Posted: June 9, 2008 7:36 pm
by conched
Rolling Stone October 4, 1979
Misadventures in Paradise
Keeping up with JIMMY BUFFETT in the land of sunshine, greenies, fins and bikinis
by CHET FLIPPO
HE IS DEDICATED AS EVER TO CERTAIN INDECENCIES AND SHALL WE
say reversible brain damage...he was among the first of the Sucking Chest Wound Singers to sleep on the yellow line...this throwback altarboy of Mobile, Alabama, brings spacey uup-country tunes strewn with forgotten crabtraps, Confederate memories, chemical daydreams, Ipana vulgarity, ukulele madness and, yes Larry, a certain sweetness. But there is a good deal to admire ini Buffett's inspired evocations from this queerly amalgamated past most Americans now share. What Jimmy Buffett knows is that our personal musical history lies at the curious hinterland where Hank Williams and Xavier Cugat meet with somewhat less animosity than the theoreticians would have us believe. ---TOM McGUANE,
from the liner notes to "A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean." 1973
SIX YEARS AFTER WHITE SPORT COAT PUT JIMMY BUFFETT on the musical map, he still resides in his curious hinterland, but he's moved it farther south. On this radiant summer afternoon, Buffett's bar-hopping in the Caribbean and taking on a glow that rivals the tropical sun. But his reverie is abruptly shattered by a chance remark:
"You know, Jimmy, you really oughta drink a lotta pineapple juice. It'll make your come taste sweet!"
The blond, bronze, pigtailed woman who says that to famed Caribbean rake Jimmy Buffett almost falls off her bar stool laughing as he blushes a pulsating scarlet through his tan. Joining in the merriment are assorted loungers, loafers, aging hippies and members of Buffett's band---the Coral Reefers---who are scattered around the veranda of L'Entrepont, a harbor-side bar on St. Barthelemy island. Buffett, fighting to regain composure, declines the pineapple-juice advice and signals for another "greenie" (Caribbean for Heineken.)
In the interest of various individuals' marital harmony, it should be noted that Buffett, 32, does not know the woman in question, although she, like most members of this expatriate community of young Americans, takes a proprietary interest in Jimmy. He is theirs---he used to run a little marijuana through the islands himself, and he lives the life he portrays in his sun-drenched, saltwater-dappled songs of Caribbean romance and adventure.
And the local drug smugglers---Lord, they swear by the man, and would no more make a run in their boats without Buffett cassettes on board than set sail without a few cases of greenies. And now, through a curious coincidence, Buffett has dropped anchor at St. Bart's, a smugglers haven. From L'Entrepont, I can see about two dozen seaworthy vessels besides Buffett's own fifty-two foot ketch, Euphoria II.
St. Bart's is a tiny, splendid island. Its population is packed with sunbaked American and European hippies with lots of money and no visible means of support. They sit around all day at places like the topless and sometimes bottomless beach over by the Hotel Jean Bart, drinking pineapple juice and greenies. At night they might slip their boats out into the opalescent waters to take care of business. No wonder Buffett is taking a break from recording his new album, Volcano, at George Martin's AIR Studios in Montserrat to rest and relax in St. Bart's. Ever since Jimmy tired of Key West's growing commercialism and left there in 1977 for Aspen (subletting his house to Hunter Thompson), he's been looking for a foothold in the Caribbean, and St. Bart's seems to be the ideal spot.
When I called him from New York about meeting in Montserrat, he'd suggested this stopover. His directions sounded simple enough: "Fly to St. Maarten and charter a boat or plane to St. Bart's. Wait for me at Le Select Bar." Still, I've been a little gun-shy of Buffett's sense of time and space since the first time I didn't interview him. It was in 1972 in Austin, Texas. Buffett was playing solo at a little folkie joint called Castle Creek and in those preplatinum days he and I were on the same pay scale and social stratem. He put on a brilliant show and I decided to give the boy a break and splash him acrosss the pages of this magazine. He peered at me through a haze of Lone Star beer and agreed to meet me the following afternoon. Five years later, we finally got around to the interview.
Times have not changed. During his recent summer tour, we made an abortive attempt to meet in Charlotte, North Carolina. I got there all right, only to discover that Buffett had mistaken Charlotte for Charleston, West Virginia. What I mean is, his songwriting is a little sharper than his grasp of geography. Still, I took him at his word this go-round and, after landing safely at St. Bart's grass airstrip, set off for Le Select Bar.
Le Select is a legendary bar in the Caribbean, a real crossroads for smugglers and other exotic charlatans. It's a Tawdry, open-air, whitewashed-stone joint with outhouses that would make a sewer rat gag, but the clientele makes the place, I suppose. Nakes hippie children crawl across the floor, hard-eyed hippied whisper conspiratorially in English, French and Spanish at the bar, dogs wander in and out. I settled in for a series of beers and, after the regulars huddled and decided I wasn't from Interpol, one of them volunteered the information that Buffett might well be on the island.
"Big party last night," one of them whispered to me. "Everybody on the island was f**** up. Lots of acid. Buy you a greenie?"
Four hours later, I began to wonder whether Buffett had perhaps...forgotten he'd promised to meet me. I mean, a guy who claims that his two major influences are the pirate Jean Lafitte and Mitch Miller might have something else on his mind other than meeting a reporter.
"I enjoy this life as a jester/Seems to keep me moving around," Buffett sings in "Stranded on a Sandbar," one of his new songs, and that's a pretty fair self-assessment. Much like Jerry Jeff Walker (who first introduced Buffett to Key West and the Caribbean way of thought), he's a rambling, good-timey troubadour who can also rock out when the spirit seizes him. His recent success seems both accidental and incidental; a journalism major in college, a failed Nashville songwriter, a former reporter for Billboard who writes witty and unconventional songs. Any guy who's penned such minor classics as "Why Don't We Get Drunk (and Screw)" and "My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink and I Don't Love Jesus" is maybe operating with his own particular vision of the universe.
Two more greenies, I decided, and then I'm leaving. Head for the beach by the Hotel Jean Bart for a couple of days, then fly back to New York and tell the boss, "Sorry, no story there. Didn't work out."
UNFORTUNATELY, MY ROUTE to the beach takes my by L'Entrepont and Buffett, spying me, flaps off the veranda in his ragged cutoffs and T-shirt, "Hey, where you been?" he asks solicitously as he hugs me. "We saw your plane come in. Siddown. Have a drink. Man, have you ever seen anything like this? The Coral Reefers are getting a tan for the first time in their lives!"
How can you get mad at a rogue like that? All you can do is slip into his Caribbean mind-set and wait to see what happens.
"Listen," says Buffett, "the album's going great. We'll go out to the boat after a while and listen to some tapes. Russ Kunkel is drumming on it and he's perfect for the group. On Monday, James Taylor's coming down to do some vocals with me and he's bringing a couple of his brothers. How you been?"
Beaming almost paternally, he looks around teh table at his Coral Reefers, scatters a sheaf of greenbacks across the table and says, "Let's go out to the boat."
Buffett pads barefoot down to the quayside, where his rubber dinghy is tied up. He cranks up the outboard engine and we thread our way past anchored yachts in the lowering light and board Euphoria II, a lovely, spotless craft. In the cabin, Buffett pops open fresh brews, puts on a cassette of rough cuts from Volcano, and sits down beneath a framed picture of himself in the Oval Office with Carter and Mondale. "That photo does wonders for customs inspectors," he says wryly, as "Survive" comes over the speakers. "Eat your heart out, Billy Joel!" he shouts. "Aw, I'm just kidding," he adds, although it is a Joel-like piano song.
"Survive," I say to him, is really a departure from previous Buffett songs, which tend to gather themselves in two distinct camps: sensitive ballads or clever wordplays. That pattern was set with his first ABC album, A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, which was one of the unheralded sensations of 1973, alternating ballads like "He Went to Paris" with funny, goofball songs such as "Why Don't We Get Drunk."
"I know what you mean," Buffett agrees. "Hell, I sat down one day and listened to Billy Joel's 52nd Street. I like Billy Joel, I think he's a good writer. But I just sat down and said to myself, 'Well, goddamn. I can do one of those if I want to.' That really made me get off my ass and look seriously at this whole project. So that's the way I made Volcano. I went back and listened to A White Sport Coat...and A1A, which was probably my most popular album, and I just said, 's***, I can write a Billy Joel song.'"
Volcano is a long way from Buffett's first album---the 324-copy-selling Down To Earth, released in 1970 by Barnaby Records (he didn't care; Barnaby gave him $500 to buy a new guitar.) Another Barnaby album and a series of records on ABC solidified his position in the early and mid-Seventies as the perfect composite of a rocking folkie: wittier than John Prine or Steve Goodman, sunnier than Jerry Jeff Walker and harder edged than the wimps (who know who they are.) He left a failed marriage in Nashville for the good life in Key West with Jerry Jeff (with whom he wrote "Railroad Lady" on the 1973's White Sport Coat, a song that became a country classic after Lefty Frizzell recorded it.) His commercial success was moderate, although his cult following was fanatic, and he soon drew exalted admirers like James Taylor and the Eagles. The breakthrough year was 1977: Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes sold platinum, "Margaritaville" went gold, Irving Azoff signed him to Front Line Management and he toured with the Eagles; 1978's albums, Son of a Son of a Sailor and the live You Had To Be There sold well. But Azoff himself has guaranteed that Volcano will be "Buffett's biggest album ever. I'll be greatly surprised if it's not Top Five."
"Volcano," the title song, comes on the boat's cassette deck and Buffett smiles at its Caribbean cross-rhythms. "I'm really proud of this," he says, fetching more greenies from his tiny refrigerator. "Actually Keith (Sykes, a Coral Reefer) and I sort of wrote this together. The Reefers went to a little bar in Montserrat one night and heard this great 'woop-wop' band and told me about it. So I went to the bar, Cafe La Capitain---there are bars and then there are bars and this one's a classic."
Was the woop-wop band sound similar to reggae?
"Oh no," he replies seriously. "Down in Montserrat they don't particularly like Rastafarians. It's a misconcerption that all Caribbean music is reggae. Most of the down-island stuff is more calypso, happy, good-time music. This band was more like a calypso kind of maranga. It had a guy who played a long blow pipe and a banjo-uke player. The next day, I had about four working titles for the album, but none of them really grabbed me, and I was wondering, 'What the ***** can I call this record?' Then I looked out the window at the volcano (Montserrat has an active volcano) and I went ding! I'm gonna call the album Volcano. So I said, 'Now we got to write a song called "Volcano."' I went to the studio and Keith was fooling around, playing a little Caribbean shuffle, that da da da. He said, 'You know, they play everything in F down here.' I said, 'Well, hell, why not? I've never written a song in F:' So we wrote it and I said, 'Well, hell, let's go get the guys from the bar, we need the woop-wop sound to make it authentic.' I had already written the chorus, 'I don't know where I'm gonna go when the volcano blows.' So we got the woop-wop band to come in and play and it was perfect. It just felt so goddamned natural."
Buffett rewinds the tape and plays "Volcano" again to make sure I catch teh references to Three Mile Island and the Ayatollah. "You're serious, for once," I observed.
"Hell, it wasn't planned," he assures me. "I had this nice melody and I wanted some clever lyrics. What I do best is write catchy lyrics, and with Three Mile Island and everything else that's happening it just worked out perfect.
"When I played it back for the locals, they got off on it. Even the cooks at AIR came out of the kitchen to listen, so I knew that I had hooked a little bit of authenticity. It was fun for once to take some shots at real things like Three Mile Island."
He turns the volume up and we go out on deck to watch the moonrise, which apparently is a big deal with St Bartains. The pungent odor of marijuana wafts over the harbor and we stretch out on the tech deck and Jimmy takes a long toke on a joint. "Ahh," he says, "when the moon comes up you're gonna hear this bay howl." Amazingly, when the china white moon rises, there are wolflike howls emanating from various boats. You can see distant hands cupped around glowing joints and hear glasses clinking.
"Is this paradise for you, Jimmy?" I ask lazily from my prone position on deck. He replies, laughing softly: "It's close, eh?
"I may buy land here," he says. "There're two acres for sale next to David Rockefeller's house. s***, I may buy them. Why not?" Hard to argue with that.
"Let's get some pizza," he says. "There's a great place here that just serves champagne and pizza. Ahh, I can't stand it. What a tough life."
We cruise back, tie up the dinghy at the dock and start hiking up the hill from the harbor, past Le Select, from which issues Buffett's song "The Captain and the Kid." The Select regulars, who are beyond cool, look out and holler, "Hey, Jim, howzit?" It seems they will do anything to prove how hip they are and how it's not a big deal that Jimmy Buffett hangs out on their island. They passed their ultimate test a few months before, when the Rolling Stones discovered St. Bart's and moved in for a spell. Cool prevailed.
Buffett gives the regulars a perfunctory wave, plucks a jasmine flower and sniffs it. "Oh," he says, "just think. I could be recording in New York City. Match this, 55th Street." "Fifty-second Street," I correct him. Buffett laughs.
I decide that I like him: "Yer all right, Buffett. I understand you're accidentally rich." He laughs again. As we enter teh Momo-Pi-Polo tavern, all the locals gather around us, except for two swarthy guys in the corner, who seem to be closing a major deal. And the witnesses cannot give Jimmy enough attention.
"Last night," Buffett says with a sigh as the first bottle of champagne arrives, "we drank twenty-five bottles of champagne in here and never got around to eating. And that was just the beginning. Lord. I got to settle down. I got a record to finish.
"*****," I say. We toast each other. Blond American hippie women pop out of the woodwork. Good Christ, St. Bart's should be declared illegal. "A long night tonight, eh Jimmy?" I ask. He just rolls his eyes.
About $200 later, we leave Momo-Pi-Polo. "Tell you what," Buffett says, "while you're here, I really oughta show you Le President. It's a wild disco out in the hills, a great place." We locate Buffett's rented Mini-Moke, a bastardized open-air Jeep. He revs it up to about seventy-five mph and off we roar down a dirt canyon road. The owner of Le President welcomes him wiht open arms and starts playing calypso disco; local verions of "Stayin Alive" and such. Within a half-hour, the place fills up with Anglos. Jimmy tires of the excessive attention before I do and we retire to the bar to talk some more about Volcano.
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