Son of a Son of a Sailor sold big with limited radio play and no hit single, and Buffett was selling out shows across the country. “Because he’s become the Mark Twain of Southern music, you know?” Putnam says. “But I’m getting phone calls every day from the record company.” He smiles and slips into an impersonation dialed somewhere between Southern gentleman and Jersey gangster. “Hey! Norbert! When you gonna take Buffett back in? We need another record, ya know, for da third quarter this year.”
“Well, I’ll call Jimmy,” he said.
He mimes calling Buffett.
“Hey, Jimmy. What’s going on?”
“Well, I’m out here in Aspen, you know. Really busy.”
“Well, what are you doing?” Putnam said.
“Played tennis this morning with Jack Nicholson. And there’s a party later at Henley’s house, and we all go down to the Jerome every night and stay up until daylight.”
“Oh yeah,” Putnam said. “Okay. So you’re busy. They want another record.”
“I can write some stuff,” Buffett said. “I’ve got some stuff in the works.”
He had two or three songs. Not a lot to work with, and not much of a surprise. Buffett hadn’t been lying when he wrote “Mañana.” He was fresh out of tunes before Son of a Son, had scraped together a good record, and now the label wanted more.
Tom Corcoran, meanwhile, was enjoying some downtime camping in Maine. He’d been there a year earlier with Judy and Sebastian when Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner called trying to track him down because Corcoran was working on a treatment for a screenplay with Hunter Thompson, who had moved into Buffett’s Key West apartment after Buffett had moved to Aspen. Buffett had given Thompson Corcoran’s name and number to contact when he got to town.
While Buffett was staying out all night at the Hotel Jerome and playing tennis with the stars near Thompson’s Owl Farm, Thompson was wrecking boats and learning how to turn himself into a flamethrower with just a match and some 151-proof rum (Chris Robinson taught him that trick). It was quite the cultural-exchange program.
Buffett had “already kind of developed what Hunter had always had, which was a disinclination to hang around with fucked-up people,” Corcoran says. “And they were plagued with them, because everyone wanted to show Jimmy what a wild partier they were because he was so famous for being a partier—and he just hated it.”
Everyone wanted to get wrecked with Jimmy Buffett and high with Hunter Thompson, to try to out-Gonzo Dr. Gonzo. That never worked. It couldn’t be done. It wasn’t healthy for anyone—most especially Thompson, because he couldn’t turn down the challenge, no matter how much he hated it. He wound up trapped in the character he’d created right to the end.
“Which is why Hunter and I got along so well,” Corcoran says. “I had a great taste for beer. I’d tried everything else, at least once, but it wasn’t my deal.” They could sit down and write and had been doing so. They could hang out. There’s a famous photo of Thompson, shirtless, throwing a football. Corcoran’s seen it described as being taken in various NFL training camps. It was shot in his backyard. Thompson was throwing a pass to Sebastian.
As surprised as the campground manager might have been to find the publisher of Rolling Stone on the phone in 1977, the same guy must have been doubly surprised to hear Buffett on the other end of the line in 1978. He was calling to tell Corcoran they were going to knock out a live album for ABC. He needed his navigator/photographer to hit the road and shoot the artwork. There’d be a plane ticket in Boston.
They began at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, August 8–10, and then sent the mobile recording rig to Miami for three nights at the Maurice Gusman Cultural Center, August 14–16. Buffett had another broken leg. He’d had to do Saturday Night Live with it propped up on boat. “They didn’t know what to do with the leg so they said, ‘Let’s put a boat in the skit,’ ” Buffett told Johnny Carson in 1981. It was his right leg, his time-keeping leg, and when they went into rehearsals for the tour, Buttrey approached him during a break and said, “Your time is awful.” Buffett had to adjust, tapping his left foot and making do. He broke the leg a third time skiing.
“How do you break your leg three times in one year?” Carson asked.
“Very stupidly,” Buffett said.
Before the first show in Atlanta, Putnam pulled the Coral Reefer Band aside and asked them to try to keep things straight. Maybe save the drinks and the drugs for after the show. Unlike in the studio, they couldn’t go back and fix many mistakes. The band grumbled but did as he asked. “It was the best I ever heard the band play,” Putnam says, and he told the Coral Reefers exactly that as soon as they walked offstage.
“I said, ‘If this is any indication, it’s going to get even better,’ ” Putnam says. “I should never have said that. They never gave me another note I could use. The entire record is from the first night.”
For Buffett, the broken leg was just another source of material. “This cast is no blast but it’s coming off fast and I feel like I’m pulling a trailer,” he tacked on to the end of “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”
“I broke my leg twice I had to limp on back home,” he sang in “Margaritaville” while putting to tape for the first time the song’s tourist-sniping “lost” verse. With it in place, “Margaritaville” paired nicely with “Morris’ Nightmare,” one of two new songs.
Poor Morris. All he wanted was an easy vacation in the sun. He and his wife saved all year to “only see the islands from a tacky cruise ship.” They bought all the island trinkets, and when Morris tried to steal a nap—just one lousy nap—his wife yelled, “You can sleep when you get home.”
“The cruise ship commandos,” Buffett said, offense intended. Give him his “Perrier Blues” instead. It wasn’t one of Groovy’s favorite songs, if only because Buffett, “riding high atop the mainmast,” sweating off a hangover, “asked the boy to lower me slow.”
Corcoran recalls Groovy’s reaction. “I ain’t no boy,” he said. The original handwritten lyrics, which Corcoran has, would have been more accurate. In those, Buffett asked “the crew” for a little help. In both, he returned to his favorite topic, the yin and yang of his existence. When the anchor drops “and the sails are all furled,” he’d be back on the road. “I don’t deny that I miss it,” Buffett sang. “I’ve got this thing for applause.”
Corcoran would seed the stage with extra rolls of film so he could reload and keep shooting without being weighed down by supplies. Once, in a stadium in Orlando, opening for the Eagles, he was mistaken for the first band member taking the stage and the crowd erupted.
“I could feel it,” he says. “It was like a force. A wind just came out of the audience, and any stronger it would have picked me up and moved me back a bit. It was phenomenal. I said, ‘Oh, that’s what it’s all about.’ ”
The live shows captured, Putnam needed to mix the record, and mix it fast. Corcoran remembers Buffett on the phone and ornery backstage in Atlanta. The record company really did want a new Buffett album in a hurry and sooner than he expected. All production angles were expedited.
Putnam’s Nashville studio was booked, and so he came up with the least practical, most entertaining solution: They’d go to London. Not just go to London, but take the luxury ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 (the QE2) across the Atlantic and mix the record at AIR Studios in London. That was George Martin’s place. He produced the Beatles. “Our advance is a million bucks,” Putnam says. He thought maybe they could fly the Concorde, the new supersonic passenger jet, home.
Artwork was going to have to be finalized as well, which meant Corcoran was going to have to go along. “Judy and Sebastian are at a campground in Maine,” he told Buffett.
“Judy can go,” Buffett said.
Corcoran found a phone and called the campground, got the same manager Wenner and Buffett had and told him to tell Judy to take Sebastian and the dog to Corcoran’s parents’ house in Ohio, leave the van, and fly to New York. She could stay at P. J. O’Rourke’s. Jane would pick her up and take her shopping. They were sailing for London on Sunday.
“And we didn’t have a pot to piss in,” Corcoran says. “We were putting clothes for the trip on our American Express. It was just stupid the money we were spending.”
But he couldn’t say no. Five years earlier, Buffett had been bumming spaghetti. Now he was booking them on a luxury cruise to mix an album with a seven-figure budget. Dan Fogelberg and his girlfriend joined the traveling party and got a suite with a balcony. When bon voyage arrived, there was the group, on Fogelberg’s balcony, toasting the crowd below, which included P. J. O’Rourke cradling a six-pack on a Sunday morning.
With Fogelberg and his girlfriend along, plus Putnam’s wife, that filled one dining room table. Corcoran didn’t figure it’d be much fun to sit across the room and watch the rock stars eat and drink, so he booked a second table, for two, in a different dining room. Every lunch and dinner, Putnam sent an expensive bottle of wine. “He knew we couldn’t afford anything on the trip,” Corcoran says.
While Tom and Judy were enjoying their meals, Putnam and Fogelberg were renaming the album. The working title had been Almost Over the Edge. Corcoran had shot Buffett hanging off a wall on the grounds of Vizcaya, industrialist James Deering’s early-twentieth-century Coconut Grove estate. Looking at proofs in New York, however, O’Rourke had latched on to a photo of Buffett shot onstage, from behind Buttrey, Buffett’s face frozen between a smile, a shout, and a full laugh. “I do magazine covers all the time,” Corcoran remembers O’Rourke saying. “That’s your cover.”
Nothing about the shot suggested Almost Over the Edge. Explaining the shows in Atlanta and Miami to Fogelberg, Putnam said, “You really had to be there to understand the energy in the room.”
“That’s it,” Fogelberg said.
They’d call the album You Had to Be There, and with that solved, Putnam could turn his attention to wine.
“I said, ‘You know, the ’61 Bordeauxs have just been released,’ ” he says. Buffett gave him a quizzical look. “I think he might have thought it was a car or something.”
The wine that came from the Bordeaux region in 1961 is that rare perfect vintage. In London, Putnam asked the concierge at their hotel to make dinner reservations each night in a different restaurant with ’61 in stock—so he could sample as many as possible.
“And so we’re going to dinner, and Jimmy says, ‘So this is a good wine?’ ” Putnam says. “I’d say, ‘Jimmy, this is destined to become one of the greatest wines of the century, and so it’s a little young. It’s a ’61.”
“Oh, so it’s old,” Buffett said.
“Yeah, but it should be good for a hundred or two hundred years.”
“I remember he took a sip of it,” Putnam says, “and said, ‘Wow. This is okay.’ ”
By day they’d mix the record, and by night the women would dance until dawn and the men would gamble. Buffett and Putnam gambled, anyway. “Fogelberg and I didn’t give a shit,” Corcoran says, “So we went to the slot machines and put silver dollars in the slots. I recall standing next to Fogelberg, and he’s cranking this thing, putting silver dollars in and singing, ‘There’s a Place in the World for a Gambler,’ and I’m thinking, This is fucking unreal.”
Corcoran had to fly to Los Angeles—first class—to meet with ABC’s art director. Judy stayed in London and crashed with Bob Mercer, the EMI Records executive who signed Queen, Marc Bolan, and Olivia Newton-John, among many, and his wife, Margie—the former Margie Buffett. They had a place next to Abbey Road and went everywhere by limo. Buffett wrecking Margie’s Mercedes in Nashville hadn’t totaled the prospects of a long-term friendship.
A week later, Corcoran met up with Judy in Ohio. They picked up Sebastian and drove straight to Key West, arriving in time for Sebastian’s first day of a new school year. Putnam went back to Nashville with his wine. Buffett returned to Aspen with a few cases of ’61 Bordeaux. You Had to Be There was released as a double album and reached number seventy-two on the albums chart just ahead of Buffett’s thirty-second birthday, on Christmas Day 1978.
He’d released seven albums in six years that had produced one top-ten single. Not one of those albums had gone past number ten on the albums chart. James Taylor burped more hits in any given week. The Eagles could drop their guitars from their airplane and the wreckage would sneak into the top five. Radio hadn’t been able to deny “Margaritaville,” but after, it was like radio found the hole in the fence Buffett crawled through and patched it up.
The next career move, then, was obvious—at least if the career’s under Irving Azoff’s direction, which it was. He put Buffett in a movie about a radio station. When Cameron Crowe visited Azoff for his Rolling Stone profile, he accompanied Azoff to a meeting with executives at MCA/Universal Studios. Azoff’s job was to strong-arm a May release for FM, his first executively produced film. Arriving in a borrowed BMW (Azoff owned a Bentley), he brought along a twenty-minute teaser that included performances by Linda Ronstadt, and Buffett. The assembled vice presidents of this and that were impressed, ecstatic. Then Azoff said he was going to take the film to another studio that would give him a spring release. He got his preferred place on MCA/Universal’s calendar and Buffett was back on the big screen playing “Livingston Saturday Night,” this time for the fictional QSKY’s Save the Whales benefit.
QSKY was a little like WKWF under Corcoran—programmed by music fans for music fans. The fictional QSKY DJs had style and taste and freedom—until the Man, dressed in corporate interests, cracked down in the service of advertisers and a bigger bottom line. In protest, the DJs stage a sit in, listeners rally to the cause, the police are called, all hell breaks loose, and those corporate lackeys, observing the passion of so many dedicated music fans, realize how wrong they were. QSKY is saved. Roll end credits. Nice story.
Sitting in a Nashville studio in 2015, putting the finishing touches on four new songs, Keith Sykes remembers that era of radio, what it was, and what it was about to be. “Margaritaville,” he says, came just in time for the fading era of a more freeform medium. “Rock music stations started to really kick in to the middle and late seventies,” Sykes says. “They took over that segment, and pop music took over. The pop just played the pop, and the country just played the country.”
And there was Jimmy Buffett, still without a genre and nothing like anything on the year-end chart. The Bee Gees had three of 1978’s top-six singles, according to Billboard (“Night Fever,” “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep is Your Love”), Andy Gibb grabbed the number-one and number-eight spots (“Shadow Dancing,” “[Love Is] Thicker Than Water”). Debby Boone made the top-ten with the syrupy “You Light Up My Life,” and Buffett’s old friends the Commodores got there with “Three Times a Lady.”
Hard to see how “Cheeseburger in Paradise” finds a spotlight on that dance floor, even if it did inspire the munchies the way Buffett’s “little island that’s nowhere other than in your mind or the bottom of the Cuervo bottle”—as he put it on You Had to Be There—inspired thirst.
A lot of songs make you dance. Buffett’s little hit (and “Cheeseburger”) popularized the happy hour menu. Corcoran saw it and put it in that piece for Crawdaddy. People were drinking margaritas like they’d loved them from the beginning of time—since before Eve ate the apple and became the original woman to blame. They wanted to spend a few minutes—or a few hours, or a three-day vacation—living like they imagined Buffett lived. They weren’t alone.
“In a way,” Corcoran continued in Crawdaddy, “Jimmy Buffett appears to be adapting to his own lyrics.”
He wasn’t from New York or Los Angeles, and so he wasn’t a creation of New York or Los Angeles. He might have moved his business people, but Buffett’s sensibilities remained elsewhere.
Outside the power centers, in the towns and cities where Buffett had been making a living for most of the decade, he was . . . relatable, if also enviable. “He represented a lifestyle,” Steve Diener says, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, but maybe not.
Diener, who had replaced Jerry Rubinstein as the head of ABC Records, met Buffett once. After Buffett broke his leg the second time, necessitating surgery in Los Angeles, Diener went by the hospital for a visit. “Quiet, interesting guy,” he says. “A real Florida Keys kind of guy . . . He was really an ambassador.”
True to Don Light’s maxim, Buffett built himself a job, but the need—for a Caribbean poet spinning palm trees and stiff drinks into middle-class fantasy—that was an accidental discovery, like stubbing your toe on a treasure chest left exposed by the tide.
“A lot of the pictures we took were goof-around pictures,” Corcoran says. “It wasn’t formal PR stuff, and that’s what made Jimmy’s reputation. He was a normal guy who looked like he was fuckin’ off in the tropics. He was workin’ his head off.”
When they packaged You Had to Be There, Buffett pushed the work instead of the fantasy. He took himself off the boat and put himself on the road—just as he said he’d do. The list of antics detailed in the liner notes (signed in London) would have killed a lesser operation: Harry Dailey’s naked hall meditation, Jay Spell introducing comedian Martin Mull to braille centerfolds, Deborah McColl and Fingers doing their Ike and Tina Turner impersonations in a Montana bar, Buffett helping Fingers rehang a hotel chandelier that had found the bathroom sink. Real rock-star stuff, but so was the view from the album sleeves.
Slid from the gatefold, they revealed hotel room views from sea to shining sea. Some were nice: the photo in New York toward Central Park, or a cove full of boats at anchor in Miami. Others were interesting: the scene in Los Angeles highlighted by billboards for a new Hall & Oates record and for Hustler magazine, “For those who think pink.” Sometimes, Corcoran would open the curtains and see nothing but another building staring back. He snapped away, the banality as much a part of Buffett’s life as Euphoria II rocking gently in Gustavia Harbor in St. Barts. You Had to Be There was, in its imagery, as authentic a document as A1A.
“He was Dad,” McColl says. “Throughout all the craziness, Jimmy was the one who would maintain functionality. He could moderate unlike a lot of us, and he kept the ship running.”
One afternoon at a hotel on Key Biscayne, Corcoran had a question for Buffett. He padded down the hall, knocked on the door. Buffett opened, but the door was chained.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “You can come in. You can keep your mouth shut.”
The door shut and Corcoran heard the chain sliding free.
“And I’m thinking, What am I going to see in there? Fifteen-year-old triplets from Lauderdale?” he says. Nope. “On every horizontal surface there were stacks of receipts and he was doing the paperwork to send to L.A. to Frontline Management. He said, ‘This would ruin my reputation entirely,’ but he was doing it. The bills got paid. Everything tax wise and all that stuff. He was meticulous, and he said, ‘Don’t tell anyone you saw this.’ And he was seventy-five-percent serious. He knew it sounded ridiculous, but it was true.”
Utley laughs when he hears that story. “He still says that when he’s exercising,” Utley says. “Or when he goes to bed at 9:30.” And that happens.
Buffett had hired Marshall Gelfand as an accountant, the same guy Putnam used. Putnam talks about Gelfand being born a hundred years old and how every year he’d make the rounds to see his clients and go line-by-line through the accounting, raising an eyebrow at various and questionable sundries. In the Son of a Son liner notes, Buffett thanked Gelfand for “keeping me out of debtors prison,” an Old World, semipiratical way of saying he had good people—an eye for talent and the smarts to let them help him be him.
But it’s like Don Light said: Buffett knew how to make people think what he wanted them to think. And it wasn’t hard to play the part.
When Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo called to propose an interview with Buffett in May 1979, Buffett gave him easy directions: “Fly to St. Maarten and charter a boat or a plane to St. Barts. Wait for me at Le Select bar.”
Not everything had changed since Light called the Chart Room to find his client. Buffett, however, never materialized at Le Select. Flippo found him harbor side with the Coral Reefer Band at another bar, laughing about the band getting its first suntan and tossing a pile of money on the table for the tab while asking Flippo where he’d been. Buffett saw the plane from St. Maarten land hours before.
They bounced from bar to boat to pizza joint to after-hours disco, encountering horny women, suspicious men, and a population of hippies with “lots of money and no visible means of support,” Flippo wrote. He described Buffett as a rake and a rogue and as having been adopted by the locals. “He is theirs—he used to run a little marijuana through the islands himself,” Flippo wrote, codifying myth as factI in the pages of America’s premier rock magazine. Rock star status was cemented later when Buffett picked up the phone and called Azoff collect to tell him to send someone from Bayshore Recording Studios in Coconut Grove to St. Barts with $2,000 cash and a dozen Ping-Pong balls.
“Tonight we’ll be able to play Ping-Pong,” he said after he hung up. He and Flippo then headed off for more beer. Aboard the Euphoria II, there was a photo of Jimmy and Jimmy (Carter) in the Oval Office, a freshly rolled joint and tape of the album in progress, Volcano, which Buffett and the Reefers were taking a break from recording on the nearby island of Montserrat. George Martin had opened a studio there to complement his London operation.
“Next thing I know,” Putnam says, “Jimmy’s down on his sailboat and he calls me, ‘Hey! Norbert! I’m in a helicopter. I’m flying over Montserrat. I just had lunch with George Martin.’ ”
Putnam called Azoff: “Book Montserrat.”
Azoff booked Montserrat—for three weeks.
“We went to St. Croix on a big plane, and from there we took small planes, three or four that he had rented to get us to . . .” Keith Sykes says, trailing off, trying to remember just how they all got to Montserrat.
He’s sure his wife arrived near the end of the sessions, because they were going to stay for a few extra days. As he waited for her to arrive, Martin was waiting to depart. “It was me and George Martin and I was cool for about fifteen seconds and then I couldn’t do it,” Sykes says. “TELL ME EVERYTHING ABOUT THE BEATLES!” he blurted.
But as for how they got to Montserrat, “I know we took small planes from St. Croix to . . . St. Somewhere maybe.” It was the time of St. Somewhere, another island Buffett invented, somewhere warm and more inviting than the cold night in Boston, where “Boat Drinks” was written after tossing back a few in Boston Bruins center Derek Sanderson’s bar.
Over the years, “boat drink” has become a generic term for anything tropical, and usually frozen. The original? “I think it’s rum and Perrier, as Jimmy defined it,” McColl says.
If Martin’s presence wasn’t enough, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick signed on for the sessions, which gave Putnam a chance to lose his cool: “HOW DID YOU ACTUALLY GET THAT PAUL MCCARTNEY BASS SOUND?”
“Norbert,” Putnam says, this time effecting a distant-but-polite British accent, “Couldn’t this possibly wait until we have cocktails later?”
Or after a round at the nine-hole Montserrat Golf Club, the clubhouse raised on stilts and the staff dressed in military uniform. “This was a scene out of a Kipling movie,” Putnam says. “It was like something left over from English aristocracy.”
Corcoran got the call to get his camera back down to the Caribbean, pick the Euphoria II up in St. Barts, and get it to Montserrat. James Taylor and his brothers were coming, and Buffett wanted to show her off. When Corcoran arrived in Montserrat, he joined Buffett and the band for brunch on a cliff overlooking the bay where Euphoria II was anchored.
They’d been at work five or six days already and they’d cooked up something Buffett wanted Corcoran to hear. The engineer cued up “Fins.” Cowbell filled the studio, followed by Barry Chance’s strutting guitar riff chasing Utley’s keyboard work around the intro. “I went, ‘Oh crap, I’m going to have to pretend to like a rock-and-roll song,’ ” Corcoran says. “Because I really like Jimmy’s ballads—to this day. So I gritted my teeth and I kind of grinned and nodded.”
Then he heard a line he recognized about a woman keeping an eye out for sharks lurking in the local bar. “Well shit, he didn’t even write that,” Corcoran thought. “I’ve heard that before.” As it occurred to him where he’d heard it, he looked up and Buffett was flashing ten fingers, as in 10 percent of the song. Corcoran said he’d take it.
They were (partially) Corcoran’s lyrics. The story begins in Key West, and the sharks weren’t originally sharks. They were Eagles. He was home one night worrying about the bills he was having a hard time paying. He thought about Buffett on his way to millionaire status and figured if his pal could write those songs, he could write those songs.
“The genesis of the song came from Jimmy and Joe Walsh joking about hanging out with Frey and Henley in Coconut Grove,” Corcoran says. They’d hit the bar, usually Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmit would be along as well, and Frey and Henley would be immediately consumed. “Every lovely woman in Miami was hanging there waiting to be anointed,” Corcoran says, “and Walsh and Buffett were the ugly guys in the corner.”
Corcoran scribbled a few lines at home, and then the phone rang. Whatever it was, it took him away from writing and he forgot about it until Buffett called and told him to pack for Sail Week in Antigua. Corcoran was doing that when he saw the paper, tossed it in his duffle bag, and forgot about it a second time. In the middle of a race from Antigua to Guadalupe, Corcoran was rifling through his bag when he found the lyric and read it to Buffett. Buffett took it and stuffed it in his journal.
Chance must have picked up his writing credit for the guitar riff, and McColl doesn’t remember what she contributed. She’d been planning to spend some time with a dive instructor on St. Barts, and so that might have translated to “roll in the sand with a rock and roll man,” or, as the lone woman in the operation, she might have been the only girl in town. McColl hadn’t come from Cincinnati, as had the woman in the song, but that was as good a city as any to depart for the Caribbean from.
Working on Montserrat was exactly as you’d imagine. They had a pool, and there was the golf club, and another bar was set up in the studio. One of the Taylor brothers took to making pitchers of martinis. “I remember waking up one morning to Fingers and James Taylor walking through my room saying, ‘We’ve lost James’s brain. We think it fell in the pool,’ ” McColl says.
Volcano’s title track was written late in what they called recording camp. “One day Keith Sykes came into our house strumming his little Martin, singing the chorus,” Buffett wrote in The Parrot Head Handbook.
“I don’t remember that happening,” Sykes says. “What happened to me, my side of it was I had gone to the volcano to see the thing.”
He grabbed a golf cart and drove as far as he could up Montserrat’s Soufriére Hills volcano, the one responsible for turning the island’s beaches black. “I’d never seen that before,” he says. He got to the top and his jaw dropped. “There’s nothing but this yellow earth with steam screaming out of it,” he says. He went back to the studio and told Buffett, who said, “Well, we’re going tomorrow.”
The next day they went back and played. The steam slashing from vents condensed to form a small river, maybe a foot wide, running off the mountain and down to the ocean. Fifty yards (give or take) from where the river began, they found the water had cooled enough to touch. They built a small dam and splashed at each other. “We went back to the studio smelling like two 150-pound blocks of sulfur,” Sykes says. They wrote “Volcano” in about fifteen minutes. They recorded it the next day with a group of local musicians they’d been hanging out with, the Woop-Wap Band, lending a hand. Because the locals played everything in F, Buffett and Sykes wrote their new song in the same key.
“I remember singing, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ and Jimmy said, ‘Where I’m a gonna go . . .’ ” Sykes says. “And then we just started trading lines . . . I mean, that’s the fastest I’ve worked on anything. I’m still working on stuff I started in 1968.”
“Survive” didn’t go back that far, but it went back. Buffett had been listening to Billy Joel and, much the way Corcoran figured he could write a Buffett song, Buffett figured he could write a Billy Joel tune. So he and Utley wrote a pretty piano ballad, and then lost it. Corcoran found it on a demo while cleaning up the boat.
“I plugged it in and I said, ‘Well that never got recorded. That’s not on Son of a Sailor,’ ” Corcoran says. “So I figure, okay, that’s gonna be on the next record, and then it wasn’t. It wasn’t on the live album. I said, ‘Whatever happened to “Survive”? You were working on that for Son of Sailor?’ And he said, ‘I fucking forgot it. Utley! I forgot, “Survive.” ’ ”
“Treat Her Like a Lady” was an ode to the ocean, and the respect she deserves, written with Dave Loggins who, according to the liner notes, appeared “courtesy of a bottle of Cristal Champagne.”
“Stranded on a Sandbar” sounded a lot like contentment, the self-defined “jester” admitting that while he hadn’t found the answers others had by their early thirties, he was “stuck in this fairly nice maze.”
“Chanson Pour Les Petits Enfants” translates to “song for little children,” the kids in this case being a couple of friends who rowed up to the Euphoria II with coffee and croissants the morning after she had arrived in St. Barts. Both the caffeine and the food, Buffett has said often, were most welcome after the previous night’s revelry.
The kids, young Mr. Moon and Magnus, soar “through the Milky Way counting the stars, once around Venus, twice around Mars” in what’s a sweet little fairy tale—the kind Buffett might play beside the bassinet in Aspen he was trying to figure out how to assemble in “Dreamsicle.”
That was a self-portrait, one in which the jester refers to himself as an “overnight sensation” suddenly equipped with “house pets, Lear jets” and a baby on the way. On June 1, 1979, a few weeks after the Volcano sessions were complete, Jimmy and Jane welcomed a daughter, Savannah Jane Buffett.
It was possible to see “Survive” as a sequel to “Come Monday,” the biggest obstacle between man and woman being distance one more time. Though he gets there. The clouds break and he’s looking down on the Rocky Mountains, and it’s good to be home. “Let’s drink champagne till we break into smiles,” Buffett sings.
Jane remained in the background, just beyond the frame—an inspiration for songs, sometimes a cowriter, a pretty-good photographer, and coconspirator (though often unnamed). “Lady I Can’t Explain” celebrated her style, and was something of an apology for Buffett’s. With “the imagination of a child” fueling the heart of a “hopeless romantic,” there was bound to be trouble. But he meant well, and she’d forgive him. “Still you won’t let me live some of these episodes down,” he sang. And maybe that was what made it work.
When it came time to record “Sending the Old Man Home,” a salute to a retiring naval officer, Buffett wanted to sing it with James Taylor. Putnam talked his way in on a bass, because he wanted to be able to say he’d played with Taylor.
Buffett and Corcoran went back up the volcano to shoot some pictures, Buffett taking a seat next to a vent, pointing into the volcano. Then he grabbed the camera and snapped one of Corcoran. When the volcano did indeed blow in 1995, Corcoran thought about that photo and how, in geologic time, it’d only been a second or two since he and Buffett had been goofing off on Soufriére Hills. One more near(ish) miss, and another good story.
The record finished, it was time to go home. Almost. “We’re saying good-bye to the kids in the office, I remember one of the girls said, ‘Uh, Mr. Putnam and Mr. Buffett, there’s just one thing,’ ” Putnam says. “And we said, ‘What’s that?’ ”
“Well, sir,” she said. “We’re not allowed to charge your bar bill.”
“How much is that?”
“That’ll be $9,000,” she said.
Putnam doesn’t remember how they paid. They didn’t have $9,000 in cash, and there wasn’t time to call management and have more flown in. Buffett’s Rolex was in play at some point, but he held onto the watch. Most likely, Putnam says, their savior was American Express.
They took the tapes and flew them off the island. Volcano was released in the fall of 1979 and, like all Buffett’s recent albums, sold well, pushing to number fourteen. And like all his recent singles, radio wasn’t interested. The cover featured a Richard Bibby painting of a lush island marked by a steaming volcano. On the back cover, they used Corcoran’s photo of Buffett smiling and pointing toward the venting steam. At the bottom of the shot, three simple words: “Ain’t Life Grand.”
Not long after the album hit stores, Jimmy Buffett, looking faded as dusk, was found grinning on the cover of Rolling Stone.
“Yer all right, Buffett,” Flippo said to him in the story. “I understand you’re accidentally rich.”
Not as accidentally as he made it look, but he wore the lucky beach bum shtick well, and the Coral Reefer Band enjoyed the ride as they went back on the road.
“You had a lobby call at a really nice hotel,” Sykes says. “Limos to take you to the private plane that took you to the next limo that took you to the hotel and then took you to the gig. The joke was, ‘Gee, I’ve got to walk all the way from the plane to the limo? Damn!’ ”
I So much myth as fact that when Buffett returned to St. Barts after Rolling Stone hit newsstands, he was detained by the local authorities. “Me and my big mouth,” he told Time’s Eric Pooley in 1998. “I had never been a dope dealer; I was just hangin’ out in bars, tryin’ to be cool.”