Jimmy Buffett: Escape Artist, Incorporated.

Can't Fish MK Two. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Torn Between Two Lovers by Mary McGregor. And why would I play you that slice of you know, I've never actually heard the song before cheese. Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February fourteenth, nineteen seventy seven, And that was the day a son of a son of a sailor released a song called Margueriteville and changed

his life forever. On this episode, drug trafficking, a badass so bad is still walking tall Bono, dodging bullets, music History's Escape artist Jimmy Buffer.

lines of coke than Jim Harrison's one good eye. Jimmy Buffett's early Nashville records proved that he was Merle Haggard. No Johnny paycheck. Jimmy Buffett knows where Bumfardo is buried. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but not by much. Also, who's Bumfardo you ask? We'll get to that. Jimmy Buffett, the Jimmy Buffett that I thought I knew, the one pedaling not just songs, but margarita's and cheeseburgers, and T shirts and beer and yes,

even lost shakers of salt. That dude's past is not only fascinating, it directly explains how this super charming, legendarily mustachioed, pretty ok seventy singer songwriter was able to create a billion dollar empire out of escapism. Because before we made it, Jimmy Buffett had to escape himself. Key West aka Bone Island, where Florida runs out of road, where the ocean laps pink and blue scaffolding for smugglers nowhere left to run.

If you've made it this far, to the absolute end of American Earth, they're likely not going to catch you. You've escaped, Except that Jimmy Buffett wasn't running away from anything. Instead, he was running towards something. He just didn't know it at the time, nineteen seventy two, the smugglers were brazen. This was Key West in the early seventies. It was

a brazen kind of town. And Jimmy Buffett watched drug traffickers unload the dope straight off the boats onto the shrimp ducks right there in the middle of the day. It was so hot it felt like the sun had a twin. Jimmy was a shrimper, he'd grown used to the heat, but this was something else. He stood there, twenty four years old, recently divorced, sweating bullets, long hair, bushy mustache, cut off jeans, nothing else, contemplating the dope

on the dock. There was a lot of money in those packages, more money than he was earning from shrimping, and more than he was seeing pedaling songs over at the chart room at night Z. Far more money than he'd ever made in Nashville. The Giant's fist came through the half open passenger side window, quick landing hard on the side of Jimmy Buffet's publicis's face. Jimmy struggled drunkenly to get the car started. The giant now had the public's head cradled in his bear like paw and was pulling,

slamming the man's face into the window. Jimmy fumbled with the ignition he was wasted. That was the problem. He and the publicist from BBC Records, the label had signed him on account of some natural recordings, were out celebrating. They had just tied one on at Roger Miller's King of the Road Motoring, and they stumbled out blotto. Then Jimmy jumped up on top of a park Cadillac, this giant of a man's Cadillac, apparently, But this wasn't any

ordinary giant. Jimmy would later learn that this was Beauford Pusser. If Jimmy Buffett was, as he claimed in one of his songs, God's own drunk, then Baufford Pusser was God's own badass. As the former sheriff of McNairy County and Tennessee, he'd survived two assassination attempts, He'd been shot stabbed too many times to count. His wife got murdered in Old Bufford here when at her killers were a determined vengeance

that was and still is the stuff of legend. Baufford Pusser was so bad ass they made one movie, two sequels in a TV show after him Walking Tall. Hell, they're still making movies about him with the rock. But at this moment, Baufford Pusser was training his vengeance on Jimmy Buffett, and Jimmy Buffett thankfully got his car and gear and escape. He escaped. Not just the violent clutches

of Beaufford Pusser, but the soul crush of Nashville. Jimmy arrived in Music City after a short stint in New Orleans, where he saw firsthand how to entertain people hell bent on losing themselves in music. It was like that back home in Mississippi too. It was like that all over, he imagined. But Nashville, Nashville was tough. As a songwriter, Jimmy didn't learn much aside from the fact that Nashville

didn't think he'd fit in. He was forced to pick up work as a music journalist, penning notices for Billboard magazine, and he did learn from his time at Billboard, not necessarily how to write or report. Instead, he learned that the music business is designed to steal from artists, and that the music business is as craven as the smuggling business off the coast of Key West. Different commodities, different deves,

but crimes. Nonetheless, in the music business, the artists are the commodity, and like shrimp off the coast of the Keys, there is always more to harvest. So if Jimmy Buffett as an artist was going to be treated as a commodity, then he was at least going to control the commodity. It was a valuable lesson, except the reality was harsh, because there's no value in controlling something nobody wants to buy.

So Jimmy split Nashville, but not without a record contract, and landed in Key West, where he quickly learned that he was the only product in town. Here, songwriters were scarce,

but writers were not. After locking down a steady ish gig at the Charthhouse, where he played for tips and goodwill and well, let's face it, the sheer fun of it, Jimmy quickly fell in with Key West's literary crowd, guys like the celebrated author Tom mcguain, Jim Harrison, the future author of Legends of the Fall, the novelists and poet Richard Brodigan who'd been sought out by the Beatles sometime earlier, and Carl Hyason, who would go on to write Stripped,

Bad Monkey and a host of other bestsellers. Aside from writing, these guys endeavored to drink all the alcohol and do all the drugs Key West could hold. They formed an unofficial social club called Club Mandible, their mandate to inebriate in Fornice and Jimmy Buffett fit right in time skipped

along hazily in Key West. Nineteen seventy two turned into nineteen seventy three, and Jimmy Buffett sang songs at night, worked sometimes during the day, and he wrote when he was inspired, making his way back and forth to Nashville to record in her studios. His third album, seventy three is A White Coat and a Pink Crustacean was more island than country. It wasn't novelty, but it was novel and as such hard for the record label to find

an audience for money was tight. Jimmy wondered what it would be like a guy he knew who told him he could make twice as much as he got paid

for his last record on just one run. Buying that Boston Whaler would be no problem and he could just escape drift, Forget it all the grind and the unending pressure of proving to the world that you have something to say, something different, something worth hearing, and the mind fuck of knowing that that same thing that makes you different, so worthy of listening to, is the same thing that

makes it so hard for people to hear you. It was enough to want to strip it all off, leave it lying on the beach, step out onto that smuggler's boat, and never pick up a guitar again. Jimmy Buffett was lost at sea, literally stranded in a tiny dinghy that had been poorly nodded to a bigger boat, the boat that the party had been on last night. Jimmy went to sleep in the dinghy and woke up floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by nothing but

water and horizon in every direction above. The sun baked down upon him, and there was nowhere to go. Which way was home? Which way spelled death? Jimmy didn't know. Then from far off, Jimmy heard it the buzz of the cigarette boat's engine. Traffickers. Jimmy flagged them down, and thankfully Jimmy knew them so incredibly they slowed when they saw him, and, despite being in the middle of a run, pointed Jimmy toward home. Jimmy had had a hell of a run. In the four years since he arrived in

Key West. He released four full length albums, A White Sports Code in a Pink Crustacean, Living and Dying in Three to four Times, a one a and Havana dreaming. He'd scored the excellent documentary Tarpin, filmed in Key West. It's about Key West Flats Tarpin fishermen, many of them as friends, and he provided the songs for the soundtrack to a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges, Rancho Deluxe, which was scripted by Jimmy's Key West buddy, the novelist

Tom mcguain. That six albums in four years plus touring, if there was such a thing as island time, Jimmy Buffett's version included hustle. It was that entrepreneurial instinct Jimmy learned back in Nashville, and prior to that from his family upbringing, being the son of a son of a sailor. As he said, no one was coming to save his career.

It was just him and he was close. If he wanted to escape the Nashville grind, if he wanted to escape the prospect of living a life in the straight world with a nine to five, if he didn't want to spend the rest of his days singing in bars for tips, hustling one nighters on college campuses, or worse, propped up against the beach bar yammering on about what could have been. Then something needed to change. Jimmy Buffett needed to turn his hustle into record buyers. Back in

Key West, everything was changing. Bumfardo was missing the local fire chief, the one who somehow could afford a Cadillac on a fireman's salary, a lime green Cadillac, a car that he paired with his fire engine red suits and his rose colored sunglasses. Florida's Governor, Reuben aske You had had enough of lacks attitude on drug trafficking and put

together a drug squad operation Counch. When state narcotics agents swept through town in the fall of nineteen seventy five, no one was surprised when Bumfardo got popped, along with nineteen others suspected drug dealers. Bum Fardo was convicted for dealing coke and pot, but before his sentencing, he disappeared, vanished. No one knew where he was. Some Key West residents told themselves bum grabbed his go bag and split for South America, but most believed something else. Bumfardo was shark

bait and gone. Maybe gone. Jimmy Buffett laughed it off, wearing a wears Bumfardo shirt on stage until he was pulled aside by a local in the know, and this fellow quietly told Jimmy that if he himself didn't like the idea of being chummed for bol Sharks, then he'd be wise to never wear that shirt again. After Bum disappeared,

everything changed in Key West. With the drug dealers off the docks, the city instituted a revitalization project in nineteen seventy six, and downtown was cleaned up and a new tourism marketing plan brought in college kids, gays, and even vacationing families. There was now a strange air of overt commercialism blanketing Jimmy Buffet's adopted hometown as he set out to make his next record, Changes in Latitudes. Changes in Attitudes was true to its title. Like Key West in

nineteen seventy seven, this record was about change. It was Jimmy's first to fully feature the Coral Reefer Band, the group that was once a fictional group of musicians Jimmy had conjured up slowly grew into an actual touring band, then a gaggle of musicians who accompanied Jimmy along with other session players in Nashville and finally into a band in the truest sense. On Changes, the album, unlike Jimmy's

previous long Players, wasn't recorded in Nashville. It was made in Florida in Miami at Criteria four sixty one Ocean Boulevard, where Eric Clapton had recently found greatness. On Changes, Jimmy collaborated with producer Norbert Putnam, whose own genius stroke was hearing Jimmy Buffett for who he was not just a singer songwriter, not Jim Crochey or some flip flop Chris Christofferson.

He was something totally different. He was Jimmy Buffett, an artist with a completely unique point of view on the world, one that was heavily influenced by the end of the world that he'd escaped to Key West. His lyrics reflected that island escapism, so the album needed to sound like

island escapism. It needed to sound like Jimmy Buffett, which is to say, it needed to sound like a dude who just fell out of a hammock and hit his head on a tequila bottle on his way down before shaking it off, grabbing his easy one and rolling a spliff, Norbert Putnam went to work throwing tropical sounding instrumentation all over the recordings he Jimmy and the Coral Reefer Band were putting down at Criteria congas, steel drums and overall

laid back feel to everything. And then Jimmy brought in a new song and nothing would ever be the same again. Margaritaville is a fictional place we all know. The sun never stops shining, and the whaler's music plays softly in the distance. Men and women, Married couples dance slowly, connected in ways they haven't been in years. The beer is ice cold and the cocktails are just sweet enough, and nothing ever runs out. The food puts you taste buds

to work somehow. The cheeseburgers don't even make you fat. The bartender is a poet and flirts just enough to let you know you still got it going on, but not enough to piss off your spouse. And there are no hangovers, just bloody Mary's in a short walk to the beach, where a rejuvenating dip and coral blue seawater awaits. Shoes, shirts, hell, even shorts are all optional. What isn't optional, however, is a relaxation. You feel like your best self in Margaritaville.

No boss, no commute, no kids, no pressure, no problems. Except Margaritaville wasn't really this at all. Margaritaville was Jimmy Buffett, mercilessly hungover after a gig in Texas, killing time in a Mexican strip mall restaurant before a flight, trying to drink away his headache with bottomless Margarita's while writing the lyrics to a new song of his called Wealth. Why not Margaritaville. That's where the song sprang from. The escapism you hear in the storytelling of that song's lyrics, the

half a fuck up culpability of the protagonists. Some people say it's a woman to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault. That's Jimmy Buffett's genius, pulling that story so simple, yet so layered and so different from its actual place of origin, and turning it into something else, something so powerful. That was only part of Jimmy Buffett's superpower. The other part was what Jimmy Buffett eventually did with

that song. Not only was it a hit, the signature song off of changes Margueriteville rocketed him to a level of fame that until then had eluded him. It was the artistic spark that launched a commercial empire and the level of escapism Jimmy Buffett never could have imagined. We'll be right back after this. We're We're where. One hit song, Margeritaville, changed Jimmy Buffett's life. Released in nineteen seventy seven on his seventh album, the song charted higher than any of

Jimmy's previous singles. Margaritaville, despite its hungover origins, nailed not only what Jimmy Buffett was all about, but what Jimmy Buffett had to offer a break and escape from the grind, and it opened him up to a much larger audience. Throughout the late seventies and early eighties, Jimmy shows began to take on something akin to Grateful Dead concerts, but without the darkness. Jimmy's fans weren't zonked out deadheads. They were, as Jimmy's bassist at the time, the former Eagle, the

Great Timothy B. Schmidt, coined them, parrotheads. Parrotheads are a very specific type of rock and roll fan. First of all, they're Jimmy Buffett fans, the second they're shameless dorks, and that in the best possible way. There's no shame in wearing whatever you want in public, even if that means a Hulu skirt and a gaudy Hawaiian shirt in the

middle of October. That's kind of the point. Jimmy Buffett shows are all about escaping the confines that prevent you from wearing whatever the hell you want and having fun on a work night in the middle of October. There's nothing wrong with that, despite the fact that every bit of fashion sense I have has led me to rebel against this tribe for as long as I can remember. But now with age, unless punk rock piss and vinegar coursing through my veins, I kind of admire it. It's

that hole so not cool. It's cool type of thing, and in my mind, nothing is cooler than not caring what other people think, which, in a weird way, is what your pediatrician or accountant or lawyer were doing back in the nineties and two thousands when they were going to Jimmy Buffett concerts dressed like a coconut and drag and of course the parrot Heeads leader himself, Jimmy Buffett was also a shameless stork, despite his cool seventies must dash and three inch in scene cut off jeans from

back in the day. Jimmy was and always had been a shameless dork on stage. At least he was a ham My sense is that's who he was off stage as well, And again I mean that in the best way. Ask my wife who the biggest dork in the houses and she'll tell you it's me. And it's because I'm most comfortable at home for you to act and be however I want around my loved ones who accept me

for who I am. I believe Jimmy Buffett acted this way too, except he did it on stage every night in front of sixty thousand people, which means Jimmy Buffett was totally authentic. And that tracks because it's the authentic creators and artists who developed the most devoted fans, Just as Jimmy Buffett did with his Parrot Heeads. They took their cue from Jimmy not only in fashion and they exaggerated that whole Key West casual thing to the nth degree,

but also in attitude. They bought concert tickets and records in T shirts, and when the money started flowing for real in the mid eighties, Jimmy recalled those Nashville days and the lesson he learned about control. He invested his hard earned capital into himself first. Before even the success of Margaritaville, Jimmy realized he was getting hosed on merch sales by bootleggers, so he opened his own Beach Them Merchandise T shirt shop in Key West in the late seventies.

In nineteen eighty five, he took a big swing and expanded the T shirt shop into the Margeritaville store and cafe. Now he was serving food and drinks to fans and tourists. In nineteen eighty nine, Jimmy launched his own record label, Margeriteville Records, as an imprint of MCA, seizing not only creative control of his own music, but a bigger piece of the pie as well. This would last for ten years until in nineteen ninety nine, Jimmy started Mailboat Records

to release his music independently. Mail Boat went on to release records by artist Jimmy l liked, Boz Skaggs, Sammy Hagard, def Leppard Walter Becker in More. In the year two thousand, Jimmy opened to Margaritaville restaurant in Casino in Las Vegas. In two thousand and five, he launched Margaritaville Tequila. He followed that with a hotel in Pensacola, Flora in twenty eleven,

and a resort in Orlando in twenty eighteen. And along the way he launched everything from the wildly successful land Shark Lagger to beach chairs, flip flops, frozen foods in CBD gummies. In nineteen ninety six, this billion dollar empire in the making was doing more than keeping this son of a son of a sailor afloat. That January, Jimmy was in the air piloting his new plane, nineteen fifty

four Grummin HU sixteen Albatross seaplane. His passengers were none other than U two's Bono, Bono's wife and their two young children, aged six and three. Jimmy was held ban on landing in this particular area of Jamaica because he knew of a little place with the perfect chicken, jerk chicken that would blow Bono's mind. Jimmy brought the plane down with ease, and the only problem was Jimmy didn't

have permission to land. As Bono and his wife and children began to make their exit, that's when it happened. Bullets started flying. Bono, his kids, his wife. They dove back into the plane. One bullet cracked the plane's windshield, six others peppered the rest of the plane. Jamaican authorities

descended upon the plane, looking for answers. Who were these drug traffickers and what made them think they could just land their plane unannounced at their small airport And there were no drug traffickers, of course, Jimmy Buffett had sworn off that career path years ago. There was only confusion. Bono was pissed, he his wife, his children. Once things were cleared up with authorities, they split from Miami, leaving Jimmy Buffett and his jerk chicken behind. How it all

got to this point was anyone's guess. A pissed off pop star, violent Jamaican authorities firing bullets at his plane. There wasn't Jimmy's first escape from death's clutches. He'd survived the plane crash in Nantucket a couple of years prior. But where was all this going? And what was the point? More money for more toys, more business endeavors, more adventure, where's the fund? And escape if it ends up killing it? Jimmy Buffett needed his own change in latitude and attitude.

Throughout the nineteen eighties and nineties, Jimmy Buffett steadily built a commercial empire that was on the verge of eclipsing his success as a musician. Not that he wasn't a success musically. He most certainly was. He sold records, he packed stadiums with fans, but he wasn't atop the zeitgeist, and he never really was sure. Margaritaville was a smash, but by the early two thousands that was decades in

the rear view. And yes, Jimmy had his name and face on all manner of merchandise, but that was all fans service. Weird as it seems, even with all the success, Jimmy Buffett in two thousand and three was kind of a niche product. You know, it wasn't a niche product.

In two thousand and three country music, the genre was doing hundreds of millions in concert tickets, in record sales, and resurging with youth and American culture beyond the Bible Belt, country radio stations were enjoying more success than they ever had in non traditional markets. Alan Jackson was one of country's biggest stars, so when he asked the question in his smash single It's five o'clock Somewhere of what would Jimmy Buffett do, country music fans everywhere wanted to know

the answer. That drink they were planning on right after work depended on it, God damn it, and Jimmy Buffett didn't disappoint. He answered Alan Jackson in an impartial duet on the hit single, singing with his trademark term and Island Ease, and he was instantly introduced to an entire new generation of fans. The song was a smash hit. It spent eight weeks at number one on the Billboard

Country Charts. At Jimmy's name and voice, who were suddenly within earshot of anyone in a parking lot before a sporting event, or at a beach, or at a bar on a Friday afternoon, getting out of work and in rush hour traffic with a radio on, trying to escape the confines of their adult lives, and the song helped

Jimmy escape once again. It helped him level up from being the flip flop adventurer with a devoted but niche fan base to national treasure status, a sort of half stone, half loaded poet, laureate country star for partiers everywhere, the guy from that song. No, not that one, the other one. That one, No, the other one. Jimmy was no longer

the Margueriteville guy. He was Jimmy Buffett. And with this new level of success, his business is soared, so much so that he became friends with another Buffett, the billionaire investor in philanthropists, Warren Buffett. I'm not sure what that means or why I think it's important to tell you that. Maybe because it underscores the fact that Jimmy Buffett was so much more than one thing, and that's a hard legacy to leave. There's an old interview with Jimmy's friend

and brother in law, the writer Tom mcguain. He's not talking about Jimmy, but he's being interviewed about Key West, and he quotes French poet Stefan Malarme in part by paraphrasing, at a point, an artist dies, whatever his life was, whatever his work was becomes one thing. That's heavy because it means that being an artist is a curse of sorts. I don't know one artist, and I count myself among them who was just one thing. Jimmy Buffett's life and

his work were about escaping the restrictions of being one thing. First, it was about escaping the limitations of being a Nashville artist, then a trafficker, or just another happy go lucky saloon singer in Keith West, or just a niche artist. Jimmy Buffett fought his way out of those traps with his music, and he inspired millions in the process. But Jimmy Buffett was,

of course, more than just one thing. He was a musician, a fisherman, a sailor, a joker, God's own drunk, a bandleader, a businessman, a father, husband, brother, and an entertainer who gave millions of fans an offering from their stressful lives, even if it was just for one night in October and not on the shores of Key West as he

experienced it. He played music until the end, even staging his last performance on an island soa Rhode Island, and then spending his last moments in twenty twenty three, before the cancer took him at age seventy six, surrounded by family, smiling and laughing, and then leaving it all on the beach and sailing away. I'm Jake Brennan and this is disgrace Land. All right. Thanks for checking out this episode of Disgraceland. Apple podcast listeners, make sure you have auto

downloads turned on. Listen. Question of the week. Which artists did you at one point in time despise and now find yourself kind of digging a lot? Jimmy Buffett is that artist for me? All right? Let me know six one seven nine o six six six three eight voicemail and text to let me know which artist you didn't like before but now kind of can't get enough of. Six one seven nine o six six six three eight voicemail. Text. You might hear your answer on the after party bonus

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