Author’s photo
The Hemisphere Dancer, keeping watch on the diners and the drinkers outside the Margaritaville Café at Universal CityWalk, Orlando.
But somehow most of the show seemed but a warm-up for the climax, “Margaritaville,” the 1977 song that catapulted Buffett from cult figure to pop star. Those were the best days of his life. No wonder he keeps reliving them.
—Divina Infusino, San Diego Union-Tribune, June 1, 1985
That would depend, obviously, on how one draws the borders of a life. Back in Paris in 1974, during the making of Tarpon, and when Buffett and Jim Harrison weren’t peeping the editing of Emmanuelle, Harrison did get to the business of narrating Guy de la Valdene’s documentary.
“Who said we go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms,” Harrison said. “So you try to seek out in life moments that give you this immense jolt of electricity. It’s a tranquilizer better than any chemical tranquilizer. So you try to have something that gives you the electricity and freshens up your feeling about being alive.”
A career is one enthusiasm, sure. But there are others.
With his greatest hit(s) and Last Mango in Paris released, with his ramshackle T-shirt shop humming, Jimmy Buffett could turn his attention to an impending milestone—his fortieth birthday, which would arrive at the end of 1986.
The day after his thirty-ninth birthday, Buffett bought a seaplane, a Lake Renegade 250 he named Strange Bird. Next, he hired a flight instructor, an old Chalk’s pilot, and they set up class in Buffett’s home in Key West. From there, they set out across the Gulf to South America and Central America, and then down into the Caribbean.
He’d signed away the Euphoria II in Le Select on St. Barts, but he’d bought a home there, and then he and Groovy, who’d bought his own sailboat, purchased a hotel/bar/disco. Autour du Rocher (“around the rock”) sat atop a hill with St. Jean Bay on one side, and Lorient Bay on the other. “It’s the biggest damn financial nightmare—a great, dumb, stupid, wonderful thing to own,” Buffett wrote in The Parrot Head Handbook. “I’ve yet to see a dime come out of it, but I bought it truly for no other reason than to be able to sit on a stool and tell whoever I’m talking to that I own part of a bar in the Caribbean.”
He could slice limes and watch smugglers scheme, imagine spies exchanging secrets in the shadows, and because it was St. Barts, look on as the rich and the beautiful chased after the rest of the rich and the beautiful. Find someone who wouldn’t buy something as great, dumb, stupid, and wonderful as that.
In the fall of 1985, Buffett added Corona Extra to his touring roster, signing a new endorsement deal with a new beer. He wrote a jingle, did some posters, hung some signage at his shows. In March 1986, the Los Angeles Times profiled Corona under the headline, “Import’s Popularity Baffles Analysts.” In that regard, Corona had hired the perfect spokesman.
Musically, Buffett had given up on Nashville—again. He’d tried for two albums to walk someone else’s middle ground between who he was and who radio might like him to be. “I never really was a country act,” he told Knight-Ridder’s Gary Graff. “When they pitched that whole thing to me, I said, ‘I’ll give you one last shot at thinking radio means that much.’ And it didn’t work anyway, so I went back to doing what I wanted to do and picking up things I’d been talked out of or compromised on in the past.
“Y’know, I really didn’t think I’d live to be forty. Now that I’m here, I’ve decided they can’t tell me to do anything.”
Buffett would executive produce the next record. Utley would coproduce. They’d go to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Fort Lauderdale to record. He’d put the legendary Memphis Horns to work, and he’d bring Ralph MacDonald, who’d spent a decade with Harry Belafonte and written classics like “Just the Two of Us” and “Where Is the Love,” into the fold. Savannah Jane played mini-congas on the album. Buffett wouldn’t worry about genre, but he’d think about audience—his. They liked Jimmy Buffett and so he made them a Jimmy Buffett record.
Floridays, named after poet Don Blanding’s 1941 book, put Buffett back among “pale invaders and tan crusaders” at the “corner of Walk and Don’t Walk somewhere on U.S. 1.” On its cover, Buffett squinted against a fading sun. On the back cover, he posed at the Belize Zoo with his guitar on his lap and a spider monkey named Sparkle Plenty on his head. He went to Rio in “First Look,” to the bayou of his past in “Creola,” and to Memphis in an attempt to reassemble a relationship (“Meet Me in Memphis”) with the help of those horns and an allusion to an old, familiar Otis Redding song.
Buffett took the island ethos of “soon come”—“it means maybe never,” Buffett wrote in his 1978 Outside story from Antigua—and applied it to the story of one broken airplane and two strangers taking advantage of the situation (“No Plane on Sunday”). “When the Coast Is Clear,” his first cowrite with Mac McAnally, could be heard as the antidote to the increasingly crowded island of “Margaritaville.” The tourist traps had shut for the season, the hotels were empty, and a guy could sit in peace and quiet and catch up with old friends. “Almost like it used to be, before the circus came to town.”
Drummer Matt Betton wrote “If It All Falls Down” like he was Buffett’s biographer. “I live the perfect crime,” he had Buffett sing, “and crime pays more than it used to.”
Ahead of Buffett’s fortieth birthday, “Nobody Speaks to the Captain No More” echoed “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” The glories of “another place, in another time” have faded into questions: “Hey, what the hell were we fighting for such a long, long time ago?”
One of two songs on the album Buffett wrote alone (“First Look” was the other), it was dedicated to Gabriel García Márquez, Allie Fox, and Phil Clark. Márquez wrote the novella No One Writes to the Colonel, about a veteran of the Thousand Days’ War. Fox was the anti-consumerism hero of Paul Theroux’s novel The Mosquito Coast.
Clark was Buffett’s old pal, the real pirate who’d once been looking at forty. He’d been found dead on a Northern California beach. Best anyone could tell, he’d been swept overboard from a boat headed somewhere else. In Key West, they took up a collection to fly him home, where, for years, his remains sat above the bar in the Full Moon Saloon.
Floridays charted the way Jimmy Buffett records had come to chart (number sixty-seven), but he took a more natural road to get there. The songs were lived in and comfortable.
“These are exciting times for me,” he told USA Weekend in August 1986. “I’ve been doing this for twenty-two years. I’m just a saloon singer who’s grown up or at least is making an effort to try to—and I think audiences can relate to this kind of rock-’n’-roll Peter Pan attitude I have.”
Asked in that interview about his continued separation from Jane, Buffett shouldered the blame—it was his own damn fault—saying how hard it is to be married to a touring musician and applauding the job Jane had done with Savannah Jane. He said he’d stopped living on the boat because it was hard to order pizza and every tourist wanted him to take a picture with a fish they’d caught. A typical day? “I write, play guitar, eat, read, sing and fish,” he said. “I’m like a retired person, only I sometimes have to deal with accountants who call me up and tell me I need to tour soon so our government won’t go broke.”
He sounded . . . practical. In all things. Including moderation. “I was still feeling pretty bulletproof, but I noticed hangovers were starting to feel like surgical recovery,” Buffett said in a commencement address at the University of Miami in 2015. He told a story he said he’d never told before, about a B-I-G T-I-M-E in Denver, “around the time I hit forty,” he said.
He and the Reefers played back-to-back nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre the summer before his big birthday. He still hadn’t recovered by the time they hit the stage. “I made it through the show,” he said, “but I was mad at myself for not giving the crowd its money’s worth. Nobody in the crowd knew, but I sure did. It’s not a pretty thing to see talent wasted; it’s even sadder to waste it yourself.”
His ambition hadn’t exactly been sated, his answers and questions weren’t locked away, but as Jimmy Buffett moved into middle age, four, five, ten, fifteen years slipped away. Just as they had for the Eddie Balchowsky–inspired gentleman of “He Went to Paris.”
He released albums: Hot Water (1988), Off to See the Lizard (1989), Feeding Frenzy (1990), the four-disc box set Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads (1992), Fruitcakes (1994), Barometer Soup (1995), Banana Wind (1996), Christmas Island (1996), Beach House on the Moon (1999), Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays (1999).
He wrote books: Tales from Margaritaville: Fictional Facts and Factual Fictions (1989), Where Is Joe Merchant? (1992), A Pirate Looks at Fifty (1998).
In 1997 he partnered with Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Herman Wouk to turn Wouk’s 1965 novel Don’t Stop the Carnival, about the foibles and folly that follow a New York PR guy who runs away to the Caribbean to buy a hotel, into a musical. The book had been at least partly responsible for Buffett’s investment in Autour du Rocher (which mysteriously burned down in 1991). When Buffett approached Wouk, he was riding high. Where Is Joe Merchant? had spent seven months on the New York Times best-seller list. Buffett faxed Wouk’s agent his pitch. Wouk faxed back: “Thanks for your interest, but who are you?”I
When next they communicated, Wouk had figured it out. “I’ve checked on you,” he said. “You’re pretty good at what you do.” They didn’t make Broadway, but they did okay in Coconut Grove, and Buffett and the Coral Reefers recorded and released the soundtrack in 1998.
Buffett tooled around in that Lake Renegade 250 until he felt the need for more, and replaced it with a Grumman G-44 Widgeon he named Lady of the Waters. She’d been a World War II patrol plane and had been found by a friend in Michigan. “Her mission has gone from carrying depth charges to cradling an eight-foot surfboard, a couple of fly rods, a cooler, a bunk, and my Saint Christopher medal,” Buffett wrote in A Pirate Looks at Fifty.
The medal—and the navy training he’d been required to take to fly a training mission off Key West—came in handy taking off from Nantucket’s Madaket Harbor just after 3 p.m. on August 25, 1994. “Just prior to lifting off the water, out of the corner of my left eye, I spotted some contrary water what looked to be to me some kind of swell and decided to pull the power, but before I could do so, the plane veered extremely to the right,” Buffett would tell the National Transportation Safety Board. “Attempts to level the plane with opposite aileron was not responsive.”
The NTSB report continued: “The pilot stated that he ‘. . . pulled the power back . . .’ and ‘. . . was able to keep the plane from rolling completely over.’ He stated the airplane’s left side of the nose impacted the water and the airplane nosed over.” The son of a son of a sailor’s plane had been flipped by the wake from a boat. Buffett had to fight his way out of the cockpit and onto the wing of the plane, where he was rescued by friends he’d been fishing with moments before.
Barely a year and a half later, Buffett was piloting his newer, ever larger seaplane, a 1954 Grumman HU-16 Albatross named the Hemisphere Dancer toward Negril, Jamaica, when authorities, mistaking the Albatross for a drug plane, opened fire. Among the passengers on board were U2 singer Bono and his family, and Island Records president Chris Blackwell.
Not on board was one of Buffett’s pilots, his friend Jim Powell. On that flight to Jamaica, Powell told the Chicago Tribune a few months later, Buffett’s imagination and sense of adventure got the better of him. “What happened in Jamaica was that Jimmy wanted to land on the north coast, and I looked at the weather map and knew the water would be too rough for his seaplane to land and that we’d end up having to make alternate, last-minute arrangements,” Powell said. “I didn’t have any approval for alternate arrangements.” He wasn’t especially surprised two days later when he heard what had happened. “To work with Jimmy,” Powell told Time in 1998, “you’ve got to be able to think and whistle at the same time.”
In 1991, Buffett and Jane finally didn’t get divorced. They’d been close, but they couldn’t ever bring themselves to finish the paperwork. Promoting Off to See the Lizard in 1989, Buffett mentioned to Johnny Carson that he’d taken Jane on a date the night before. They’d gone to the Batman premiere.
“You said dating your wife,” Carson said. “How long have you been married?”
“Well, I was married about twelve years, but I haven’t lived with my wife for six years or so. She wanted some space, so she lives in Malibu and I live in Key West.”
“That’s a lot of space,” Carson said.
It was, but it (and some therapy) worked. They came back around like the “Boomerang Love” described on Off to See the Lizard. “Different islands, different worlds,” Buffett sang, “but we really are the same.”
In 1992, a second daughter, Sarah Delaney, was born. Two years later, the Buffetts welcomed an adopted son, Cameron Marley, and Buffett finally had someone in the house to share in his appreciation of big, slow, noisy, awesome toys like the Albatross. Jane preferred the jets Buffett had also learned to fly.
Hot Water was the first album recorded (in part) at Shrimpboat Sound, a nondescript, unmarked, sun-bleached former seafood warehouse on Key West’s waterfront. Thousands of tourists walk by it every day on the way to sunset sails, fishing charters, or a beer at Schooner Wharf or Turtle Kraals. Shrimpboat Sound’s only markings remain warnings of 24-hour video surveillance and a sign outlining “Manatee Basics for Boaters.”
Shrimpboat wasn’t the only new hangout. In October 1987, the Margaritaville Store moved to Duval Street and expanded. The Margaritaville Café was born, a new partnership between Buffett, Sunshine Smith, and Kevin Boucher.
Boucher was born in 1938 and grew up Irish Catholic in Harlem. His dad ran a bar, and so he learned the trade before he could see over the stools. He took those lessons and applied them to 1970s Manhattan, running clubs contemporary of Studio 54, but different. At J. P.’s, it wasn’t uncommon for Billy Joel, or Steve Winwood, or Jimmy Buffett to pop in after hours, after a show, and play a few songs.
But Manhattan’s nightclub business was getting complicated. Money was pouring in, but so too were the types of people who get interested in fast money. Boucher and his wife, who’s Cuban, left for Key West when he turned forty. He didn’t hurt for work in a booming tourist town.
In 1987, Boucher was getting ready to go to Miami to capitalize on the rebuilding South Beach scene. He ran into Buffett and mentioned he was leaving town. They’d first met in New York after hours, when Buffett was playing Boucher’s club. Boucher knew how to run a business, but he’d also traveled the world, and sprinkles a conversation with stories from the Himalayas, India, Afghanistan, and Greece. He and Buffett got along well. Buffett told him they needed to talk.
The Margaritaville Café and a new Margaritaville Store opened on Duval Street, next to Fast Buck Freddie’s in the Kress Building in late 1987. Margaritaville’s new offices were connected but wore an address around the corner, 424A Fleming Street. Buffett had new personal stationery printed. David Wolkowsky owned the building and cut Buffett and his team a deal so long as he could keep the rooftop apartment for entertaining friends.
Boucher set the goalposts. They aimed for a middle-class crowd—not too exclusive, but not too cheap. They wouldn’t price anyone out, but wouldn’t invite the sloppy drunks that fall out of Sloppy Joe’s on a Friday night.
They built a small stage in the back of the room—smaller than Buffett would have liked, but they needed the space for tables. Boucher employed his burger recipe—part ground beef, part brisket, other secret ingredients—for the benefit of the Cheeseburger in Paradise.
By the time Margaritaville expanded, it had grown to sixteen employees and was doing $1 million a year in sales, according to a 1988 Key West Citizen story. That same story, headlined “Margaritaville Café is a mecca for Jimmy Buffett fans,” came with a photo of Buffett playing guitar while Ed Bradley sang and banged on a tambourine. Below the story, an ad for the café asked “What is Margaritaville?” It was more than an attitude, or the staff, or the $20,000 sound system. It was good food, drinks, and music until 4 a.m. “It’s a club where you can lift a glass with a friend, and share a candlelit dinner with a date; and maybe run into Steve Winwood, Harrison Ford, Russ Kunkel, James Taylor, Steve Cropper, Michael Utley, Ben and Jerry, Ed Bradley, ‘Fingers Taylor,’ Jim Stafford, Capt. Dennis Connors, and of course, J. B. himself.”
Corcoran did one day. He was in Key West working on a magazine assignment to chronicle all the businesses that had rebranded themselves Kokomo after the Beach Boys’ hit.
“That year, you could count the whores, the people who changed their business names to Kokomo this and Kokomo that, even the beach at the Casa Marina hotel was called Kokomo Beach,” Corcoran says. Not that the Keys had turned its back on Buffett. The November 1, 1988 Lakeland Ledger included an Associated Press story headlined, “Where’s Kokomo? Down by Margaritaville” and noted that on Islamorada, the Holiday Isle resort had renamed its pool Kokomo at Margaritaville.
Corcoran stopped at Margaritaville for a beer. “I go in, the place is packed,” he says. “And I knew the bartender and I ordered a beer and I’m just standing there.” When there was a tap on his shoulder. “It’s Jimmy,” Corcoran says. Buffett takes a finger, puts it to his lips and says, “Shhhh. Nobody knows I’m here.”
He was having lunch with Sunshine Smith. “Nobody, for the entirety of lunch, recognized Jimmy Buffett,” Corcoran says. “In Margaritaville.”
The concert tours continued apace, the crowds grew, and the shows became ritual. Outside the venues, costumes and cheeseburgers, margaritas and friendship. Inside, Parrot Heads knew when to wave their hands like fins above their heads. They knew all the words to all their favorite songs, and those songs were in the set every night. No exceptions, and not necessarily because those songs came from the best years of Jimmy Buffett’s life. He was playing old songs, but he wasn’t reliving old glories as much as he was allowing other people to maybe remember theirs for a bit. He had his enthusiasms, and his fans had theirs.
“You have to give the people what they want,” Buffett told Rolling Stone in 2007. “I’m not out there to make statements. I’m descended from court jesters, not theologians, and I just go out there to entertain. Joseph Campbell said, ‘If you have a really great old car, and it keeps running, you may want to change the paint and seat covers, but you don’t want to sell the car.’ ”
His fans were there to escape for a few hours into his world, however they imagined it. “The point is, I lived out a fantasy,” he wrote in the Parrot Head Handbook. “It may be everyone’s fantasy, but I’m sure glad not everyone lives it out . . . I love being the guy who gets to tell people about it.” It was “the gospel from the coast,” as he’d sung it in “Floridays.”
As he watched his audience continue to grow, he recognized a changing demographic. The Parrot Heads were having children and bringing them—the Parakeets—to the shows. As unlikely as it seemed, Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band had become family entertainment. Every now and then, “Why don’t we get drunk and screw” would turn into “Why don’t we get milk in school.” Children’s books seemed like the next natural outlet for Buffett’s colorful whimsy.
In 1988, Buffett and Savannah Jane partnered to expand the story of the The Jolly Mon. In 1991, they released Trouble Dolls, the story of a girl named Lizzy who, with the help four tiny dolls of Guatemalan legend, sets out in search of her father, an environmentalist who’d crashed his seaplane—a Lake Renegade 250—on his way home from Florida’s Everglades. “Children, see what you can see,” read the dedication, a simple piece of advice that had worked for generations of Buffetts.
Tales from Margaritaville began with a big idea, and a good one—a “grand idea,” Buffett wrote in May 1989 to Bonnie Ingber, his editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Thinking and whistling, he decided he’d pair his first book with a new album. But he was happy with Off to See the Lizard. He thought it might be the best record he’d made in some time. “The more I think about it, the book might take a second fiddle to a popular album and all the hoopla it will create,” he wrote Ingber.
“Go ahead and tell me you told me so and I’ll take my medicine,” he added.
Off to See the Lizard had its charms, particularly “Changing Channels,” an elegant ballad about time passing (cowritten with McAnally), and “Take Another Road,” the story of a cowboy and his pony making a move down “another road from another time, like a novel from the five and dime.”
But the cowboy’s story was better told in Tales from Margaritaville. The album went to number fifty-seven when it was released in the summer of 1989; the collection of short stories topped the New York Times best-seller list when it arrived in time for the Christmas season.
In Tales from Margaritaville, the cowboy got a name: Tully Mars. He was on the run from a Wyoming changing faster than he cared to reckon with. The ranch where Tully worked and lived (in a tropically adorned Airstream trailer where he slept in a hammock and dreamed of the beach) had been purchased by Thelma Barston, a “junk-bond queen” who reminded Tully a lot of Cora Brown, the ex–beauty parlor operator from New York who’d gone to Livingston, Montana, in Rancho Deluxe. Mrs. Barston intended to turn her new property into a poodle farm.
Tully, then, was left with no choice. He had to punch out her assistant, who deserved it, if for no other reason than the mink coat he was wearing. Tully loaded up his horse (Mr. Twain), his Martin guitar, some Travis McGee paperbacks, a copy of Following the Equator and headed south. “He knew no other person in the world who had so completely and swiftly ended a long phase of life and set out to find a better one,” Buffett wrote.
As in song, Buffett’s fictions were never far from his facts, and his facts always slightly fictionalized. Corcoran says he and Groovy used to joke about writing a song titled, “I’m Living a Future Lie,” because they’d live one adventure, and then relive a sometimes similar version once Buffett began storytelling.
Like Buffett, Tully Mars had been there for the filming of Rancho Deluxe (he’d wanted to get a glimpse of actor Slim Pickens). The New Orleans where Tully danced the night away was Buffett’s New Orleans, and Tully was dancing with a woman named Donna Kay he’d met at a diner in Blytheville, Arkansas. Donna Kay is Sunshine Smith’s name, and Michael Utley grew up in Blytheville. On the trip to Margaritaville, Tully encounters the Twelve Volt Man making margaritas with his blender (powered by a generator) and listening to A1A on cassette. Tully arrives in Margaritaville aboard a shrimp boat named Caribbean Soul. Her captain’s name: Captain Kirk. Kirk, Tully writes to Donna Kay, will be able to reach him on the Coconut Telegraph, should he need to be found. And clearly he hoped there’d be a need, his feelings for Donna Kay echoing Jimmy’s for Jane at the time. “Distantly in Love,” as the One Particular Harbour ballad said.
Buffett took every song he’d sung and every story he’d told and packaged them with a wink for his fans, and a nod to anyone who hadn’t paid attention. In the book’s opening pages, in a chapter titled “Walkabout,” Buffett worked off British travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book, The Songlines. The Aboriginal people of Australia believe the world was sung into existence, and so their songs, passed through the generations, tell the story of the land and map the geography. A song, then, is sacred.
In Tales from Margaritaville, “Margaritaville” began its transformation from song to world. Before, it had been a state of mind. After, it had borders and characters and those characters—Tully Mars, Donna Kay, Captain Kirk—rubbed shoulders with faces recognizable from Buffett’s other work.
Where is Joe Merchant?, his first novel, was more of the same, filled with asides referencing songs, lyrics, and scraps of Buffett’s past—including the near miss with the Gulf tanker en route to the Bahamas before “Margaritaville” became a hit. There’s a reference to Ed Bradley, and a Cuban with a pencil-thin mustache; there are squalls out on the Gulf Stream; there’s a night spent dancing at the Boca Chica Lounge, and an admonishment not to try to describe the ocean “if you’ve never seen it,” a line straight from “Mañana.”
Buffett’s seaplane-flying protagonist is Frank Bama, and he first arrived on Key West riding in an old Packard. His on-again-off-again love interest (introduced in a chapter titled “The Lady I Can’t Explain”) is a woman Bama had met in a phone booth outside the Chart Room. Her name was Trevor Kane, the heir to a hemorrhoid ointment fortune. Joe Merchant was her brother—a fast-moving, fast-living rock star long presumed dead. Buffett was a rock star presumed dead in certain (and especially critical) circles.
And Ms. Kane, upon reading and then balling up and tossing away a story about her brother written by an acidic little tabloid putz named Rudy Breno, says, “They all come down here thinking they’re Hemingway. That’s what’s wrong with the fucking world these days. Nobody wants to put in the time it takes to be legendary. Mythology is not fast food.”
No, it isn’t, and so Buffett prepared his carefully, setting it in the tropics he knew so well, peppering it with heat-warped characters and just a touch of the profane. He wrote a lone palm with a tire swing hanging from it as the foreground to a seaplane on approach set against a brilliant Caribbean sunset. He wrote mayhem and mysticism. He foreshadowed new songs, casually referenced old ones, and even found a place for the dolphin who saved the Jolly Mon.
“I think I made a D in marketing,” he told the New York Times in 1993, “but I remember supply and demand.” As the one and only Jimmy Buffett, he understood what his fans wanted, and controlled the supply. He mentioned a fan in Chicago who’d reminded him that many Parrot Heads have to wear ties to work. Duly noted, the Margaritaville staff had a tie designed. “It’s a real yuppie tie,” Buffett said, “but it’s got parrots on it.”
By then Margaritaville had expanded. Kevin Boucher had moved to New Orleans to facilitate the opening of a location in the French Quarter just around the corner from the Upstairs Alliance’s base of operations. Buffett had been eyeing the property for some time. In 1990, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported he was negotiating for what had been the Storyville Jazz Club, where Tully Mars and Donna Kay had danced until dawn. Didn’t happen. The building’s owners said the highest offer from Margaritaville was still several hundred thousand dollars below what was, at the time, a $1.4 million price tag. Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records (who’d be aboard the Hemisphere Dancer a few years later when it came under fire), and Taylor Hackford, who directed An Officer and a Gentleman, bought the building and opened a comedy club. When that didn’t work out, Buffett stepped in and signed a lease.
Buffett’s new Margaritaville quickly became a go-to destination for music in the French Quarter. Coco Robicheaux was a regular, as was Rockin’ Dopsie Jr., Marva Wright, and the Rebirth Brass Band. Alex McMurray had a band called Royal Fingerbowl that held the 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. slot every Sunday.
“For us it was a Sunday morning, kind of Bloody Mary crowd, and you know, it’s a lot of tourists and we were young guys and we were kind of douchebags,” McMurray says. “And we had a thing—people wanted to hear the songs they know, and we didn’t do any of that.” Sometimes they wanted to do “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” from Oklahoma!—with a free jazz finish. When the inevitable request for “Margaritaville” arrived—and it was requested every day—they’d play “Margaritaville.” But they might sing it in the register of a Norwegian death metal band. “The Cookie Monster voice,” McMurray says.
“And the staff loved us, because they were people we knew,” he said. “The bartenders thought it was a riot. We didn’t just come in and fuck around. What I heard, and I don’t know if this is true, Jimmy got wind of our skewering of his tunes and he laid down an edict that nobody could do Jimmy Buffett tunes in the front bar.
“It might be apocryphal.”
It might be that Buffett wanted Margaritaville to be what the Bayou Room had been for him—a place to work out your musical chops and get better. He might have wanted local bands to be able to do that without feeling like they had to be a Jimmy Buffett cover band.
Just as Buffett found another reason to spend time in New Orleans, he’d once again worked his way back to Nashville, the city he couldn’t quit for long. When he released the career-defining box set Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads in 1992, it was on Margaritaville Records, an imprint of MCA Records, and it moved more than a million copies.
Margaritaville Records operated out of an office in Nashville, and Buffett turned to a familiar face to run the operation—his ex-wife’s husband, Bob Mercer. “What’s our philosophy? That pretty much sums it up,” Mercer told Cox News Service in 1992. Buffett installed himself as chief talent scout, and gave Michael Utley a similar title.
Buffett signed a couple of New Orleans bands, Evangeline and the Iguanas. He signed Marshall Chapman, who’d lent a hand on the writing of Last Mango in Paris. He signed Utley and fellow Coral Reefer Robert Greenidge as the instrumental group Club Trini. Buffett tried to sign Amy Lee, the Coral Reefer’s saxophone player and leader of the horn section. But he wanted her to sign an eight-record deal, and she’d once been warned about signing multi-record deals—by Buffett. “Jimmy wasn’t very happy with me,” she says, “but I had a good teacher.”II
Buffett was more successful signing Todd Snider, a sharp-witted singer-songwriter originally from Portland, Oregon, who’d bounced around Texas and landed in Memphis, where his father was working in construction. “My dad was in a bar in Memphis and he met a guy who knew where Keith Sykes lived,” Snider says.
He set about politely stalking Sykes, who, by then, had stopped performing and gone full-time into the publishing business. Armed with an address, Snider began mailing Sykes songs. “I called him up and said, ‘I like your songs,’ ” Sykes says. “Next thing I know, he’s standing at the door.” Almost before Sykes could hang up the phone, like a Looney Tune.
Snider had a standing gig at a bar called the Daily Planet. Typical bar crowd. The kind of place built for happy hours and to dispirit a singer alone onstage with only a guitar as defense. Sykes braced for a slaughter. “He starts singing songs and people started singing along with him and I thought, Damn, how did that happen?” Sykes says. “He just had this magic thing where people connected immediately.”
He had what Buffett had, for better or worse. In New York and Los Angeles, Snider was too country. In Nashville, he wasn’t country enough. It took three years of hard work, but Sykes finally helped Snider land a six-month development deal at Capitol Records. “And I was worse then at being me than I am now,” Snider says. “So I fucking exploded that thing.”
Recollections differ on what happened next. Sykes remembers going to the Margaritaville Records offices when Buffett was in Nashville and playing him Snider’s stuff. Buffett dug it; Bob Mercer really dug it, and they invited Snider for a meeting. As Snider tells the story—and Snider tells remarkable stories, some of which are even mostly true—he and Sykes were on their way to have lunch with Jimmy Bowen when Sykes saw Buffett’s car, honked, and waved hello.
“Bob Mercer just sort of took over from there,” Snider says. “Bob saw me, and called Jimmy from Memphis.” Buffett had Mercer send Snider to California to open a show. “That was my audition,” Snider says. “When I got done playing that show, I came off and he asked me if I wanted to make an album for him.”
Utley, in his Margaritaville Records role, caught Snider in Nashville. “It was like hearing a young Jimmy, a young Kris, although I didn’t know Kris when he was young,” Utley says. “The freshness of the songs, the honesty.”
Margaritaville released Songs for the Daily Planet in 1994. Utley coproduced with Tony Brown, and it did well for a debut. Snider moved more than 100,000 copies of a record that was funny, heartbreaking, and often both at the same time. “My Generation (Part 2)” was Snider’s answer to his father’s Woodstock generation saying Snider’s generation, “raised up in the hallowed halls of half a million shopping malls,” wasn’t good for anything. So Snider made a list of things they were good for: hair gel, hanging out at health spas, condom sense, drum machines, forty-dollar tie-dye T-shirts, and living off dad as long they could. “Oh my generation should be proud,” he sang.
But the song that got Snider the most attention barely made the record and didn’t make the track list. It was hidden at the end of the album, tacked on to “Joe’s Blues.” A nod to Bob Dylan’s talking blues takes on Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs, “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” was about a band that moved to Seattle to capitalize on the grunge craze. They bought flannel shirts, they cranked up their amps, but that wasn’t enough. They needed a gimmick. They landed on silence. They’d be “the only band that didn’t play a note—under any circumstances.” And they didn’t. Not even when they were asked to play MTV’s Unplugged—where they refused to play acoustic versions of the electric songs they hadn’t recorded. “Then we smashed our shit,” Snider said.
“That song was undeniably great,” Sykes says.
The label wanted to push the song. VH1 wanted a video. They were practically begging for a video so they could make the song a hit. “And I could just see the K-tel commercial and balked,” Snider says. He had a song about a band willing to do anything for success, and he wasn’t willing to do anything for success. “And now I think what if I woke up in the middle of the night and saw myself on the K-tel commercial and I’d be like, ‘Oh, kick ass.’ But when I was twenty-eight I thought no way do I want to wake up at fifty and see myself on that.”
It was that resistance to opportunity that led Buffett to dispatch his bodyguards to summon Snider to a dressing room in a stadium in Miami. Upon arrival, Buffett pelted Snider with fruit. “Why fruit?” Snider wrote in his book I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like. “Because it was Jimmy Buffett’s dressing room . . . Fruit was handy.”
Buffett, seen through the lens of his mythology, was the easiest-going guy in America, Captain Laid-back. But he couldn’t understand—or abide—a willfully missed opportunity. He had to fight to get Snider to play the song in his set; fans—paying customers—wanted to hear the song. Play the damn song.
There was a night in New Orleans that Snider wrote about in his book. They were at the Margaritaville Café and had just finished their set when Buffett, Hunter Thompson, and Ed Bradley materialized backstage. Thompson didn’t as much request as challenge Snider to play a song. Snider told him the guitar was already packed away. Hunter shoved him. “Menacingly,” Snider wrote. Then laughed as he and Buffett and Bradley charged out into the French Quarter, leaving Snider behind. Maybe he could have joined them, but he didn’t feel he belonged. There was aggressiveness, an assuredness of purpose and ability he didn’t possess. They were from the sixties and the seventies and success meant something different to them than it did to Snider. It meant more.
“I see it as a positive thing that he had that I didn’t have and don’t,” Snider says. “It was this thing that’s kind of gone from America, and it’s not Trump-y; it’s swashbuckling. It was a different time, I have to think. And those guys had that confidence that didn’t seem bullshit . . . I kind of think that character is gone in our culture, to a degree.”
And with that success and that confidence came power—conferred, not requested or required. “He couldn’t escape it,” Snider says. “It was like, ‘Can we get him a better table? No? Then build him one.’ And he’s like, ‘Fuck it, man. I want to go swimming.’ ”
Jimmy Buffett had attained his stardom, his wealth, his power by taking advantage of the opportunities he’d had, and unapologetically. He appreciated people who could and would do the same. Enter a different kind of swashbuckling character.
John Cohlan grew up in New York, went to college in New Jersey (Princeton) and law school at Georgetown, and then made what he considers a smart decision. “I never practiced law,” he says. Instead, he went into private equity, what was then known as the leveraged buyout business, in New York’s financial district. In the mid-nineties, he was working for a company called Triarc, which purchased a conglomerate known as DWG. They owned Arby’s and RC Cola. “We actually bought Snapple at some point,” Cohlan says.
The head of the company, Nelson Peltz, had a home in Palm Beach and, like millions before him, thought it’d be nice to move to Florida. So he moved his business to Florida. “I was thirty-six, thirty-seven,” Cohlan says. “I was single. The last place I wanted to go was Palm Beach.” He called a friend, Michael Fuchs, who was running HBO. “Look,” Fuchs told him, “there can’t be much of a social life in Palm Beach, but I have a good friend, Jane Buffett, if there’s any social life down there, she’ll know about it.”
Cohlan called Jane and met Jimmy. What he knew of Buffett he’d learned in college. When spring came to New Jersey in the late-seventies, the women would pack away the sweaters, dig out the halter-tops, and play Jimmy Buffett songs. “He invited me to be his guest at something I’d never heard of growing up in New York,” Cohlan says.
Quint Davis runs the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and his friendship with Buffett is equal to Buffett’s friendship with the city and the festival, which has grown to encompass seven days of music over two weeks at the Fair Grounds Race Course. It maintains a liberal definition of “heritage.” Bon Jovi has headlined.
In the sixties, Davis ran a head shop called the Love Shop when Buffett was playing the Bayou Room. He later spent time on the road with Professor Longhair, B.B. King, and Chuck Berry. He can sometimes be seen on the sideline at New Orleans Saints home games, standing next to Buffett.
Buffett played to a massive audience at the 1998 Jazz Fest, opening with the hometown boogie-woogie of “Saxophones” and even sneaking the not-often-enough-played “Biloxi” into the set. “And I’m standing there at the side of the stage,” Cohlan says, “looking at all those people.”
Triarc was a holding company. He wasn’t operating any of the companies they controlled. Once a month, executives managing the day-to-day would arrive for reviews. “Among other things, they’d talk about their brands and what was going on with their brands,” Cohlan says. “I kind of looked out at these 100,000 people and I said, ‘Oh my God. This is a brand.’ ” Forget RC Cola. It’s a beverage, but what’s it stand for? Refreshment? There’s nothing uncommon about that. Margaritaville had an ethos.
Triarc’s Florida experiment didn’t last, but Cohlan’s friendship with Jimmy and Jane did—and despite his initial misgivings about what the move to Florida might do to his social life, he met the woman he’d eventually marry while he was living there. He moved back to New York, but was a regular visitor to South Florida and emailed often with Buffett. One day, Buffett called.
Edgar Bronfman Jr. had called Buffett with an offer. Bronfman led Seagram Co., the liquor giant that had purchased MCA and Universal Studios. That made him the owner of theme parks and Buffett’s record label. He wanted to license Margaritaville and build a restaurant outside the park in Orlando.
Buffett had toyed with an Orlando theme park at least twice before. In a 1998 profile in Playboy, he said Disney approached him in 1989 with an offer to put a Margaritaville in its park. Buffett turned to his father, who pointed out that he had enough money to do anything he wanted. Why do anything he was uncomfortable doing? Buffett thought about it and made Disney a ludicrous counteroffer. “I asked for a percentage of the gate on nights I played,” he told writer David Standish. “I told them I work on eighty-twenty splits most of the time doing concerts, so I want twenty percent of the whole gate on nights I work.” After Disney’s execs stopped spinning, they said no. Fine. “In Margaritaville, you expect to see dope dealers, various riffraff—and Disney World is too clean,” Buffett said.
For Where is Joe Merchant?, Buffett invented Cat World—a park across the street from Disney where parents could engage in catharsis by feeding mice dressed like Mickey Mouse to hungry cats.
By 1998, however, with a growing business, Buffett didn’t say “No,” or wildly counter. He called Cohlan. “Jimmy is one of the more intuitive people you’ll meet,” Cohlan says. Buffett was interested, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to license his name. “So he called me up and said, ‘Look, you sort of talked about this like a brand . . . if you come and do this with me, it could be fun.’ ”
It could also have failed miserably, and Cohlan was making a lot of money on Wall Street. But Bear Stearns & Co. had taken Planet Hollywood public in 2006. “So I kind of knew there could be a business in the big box restaurant,” Cohlan says. “I did two things.”
He had a friend, a banker, who was from Mississippi and well versed in all things Buffett. Cohlan asked his friend to ask his friends how far they thought Margaritaville could go. “Because, between you and me, being in front of a theme park didn’t strike me as the most logical place for a Margaritaville, right?” Cohlan says.
The report he got back was it would work as long as it was “high quality, clever and fun.” A model for that existed—in Key West and New Orleans. Boucher had figured much the same thing.
“The other thing I did,” Cohlan says, “I figured, well, if I’m going to do this, do one of these big things in Orlando, you gotta do one in Las Vegas.”
He’d never been to Las Vegas, but he had a friend—another banker—whose clients included Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn, who, it turns out, is a big Jimmy Buffett fan. Cohlan asked his friend if he’d ask Wynn if the idea of a Margaritaville in Las Vegas made any sense. Word came back early the next morning that Wynn would do a deal like that tomorrow, if he could.
Cohlan left Wall Street, and he and Buffett started Margaritaville Holdings. “And it was really started with the Universal Orlando restaurant,” Cohlan says. “It was real entrepreneurial. Jimmy was like, ‘Come be my partner, but it’s not Wall Street. We gotta figure it out.’ And we did figure it out.”
They even got Seagram’s to pick up the $12 million construction tab and then hand over the keys. Cohlan went and found Dan Leonard to run the restaurant and the McBride Company to design it. McBride continues to design Margaritaville properties. Leonard is now president of Margaritaville’s hospitality division.
The Margaritaville Café at Universal CityWalk opened in 1999. Buffett played there in March of that year. “I think we did in that first year, $18 million,” Cohlan says.
Everyone—Boucher, Cindy Thompson, Michael Utley—everyone who was around before, marks Orlando as the after. “If you want to learn how to survive in the jungle, you train in Belize,” Archibald “Archie” Mercer, an ex-soldier running a Central American wildlife preserve in Buffett’s 2004 novel A Salty Piece of Land said. “If you want to learn how to survive in the tourist business, you train in Orlando.”
Author’s photo
The Hemisphere Dancer, keeping watch on the diners and the drinkers outside the Margaritaville Café at Universal CityWalk, Orlando.
Archie’s training had come in a reboot of the Cat World concept from Buffett’s first novel. Buffett, meanwhile, kept right on touring. The schedule had eased. They’d work on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and only for a couple of weeks. Then they’d break and he’d travel or write, surf, fish, or sail. Then they’d fire up the machine—and it had become an efficient touring machine—and return to the road. “If angst is your diet and serious thought is your idea of recreation, then PLEASE DON’T BUY THIS RECORD,” Buffett wrote in the liner notes of 1999’s live Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. “But, if you like the beach, need some escapism and like to laugh, stomp and dance, then you have come to the right spot.”
Just how it all had grown stunned an old friend who had gotten his first look at the expanding world of Margaritaville on the same tour where Buffett captured the live record. After working on Havana Daydreamin’ in 1975, Doyle Grisham didn’t play on another Jimmy Buffett album until 1982, when Buffett returned to Tennessee to make Somewhere Over China, and then not again until 1999.
Grisham always figured Buffett would move on and fill out his sound with other musicians, and, by 1976, he figured it was time for him to do something like “Margaritaville.” Grisham absolutely noticed when it hit, and then went back about his life, playing on albums by Randy Travis, George Jones, and anyone else in need of a lonesome sound.
“After that, I didn’t keep up with him much,” Grisham says. “He moved into another different area of music, and I didn’t notice as much airplay. But I didn’t notice a lot of people. I was spending ten to twelve hours a day in the studio. You kind of lose track of things, if you don’t keep track of them on your own. So I was very surprised when I saw 25,000 people. Country acts weren’t drawing that at that time.”
Mac McAnally bought an old house in Muscle Shoals that had belonged to one of the town’s prominent doctors. (Swampers bassist David Hood’s Sunday school teacher once lived next door.) McAnally had turned it into a studio, La La Land. In 1999, Buffett and the Coral Reefers went there to record a chunk of what would become Beach House on the Moon. Grisham was called in to play and then asked to join the tour. They kicked off at the end of May in Charleston, South Carolina, playing a sold-out arena that didn’t quite fit 25,000 but must have felt like it to someone sitting on Buffett’s stage for the first time.
“It was such a well-known secret, how popular he was,” Grisham says. He looked out across the Parrot Heads and arrived at a reasonable question: “I wonder how long this is going to last?”
I Buffett recounted the exchange for the March 30, 1997, edition of the Miami Herald Sunday magazine Tropic.
II Buffett’s word, however, was good. Lee remembers one night on the plane, after a show, when Buffett broke out his new signature Martin acoustic and she joked that everyone in the band should get one. He agreed, but then checked his watch. The official rule was anything he said after midnight didn’t count. It was a few minutes before midnight. When she got home from tour, a box arrived, and it was a guitar.