Jimmy Buffett: Misadventures in Paradise
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 up-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 in 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. Barthélémy 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. 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 50-foot ketch, Euphoria II.
St. Bart’s is a tiny, splendid island. Its populace 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 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’d called him from New York about our 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 stratum. He put on a brilliant show and I decided to give the boy a break and splash him across 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-around 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. Naked hippie children crawl across the floor, hard-eyed hippies 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 fucked 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 me 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 the table at his Coral Reefers, scatters a sheaf of greenbacks across the table and says, ”Let’s go out to the boat.”
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