“I would write with people, and there was this one guy I was writing with, he was really, really talented and really young and dumb and he didn’t know any better,” Don Rollins says, prefacing why it’s sometimes good to be young and dumb and not know any better. “He had a ten-year-old Honda Civic and two hundred bucks and he went to Nashville.”
For every famous face on the wall of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the Bluegrass Inn, or any other old time haunt on lower Broadway in Nashville, there are a million stories that start with an old car and $200 and end with an old car, an empty tank, and no cash to fill it. But within six months, D. Vincent Williams had a record contract and a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music, which, after taking a look at the writing credits on Williams’s work, offered Rollins a deal as well.
Unlike Williams, Rollins couldn’t just run off to Nashville. He was teaching saxophone and directing the jazz band at Lamar University, his alma mater, in Beaumont, Texas—where he’d grown up. For a few years, Rollins taught during the school year, concentrated more effort on songwriting in the summer, and balanced his jobs. In 2000, he made Warner/Chappell an offer: If they’d pay him a little more, he’d move to Nashville and take a run at writing full-time. At the end of the 2000–1 school year, he moved to Nashville and into the glamorous world of songwriting, where his job was to sit in a room and churn out ideas—one song a day, five a week. “Most of what you get is a pile of rejection slips,” Rollins says.
He met Jim “Moose” Brown in a recording studio. Brown’s done plenty of touring, including with Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, but around Nashville his reputation was made in the studios. “A really fabulous session player,” Rollins says. Some things are the same as they were back when Buzz Cason opened Creative Workshop and Tompall Glaser assembled the Hillbilly Central crew. Songwriters write, session guys record, managers and publishers pitch. That’s how Rollins met Brown.
In February 2003, they sat down together to write a song for a singer named Colt Prather, who was looking for “a Jimmy Buffett song, something with that groove,” Rollins says. He had two lines ready to go. The first was something he’d heard a colleague in Texas say whenever he wanted an early beer: “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” The second acknowledged their starting line head-on: “What would Jimmy Buffett do?” The rest fell into place. They finished the song before lunch, demoed it in March, and pitched it to Prather’s producer. When it was rejected, Rollins went right on writing songs. That was the job.
“Then I get a call that Alan Jackson has it on hold,” Rollins says. “I didn’t think anything then, either, because you get songs on hold all the time.” Rollins didn’t think the song was country enough for Jackson. But when he heard Jackson wanted to do the song with Buffett, then things got interesting.
“Alan recorded it April 15,” Rollins says. Barely two months after he and Brown had completed the song. “And that is, like, light speed for Nashville. Traditionally when you hear a song on the radio out of Nashville, it was written three to seven years ago.”
“It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” tapped the impatience of every hourly worker who feels they’re “getting older by the minute.” It was for every office drone pushed a little too far by a boss for too little in return. It was for everyone who punches a clock, watches the clock, and can’t understand why the damn clock isn’t moving any faster. It was in the great and lasting tradition of Johnny Paycheck’s cover of David Allan Coe’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” but with the added appeal of a Jamaican vacation.
It was about, as Mac McAnally (playing the part of Jackson onstage) likes to say, the theory of drunkativity. He worked up a lab experiment, also shared with the Parrot Heads. “You take your watch off, you throw it in the punch bowl and you slosh beer all over it,” McAnally said in Austin in 2013. “You can dance around it if you want. It’s not really important. Turns out time quits mattering.”
Well, some time matters.
“I just want to thank Alan for the thirty-four seconds I spent in the studio,” Buffett said. “It turned out really good.”
Buffett spent more than thirty-four seconds in the studio and the song, but not much more. After Rollins and Brown sent their work-a-day Joe to the bar for a liquid lunch, he pours himself into a cab to get back to the office by two. “At a moment like this, I can’t help but wonder,” Jackson sang, “What would Jimmy Buffett do?”
He’d pour a drink and engage in topical banter with Jackson as the song fades out.
“It’s always on five in Margaritaville,” Buffett said.
“I’ve been to Margaritaville a few times,” Jackson replied.
Jackson affixed “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” to Greatest Hits II, and ended up with the first song for his next greatest hits record.I “It was a steamroller,” Rollins says. It cracked the top twenty on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart and spent eight weeks in the summer of 2003 at number one on the country chart. “A lot of it was because Buffett hadn’t been on the charts,” Rollins says. “He hadn’t been on the radio much in forever and people loved Buffett. They never forgot about him.”
Rollins and Brown won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Country Song. Buffett and Jackson won a Country Music Association award for vocal event of the year, and Academy of Country Music awards for single of the year and video of the year.
Three decades after Jimmy Buffett arrived in Nashville from Mobile, he was an overnight country music sensation. And after twenty years of saying from stages some version of “I don’t need awards when I have fans like Parrot Heads,” he had a little hardware. “I thought I’d make it through with a clean slate,” he told 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft in 2004. “I was at the point where it’d be cool not to get anything.”
The 2003 CMA Awards featured a performance by Jackson, Buffett, and their combined bands. More than any other genre, country music likes to salute itself, and the CMAs are one of the biggest parties of the year. “All the kids were there,” Buffett told Kroft. Toby Keith. Kenny Chesney. Martina McBride. Everyone who might maybe want to sing on, say, a new Jimmy Buffett record.
“I had this idea to do this project, and you always have to have a Plan B and I thought, well, if nobody comes to the party, I have a perfectly great band, and perfectly great singers and we’ll do it that way,” Buffett said. “But I’m gonna ask ’em, because all they can say is no.”
So he made his pitch: come to Key West, work a little, play a bunch. He told George Strait he could bring his boat. Everyone was interested. “The other thing is, I think it’s probably true and I can admit to the fact, is I don’t take this stuff as serious as everybody else,” Buffett told Kroft. “I’m not a go-to-the-studio-and-shake-every-note kind of person. I’m a go-capture-the-magic guy.”
The record he wanted to make with all his new friends made as much sense as any he’d recorded since Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, when Norbert Putnam led Buffett to the sea.
It hadn’t been a fluke that Don Rollins and “Moose” Brown had come across a singer looking for a Buffett-styled beach/drinking song. As awkward as Buffett might have looked in 1984, on the beach in his jeans and his cowboy hat on the cover of Riddles in the Sand, he was ahead of the curve—or, in that bright yellow shirt, lighting the way. By the time “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” hit, Buffett had become a bigger influence on Music Row than Willie, Waylon, or any of the boys.
In 1996, Chesney recorded one of Mac McAnally’s best songs, “Back Where I Come From.” It’s about pride in a place as charming and warm, humble and funny as McAnally and the people he grew up with. Where, in Sunday school, they teach you who made the sun shine—for everyone already knows who made the moonshine. Those little towns off interstates where time passes with “Amazing Grace.” It’s a perfect little dirt-road country song, and Chesney, who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, wore it well.
In 1999, Chesney was still that guy, projecting farmhouse cool in a white T-shirt and brown cowboy hat on the cover of Everywhere We Go, an album that featured the hit, “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”
That was before he got a yacht. Three years later, when Chesney released his next studio album, he’d shed the sleeves on the T-shirt (now black) and was standing on the cover in a Caribbean paradise, peaks rising from blue waters behind him. No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems was his new promise. He moved four million copies of that album.
“When I really think about it, would I have been the next Jimmy Buffett? I think even then I thought that wasn’t a great idea,” Todd Snider says. “Then I saw Kenny Chesney do it and I thought, ‘Damn, it was there to do.’ In my mind I was thinking the world’s not going to let that happen.”
Chesney followed up No Shoes with a Christmas album, All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan. In 2004, he released When the Sun Goes Down and followed that up with Be As You Are, which included “Guitars and Tiki Bars,” and “Old Blue Chair”—his “Tin Cup Chalice.”
Online, there’s a video of Chesney sitting by the beach wishing he could bottle everything he’s seen in the islands, all the fun he’s had, and the “heart and the energy and the passion my friends bring to the show.” If he could bottle all of that . . . well, he did bottle all of that. It’s called Blue Chair Bay Rum.
In 1998, Buffett solved his radio problem when he launched Radio Margaritaville online. In 2005, it was added to Sirius’s satellite lineup (while remaining free online). “It’s like the old pirate radio stations that sat offshore and played what they want,” Buffett told the Associated Press in 2001. What he wanted was some Jimmy Buffett music, but also old soul, New Orleans R&B, reggae, world music, live broadcasts of Buffett shows, and a couple of times a week, old shows—also available on demand.
In 2016, SiriusXM and Chesney launched No Shoes Radio for his No Shoes Nation—the name of his fan club. No Shoes Nation flies pirate colors from their tailgates to the tops of the football stadiums Chesney packs every summer.
If Buffett’s analogy is the Grateful Dead, Kenny Chesney is his Phish.
Chesney’s full turn to surf from turf was a natural conclusion. Someone was going to see Buffett’s touring revenue, see the pageantry and loyalty of the Parrot Heads—see the brand—and recognize an opportunity. Toes had been dipped in those waters for years.
In 1995, Clint Black took to the beach (in a wetsuit) for the video for “Summer’s Coming.” Garth Brooks took “Two Piña Coladas” to the top of the country chart in 1998. The cover of the single featured Brooks in all black, smiling between two illustrated palm trees. Phil Vassar’s 2001 top-ten country song “Six-Pack Summer” made a good-time checklist that included “the sunblock, a blanket and the best of Jimmy Buffett.”
In 2004, Blake Shelton’s “Some Beach” opened with some poor schmuck driving down a highway, thirty minutes late to wherever and singing “Margaritaville” as a coping mechanism. The same year, Toby Keith could be found lounging in a hammock with a couple of women singing about Steve and Gina, a margarita-inspired couple-for-the-night who met at Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo Cantina. Soon enough, Keith would have his own mescal label; Hagar already had Cabo Wabo Tequila and a little club in Mexico that had come out of Van Halen’s 1988 song “Cabo Wabo.” Hagar has built Cabo Wabo into a Margaritaville with louder guitars.
Buffett had once been too country for New York and Los Angeles, and not country enough for Nashville. He’d tried to be something other than himself, and then given up and given his energies to the Parrot Heads. And then he became a genre unto himself. The industry finally came around.
While Music Row was booking beach vacations, Buffett was busying himself being Buffett. He was, for example, wandering the narrow side streets of Corsica with his son, Cameron, in search of a dagger, “a shipboard promise for good behavior,” Buffett wrote in the liner notes of 2002’s Far Side of the World. They found a shop, open but with a chain preventing their entrance. “Inside, a large man with steely eyes and a long beard sat sharpening the blade of an ominous-looking knife,” Buffett wrote.
An hour later, they left with the knife, some smiles, and a few more stories from another mysterious corner of the world unlocked. “In Innocents Abroad, my old hero Mark Twain said, ‘I flit and flit—for I am ever on the wing—but I avoid the herd,’ ” Buffett wrote aboard his MV Continental Drifter.
Far Side of the World was full of songs from Africa (the title track) and memories from St. Barts (“Autour Du Rocher”). There was a cover of Louisiana slide-guitar hero Sonny Landreth’s “USS Zydecoldsmobile”—and an inconsequential bumper sticker song, “What If the Hokey-Pokey Is All It Really Is About?” that seemed better suited for merchandise than set lists. But it was fun, and his fans liked fun songs.
Buffett had been across the northern Sahara, to the Nile, and on to Tanzania. He’d been in St. Barts and South Florida and at his summer home on Long Island. His influence wasn’t his worry.
McAnally, who’d made Music Row a second home, hipped Buffett to his hard-won victory in the battle of Nashville. Then came Alan Jackson’s call, a big hit, a few awards, way more laughs about how they’d finally made it, and a trip to Key West to make an album built on a collection of duets with the biggest names in country music.
“If you haven’t already guessed by the title, this album will have a solid barefooted base in what we have always done, but with a toe or two leaning in the direction of today’s country market,” Buffett wrote in an email to all involved in what was originally titled Conky Tonk. “Let’s face it. This is not a big stretch for me.”
Clint Black, Chesney, Keith, Jackson, and Strait joined Buffett on Hank Williams’s “Hey, Good Lookin’.” Buffett and Jackson combined forces on Guy Clark’s “Boats to Build.” Chesney joined Buffett again on “License to Chill,” another lots of work and the boss is a jerk song. With Martina McBride, Buffett sang a birthday song, “Trip Around the Sun,” and he recruited Nanci Griffith for “Someone I Used to Love.”
The most incongruous—and surprising—guest on the album was Bill Withers, who appeared on his own “Playin’ the Loser Again” and added a cowriting credit with Buffett on “Simply Complicated.”
“Bill Withers is the closest thing black people have to Bruce Springsteen,” the drummer for the Roots, Questlove, told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene in 2015. Withers essentially retired in 1985 and hadn’t released any music—until Jimmy Buffett called.
With Toby Keith, Buffett worked up a Will Kimbrough song, “Piece of Work.” Some months earlier, Buffett had gone to dinner with his niece Melanie and asked her what had ever happened to Kimbrough, a guitarist from Mobile who’d played with Todd Snider. Melanie dropped Kimbrough a line and told him he should send her uncle some songs. Kimbrough packaged up all his work and sent it FedEx.
Kimbrough remembers his first encounter with Buffett well. In February 1995, Kimbrough was backstage at Tipitina’s in New Orleans. “The backstage at Tipitina’s is like three or four broom closets opened up into a space, with mops and buckets and a giant ice chest with hot water and hot beer floating in it,” Kimbrough says. “It’s nasty. But everybody wanted to be back there.”
Jerry Jeff Walker might have been there that night. Kimbrough knows Buffett was, because at one point, jammed up against a wall by the mass of people, he looked over and realized he was standing next to Buffett.
“Hi,” Kimbrough said.
That was the first time he and Buffett met, but being from Mobile, he and Buffett went back. “Everyone had the records,” he says. “Like anyone who’s that big, a cultural icon, their hometown absolutely loves them and desperately needs them to come back and tell them he loves them.”
Jammed into the closet-like backstage at Tipatina’s, when Buffett found out Kimbrough was from Mobile he said, “Oh, you’re another escapee.” Kimbrough loves Mobile. Still has family in Mobile. Plays Mobile all the time. “To me Mobile’s a place that’s wonderful to go back to when you’re older, because it doesn’t change that much,” he says. “But when you’re eighteen, a place that doesn’t change that much—some people just thrive and some people just feel like they’re stuffed in a box.”
After Snider’s Nervous Wrecks disbanded in the late-nineties, Kimbrough went to work producing, recording, and touring, working still with Snider from time to time, but also with Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Rosanne Cash, and a roster of heavy-hitting artists.
He also made his own records, including Home Away, which Kimbrough released in 2002 and included in his shipment to Buffett. Time passed before he got a call from Buffett’s people saying Jimmy wanted to cover two songs: “Piece of Work” and “Champion of the World.”II
“Is that okay?” they said.
“It’s great,” Kimbrough replied.
“Piece of Work” was written in the hospital one night after his second daughter was born. She’d had to stay a few extra days, but the night before she was scheduled to go home, the whole family—Kimbrough, his wife, and their oldest daughter—spent the night. Kimbrough couldn’t sleep, and so he got up and sat in the bathroom reading when a song popped in his head. He grabbed a paper towel and jotted down a collection of contradictions: iron and lace, angel and fiend, lavender and gasoline. “I’m the CEO of the mailroom clerks,” he wrote. “Lord have mercy what a piece of work.”
Minus any guest stars, Buffett threw in a Grateful Dead song (“Scarlet Begonias”) and another tune from Tom Corcoran’s Greatest Hits of the Lesser Antilles mix, Leon Russell’s “Back to the Island.”
Buffett and McAnally wrote “Coast of Carolina,” a sequel to “Come Monday” capturing all those many nights since Jimmy and Jane first connected in the phone booth outside the Chart Room. It’s a celebration of longevity, and so it’s a celebration of perseverance and compromise. “The walls that won’t come down, we can decorate or climb or find some way to get around,” Buffett sings. True in life, in love, and even in Nashville.
License to Chill, as the album was eventually titled, was released in July 2004 and debuted at number one on Billboard’s albums chart—Buffett’s first number one. All it took was thirty years from the summer “Come Monday” gave him a shot at a career. Jimmy Buffett was, finally, a brand-new country star—with a chain of restaurants instead of bowling alleys. No wonder the art inside the CD featured him looking back over his shoulder, laughing.
“Hiram Hank Williams worked at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company from 1942 to 1944,” Buffett wrote in the liner notes, signed from Buenos Aires. “In his own handwriting, he scribbled his occupation on his job application as ‘welder/musician.’ I know this because I read the file after my mother discovered it when she worked at the shipyard. She thought it was something I would be interested in. She was right.”
Buffett reached back to Thomas McGuane’s words from A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, to the “curious hinterland where Hank Williams and Xavier Cugat meet.” Buffett admitted he wasn’t sure what that meant in 1973. “Now I do.”
“I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Nashville,” Buffett told 60 Minutes, breaking into a grin. “Right now it’s love.”
Zac Brown called up Buffett to lend a hand on 2010’s infectious hit, “Knee Deep” and then CMT paired the two for an episode of Crossroads. They shot it outside Nashville, and Kimbrough took the solo on Brown’s down-home “Chicken Fried,” and they all put down “Nobody from Nowhere.” Written by Kimbrough and Tommy Womack, it had been the lead track on Buffett’s 2009 Buffet Hotel, an album that took its name from a West African hotel Buffett encountered on a journey to get his passport stamped in Timbuktu.
Buffett and Zac Brown mashed up the latter’s “Free” with Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” and soon Buffett was playing that, “Knee Deep,” and sometimes even Brown’s “Where the Boat Leaves From” in his shows. He didn’t have anything to do with “Where the Boat Leaves From” (other than to set the template and inspire the spirit), but Buffett knew it was exactly the kind of song Parrot Heads wanted to hear.
Toby Keith and Buffett continued their mutual admiration society. In July 2013, Keith hosted a benefit concert in his native Oklahoma to lend a hand after a devastating tornado. Sammy Hagar came and played and mentioned he’d done a duet album and cut “a laid-back version of ‘Margaritaville,’ ” Keith says, as if the song wasn’t born laid-back enough. Keith sang a few verses, and Hagar included “Margaritaville,” set to an “Under the Boardwalk” beat, on his 2013 record Sammy Hagar & Friends.
A year earlier, Buffett had pulled Keith in on “Too Drunk to Karaoke,” for Buffett’s Songs from St. Somewhere. He’d sheepishly asked Keith to lend his voice after Buffett had turned down Keith’s offer to join in on his 2011 top-ten hit “Red Solo Cup,” a song about red Solo cups. “You can tell me no, because I deserve to be told no,” Keith recalls Buffett saying. In 2015, Toby Keith enlisted the Coral Reefer Band for “Rum is the Reason”—“pirates never ruled the world.” Buffett helped Keith out on “Sailboat for Sale.”
After License to Chill, Will Kimbrough got a call to join Buffett in St. Barts for a writing session. They’d get going at 10 a.m. Buffett would usually be on his way up from the beach. He’s got a duplex on the harbor. “Nice little place,” Kimbrough says.
They worked on a song Kimbrough brought called “Bodysurfing in a Hurricane.” It quickly became “Surfing in a Hurricane.” Much of the song Parrot Heads would hear on 2006’s Take the Weather with You was cut in Buffett’s living room. “He had the cheapest little Pro Tools interface and a Shure SM58 microphone, and we put the microphone on a paperback book in front of the amp and recorded surf guitar,” Kimbrough says.
Sometimes, as was the case with “Wings,” from Buffet Hotel, Kimbrough sent a work in progress and Buffett’s interest was piqued. Other times Buffett might have words, but would need music. He’s still engaged in songs and songwriting. Sometimes he needs a push. “I think he gets inspired and then he wants someone to spark the fire back up and get it finished,” Kimbrough says. “Get him excited.”
Kimbrough eventually earned honorary Coral Reefer status, a thrill for a guy who grew up with Buffett’s songs. “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “He Went to Paris,” those were his favorites. Buffett jokes that Kimbrough got new living room furniture out of the deal, but he got a lot more than some nice checks in the mail.
Kimbrough’s played with most of Nashville. He’s in demand as a guitarist and a producer. He makes his own solo records, and has a band called Willie Sugarcapps with a group of Gulf Coast friends. They play swampy Americana. Will Kimbrough is anyone’s definition of an ace.
But when Buffett—who’s long championed underappreciated writers like Jesse Winchester and Bruce Cockburn, and who introduced Todd Snider to an audience he maintains to this day—cut “Piece of Work,” it made Kimbrough see himself as a more serious songwriter. It made him work a little harder.
“The ball’s always in his court,” Kimbrough says. “I’m here doing my thing: making my records, playing on people’s records, touring, writing songs, producing records. I’m busy, because that’s just the life, if you’re lucky enough to get it.
“But the main thing I’ve ever gotten out of it is the experience of getting to write with him and record. It’s a joyous thing, about ninety-nine percent of the time and I think all of the great songwriters I’ve ever been around take joy out of it.”
I He put it on 2012’s Playlist: The Very Best of Alan Jackson.
II “Champion of the World” didn’t get cut for Buffett’s record, but Little Feat’s Bill Payne was playing keyboards in the sessions and Little Feat would record the song with Buffett for its 2008 duets record, Join the Band.