In Margaritaville, as Jimmy Buffett once said, you expect a few dope dealers and ne’er-do-wells. So in 1978, the Euphoria II was in San Salvador, anchored in a postcard cove with only one other boat nearby. Buffett was up the mainmast sweating out the previous night’s misbehavior when he called down, “You should see what’s coming our way.”
It was a Cigarette boat—the brand Miami Vice would introduce to the rest of the United States soon enough—sleek, powerful, and expensive. It pulled up alongside Euphoria II with a request.
“What would it take to use your radar?”
“What would it take to drive your boat?” Buffett said.
Easy trade, and after a wild ride in the speedboat, everyone went on with their day. Evening fell, and the cast of the Euphoria II invited the folks aboard the other sailboat for dinner. After dinner and revelry, Buffett decided he wasn’t ready to call it a night. He hopped into his dinghy, bumped it playfully into the hull of the other boat, tied up, and kept the party going until he fell asleep—in the dinghy. And that wouldn’t have been a problem, but his knot didn’t hold and he drifted to sea. When he awoke, he saw nothing but water in every direction—with no idea which direction would take him to the safety and comfort of Euphoria II.
That’s when, for the second time in as many days, the Cigarette appeared. Over the horizon came another boat—the mother ship, loaded with product. The guys who’d been so friendly the day before weren’t as happy to see Jimmy Buffett in his dinghy. Tensely, they pointed him in the direction home.
“If it hadn’t been me,” Tom Corcoran remembers Buffett saying, “I’d have been dead.” The exchange felt dangerous. That was new.
Key West grew. The storefronts on Duval Street filled. The sunset celebration at Mallory Square got a little more professional and managed as space shrunk and more artists, musicians, and vaudevillians came to compete for an increasing pile of tourism dollars. Hotels were remodeled. Bed and breakfasts opened. Captain Tony finally won a term as mayor, from 1989–91, and was named Mayor Emeritus after that.
In 1977, Corcoran saw something he hadn’t seen before: college kids. On spring break. In 1978, it was cars full of nearly identical-looking young gay men. By 1979, families had arrived. “I went, Oh crap,” Corcoran says. “This was before Jimmy could make this happen. Now surely, everyone who’s a fan of Jimmy Buffett wants to see Key West at least once. But the same can be said of Hemingway, or fishing. There are all these draws. The romance of the islands, and all that stuff.”
When historian Tom Hambright, who was stationed in Key West after enlisting in the navy in 1960, gives talks about the island, he asserts “Margaritaville” and Buffett brought far more tourists to town than any billboard. His is anecdotal evidence, but he has a lot of anecdotes.I
Chris Robinson, Buffett’s old downstairs neighbor, remembers a toga party Phil Tenney, the owner of Louie’s Backyard, threw. This was probably 1979 and, to be specific, it was a combination toga/costume party. Robinson topped his bedsheet toga off with a colander wrapped in tinfoil. He was the Lost Shaker of Salt. Nobody guessed. When the cruise ships let out these days—as they do more regularly than ever—passengers pack the Margaritaville Store to buy Lost Shakers of Salt.
Among the old gang, there were breakups and crackups and people calmed down, little by little. Robinson lives about twenty miles from Key West now, working as a fishing guide on Sugarloaf Key. “Some have become successful,” Robinson says. “Some are starving fishing guides. But it’s a nice office out there.”
He keeps the big picture in focus. The old timers on the island when he arrived, they told him he should have seen Key West ten years earlier. Someone’s always been anywhere first, and it was better then. It’ll always be that way, everywhere.
“It’s Margaritaville for a younger group now,” Robinson says. “They come down here, and they’re from the Midwest, and they’ve never seen anything like this. I try not to take it for granted, and of course things are a lot more serious. DUI and the police, and the property values have gone up so much. I paid two hundred dollars to live on the water and now it’d be five thousand dollars, but it’s still fun. I do miss living here at times.”
The kids come down now, and nobody knows of a time when the bars didn’t serve margaritas and you could park anywhere on Duval and have the sheriff let you drive him home.
It was early November 2015 as he sat chatting by the beach. The afternoon was sticky—Corcoran says the old rule in Key West was to try to smell like today, not yesterday—but a breeze had kicked up from offshore. Dark clouds were piling in the direction of Cuba. It looked like rain. Robinson turned his eyes to the sky and shook his head no. Fishing guides know what’s going on out in the office.
Lunch had been by the beach and the next stop was the Casa Marina, a Waldorf Astoria resort. Before the Casa Marina was a Waldorf property it was a Hilton. It began as another of Henry Flagler’s dreams, a place for his railcar passengers to relax in style at the end of the tracks, which would become the end of the road. When the hotel was expanded in 1978, Robinson and Hunter Thompson sat on their backyard beach behind the Waddell apartment and drank beer while they watched the construction workers wrestle with wheelbarrows on an awkward shoreline.
From that same beach today, you could still throw a flip-flop and hit the Casa Marina’s property. A throw in the opposite direction might knock over a drink at Louie’s Afterdeck. A group on a bicycle tour paused in front of Louie’s Backyard, its guide pointing to the white building next door. “That’s where Jimmy Buffett lived.”
It’s sacred ground now, all of it, and that’s why Parrot Heads from around the country were beginning to arrive for the annual Meeting of the Minds. In the bars and restaurants of Key West, Meeting of the Minds is known as “the Parrot Head thing.” It is not necessarily a term of endearment. Among the service industry veterans, Parrot Heads have something of a lousy reputation when it comes to tipping. Corcoran figures this is probably true for some and made up for by the generosity of others. In total, the good-bad customer ratio can’t be any different than the population at large. And coming in November, on the heels of the annual Fantasy Fest parade and party, it’s another kick to the local economy after the summer lull and hurricane season.
Still, you hear it all over town. In the Green Parrot Bar: “Oh, it’s the Parrot Head thing this week.” Over at Captain Tony’s: “This week’s the Parrot Head thing, isn’t it?” Down at the Chart Room: “We’re bracing for the Parrot Head thing.”
The Parrot Head thing: In 1989, Scott Nickerson had a flash of inspiration. He was a musician living in Atlanta and he’d go see Buffett, who, at the time, was playing three- to five-night stands in a market that had been good to him since the Bistro days. Nickerson would see the same people every night, and then not see them again until Buffett came back the next year. He thought he could form a club without making it explicitly a Jimmy Buffett Fan Club.
Almost a decade earlier, Buffett had teamed up with Senator Bob Graham to form the Save the Manatee Club, a group dedicated to protecting Florida’s loveable, and endangered, sea cows. In that spirit, Nickerson thought he could toss some community service into the mix and then they’d all retire to a backyard for barbecue, a beer, and some music.
He took out an ad in Creative Loafing, an entertainment-themed paper in Atlanta. It was a little ad, free he thinks, and filed under miscellaneous. “About as big as your little finger,” Nickerson says. “Whatever I put there, it was enough to get phone calls. And I got a few.” He got one from a woman in his apartment complex. Others came from around the city. On April 1, 1989 (no joke) they met in the parking lot at Chastain Park, where Buffett often played, threw Frisbees, and had a few laughs. For anyone who stopped and asked what they were up to, they had flyers. That perfectly casual afternoon was the first meeting of the world’s first Parrot Head Club. “I can’t tell you how many people that was,” Nickerson says. “It was under twenty.”
He made a call to the Margaritaville office in Key West to make sure what they were doing was okay. That set in motion a loose affiliation that continues today. Buffett’s lawyers indemnified their client, and Margaritaville was generous with the use of their trademarks. “Sunshine Smith was with us on the whole thing,” Nickerson says.
The Coconut Telegraph wrote about the club and passed along Nickerson’s number. “And then my phone rang off the wall,” he says. He worked with Margaritaville to develop a few guidelines, a template, and by the end of 1992 there were Parrot Head Clubs in Texas, New York City, Orlando, Detroit, and New Orleans. In December of that year, another musician, Jerry Diaz, organized the first Meeting of the Minds—in New Orleans. About eighty people showed up. A year later, attendance doubled. By then there were nineteen Parrot Head Clubs.
Helped along by the Internet, the numbers kept growing. In 1995, George Stevenson, the kid who’d discovered Buffett pounding on the door of the Euphoria Tavern, cofounded a Parrot Head Club in Oregon. In 1998, Meeting of the Minds made the logical move to Key West. As of 2015, there were 216 Parrot Head Clubs in the United States, 1 virtual Parrot Head Club for fans who don’t live where there’s a chapter, 11 clubs in Canada, and 1 in Australia.
Between 2002 and 2015, Parrot Head Clubs donated more than $41.3 million and 3.6 million volunteer hours to local charities. Nickerson’s idea was a good one.
The 2015 Meeting of the Minds was the twenty-fourth annual. Its theme: A Salty Piece of Land. In the 2004 novel of the same name, Buffett returned to the story of Tully Mars, his cowboy in the jungle.
“Like most tribal celebrations, the myths, cultures, and historical events that originally sparked them still present a slight attraction to the attendees, but it is more of an excuse to throw a wild party,” Mars says of a stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for Frontier Days, “during which time the local chambers of commerce and religious leaders tend to cast a blind eye toward the debauchery because of the business it brings to town.”
There’s no reason to cast an eye, blind or otherwise to the more than 3,500 that now travel to Key West and book every room in the Casa Marina and many more around town. The Key West Police Department sells T-shirts—featuring, in 2015 anyway, a parrot wearing a hat and badge—to raise money for the Police Athletic League. A map in the back of the convention guide offers an official, “Welcome to Beautiful Key West, Florida.”
The cover of the guide matched the back of the official T-shirt, both of which echoed Jim Mazzotta’s early Caribbean Soul designs. Buffett’s Hemisphere Dancer cuts through a splash of margarita and over palm trees lining the beach in front of the Casa Marina.
Inside, Parrot Heads were greeted by ads for the Margaritaville Beach Resort in Hollywood Beach, Florida; Margaritaville Foods (“Escape to Paradise Tonight!”); Margaritaville Tequila (“Paradise Is Just a Sip Away”); and a lineup of sponsors that included Margaritaville Premium Spirits, LandShark Lager, Magaritaville Travel Adventures, the Margaritaville Vacation Club by Wyndham, and Radio Margaritaville. A two-page centerpiece photo of two empty chairs on a beach near a lone palm invited an “Escape to Margaritaville” where you can dine, stay, and shop.
The welcome bag included a coupon for 20-percent off any one item (and free shipping) from Margaritaville Cargo (home to the line of Frozen Concoction Makers), a coupon for fifty cents off one box of Margaritaville Freezer Bars (flavors: margarita, piña colada, and strawberry daiquiri), a coupon for one dollar off any two bottles of Margaritaville sauces or rubs, an actual bottle of Jimmy Buffett’s Island Tea (peach mango), and one box of strawberry-daiquiri-flavored Margaritaville gelatin.
When Cohlan partnered with Buffett and they got Seagram’s to build them the Margaritaville Café in Orlando, Cohlan made one more move—a stone-cold Wall Street shuffle. He told Seagram’s Margaritaville wouldn’t serve Seagram’s spirits.
Seagram’s had recently introduced Parrot Bay Rum, which Cohlan and Buffett felt cut a little too close to Buffett’s Parrot Head branding. “Nobody had the courtesy to call,” Cohlan says. And remember, Seagram’s wasn’t just Buffett’s restaurant partner at the time. It also owned his record label. Seagram’s begged ignorance, asked forgiveness, and requested a meeting to make things right. Their peace offering: a line of Margaritaville spirits for the Orlando restaurant. Cohlan, however, had done more research—research that, unsurprisingly, showed a high correlation between Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett, and tequila.
Cohlan didn’t see any reason to limit distribution to the three Margaritaville Cafés in existence at the time. Why not go far and wide with a Margaritaville Tequila? “This,” Cohlan says, “is when I realized what the potential for this could be.”
Liquor led to beer and a partnership with Anheuser-Busch, who developed a Lone Palm Lager for Margaritaville. They pulled the name from a song on Fruitcakes inspired by a couple of beach chairs Buffett spied while having lunch on St. Barts, a Larry McMurtry novel, and something Art Neville said.
The Neville Brothers were opening for Buffett in Cincinnati, and Buffett stopped to see Art in the hotel: “And I walked into Art’s room and he showed me the view from his room, which was a demolition site,” Buffett said onstage in Sag Harbor, New York, in 1999. “And he looked back and he said, ‘Hey, Bubba, not even a bird would fly by this window.’ ”
“Lone Palm” isn’t that lonely a song. There’s a garden full of tropical fruit, a couple sitting in those chairs, and they stare contentedly out at the ocean. It’s an admission of love’s complications (“we sailed from the Port of Indecision”), but it’s a nice, peaceful place.
People liked the beer, but when Margaritaville test-marketed the name, however, people connected it with drinking alone, which is sad. They turned next to an old standard, “Fins,” and LandShark LagerII was born. The world Buffett had been building in his books—one expanded from his songs and the stories he could tell—began to populate the Margaritaville brand.
The real live Jimmy Buffett recognized what was happening. He introduced a new character in A Salty Piece of Land, an old rock star named Willie Singer. “Unlike most entertainers, Willie Singer became more popular the older he got,” Buffett wrote, “but he didn’t care that much for the fame. Though he was still making great music, it was his other exploits that kept him in the headlines and made him a fortune.”
Fictional facts, and factual fictions. Art imitating life, packaged and sold and neatly displayed in the pages of a convention guide. Corcoran had no idea there was Margaritaville gelatin. But he got a kick out of it when he saw it included in the Meeting of the Minds welcome kit.
About a month before the gathering, convention director Andrew Talbert sent an email to registrants. It wasn’t subtle: “I have just been advised that JIMMY BUFFETT is coming to play FOR YOU on Thursday of Meeting of the Minds and this is only for YOU at the CASA MARINA!!!”
Also: “I was asked by the management to keep this show private for the Parrot Heads at MOTM!!!”
Mac McAnally had been scheduled to headline the first official night of the convention behind his recently released album AKA Nobody. Buffett hijacked the slot because he could and because he needed to be in Cuba a few nights later to play for the marines. Anticipation was high. Security would be tight.
If Meeting of the Minds is anything, it’s a music festival. There’s a shop—the Mini Mart—and a street fair on Duval in front of Margaritaville. There’s lounging poolside and lots of drinking, but all of these activities are accompanied by music. Much of it is trop rock. Buffett is considered the pop of trop.
The Trop Rock Music Association began as the Margarita M.A.F.I.A,III but there are an awful lot of songs about rum, drinking rum, drinking rum on beaches, and throwing away careers to drink rum on beaches.
John Frinzi isn’t exactly trop rock, but trop rock fans love him. He’s a Florida-based singer-songwriter with a sense of melody to match his sense of humor, and he’s always going to look like he’s about twenty-eight—even when he’s sixty-eight.
He’s the biggest star around the Casa Marina who isn’t a Coral Reefer. While the rest of the trop rock world fans out across the island, Frinzi was signed exclusively to the Casa Marina’s stage. He’d secured a pass for Chris Robinson, who was looking to get his hands on that before Buffett hit town and access tightened up.
The Casa Marina opened on New Year’s Eve in 1920. President Warren G. Harding stayed there before it was a week old. Henry Flagler never saw it open. He died in 1913; construction began in 1918. To honor his memory, architects Thomas Hastings and John M. Carrère, who’d designed the New York Metropolitan Opera House, the New York Public Library, and the office buildings of the Senate and the House of Representatives kept careful eye over every detail. A $43-million renovation was completed in 2007. The Casa Marina carries a classic elegance, its two pools surrounded by lush vegetation, its sidewalks lined with palm trees and reflecting pools. Its private beach is the biggest on the island. A pier reaches into the Atlantic.
In the middle of opulence, Robinson stood in fishing clothes, his white hair past his shoulders and his mustache catching the breeze, an original pirate hanging happily with his old friend’s flock.
The main stage was set over on the beach, its back to the Waddell apartment. Palm trees had been candy striped in yellow caution tape: LandShark Sighting. Robinson didn’t see Frinzi, but Thom Shepherd was on the second stage, set up at the foot of the pier, near a sand sculpture of a lighthouse and a setting sun. Shepherd was working up to a song that had become inescapable on Radio Margaritaville.
He wrote “Always Saturday Night” about landing in Key West on a Sunday night only to discover, much like when it’s “Five O’Clock Somewhere,” that time is irrelevant in certain situations. As an added touch, at the end of the song, Shepherd threw in the five most familiar notes from “Margaritaville.”
Shepherd’s producer talked him into that. “I said, ‘There’s a strong likelihood this is going to get played on Radio Margaritaville; it could be a bad thing,” Shepherd says. “I have found that apparently they really like it. And the crowds love it, too.”
The crowd was doing just that when a woman in a bikini walked by and complimented Robinson on his mustache.
“Rides are affordable,” he said. Timing being everything in comedy, she blushed and laughed and they began talking—her husband included. They were from Colorado. Their Parrot Head Club had been trying to get Buffett to play Red Rocks for years, carrying signs to various shows. The sign for Thursday night’s set was already drawn up.
Corcoran, smiling and nodding toward Robinson like old friends do, strolled casually into the scene. Corcoran’s a Parrot Head magnet. Everyone knows him and his history with Buffett, and at six-foot-five, he’s easy to spot.IV
The next to arrive was Roger Bartlett, fresh from rehearsal with Frinzi’s band. Key West can still collect some characters. It was Bartlett’s first Meeting of the Minds, and he was nervous. His 2013 album Manhattan was a blues record. Superimposed on the cover against the Midtown skyline, he was wearing a skull and cross-swords T-shirt, but his island wasn’t tropical, and it wasn’t relaxed. They honk a lot of horns up in the city.
Despite his foundational place in Buffett’s—in Margaritaville’s—musical history, Bartlett hadn’t worked the Parrot Head circuit.V He’d be playing with Frinzi’s band, and as good as Frinzi’s band is, it was still a pickup band with one rehearsal. He wanted to impress.
He had, however, arrived to a pleasant surprise. His pass was all access, all the time. For a few years after Bartlett left the Coral Reefer Band, he’d drop in on shows, maybe sit in for a few songs. Sometimes, if they needed a guitar player for a short run, he’d get a call. Those calls stopped, the drop-ins stopped, and he lost touch with Buffett. Bartlett didn’t figure he’d be allowed anywhere near Buffett’s backstage. His pass said otherwise. He was interested to see what would happen the next day.
The Casa Marina on the first official day of Meeting of the Minds—the day Buffett was coming—wasn’t as casual as the day before. Security—both volunteer and courtesy of Key West’s finest—had taken up positions at the door, scanning credentials to keep the non-initiated out. The registration line moved efficiently. The woman passing out T-shirts warned, “Do not bring it back and say it’s dirty. That’s how the collar looks.”
The stilt walkers were out, followed closely by their boss, Tim Glancey, who calls them “the kids.” Glancey’s a magician. He was living in Orlando in 1989 when the NBA came to town and named its new franchise the Magic. Glancey saw an opportunity. He told the Magic they should work together, what with all they had in common. “We don’t do magic,” they said.
“Neither do I,” he said. “I do sports magic.”
“What’s that?”
“Give me a day.”
He became in-game entertainment and patented an expandable backpack basket he could run around the arena as fans lobbed shots from their seats. Within five years, Sports Magic Team Inc. employed sixty and was making more than $1 million a year, in part because of something that happened in 1992. The NBA All-Star Game came to Orlando.
Glancey was doing card tricks for high rollers in a luxury suite when someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Jimmy wants to see you.”
Glancey spent the next fifteen years on the road with Buffett as something resembling an opening act and assisting with the more vaudevillian pieces of the stage show.
On the Havana Daydreamin’ Tour in 1997, they came up with El Stumpo the Bando as a way to open the second half of the show. A couple of fans would be called to the stage to put Buffett on the spot with a request. “As a rule, we weren’t allowed to tell Jimmy what songs were requested,” Glancey says. Buffett spent the tour carrying around an eight-inch-thick book of lyrics, studying. Sometimes he’d flash Glancey a look that said, “Where the hell did you find this one?” Sometimes he’d call on Utley for an assist. But he was always game for the challenge. With the foundation of the set list the same night after night, it was a way to build fun and spontaneity into the set—as much for the band as the fans. “That’s probably why he is the success he continues to be,” Glancey says. “Because he’s not set in his ways.”
At the Casa Marina, the kids on stilts were smiling and posing for pictures. The bars around the property were open and busy. Cheeseburgers were available. The Mini Mart was humming. Inside, Corcoran was entertaining questions about Jimmy this and Buffett that and doing fast business with his recently finished novel, Crime Almost Pays—a break from the Alex Rutledge mystery series he set in Key West and began with 1998’s The Mango Opera. Next to Corcoran, J. D. Spradlin’s Radio Margaritaville equipment was ready and waiting his broadcast.
Bartlett was still nervous a few minutes before his set. Needlessly so. “Brings back such memories,” he said from the stage. “Especially since I don’t remember them.” He played “Dallas,” his contribution to A1A, after opening with “Let the Good Times Roll.” Utley joined him onstage for a few songs and smiles.
Backstage, Buffett arrived, looked at Corcoran, and said, “Are you still alive?” Buffett looked at Bartlett and didn’t say anything, at least not at first. Bartlett didn’t think Buffett recognized him. “I have lost thirty pounds since he last saw me,” Bartlett says. They had a quick chat, but a welcome one after all those years.
Well before he landed in Key West, Bartlett had been practical about the different paths their careers had taken. He’d read an online estimate that Buffett was worth $400 million.VI “I’m not,” he says. The people who are worth that much—and Buffett’s likely worth far more—tend to hang out together. Still, it was nice to see his old road-trip partner, who took the stage with the smile he’s been smiling since A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean reintroduced him to the world. That smile’s never changed.
“Good evening, everybody,” Buffett said, adjusting a turquoise Fender Stratocaster while the Coral Reefer Band filled in behind him. When you’re Buffett, and when shorts and T-shirts are your work attire, it’s a fine line between business and business casual. But the baseball hat, the faded shorts, and what appeared to be whatever T-shirt he’d walked off his plane in suggested a more-casual-than-usual Jimmy Buffett.
“Oh, look,” Buffett said, motioning to his right. “It’s eight-time CMA musician of the year.” The night before, in Nashville, McAnally had indeed won his eighth musician of the year award.
“Thank you, Bubba,” he said.
“How big is that statue?” Buffett said.
“It’s . . .” McAnally began, before being interrupted.
“It’s large,” Buffett said.
“It’s a pretty good size, yeah.”
“And you have eight of them?” Buffett said.
“Yeah, there’s eight.”
“Are they in the back of your Suburban? Where do you keep them?”
“There’s four in the mantel in Muscle Shoals and there’s four on the mantel in Nashville,” McAnally said. “They’re getting a little crowded, but that’s a good problem.”
Buffett paused.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “We better play.”
Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band shifted into “Great Filling Station Holdup,” eventually found the right gear (after someone began playing “Cuban Crime of Passion”), and then segued at the end into the Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider,” a regular event in the big rooms they play on tour.
“Let’s face it, you’ve heard this stuff for a long, long time,” Buffett said. “So, what are we going to do to kind of get excited? How many quarters can you put in a Magic Fingers until it’s dull?”
He’d decided they would play A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean in its entirety—though out of order—and unrehearsed. For a night, he’d be the Jimmy Buffett on Waddell, the guy who’d arrived in the Flying Lady as opposed to the guy flying one of his toys. It was a short walk and a lot of years from those first days to the Casa Marina stage.
“I saw Tom Corcoran, my friend who some of you know, who was down here taking pictures when nobody knew who we were,” Buffett said. “The first time the Coral Reefer Band was ever together was in the filling station on the corner of Simonton and Fleming where he had a hat shop at that time.
“That college degree and that naval education served him well in that hat shop. I was glad he was there because he let us have the garage next door, and that’s where the Coral Reefer Band first rehearsed. And we played, it’s not there, many things are not here anymore . . .”
Not Logan’s Lobster House, where the Coral Reefers played their first show. Not F. T. Sebastian’s Leather Shop. It’s a Chinese restaurant. Not Howie’s Lounge. It’s the redundantly branded $5 Dollar Store. The Old Anchor Inn lives on only as a plaque near the door to the Red Garter Saloon, the self-proclaimed number one strip club on the island and home to what they advertise as Husband Day Care. Fast Buck Freddie’s is now a CVS drugstore. They no longer unload bales of marijuana in the middle of the day at the shrimp docks. The Downtown ’76 revitalization project is memorialized on a faded plaque on a sidewalk corner along Duval Street.
Fausto’s Food Palace is still there on Fleming and is still the place to go for a remedy on those mornings when your head hurts, your feet stink, and your relationship with the Lord has been called into question. But rather than a burned-down Jimmy Buffett pushing wearily through the doors, the day before found Buffett on the front page of the Key West Citizen. “Buffett: Build Amphitheater” read the headline striped across A1.
He’d put his name behind a proposed $4-million performance venue at a park planned for land the navy handed to the city in 2002. “I applaud your efforts and look forward to the amphitheater becoming reality,” Buffett wrote in a letter to Mayor Craig Cates.
There to here. Here to there. It had been a long time since those early mornings in the Boca Chica, “which stayed open until 5 a.m.,” Buffett said onstage, “and then you could go to the airport bar that opened at five. There was a logic to this place that defies description.”
Forty feet from the stage, Robinson shook his head. “The Boca Chica was open twenty-four hours,” he said. When Buffett announced his arrival as November 1972, Robinson shook his head again and said, “1971.” Farther back on the beach, Corcoran did the same, and when Buffett finished A White Sport Coat and played “Woman Goin’ Crazy on Caroline Street,” Corcoran told a few nearby friends about the Shel Silverstein connection.
Introducing “Why Don’t We Get Drunk,” Buffett turned the story to Atlanta, where he overheard those late-night negotiations and where, decades later, the first Parrot Head Club would form. When they’d run through White Sport Coat and moved on to “Margaritaville,” he invited Nickerson onstage to play drums. Nickerson nailed his part.
It was a special set, and most everyone appreciated it for what it was—a trip back through the years with the guy who was there when the island was untamed. Most everyone, anyway. A woman in the crowd drinking rum from a water bottle lost patience during one story and shouted, “Oh stop talking already.”
He hardly played any of the have-to songs, and so, for once, he got to sing a few of the want-to tunes. Introducing “Death of an Unpopular Poet,” he said, “I don’t get to play this song enough. I love this song. I really do.”
He makes the set lists. He could play it more, but then maybe he can’t. What’s worse, after all, not playing a song you love, or watching a basketball arena get up and go for more beer while you play the song you love?
“It’s the tailgate party,” Utley says. “Jimmy laughs at it; we’re music for their party. And it’s true. Management doesn’t like to hear that, but it’s true. It’s the experience that’s important to the people now, and so it does overshadow the songwriting.”
For a night, however, Jimmy Buffett was able to step out of the character of Jimmy Buffett and play the guy the brand was built on—himself. He introduced “A Pirate Looks at Forty” first by remembering the day he got a call from a friend who said Bob Dylan had played the song the night before,VII and then by remembering Phil Clark.
“It wasn’t about me, it was about him, and he truly was the pirate looking at forty in those days,” Buffett said. “And it’s great to play the song in the place where I wrote it about the person who was the inspiration.”
Down at the Chart Room, where Clark worked when Jerry Jeff brought Buffett to town, the Thursday night crowd—including Steve and Cindy Thompson—listened live on Radio Margaritaville. “So Phil, wherever you are,” Buffett said. “Actually, his ashes are in the bar downtown that used to be the Full Moon Saloon. So you can go say hi to Phil if you want. I might stop by. I don’t know.”
As Buffett sang “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” Chris Robinson, who’d replaced Clark at the Chart Room, sang quietly along.
Buffett finished the set with “We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About,” said goodnight, and was off to Cuba the next morning. The Parrot Heads moved to the beach, or over to Louie’s—where the Afterdeck filled up—or out onto Duval Street for as late as they could go. Corcoran pulled up on a lawn chair next to friends. Doyle Grisham stopped by for a drink. Thom Shepherd returned to the second stage and pulled Aaron Scherz up for a late-Thursday-night rendition of “It’s Always Saturday Night.”
In 1986, writer Phillip Lopate crafted a fantastically grumpy essay, “Against Joie de Vivre”: “All the people sitting around a pool drinking margaritas, they’re not really happy, they’re depressed,” Lopate wrote. “Drunk, sunbaked, stretched out in a beach-chair, I am unable to ward off the sensation of being utterly alone, unconnected, cut off from others.”
If that’s not the exact sentiment “Margaritaville” captured, it’s only off by its disdain. “Margaritaville” wasn’t born a happy song. Its narrator—Buffett, mostly—is falling apart, frustrated, dispirited, and disillusioned. Why had he stayed so long? What was the point and what was he accomplishing? Not much.
“If you just read it off the paper, it doesn’t read as the positive force it is,” McAnally says. “If you just say the words of ‘Margaritaville’ it’s not necessarily a positive thing. It’s only when you put that song together with Jimmy’s ridiculously positive personality that it becomes this thing.”
This big, beloved thing that lifts people up from what is and sets them down in what was, or what could be—even if only for a day (or hour) or two. And, yes, sometimes they drink.
If the Day One mood had been anticipatory, Day Two dawned (sometime after noon) hungover. The crowd around the Casa Marina pools was subdued. Naps were in progress. There was a street party on Duval, and it would fill up, but not fast. Whenever. Soon come.
A stage had been erected outside the Margaritaville Café. From the company’s first office,VIII above the CVS (which is down the street from another CVS), people threw Mardi Gras beads. Across the street, the balcony above Banana Republic had been adorned with banners for Margaritaville Spirits and the Margaritaville Vacation Club. LandShark necklaces and Margaritaville-branded beach balls were everywhere—dozens of inflatable indicators of the size of the empire. Under this corporate umbrella, the people danced.
Parrot Heads get a bum rap, and not just as tippers. If they’re considered at all, they’re considered a cultural problem rather than a symptom. VICE once let a writer loose in Margaritaville’s Bossier City, Louisiana, casino and hotel complex. He took a look around and characterized Buffett as “money-hungry and creatively bankrupt—a songwriter peddling bland, unobjectionable good-time tunes to over-the-hill office workers who fantasize about being burnouts.”
Go behind the VIP lines at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival sometime. Watch Usher wait for a wood-fired pizza while dozens of impeccably primped Southern California cool kids pretend to be too cool to take photos of Usher waiting for pizza. Watch them sneak those photos and catch what’s become known as festival fashion. The costumes aren’t any less ridiculous at Coachella than they are in front of Buffett’s stage. They’re just on (often) younger and (sometimes) fitter bodies.
The only difference between a Coachella-associated pool party at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs and the Casa Marina scene is a more earnest brand of singer-songwriter, and Snapchat.
No one fantasizes about being a burnout, because being a burnout is easy. A lack of effort is paramount to the job description. But burnouts miss their kids’ soccer games. No one wants that. The Meeting of the Minds crowd is full of people holding jobs—often very good jobs—and caring for families. Once a year they like to blow off a little steam with people they know, like, and have something in common with. The world’s full of stress and worry and overtime demands. What’s wrong with a little fun?
“The great thing about Parrot Head Clubs is they’re organized,” Thom Shepherd says. Shepherd once wrote a hit called “Redneck Yacht Club,” and it’s become as close as he’s gotten to a “Margaritaville” of his own. Craig Morgan took it to number two on the country chart. There’s a bar in Oklahoma that licenses the name from him.
He wrestled a little with whether or not he wanted to be perceived as a guy who played Parrot Head parties. Would that hurt him in the broader musical world? But he also wrote a song called “Parrot Head” with a punch line about waking up with feathers in his bed and realizing he “flocked a Parrot Head.” It’s on an album called Tropicalifragilisticexpialidocious, and that’s exactly the kind of linguistic trick that’ll get you invited to festivals like Feeding Phrenzy (Panama City, Florida), One Particular Phlocking (Breinigsville, Pennsylvania), or C-U in the Prairibbean (Champaign, Illinois).
It’s not exactly the tour schedule Shepherd first imagined, but it’s a good career. When he flies to play a show and he calls to tell the organizers when he’ll arrive and where he’ll stay, most often they say, “We’ll pick you up, and you’ll stay with us.” And no one expects him to be a Jimmy Buffett cover band—though plenty of those exist. Nickerson was in a popular one called A1A.
Shepherd likens the experience to playing the Bluebird in Nashville, the listening room where Utley first heard Todd Snider and where so many great, great, great writers have gone to work out material. “Playing for the Parrot Heads is like playing for a Bluebird crowd in Hawaiian shirts,” he says. “They like originals. I’ve even done Parrot Head gigs where they say, ‘Please do not play any Jimmy Buffett songs.’ ”
After the street fair, Frinzi was booked to play some Jimmy Buffett songs back at the Casa Marina. But he wasn’t going to just play Buffett songs. He saw Keith Sykes and started finger picking “Coast of Marseilles” as a way of coaxing Sykes onstage and then he handed over the guitar so Sykes could play a new song, “Come As You Are Beach Bar,” part of the four-song EP he’d been recording in Nashville. Another of the songs, “Best Day,” was based (loosely) on that long ago day off Key West when they lost their sangria and had to scrape together enough booze to get loaded in the sun.
With a nod to Corcoran, who’d given Frinzi a copy of Greatest Hits of the Lesser Antilles and was called to the stage for the moment, Frinzi played Tom Waits’s “Shiver Me Timbers.” Later, he played “Shoreline”—a poem Corcoran wrote in 1967 and Frinzi put to music.
By then Grisham and Utley were sitting in and after a short break, Frinzi reemerged as the Shrimper Dan Band, named after the man Billy Voltaire kills in “Cuban Crime of Passion.” Each year they pick an album to play in its entirety, and A1A was the winner.
Bartlett was called on for “Dallas.” Aaron Scherz took an emotional vocal on “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” The Shrimper Dan Band walked the line between reverence to source material and reliance on Buffett’s belief he descended from court jesters and not theologians. As the mistakes piled up, so too did the laughs.
Coral Reefers came and went and when Frinzi and his band were done, they handed the stage to Bill Wharton, the Sauce Boss. He makes gumbo during his set. Buffett immortalized him in the song “I Will Play for Gumbo.”
Saturday brought the Coral Reefer Band playing some Buffett songs, some Ralph MacDonaldIX songs, and some of their own songs. When they were finished, the Trop Rock Music Association Awards Show took center stage. James “Sunny Jim” White picked up male vocalist of the year. He’s the Mac McAnally of trop rock. He wins every year. Sunny Jim lives near Venice, Florida, though his musical address is Laid-back Lane, and once a month will play a show at the train station the circus used to leave from. The massive sliding doors were for the elephants to walk through.
Sunny Jim earned his beach cred playing the Hyatt on Grand Cayman. He worked his way into The Firm, the Tom Cruise flick based on the John Grisham book, and onto the soundtrack with a song called “Blame It on the Rum.” He worked his way into Buffett’s A Pirate Looks at Fifty by sneaking off to the Grand Cayman airport to try to say hello when Buffett landed the Hemisphere Dancer. When Buffett’s ride didn’t arrive in a timely manner, White offered a ride. When Jimmy and Jane needed a babysitter so they could go to dinner, White and his wife, who had twins about the same age as Sarah Delaney and Cameron, offered. Buffett returned the favor by sending Radio Margaritaville to the island to broadcast some live Sunny Jim music.
Howard Livingston & Mile Marker 24’s set included a brightly costumed dance number and a gag where he makes a margarita onstage, mixing it with a 1952 Johnson outboard and then auctioning the finished product off for charity. There’s a companion song about how it takes a while to get his Johnson going.
Out over the Atlantic, lightning flashed as a breeze picked up and carried Livingston’s song out past the Casa Marina and into the night. There were seats to be had at the poolside bars, and the hotel lobby was quiet. Around the corner, past the Waddell apartment that never did have a front porch swing, Louie’s Backyard (which did) was open and the Afterdeck was alive. “It’s the Parrot Head thing,” a waitress told a group looking for a table. While off in a corner, Chris Robinson and Keith Sykes caught up on the years, and remembered what used to be.
I He also has a file of Buffett-related clippings, mostly old newspaper stories, magazine features, and the first edition of the Coconut Telegraph. Then there’s the photocopy of a note from Buffett: “When I first moved to Key West and spent summers in town this library was a place to pass the days browsing and reading about the old days on this island for songs I’d eventually write—and it was air conditioned. If you ever need assistance to keep the air flowing, I’d be happy to help. Thanks for keeping me cool in those happy summers not so long ago and being my office before I could afford one.” He signed it October 22, 1987. Hambright said only once have they almost called in the favor.
II In 2006, when Buffett turned his tour sponsorship over to Margaritaville Tequila and LandShark Lager, Corona turned to . . . Kenny Chesney.
III M.A.F.I.A.: Musicians, Artists and Fans In Alliance
IV Somehow, Corcoran is sometimes mistaken for Buffett. “I’m six-five!” he says, retelling one story. Buffett is not.
V Though he did make a 2001 Coral Reefer Band reunion in South Carolina. Among other highlights, Keith Sykes did “Jimmy Bob,” his impersonation of Bob Dylan singing “Margaritaville.”
VI In December 2016, Forbes estimated Buffett’s net worth at $550 million, ranking him thirteenth on its list of America’s Wealthiest Celebrities, just ahead of Bruce Springsteen and Howard Stern and $10 million behind Madonna. “As long as people enjoy being drunk on a beach,” Forbes wrote, “expect the Margaritaville empire to expand.”
VII That happened. In Pasadena, California, in 1982. With Joan Baez.
VIII The corporate headquarters is now in Orlando.
IX MacDonald died of cancer in 2011.
