. Jack Nicholson was hanging out when he wasn’t in Los Angeles or on a movie set. Steve Martin would swing by. Hunter Thompson had Owl Farm nearby, and the rich and the famous and the curious would arrive hoping for an audience in the kitchen. Business executives were snapping up lots. With 1972’s “Rocky Mountain High,” John Denver had done for Colorado what Jimmy Buffett would do for Florida. But on Key West, Buffett was a big celebrity on a little island. He was just another recognizable face around Aspen, one of many, and less famous than most.
He’d been clear about fame as far back as A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, when he sang about how he didn’t want that confusing kind where you’re recognized on a plane. So Aspen had become the next great place to be. More comfortable than Key West in the summer, too.
The night before the wedding, Thompson strutted through the bachelor party in a three-piece suit offering acid on a silver tray and cocaine with a silver straw. Joe Nuzzo swears it snowed (real snow) that night and that he and his date (just one, because it was out of town) made snowmen at 3 a.m. Those snowmen were the only evidence left when the crowd awoke in the middle of the next day.
Chris Robinson, Buffett’s neighbor, was mistaken for a rock star—not uncommon with hair down to his waist. “I love your music,” a waiter said. When Robinson protested, the waiter, feeling like Robinson was just being modest, said, “Well, I mean, I like the rest of the band, too, but you’re my favorite.”
Juan Thompson dressed in a white tuxedo with a blue cummerbund his mother had bought him in New York. “I even had a walking stick,” he wrote in 2016’s Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson. “I’m sure I was the only child at that wedding reception, which I learned later was an evening of high debauchery.”
True to the invitation, the party went until it ended, and then Jimmy and Jane headed to the islands.
• • •
“The University of Florida did this thing called the Halloween Ball; it was the most insane thing you’ve ever seen,” Bob Liberman says. “It was a free concert by the library, and people would come dressed in costumes. There must have been 20,000 or 30,000 people there.”
Buffett played. Liberman, a student, worked it and the two met there. They ran into each other again when Liberman was working at the Great Southern Music Hall in Gainesville. Liberman was still in school when he got an offer to work on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975. When pieces of that tour (including T Bone Burnett) reassembled to form the Alpha Band, Liberman hit the road with them. He was driving a cab in Fort Lauderdale in 1977 when dispatch flagged him.
“Driver Liberman, your mother just called.”
“I call home,” he says. “God bless her heart, Jewish mother. ‘Ma, what’s so important? I’m at work. Everybody heard you call me.’ ”
“I thought it was important,” she said. “Jimmy Buffett just called and he wants you to call him back.”
“That is important, Ma. Thank you!”
Liberman called Buffett right back.
“What are you doing?” Buffett said.
“Driving a cab.”
“Would you like to come work for me?”
“Yeah,” Liberman said. “When do you need me?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where do you need me?”
“Atlanta.”
Liberman got on a plane without asking what job he’d accepted. “You’ll learn,” Buffett told his new assistant tour manager. If you were right for the job, Buffett’s confidence was enough to make it work.
Deborah McColl was back in Atlanta—the nearby suburb of Buckhead—playing a show when Buffett came by to catch her set. Things had changed since he’d hitchhiked up in 1972 and sat in with McColl’s old band at the Bistro. She was working a solo act, and Buffett was building out his sound. “I think that night when we were talking at the table he asked me if I wanted to be on the Son of a Son of a Sailor album with him,” she says.
Success had presented opportunities—some he’d hoped for, and some Buffett hadn’t planned on. Around the time Don Light closed the new deal with ABC, he and Buffett renewed their partnership and extended their management contract. Light had believed in Buffett when no one else had, and advocated for him when no one else would. Buffett had done his job and they’d all, finally, profited. Still, Light was in Nashville, and Nashville was where they made country stars. Buffett wasn’t one of those.
In Aspen, he was hanging out with Hollywood. Frey and the Eagles did their business out of Los Angeles. Buffett began to collect business contacts and lawyers on the West Coast. He didn’t get rid of his apartment in Key West, but Colorado became home.
To fit his new terrain, Buffett had gotten rid of a Mercedes and bought a Chevy Cheyenne pickup in Nashville. He was complaining one day about how much it was going to cost to have it shipped to Aspen, when Steve Vaughn said he’d drive it there.
Outside Leadville, Colorado, a couple of good ol’ boys with a fully stocked gun rack pulled up alongside and started flipping middle fingers and shouting at the long hair—but otherwise Vaughn’s trip to Aspen in Buffett’s new truck was uneventful. When he got there, the newlyweds were at the movies. They’d gone to see The Bad News Bears. When they got back, Buffett took Vaughn to Hunter Thompson’s farm for an afternoon of firearms and chemicals.
Hunter was never far from Buffett in Aspen. Footage remains on YouTube of the night Buffett dropped in to play a fund-raiser Thompson was hosting. With Glenn Frey on guitar and Steve Weisberg, of John Denver’s band, playing dobro, Buffett (in a pressed and collared shirt) dutifully sang his hit.
He believed you give the people what they want, but there was one move he had to make for himself. Buffett told Light he wanted out of their recently signed extension. He was going to put his career in Irving Azoff’s hands.
Azoff is a five-foot-three industry giant. He’s ambition in compact, combustible form. As Cameron Crowe wrote in his June 15, 1978, Rolling Stone profile of Azoff: “He is the enfant terrible of the music business. To get his clients top dollar, he’ll rip up a contract, yell, scream, terrorize, stomp, pound and destroy inanimate objects . . . gleefully. He is the American Dream taken by the balls. Many of his clients will spend their off-hours watching him ‘kill’ on the phone.”
“What wedding present do you get for the guy who’s already taken everything he wanted?” Frey asked Crowe. A paragraph later, Don Henley called Azoff, “Napoleon with a heart.” But he could comfortably dispense with that heart if you weren’t on his side.
Jerry Rubinstein, then the head of ABC Records, had occasion to work with both Light and Azoff. “You can’t even talk about ’em in the same breath,” Rubinstein says—if only because Azoff sucks up the oxygen in any sentence. That wasn’t a knock on Light, precisely. Azoff, Rubinstein says, is one of the best ever, period. New paragraph.
“It’s a tough business and you need to be aggressive to represent any artist,” Rubinstein says. “Certainly Irving is one of the more aggressive managers around.”
Azoff pulled Joe Walsh’s career from the gutter, pushed the Eagles to the top, and as documented by Crowe, even talked them out of a dope jam at customs in the Bahamas. Norbert Putnam once watched Azoff grab a map and a pencil and reroute an entire Buffett tour—while he was on the phone yelling at someone for something else.
Azoff and Light negotiated the deal. When Light felt he wasn’t getting what he deserved, he reminded them he didn’t have to do anything. He had recently signed that management contract with Buffett. That tended to get the conversation back on track.
Among the concessions, Light got 25 percent of “Margaritaville,” which he’d later sell back to Buffett for $100,000 when “Margaritaville” wasn’t making him but $10,000 a year. That was the late seventies, maybe early eighties and proved to be a mistake. Everyone told him you never sell publishing. “One hundred percent of the blame rests squarely on me for that,” Light told Peter Cooper. “If we’re going to be fair about it, and we try to be. That was my call.”
Now Buffett had high-powered representation and, a year after telling High Times he wasn’t selling his lifestyle because nobody was buying, well . . .
“When Jimmy Buffett sings ‘A Pirate Looks at 40’ . . . every pot dealer with dreams for bigger things in America thinks Buffett wrote the song just for him,” Corcoran wrote in the December 1976 edition of Crawdaddy. “They’re not too far off. Poetry always gets stretched to please the musical audience, of course, and play with listeners’ fantasies, but the end result seems more and more to have the audience stretching their lifestyles to match the songs.”
That “rather affable freak who sold tacos from a pushcart,” as Jim Harrison had described Corcoran, could write—just as Harrison figured the night the two met outside Captain Tony’s. From the driver’s seat of the Green Weenie and the angles presented by his all-access photo pass and friendship with the boss, Corcoran had sniffed out an absurdity central to Buffett’s appeal.
Corcoran called it the “Everyman’s dream of escape from civilization,” and the farther Buffett sailed from the Everyman—and the Everyday—the more he appealed to people who fit the definition of both. People weren’t enamored with Jimmy Buffett because he was one of them; people were enamored with Jimmy Buffett because he could have been, but wasn’t. He was some imagined version of a better, freer self.
Those cars rolling down from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—and every other state full of white picket fences and American Dreams—they didn’t want to get caught up in a deal gone wrong (or gone right), but it was fun to think they could.
They even didn’t have to hit the road. They could hit their turntable or their tape deck and listen to the same thing the smugglers were listening to and it didn’t matter if Jimmy Buffett ever smuggled an ounce of anything. Smugglers liked Jimmy Buffett. It was in Rolling Stone. It was in “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” That the real pirate, Phil Clark, had gotten caught up in a bust at Immokalee airport and was on probation in Tarpon SpringsII didn’t matter any more than Buffett’s own pirate credentials. For four minutes, everyone was a pirate when Jimmy Buffett sang about pirates.
“He can pit a hangover against a sunrise and make his audience want the experience every day,” Corcoran wrote. “Buffett can paint a picture of decadence and make it elegant. And he wonders why all these funky people, the perennial fuck-ups and two-bit adventurers, are drawn to the ocean, to a place of such beauty.”
He’d seen the ocean, and the islands rising green and inviting from it. He’d found time that spring to sneak away to Tortola and St. Thomas (Juan Thompson back aboard). He’d run to the Caicos Islands (where Bum Farto was or wasn’t) with Glenn Frey. They boarded the Euphoria and made for the Dominican Republic, where they found peace and quiet and, Corcoran wrote, good cheer and free beer aboard a neighboring boat packing only Buffett and the Eagles tapes.
The Euphoria had been everything Buffett had dreamed she’d be—a nice starter boat. With “Margaritaville” money piling up, Euphoria ceded to Euphoria II, the difference being about fifteen feet of yacht, from thirty-three to forty-eight feet in length, and more electronic gadgets—including a bulky video cassette player with a small screen so they could watch The Wizard of Oz and Key Largo on deck and under the stars. Buffett ordered custom matchbooks, black with silver embossing:
Euphoria II
Key West
“If we weren’t all crazy
we’d all go insane”
Writing an early draft of liner notes for the next album, Buffett sat in Nassau Harbor in mid-January 1978 and considered the competing interests of his life. He hadn’t touched a guitar since he’d left Florida—save for one night in Bimini, at the Compleat Angler, when he’d jumped up with the band. “I have been a little too occupied changing winches, wiring spreader lights, repairing bilge pumps and numerous other jobs that go hand in hand with the pleasure of being a boat owner,” he wrote. There were sweet memories in those chores. Growing up, he’d leave church and help his dad maintain his boat.
From Nassau the Euphoria II worked south without interruption. They made it to the far eastern edge of the Bahamas, San Salvador, with Judy Corcoran and Jane along. The women left San Salvador by plane and the guys set out on the 800-plus-mile journey through the Atlantic Ocean to St. Maarten. The ocean decided to flex its muscle and beat the hell out of them for long days and longer nights. When they were finally, mercifully within sight of St. Maarten, they came across two fishermen who’d been blown out to sea from nearby Anguilla. The Euphoria II detoured to get them safely back home.
“Not a beautiful luxury cruise,” Corcoran says. “When we finally got to the north half of St. Maarten, the French half, the women were there waiting and we all went to dinner and we all fell asleep in our food. We were just toast.”
The next day met them with weather fit for a song. They set out for the Dutch side of the island under perfect skies, with perfect seas and perfect wind. “We were getting our reward for the shitty trip across the ocean,” Corcoran says.
“Groovy” Gray had hired on as Buffett’s captain and, like Azoff on your contracts, Groovy was the guy you wanted on your boat. His father, Gordon L. “Gordo” Gray Jr., had been a navy fighter pilot. In 1955, he set a Fédération Aéronautique International speed record on a five-hundred-kilometer closed circuit, when he flew a pre-production Douglas A-4 Skyhawk an average of almost seven hundred miles per hour. There’s a photo of Gordo after the flight, surrounded by Douglas engineers. Gordo’s hair was tight, his jaw square, his posture confident. Three years later, Lieutenant Commander Gordon L. Gray Jr. graduated from the Naval War College.
When he retired, he took his kids out of school and they sailed the Caribbean for a year. “That’s why Groovy was so good on a sailboat,” Corcoran says. Gordo passed along his knowledge, his guts, and some tradition: the Hamburger Award.
On board the aircraft carrier, Gordo’s squad had taken a chunk of military grade beef, nailed it to a piece of wood, lacquered the hell out of it, and awarded it to anyone who pulled off the daring or the unexpected. Get laid on leave? “You’re a real hamburger.” Walk away from a crash. “You’re a hamburger, buddy.” Each new Hamburger would affix the trophy to the bulkhead of his stateroom until someone else earned the trophy. Gordo carried the spirit home with him and it became a family tradition. Groovy, Corcoran says, took the idea to college and upgraded. He added cheese.
Sailing around St. Maarten that perfect morning, Buffett was at the helm of his boat. The women were sunbathing topless. There were whales surfacing. Passing boats were full of more topless women. They had club sandwiches from a French bakery. “It couldn’t have been sweeter,” Corcoran says. He and Groovy were on the low side of the Euphoria II, balancing beers on their chests when Groovy looked over at Buffett and said, “Bubba,III you’re just a cheeseburger in paradise.” Buffett’s eyes lit up.
“That’s where it came from,” Corcoran says. “It never came from a restaurant. Jimmy’s told dozens of restaurants that he wrote the song about them just so he could get free meals. He told Le Select in St. Barts that he wrote the song about Le Select because he genuinely liked that guy, and I think if there had to be an official restaurant for the cheeseburger in paradise song, it would be Le Select in St. Barts.
“But the fact is, that line came out of Groovy’s mouth on that day on that sailboat. Bubba went absolutely batshit.” It was going to be the name of the next album. He told Corcoran they could shoot a cover with a big cheeseburger, and Buffett swimming out of it in full scuba gear. He smartly scrapped that idea and settled for a song. The new album would be called Son of a Son of a Sailor.
Released in March 1978, the album was announced on its back cover as “Mr. Jimmy Buffett Appearing in the Trials and Temptations of a Son of a Son of a Sailor and Other Recitations Accompanied by His Highly Acclaimed Musical Band.” The “Grand Tableau” promised within was set in the hold of a pirate ship, the Coral Reefer Band manning the oars. Commodore Azoff worked the phones with an assist from Bob Liberman. In the foreground, an innocent-looking bellhop stands ready with Perrier, Mount Gay Rum, and Tums for Jimmy and Jane, who look like they got lost on their way to the yacht club. There was a help-wanted ad in the corner: “Able-bodied crew for extended pleasure cruise . . . Thoughtful captain with 12 years experience. Swingers need not apply.”
In June 1978, “Cheeseburger in Paradise”—the only hint of its origin being the final line, “I’m just a cheeseburger in paradise”—peaked at thirty-two on Billboard’s Hot 100. So it did okay, but was hardly anyone’s definition of a hit. The album reached number ten and went platinum anyway.
To make the record, Buffett again turned to Home at Last for a mansion, a chef, and a maid and to Putnam for production. Instead of Criteria, the bar was set up in Bayshore Recording Studios in Coconut Grove. Finishing touches were applied at Putnam’s studio in Nashville.
Buffett cleaned up “Livingston Saturday Night” (a little), and pulled two Keith Sykes songs for the sessions to make up for the one he’d left off Havana Daydreamin’. “The Last Line” was about a songwriter’s wish to write one great lyric, then walk away, only to realize he can’t, and won’t. “Coast of Marseilles” was about running away to forget—and how that never works. The past is always right behind you.
In “African Friend,” Buffett told the story of two strangers bonding over a hot streak at a craps table in a Haitian casino, one waking up on the steps of a whorehouse with a note from the other pinned to his sleeve: “It was a pleasure and a hell of an evening; it truly was our night to win.”
The “Cowboy in the Jungle” was another man out of place, what with his “shrimp-skin boots.” He was an adaptable sort, the type to “roll with the punches, play all of his hunches.” Intuition had worked well enough. He’d be fine—better than the gaudy tourists puking up rum drinks and lying about the day’s fishing, that’s for sure.
Time on Tortola and St. Thomas inspired “Mañana” when inspiration was needed, Buffett admitting the new album was old, and he was “fresh out of tunes.” He’d find them, as always, in the people he’d meet, the places he’d visit . . . and in the rum he’d drink.
Ever aware of the tide lines of his world, “Fool Button” was a counterpoint—proof he didn’t need time off to find a song. It was a strutting rocker about lost rental cars, strange hotel rooms, barroom blues blowouts, and nights gone haywire. And it came with a warning, or maybe a challenge. Go ahead and doubt Buffett and his stories if you like, but “get a bottle of rum and some Eskatrol and watch the same thing happen to you.”
“Son of a Son of a Sailor” turned family history into personal myth-building, Buffett reading “dozens of books about heroes and crooks” and taking a little something from each to the faraway “southeast of disorder” where the mango man mingles with a woman from Trinidad.
They were at work on the album when Liberman got another phone call from Buffett. “I got some good news and some bad news,” Buffett said. “Meet me at the pool.”
The bad news was Mike Wheeler, the tour manager, was leaving. The good news was Liberman had been promoted from Wheeler’s assistant to Wheeler’s position. He’d barely figured out the first job. “It’s not something you go to school to learn,” Liberman says, and the new job was growing.
A hit song, a hit record, and Azoff’s appearance had tightened protocols—at least for some. “It got to the point where they told Wheeler I need to talk to him to talk to Buffett,” says Steve Vaughn, who left shortly before Son of a Son was recorded. “They changed everything.” It felt like management was trying to separate Buffett from all the people who could be replaced. Before, Vaughn says, it had felt like they were just a bunch of guys on a bus having fun.
Chain-of-command issues aside, the party rolled on. “Fingers one time said I was in the band during the heavy artillery days,” says Deborah McColl, who’d joined the tour and broken up the boys’ club. “I like to say I was in the band before cocaine was addictive.”
They had a bus driver named Grandpa, and one of his rules was he never stopped on an overnight run. One night Buffett told Liberman he needed his luggage from underneath the bus. Liberman asked Grandpa to stop. Grandpa said no. Liberman told Grandpa it was Buffett who needed to stop. Grandpa didn’t have much of a choice. They pulled over on the highway. That’s when the production manager awoke, saw they’d stopped, and decided to perform another of his duties. It was his job to dump the bus’s holding tanks, and this was usually done on a quiet piece of highway. What did they hold? Waste. The problem was, they dumped by the luggage doors—right where Buffett was standing. That’s one way to enrage a benevolent dictator.
The days of bus mishaps, however, were numbered. Soon enough, Buffett got a plane. A King Air they nicknamed Cheeseburger replaced the Enterprise. “I can’t remember the pilot’s name,” Liberman says, “but he always had a cigarette in his mouth, and you could tell how long the trip was by the pile of ashes in his lap.”
Roadies cartooned the previous night’s personal destructions. Taped to the inside of the fuselage, these Coral Reefer comic strips served two purposes: they were funny, and they helped remind the band what had happened since they last boarded Cheeseburger.
“We had our own slang, we had our own references,” McColl says. “We were together all the time, and we were apart from the regular world.”
Fingers Taylor’s inebriation became a running joke, though it loses its humor in hindsight, and especially as he fades away, another Alzheimer’s victim. But at the time, his one-note harmonica solos—when he’d stumble forward, hit one note, and fall over into the microphone—were hilarious. “We were just blind to a lot of that stuff,” McColl says. “We were young and immortal and bulletproof.”
Buffett’s rules required they be ready to work when they went onstage, that for two hours a day, they perform (Fingers’ act could be considered performance in that regard). That left twenty-two hours of not much to do.
“I think I needed some intellectual stimulation, clearly,” says McColl, who’s a therapist outside Atlanta now. “I had to turn the wattage down on my brain. It’s not that people weren’t intelligent, but we didn’t have anything to do. We were so catered to.”
Buffett wasn’t any less catered to, but it was different. What could be seen as management-driven isolation from one point of view might have felt like self-preservation from another. He was detail oriented, driven, and clearly in charge. But every problem couldn’t be his problem or else every day would be like standing on the side of the road and having the bus’s holding tanks dumped on his head. “And I’d get yelled at a lot,” Liberman says. “They’d never go to Jimmy. The whole point of making Jimmy happy is to defuse the situation before it ever gets to Jimmy.”
McColl had aspirations for a solo career, and so she pushed that point whenever she got a chance. She wishes now she hadn’t. She wishes she’d just been a friend, but everyone wanted something, and Buffett was the guy they thought could give it to them. “Lip balm!” became his call, the bat signal that launched tour manager Liberman into action.
When they hit a break in the tour, Buffett would disappear. He’d heard about Sailing Week in Antigua. They’d done a six-week run of shows, and when it was finished he and Jane hopped a plane and headed first to St. Thomas and then to rendezvous with Euphoria II to race and unwind. “I punched the Fool Button,” he wrote for the July/August 1978 edition of Outside. Corcoran snapped the photos. It was a wild time. Big boats. Fast boats. Gorgeous boats. Big crews. Fast crews. Gorgeous women. They were racing Euphoria II when Jane went overboard after part of a bikini she wasn’t wearing anyway. When the Eilean, a seventy-one-footer from St. Thomas passed them a few minutes later, “there was Jane working on a sail trim adjustment,” Buffett wrote. “She had her red bottoms on and seemed quite content.”
To get a feel for real racing, Buffett talked himself aboard Jader, an eighty-one-footer from Boston that “drives to weather like a freight train,” he wrote. Buffett hopped aboard, went to work, and worked hard. When Jader crossed the line in first, it was a familiar feeling. It felt like a rock show done well.
“High energy for short periods of time and peaceful elation when the job is done,” Buffett wrote. “A million little things could go wrong, but when it all goes right . . .”
After that, it was time to goof off and race the dinghy and fly on a spinnaker, a downwind sail that can be rigged into something resembling a swing. “Spinnaker flying it turns out, lies somewhere between skydiving and Ferris-wheel riding,” Buffett wrote. “Unless you’re drunk, which I was. Then it’s much less dangerous than either.”
And far safer than softball. The Boca Raton News, May 3, 1978: “Jimmy Buffett, wielding a new set of crutches, hobbled out of Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach this morning bound for ‘Margaritaville.’ ”
The culprit: an accident while he’d been visiting Guy de la Valdene. According to the paper, Buffett had tried to get a little softball practice in before flying to Los Angeles to play third base for the Eagles in a game against Rolling Stone.
The injury occurred sliding into second base (his team lost) and a hospital spokesman said Buffett arrived around 11 p.m. and spent the next day learning how to walk on crutches. The hospital’s staff spent the day fielding phone calls and turning away opportunists.
“We had a guy who brought his guitar and wanted to sing some songs to Buffett to see what he thought,” hospital spokesman Ron Errett told the paper. “We had a lot of girls who wanted to pass along how much they love him.”
Buffett missed the game and was in a cast when the tour resumed, one more challenge for Liberman. “People think it’s glamorous,” Liberman says of touring. “You don’t see anything. You see the hotel room. You can show me pictures outside of a hotel room and I can tell you what city that is. That’s what I’m good at.”
Vancouver, British Columbia, is recognizable by its mountains. The gig there was on top of one. Liberman had to transport the show and its stars via gondola, and the rookie tour manager was doing his best. “Why it wasn’t at the bottom of the mountain, I don’t know,” Liberman says, shaking his head.
Buffett had a broken leg and was in a lousy mood. There had been problems with the hotel, where Buffett had pulled Liberman aside and said, “You’re doing a great job, but sometimes you need to be more forceful. You need to step in there. Don’t let people take advantage of you. You’re being too nice.”
Duly noted. Up on the mountain, they finished sound check and were waiting for the gondola. And waiting. And waiting longer still. “Jimmy’s not really pleased with the environment,” Liberman says. “The guy I’m dealing with is a sleazeball. During settlement he tried to pay me with cocaine. I said, ‘No, I need cash.’ ”
The wait for the gondola continued. “He’s getting really pissed and I’m noticing,” Liberman says, “he” being Buffett, not the sleazeball. “I’m thinking it might be time to step in and do what he told me to do.”
Finally, their ride arrived—full of hot dog supplies for the concession stands. Workers unload and the gondola was finally empty and waiting when a group of kids in wheelchairs arrived. “I don’t know what they were doing there,” Liberman says. “Twelve, fifteen kids in wheelchairs.”
Liberman picked that moment to be forceful, to say, “No! I need this gondola.” What he remembers saying, actually, was “Ma’am, I’ve got a rock star with a broken leg. I’ve got a blind piano player—Jay Spell. Fingers Taylor is drunk all the time. Don’t go telling me . . .”
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Buffett frantically motioning “No, no, please don’t for the love of god not now.”
“He finally says, ‘Let them on, Bob,’ ” Liberman says.
The kids got on, the gondola moved down the mountain, and Buffett pulled Liberman aside for a second time. “I really appreciate you taking note of what I said,” Buffett told him, “but there’s a time and a place.”
The gondola made its way back to the top of the mountain. Buffett crutched aboard, followed by the Coral Reefer Band and their tour manager. They still had time to shower, change, and rest for the show. Except when they got to the hotel, they couldn’t get into their rooms.
Liberman had told the hotel that unless they fixed the issues the band was having—whatever those were all these years later, Liberman doesn’t remember—they weren’t going to pay. Buffett looked at Liberman like a teacher will look at a student.
“Bobby,” he said, “you don’t tell ’em you’re not going to pay until you’re checking out.”
I Krekel died in 2010 after a short battle with cancer. He was 55.
II “. . . balling a parade of earthy 19-year-olds,” Corcoran added, doing nothing to diminish Phil Clark’s legend.
III Bubba: an all-purpose term of endearment among the locals in the Keys. In 1985, a dozen Key West residents were found guilty of various drug charges in what was known as the Bubba Bust Trial.