Author’s photo
Take a little Margaritaville home, Margaritaville Store, Hollywood, Florida.
He does these huge shows and people are passionately committed to the shows. In essence, I’m only interested in thinking about him as someone who wrote some really great songs. “Margaritaville” is a nice song. People will put something down because it gets so popular. If he recorded that now, and it came out, people would really, really like it. It’s a nice story and there’s nothing in it that’s dated. It’s got this wistful feel. It’s like a party song that’s not a party song.
—Dave Rawlings, singer-songwriter-guitarist
So we return to once upon a time, to sleepy little Hollywood, Florida, and a scrappy lot across the street from low-slung, coral-colored motels with names like the Riptide, the Neptune, and the Marlin. Old Florida.
A Sunoco station opened on that lot in 1959 and then closed in the early seventies, a victim of the oil crisis. Pinched between A1A and the Intracoastal Waterway, a man named Russell T. Kouth bought the property in 1974.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Kouth made his money as a pilot flying Coppertone banners over South Florida beaches. On a dare from a restaurant owner, Kouth built a bar and restaurant by hand on the lot, opening Le Tub in 1975, but fully assembling it over four years from scrap and debris he found jogging daily on the beach.
Washed up boogie boards and frayed ropes, water skis and glass floats hang from the walls and ceilings. Outside, along A1A, he marked his place with bright yellow toilets and bathtubs he turned into planters. A yellow toilet seat near the entrance says “Seat Yourself.” The floor is uneven, the ceiling low in some places, high in others—as if Kouth had been waiting for a level to wash ashore and then gave up.
Le Tub was there in 1976 when Jimmy Buffett and Tom Corcoran guided the Euphoria down the Intracoastal on her maiden voyage to Coconut Grove, where she’d live while Buffett set to work making Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.
And Le Tub is still there today, across the street from a 17-story, 349-room, nearly $200 million beachfront testament to the allure of an ever-expanding Margaritaville: the Margaritaville Beach Resort.
John Cohlan’s official title is CEO of Margaritaville Holdings, but in keeping with company ideology, he’d prefer a more casual approach. He’s Buffett’s friend and business partner for twenty years. Buffett once bought him an antique dime, had it framed, and included a note that said while it wasn’t the first dime they’d made, it might be the first dime ever made.
Cohlan and Buffett share an office in Palm Beach. The day Anheuser-Busch sent a team with mockups of LandShark Lager’s packaging, Buffett happened to be around. Cohlan told the group they should take the designs and the bottle in to show Buffett, who signed the bottle before the beer guys got in the car and went to the airport.
A few months later, they were on the phone to work over marketing. “Normally our history had been, with corporate partners, it took them a while to really get the DNA of the way to talk about this brand,” Cohlan says. “They call me up and they say here’s our idea, it’s ‘Let the Fin Begin.’ ”
Cohlan loved it. “I said, ‘I gotta tell you something. We’ve been doing this a while, we’ve been doing this for ten years, that’s about as good as anybody’s ever come back with,’ ” Cohlan says.
On the other end of the line, Dave Peacock, the president of Anheuser-Busch laughed. “He says, ‘John, don’t you know the derivation of that?’ ” Cohlan says.
He did not.
When Buffett signed the bottle, he signed it, “Let the Fin Begin—Jimmy Buffett.” The Anheuser-Busch team got in the car, looked at the bottle, and said, “There’s the tagline.”
When Cohlan called Buffett to tell him about the ad campaign, Buffett said, “That’s good. That’s really good.”
“And I said, ‘Jimmy, it is good. You know why it’s good?’ ”
He did not.
He didn’t remember. He’d just scratched it on the bottle and didn’t think twice. He’d been doing that all his life, from the earliest days of his career. Four decades on, there’s still nobody who understands who Jimmy Buffett is and what Jimmy Buffett does better than Jimmy Buffett.
In 2009, when the Miami Dolphins renamed their stadium LandShark Stadium for a year, there were Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band playing “Margaritaville” and a rewritten “Fins” (“you’re at the only game in town”) for fans and season-ticket holders in front of a banner that read . . . Let the Fin Begin.
“It was little details about dealing with vendors, dealing with promoters,” Corcoran says. “Dealing with different concert halls. Dealing with sound systems. And when he got somebody who was good, he hung onto them, and if they started to screw up, which happened when they were partying too much and they took it for granted, he knew. He was very detail oriented, and so it was a growth thing. He just paid attention to shit. And that’s the way he was on the boat.”
By any reliable measure of pop stardom, Buffett shouldn’t have the career he’s had. “Margaritaville” was the fourteenth-biggest hit of 1977 according to Billboard, and that’s about all he got. He should be going on at 3 p.m. in the middle of a state fair opening for whatever Mike Love is passing off as the Beach Boys.
Or he should have scaled down, written more carefully detailed ballads, and played the theaters John Prine and Todd Snider play. “Most people like Jimmy Buffett have lives like mine,” Snider says. “He’s really an exception. His is a major exception to the troubadour rule—especially the one-man troubadour just trying get the job of guy-who-doesn’t-have-another-job and sings songs.”
In the early days of the Internet, a number of sites built by Parrot Heads for Parrot Heads emerged. One, the Church of Buffett, Orthodox, announced Buffett as “chief poet, insofar as he has best espoused a philosophy of cheerful hedonism.” A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, A1A, and Havana Daydreamin’ constituted the “spiritual core” of the “holy canon.” Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes was problematic because it held the “apostasy” of “Margaritaville.” Less than enamored with “the real time Jimmy” for his turn toward commercialism, they anointed Snider “the rightful heir to the title of Chief Poet, Cheerful Hedonism division.”
“If I ever had to defend myself to the Church of Buffett,” Buffett told Time in 1998, “I would only say that the bitterest artists I know are those who had the chance to jump through the hoop and chose not to take it. They stayed on as coffeehouse singers. But I jumped through not knowing what was on the other side. And when I got there, I had to deal with it. It wasn’t ‘happily ever after.’ I was just getting started.”
Since 1990, Buffett’s played to more than 10 million fans and grossed more than $400 million touring. Between 2000 and 2009, he was the tenth-highest-grossing act in the country, putting him in the company of Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, U2, and Elton John.
They all enjoy their money, but there’s no Thunder Roadside Inn. It’s not Bruce’s style, but even if it were, what would that brand be? How do you capture the complications of finding your way into a meaningful adult life while struggling with unresolved issues resulting from a conflicted relationship with your father? What’s that hotel room look like?
Margaritaville looks good on a cruise ship and in shopping malls and on the Home Shopping Network. Margaritaville plays. It’s a 305-acre resort on the western edge of Walt Disney World; a hotel and casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and an escape in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Margaritaville is a $130 throw pillow; a $300 Margaritaville Key West Frozen Concoction Maker; a $12 bottle of tequila. It’s bicycles, hammocks, bedding, luggage, candle scents, scratch-off lottery tickets, online games, and dozens of other products. Cohlan says they move more than three million cases of LandShark a year—and not just to people who remember when. There’s a college ambassador program taking the brand on to campuses around the country.
Margaritaville.com has become a one-stop lifestyle warehouse where travel stories mix with drink recipes and Buffett’s tour dates. In 2015, when Buffett decided to play the small theater inside the San Carlos Institute on Duval Street, fans were asked to go to Margaritaville.com and vote on the set list. In 2016, Buffett had a list of songs the band hadn’t played in a decade compiled, and fans could vote on which of those they’d like to hear. In both cases, Margaritaville expanded its database of potential customers.
The Margaritaville Café in Las Vegas is one of the highest-grossing restaurants in Sin City. The Margaritaville Café in Orlando is one of the highest-grossing restaurants in America’s family destination. Margaritaville has opened in the Mall of America and in a mall in Syracuse, New York, called Destiny USA.
There are hats and shoes and T-shirts, sunglasses (featuring Margaritaville Polarized Technology), and yes, flip-flops. There are vacation packages to Bimini and the Gulf Coast, and if you’re wondering what to wear, the Margaritaville Apparel Collection announces itself as “The Authentic Expression of the Casual Lifestyle.” The hat, with a bottle opener screwed under the brim says, “Chill: Est. 1977.”
Author’s photo
Take a little Margaritaville home, Margaritaville Store, Hollywood, Florida.
“I often say, even though we don’t have an airline, what Margaritaville is with all these different businesses we’re in, is we’re a travel company,” Cohlan says. “Because everything we do is sort of about taking you away, in one form or another. Transporting you.”
From wherever you are, to wherever you dream of being. By late 2016, Margaritaville was approaching $2 billion of capital investment. Fifteen million people a year visit the restaurants, hotels, casinos, and timeshare resorts. They’re doing $1.5 billion a year in sales, and Cohlan sees nothing but clear skies, full blenders, and continued growth.
Why?
Because of Jimmy Buffett.
“Who he is and what he stands for,” Cohlan says. “There is no Tommy Bahama. There really is a person behind this whole idea of Margaritaville.”
And as that guy approached his seventieth birthday, in 2016, he was as active as ever. He was in and out of Cuba, including a quick set strummed for U.S. Embassy employees before heading out to see the Rolling Stones. He played some songs in Augusta, Georgia, during the Masters and hit golf balls barefoot into some undisclosed bay. NFL star J. J. Watt sat in with the band on percussion one night in Texas. Jerry Jeff Walker opened for him outside Dallas, and when he played “Mr. Bojangles,” and the party crowd grew restless with a ballad, Jerry Jeff promised it’d be the last of those in the set.
Buffett flew to Tahiti and then to Easter Island. He played the Ryman Auditorium for the first time—sitting in with Jenny Lewis on a Traveling Wilburys’ song. He took Roy Orbison’s part and had a bedazzled marijuana-leaf sport coat made for the occasion.
He readied a musical, Escape to Margaritaville, for a 2017 debut in San Diego with eyes on New York and Broadway in 2018. He recorded a new Christmas album, ’Tis the SeaSon, to celebrate his birthday. It included, finally, that cover of “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” he’d talked about so long ago. They rewrote “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for the Parrot Heads: “2 tattoos and a purple parrot in a palm tree.”
He sailed and surfed and fished and wrote touching tributes to friends Glenn Frey and Jim Harrison—after each passed away. “Margaritaville” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and cited by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case regarding the regulation of tattoo parlors in Key West. Wrote the court: “But the singer in ‘Margaritaville’—seemingly far from suffering embarrassment over his tattoo—considers it ‘a real beauty.’ ”
Buffett played big shows, and he played little shows just for fun. He recruited his old friend from Rancho Deluxe, Jeff Bridges, to reprise his most famous role, the Dude, and appear onstage as the animated Clairvoyant Coconut. Far-out, man.
Buffett celebrated his thirty-ninth wedding anniversary, and played with Paul McCartney at a Hamptons fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton. He hurt his leg surfing, and he went to Paris—again. He went to Japan to play a few shows on military bases, and posted photos to Facebook from the cockpit of his plane as he descended into Alaska to refuel on the way. On the way home, he stopped in Hawaii to step back into his role as Frank Bama on the television series Hawaii Five-0. A few weeks later, he was fishing in the Bahamas.
He and Jane made their annual appearance at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, and hosted a few fund-raisers that made society columns. Jane mostly stays out of the spotlight, as do their two youngest, Sarah Delaney and Cameron. Savannah Jane followed her dad into the lifestyle business, working on travel documentaries, spinning tunes, and generally seeming to have a good time, all the time.
In some ways, 2016 wasn’t any different for Buffett than 1974, when the sum of his destinations and adventures seemed impossible to fit into a single calendar year.
And just as that calendar flipped, there was Buffett on St. Barts, singing “Auld Lang Syne” with McCartney at a party hosted by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. A few weeks later, Buffett was peddling his bike around Key West as the news broke that the Westin Key West Resort and Marina, just a few blocks from the Chart Room, would soon become the Margaritaville Key West Resort and Marina.
Ever forward, ever toward that “Ever Elusive Future”—to steal the title of the song he wrote for Jurassic World. That was in 2015, when sixty-eight-year-old Jimmy Buffett became a meme, the guy swooping in to save the margaritas from a table outside Isla Nublar’s Margaritaville Café as dinosaurs were swooping in for the kill.
That Jurassic World was, aside from a vehicle for Chris Pratt’s biceps and charms, a lesson in the dangers of soulless corporatism didn’t matter. Margaritaville might be corporate, but can it ever be soulless when Jimmy Buffett’s at the helm? People still like Jimmy Buffett—always have.
He continues to “flit and flit,” as Twain wrote and Buffett quoted not that long ago. He continues to smile a smile that hasn’t changed in decades, a smile that says “Can you believe I got away with this?” Mac McAnally calls what they do each night on a stage a “rolling ball of goodwill,” and Buffett and John Cohlan have figured out how to spin that into something people will pay for time and again.
It’s a funny thing, because if you’re looking for Jimmy Buffett, you won’t often find him in a Margaritaville Café. “Ever on the wing,” to quote Twain once more, you’ll find him far from the herd, possibly riding BUFIT ONE, the air corridor south from Palm Beach International Airport, and then banking toward some remote piece of beach.
He’s a daydream, Jimmy Buffett. He gets you through the workday, through that job you took so you can buy the house, the one that needs a little work. Maybe a new deck for the grill. He’s a dream in place of the dream you set aside because the house was the smart play, the safe play. And the backyard’s nice. You can host your friends, fire up the Frozen Concoction Maker, have a few laughs. Maybe at night, after the kids are asleep, you sneak a joint out there and stare at the stars and imagine what’s beyond the Bed, Bath & Beyond. There must be something beyond the Bed, Bath & Beyond.
Jimmy Buffett’s out there. Turn on Radio Margaritaville and exhale.
Has there been a cost for Buffett? Sure. Well, maybe.
“I don’t think it’s taken away from Jimmy as an artist, or making really great music, but it has commercialized it,” Utley says. “And that’s what it is. Musicians don’t do it as often; actors do it all the time.”
It’s harder to play the ballads—the songs that mean the most. In Las Vegas in 2013, “Colour of the Sun,” a pretty little song about the things that endure, from Songs from St. Somewhere, was treated as a bathroom and beer break. If Buffett noticed, he didn’t say anything other than “You throw a great party. We’re glad to be your band.”
Remember what Jim Harrison said in Tarpon? About seeking out those jolts of electricity that make you feel alive. They live in the future, but they connect to the past.
In September 2015, the city of Pascagoula dedicated a bridge to Jimmy Buffett. It’s a small bridge on Beach Boulevard, but it’s a bridge.
On a blistering afternoon, the shore filled with boats, the beach filled with fans, the cheeseburgers were cheap, the T-shirts custom, and the LandShark cold. Buffett piloted his seaplane over the scene, landed on a nearby lake, and got a police escort to the stage. “I loved riding behind the police,” Buffett joked. “It used to be the other way.”
He and McAnally played a few songs inspired by Buffett’s youth. They played “Margaritaville.” And just when it seemed they were done, Buffett ran back onstage for one more. Alone, he played “The Captain and the Kid,” a song that almost never makes the set list at the big shows, and he got to play it next to a bridge that crossed Baptiste Bayou, which runs right up to his grandparents’ old backyard and the ghost of a crab pier and a long-ago moment between grandfather and grandson.
After he left, fans took pictures next to the mural on the bridge Buffett had stopped to sign. “Start Here,” he wrote. It’s worth looking back sometimes. “Let’s just say, the odds were long,” Buffett said of his career.
When Bob Dylan was asked in 2009 who his favorite songwriters were, he said Jimmy Buffett (citing “Death of an Unpopular Poet” and “He Went to Paris,” specifically) and sent the world scrambling to figure out if Dylan was joking or not because 1) he’s Bob Dylan and 2) Margaritaville candle scents. But why wouldn’t Bob Dylan like Buffett? Song-and-dance men recognize each other.
“Waylon, when he was still alive, I saw him out at a studio and he talked about ‘He Went to Paris,’ ” Utley says, “how he loved that song. Most people, most of the acts never recorded his songs, it’s just they listened to him, and they liked what they heard.”
Ben Jaffe, of the Preservation Hall and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, was standing in the audience when Buffett and the Reefers played a fund-raiser in New Orleans in 2016. He was standing next to a rock star the world would expect to cite David Bowie, Springsteen, or a thousand other musicians before even thinking about Jimmy Buffett. Jaffe says Win Butler, of the Arcade Fire, turned to him and said, “He tells personal stories without being overly complicated.”
Which is a hell of a lot harder than it looks.
McAnally once did a songwriting seminar with Jesse Winchester and someone asked Winchester the key to writing great songs. “You just try to say what matters,” Winchester said, “and try not to say anything else.”
In the middle of the lobby of the Margaritaville Beach Resort in Hollywood Beach, there’s a towering electric-blue flip-flop. Inspired by Jeff Koons’s three-ton sculpture Tulips,I it stands on end. Its strap has broken free. It’s blown out. There’s a pop-top next to it and the sculpture quickly became a popular stop for family vacation photos and selfies.
At one end of the lobby sits JWB Prime Steak & Seafood, Buffett’s first fine-dining option. At the other end, the corporate mantra—“No Passport Required”—welcomes guests to the front desk. Seating alcoves are crowned by lyrics from “Margaritaville.” The Margaritaville Coffee Shop offers an “Escape from the Daily Grind.”
The body pillow on the bed reads “Changes in Attitude” or “Changes in Latitude”; parrots are faintly embossed on the comforters. An old photo of Tom Corcoran’s, of a sailboat at sea, is on the cover of the hotel guide. The stationery features a map of the Caribbean and the pencils read, “Mother, Mother Ocean.” The “Do Not Disturb” sign says, “License to Chill.” The ice bucket is Margaritaville branded (“Destination Relaxation”) and the minibar is set to “Island Provisions.” The “Nibblin’ on Sponge Cake” snack pack is $50. The “Wastin’ Away Again in Margaritaville” drink pack is $110 and includes your choice of one bottle of Margaritaville Tequila or rum (with a choice of flavors), twelve LandShark Lagers, and mixers.
In Las Vegas, the 5 O’Clock Somewhere Bar sits in the middle of a casino lit by overhead fixtures built to resemble sliced limes. In Nashville, that old half-sunken shrimp boat from the cover of Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, the Good Luck, has been resurrected and floats happily in a painting on a wall. You can order a Cheeseburger in Paradise or the Volcano nachos. The Euphoria, once Buffett’s prize possession, his insurance policy against an unstable world, is now a daiquiri. “One Particular Harbour” built with all the beauty and peace Tahiti had to offer Buffett in the tumultuous early-eighties, is also a bank of slot machines.
When he sings that song—and he sings it every night of his working life just the same as “Margaritaville”—and he reaches the lyric about how he’ll one day disappear, he pauses for a slight beat and says, “But not yet.”
Onstage in Las Vegas in 2013, Buffett talked about Willie Nelson coming to play a little surf bar in Montauk, New York. Buffett jumped onstage with Willie for a song, and they hung out on Willie’s bus.
“Did you inhale?” Utley said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
But the point of the story was this: Willie told Buffett his band had been worried. Willie had turned eighty and they were wondering what would happen when he retired. “And Willie went, ‘Retire? From what?’ ” Buffett said.
Good point, but nothing lasts forever. Jimmy Buffett has taken a little song he wrote in a few minutes, carried it around the world, and then turned it into a world of its own.
He’s played it in football stadiums and basketball arenas, and he’s played it on beaches and in bars and on boats. In 2015, “Margaritaville,” and the rest of a set from Houston, was beamed to the International Space Station.
Buffett’s found verses and lost verses and written entirely new verses. After he fell off the stage in Australia in 2011, he added one that left him recovering in Hawaii with some sake, some yoga, and a little weed.
For forty years, Jimmy Buffett has played “Margaritaville” for anyone who’s wanted to hear it because it’s allowed him to be a version of himself he could only ever have dreamed of—the person millions themselves dream of being. It’s bought him everything he’s ever wanted and allowed him to move with style around the globe in much the same way Hemingway did after his myth-defining years in Key West.
But maybe one day Jimmy Buffett will get to the end of “One Particular Harbour” and let the song fade out with no “but not yet,” no promise of another show. Maybe he’ll even end the set there, walk off stage, and that’ll be that. There’ll be rumors. The Coconut Telegraph, digital and faster than ever, might catch a glimpse of him back in Moorea, or in Le Select. Maybe he’ll grow a big David Letterman beard and tell stories at the end of some bar he owns but hasn’t put his name on.
He can always play Baz Bar on St. Barts, where photos from earlier performances are taped behind the bar and where, when he sits in with the band, word travels fast and the waterfront fills with locals and tourists alike.
Seems unlikely, but it could happen.
A few years ago, in Portland, he played “He Went to Paris,” and it was special. Not every song is when you’ve been playing them as long as Buffett has. The wear and tear of all those years can show on a song. But the pros, the really good ones, they find a way to get to what made a song great.
Buffett got there that night and held an arena quiet while he unfolded a story that moves closer to his own with each passing year. As he reached the conclusion—“But I’ve had a good life all the way”—the arena’s silence broke into applause, and then cheers. He laughed a little.
“Thanks,” he said.
I Parrot Head Steve Wynn purchased Tulips for $33.7 million and put it on one of his Las Vegas properties.