Before turning into the godfather of yacht rock, Jimmy Buffett launched seven principally unnoticed albums the place he got here off like a cross between an outlaw nation insurgent and a personality from a late 60s underground comedian e book, with songs criticizing materialism, non secular hypocrisy, and jingoistic politics, and extolling the glories of getting excessive, having as a lot intercourse as doable, and being a thorn within the facet of the legislation. How did Buffet go from fabulous furry freak brother to laid-back pope of the Parrotheads?
Long earlier than “Margaritaville” led to legions of Hawaiian-shirted followers embracing him as their guru, Buffett was a hirsute hippie troubadour struggling to make a reputation for himself in Nashville. He hit Music City on the proper time. A few years earlier, a countercultural sort like him would’ve been run out of city. But revolution was on the rise, and scruffy songpoets like Kris Kristofferson have been bringing people and rock influences and a brand new sort of angle to nation music.
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Mississippi-born, Alabama-bred Buffett was in thrall to the considerate balladry of Gordon Lightfoot on the time, however his deep Southern roots added a rustic spin to his sound. He received a take care of Barnaby Records, owned by pop star Andy Williams. The end result was 1970’s Down to Earth, a group of stripped-down, contemplative country-folk tunes analyzing the Vietnam battle (“The Missionary”), non secular zealotry (“The Christian”), drug dependancy (“Ellis Dee”), the persecution of hippies (“Truckstop Salvation”), and the nation’s tarnished popularity (“Captain America”).
Accounts of the album’s precise gross sales differ however all of them concur that Down to Earth didn’t surpass three figures. Buffett gamely minimize a follow-up, however the label allegedly misplaced the masters. “I never did think they’d lost it,” Buffett instructed American Songwriter many years later, “But I couldn’t really blame them.”
Bloodied however unbowed, Buffett eased all the way down to Key West, Florida, the place he discovered his groove. Working as a sailor, a avenue busker, and a barroom balladeer, he reveled within the laid-back way of life and let the ocean breeze of the Keys blow by his hair whereas he soaked up inspiration.
“It was still a Navy town,” he later instructed U.S. News & World Report. “It was a gay town. It was a hippie town. It was a local fisherman’s town. You want a melting pot? It was just that. It never ceased to give me ideas or…stories from which those first songs came.” Buffett’s supervisor despatched a few of these songs again to Nashville, the place they fell on sympathetic ears and earned the beach-bum bard a brand new take care of ABC/Dunhill.
It was 1973 and the outlaw nation motion had gained full steam with the rise of mavericks like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Tompall Glaser. Again the time appeared proper for Buffett’s left-of-center country-tinged tunes. He recorded A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean at Glaser’s studio in Nashville, nevertheless it was the beginning of what’s often known as the Key West interval of his discography.
Musically, solely “Cuban Crime of Passion” factors towards the tropical vibe Buffett was starting to brew, however the cowl’s fishing boat backdrop offered a visible trace of issues to come back. Buffett wrote the waltz-time character examine “Railroad Lady” along with his buddy Jerry Jeff Walker. Another portrait of a colourful traveler, “He Went to Paris,” could be lined by Waylon and hailed by Bob Dylan.
Buffett leans full bore on his hedonistic hippie facet with the casual-sex anthem “Why Don’t We Get Drunk,” which was method too suggestive for radio play (the title phrase is completed by “and screw”) however grew to become an underground favourite. Add the two-stepping account of an ill-conceived fuel station theft on “The Great Filling Station Holdup” and the grocery retailer shoplifting reminiscences of “Peanut Butter Conspiracy” (its title clearly impressed by the 60s psychedelic band of the identical title), and Buffett appeared like what would occur if Robert Crumb created an outlaw nation antihero for an early 70s situation of Zap Comix.
The subsequent album, 1974’s Living and Dying in ¾ Time, boasts one other boat-bedecked cowl and extra Key West-inspired tunes. Pickup vans and whaling boats share area within the lyrics, however the sonic framework is metal guitar- and harmonica-heavy, with nary a nod to the Caribbeana to come back just a few years down the road. The light, strings-swathed “Come Monday” edged into the Top 40, giving Buffett his first hit. “Brand New Country Star” is a wry, honky-tonking snapshot of a country-to-rock crossover, and the rocking “Saxophones” shoots the listener a large grin, blaming the dearth of the title instrument for the singer’s unpopularity on his Alabama house turf (a greasy sax part duly arrives to save lots of the day earlier than the tip of the tune).
The album closes with two covers that trace at Buffett’s influences: Texas country-folk cult hero Willis Alan Ramsey’s “Ballad of Spider John” and legendary beatnik monologist Lord Buckley’s spoken-word-plus-jazz shaggy canine story “God’s Own Drunk.” Word of Buffett’s ballsy twang reached all the best way to England, the place Bob Woffinden wrote in regards to the report within the New Musical Express, “He’s one of the new breed of country singers whose sense of a Larger Reality is helping to broaden the scope of Nashville country music.”
With a leg up from the success of “Come Monday,” the subsequent LP, A1A, climbed increased into the charts than any Buffett album earlier than it, however nonetheless didn’t produce a success single. Displaying some self-fulfilling prophetic powers, it opens with a large swipe at careerism, nation rocker “Makin’ Music for Money.”
Buffett occupies a seaside chair beneath a palm tree on A1A’s cowl, leaving little doubt about his way of life decisions, however musically he was nonetheless conserving it nation for essentially the most half. The push and pull pops to the floor on “Migration,” the place Buffett sings, “Got a Caribbean soul I can barely control/And some Texas hidden here in my heart.” But earlier than the tune is finished, Buffett is declaring allegiance to outlaw nation, “Listening to Murphey, Walker, and Willis sing me their Texas rhymes,” referencing Texas-based tunesmiths Michael Martin Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Willis Alan Ramsey.
“A Pirate Looks at 40” is each a refined step in direction of trop-pop and a significant inventive achievement. It’s an ideal instance of certainly one of Buffett’s songwriting superpowers – the power to make statements of dissolution and despair sound not simply bittersweet however nearly upbeat by contrasting them with a delicate musical lilt. Only in Buffettland might a tune with the next lyrics change into an arms-aloft fan fave that he can’t go away the stage with out enjoying to today.
Yes, I’m a pirate, 200 years too late
The cannons don’t thunder, there’s nothing to plunder
I’m an over-40 sufferer of destiny
Arriving too late, arriving too late
I’ve performed a little bit of smuggling, I’ve run my share of grass
I made sufficient cash to purchase Miami, however I pissed it away so quick
Hit singles or no, Buffett’s profile had risen to the purpose the place he was enlisted to supply the soundtrack for the 1975 modern Western movie Rancho Deluxe, starring Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston. The film was an epic flop, however the soundtrack album is an interesting curio within the Buffett catalog, an appropriately Western-flavored outing together with instrumentals and early variations of songs he’d revisit later.
Barnaby’s 1976 restoration and launch of Buffett’s second, “lost” recording, High Cumberland Jubilee, 5 years after its disappearance, was attributable to both a stroke of windfall or Buffett’s elevated prominence, relying in your degree of cynicism. Either method, it’s one other nice instance of his early 70s folk-rock really feel, flowing freely with hippie sagas. “The Hang Out Gang” views a commune crew of barefoot “gypsies” by the eyes of smallminded locals, and “Rockefeller Square” is an uptempo takedown of a kid of privilege slumming within the freaky underground.
But the correct follow-up to A1A, 1976’s Havana Daydreamin’, finds Buffett inside months of a crucial inflection level. On one hand, he’d seldom sounded extra like an outlaw nation archetype than on the good-time barroom stomp-along “My Head Hurts My Feet Stink and I Don’t Love Jesus,” a morning-after account of a wild night time of nation pickin’ and Olympic-level elbow bending.
At the identical time, the title monitor, with its breezy island sway and its account of Illicit actions in a tropical setting, looks as if the primary half of a layup that may be accomplished in ‘77 with the arrival of “Margaritaville.” Still, as late as mid ‘76, Toby Goldstein was making Buffett sound like the lost member of Dr. Hook, writing in Sounds that “Buffett’s humour follows alongside the traces of his album titles, as his tunes commit themselves to groupies, moms, and quaaludes.”
Havana Daydreamin’ neither lit up the album charts nor produced something like a profitable single. If his profession had ended proper there (which might not have been unthinkable if the winds hadn’t shifted so sharply), we’d have fun Jimmy Buffett as one of many nice, underrated nation outlaws. But the person who appeared to have spent the primary half of the 70s bent on turning into Florida’s reply to Kinky Friedman was only one cocktail and a busted flip flop away from an entire sea change.