JIMMY BUFFETT made his first stop in Key West 50 years ago. Success put Buffett atop the Margaritaville music and business empire. He and photographer Tom Corcoran look back over it all.
A profane phone call and Jimmy Buffett’s inability to keep his daily planner organized 50 years ago in Miami set in motion events that changed the music world. Those events made the singer-songwriter one of the most beloved entertainers in America. And one of the wealthiest, with a net worth around $600 million.
Buffett’s music and business empire includes restaurants, casinos, hotels and beach resorts, a retirement village, a cruise liner, clothing, publishing. And 29 studio albums, and as many live albums and compilations combined, plus a handful of books.
The unusual events — unusual for perhaps everyone except for the creative mind that gave the world “Margaritaville,” “Havana Daydreaming” and “Everybody’s Got a Cousin in Miami” — also helped brand Key West with a distinct sound of music and as a destination known the world over.
“I was able to make a living and live how I wanted to, and then all of a sudden things started getting better,” Buffett said in a telephone interview from his home in Palm Beach County.
Photographer and author Tom Corcoran was with Buffett at the very beginning when the “struggling young hippie” cast his voice and acoustic guitar loose on Duval Street and Mallory Square with a handful of good early tunes, like “Railroad Lady,” which Buffett wrote with Jerry Jeff Walker, and “The Captain and the Kid.”
Corcoran documented Buffett from the start in the early 1970s. His photos as the pair wandered about the Keys on gig days and social outings around the world adorned album cover artwork on packages including “Havana Daydreaming,” “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “You Had to Be There: Recorded Live” and “Volcano.” His images from the Keys years fill video screens to this day at Buffett concerts.
“Essentially, I took decent pictures and I was cheap. And I knew how to sail a sailboat. So I was good to have around,” Corcoran joked in a phone interview from his home in Lakeland. “I had no great delusions about my artistry as a photographer, but all I knew was that I had opportunity and that was huge.”
A COLLEAGUE LOOKS AT 50
“It’s just like the longevity of mischief,” Corcoran says in explaining the significance of Buffett’s career after six decades, a career that went full throttle after that fateful car ride to the Keys circa November 1971 or early 1972, depending on who’s minding the calendar.
“Or, how long will a smile last? That’s what he’s been peddling all this time. His lyrics have been brilliant from time to time. Sometimes they’re just like, ‘Oh, Jimmy, why did you do this?’ But when he was hitting them, gosh. I mean, ‘Cowboy in the Jungle.’ I could listen to that one over and over and over and over again. And ‘Sending the Old Man Home,’ that song from the ‘Volcano’ album. You know, they’re just exquisite lyrics. And good melodies to go with. What he promised and what he delivered were the same thing. It was fun. And it was concerts and live performance. And the live album really got it right,” Corcoran said.
“When I really knew he was going to make it a business was probably in the spring of ’77. I was with him when he discovered that ‘Margaritaville’ was a hit and it was climbing the charts,” Corcoran said.
The pair were in Staniel Cay, an island in the Bahamas, when they came upon what was essentially the only phone on the island inside a little concrete block building. Buffett picked up the phone and called his management. Collect.
Buffett had had some well-received albums like “Living and Dying in ¾ Time” that featured his first Top 40 hit, “Come Monday,” in 1974. “A1A” and “Havana Daydreaming” followed by 1976. These records were part of his formative “Key West Period” albums. But the latter two didn’t yield any radio hits.
“Changes in Latitudes,” generally considered the last of the “Key West Period” albums, had just come out in January 1977. (Though an argument could be made, stylistically, for the subsequent “Son of a Son of a Sailor” he recorded with his Coral Reefer Band at the defunct Bay Shore Recording Studio in Coconut Grove.)
“He said, ‘Let me call L.A. See if I still have a job.’ That is the exact words: ‘I’m going to call L.A. and see if I still have a job,’” Corcoran recalled. “They just recorded ‘Changes in Latitudes’ at Criteria Studios in November and December 1976. And he got a modest advance from ABC/Dunhill at that point. And he wondered if his career was going to go up in smoke after only four albums and now maybe a fifth. And so he pledged that advance would go to a sailboat so he could at least sail away from the dock and flip the bird back at the people who decided he wasn’t worthy of a career.
“That changed the day that he found out ‘Margaritaville’ was No. 29 and climbing.”
A SONGWRITER LOOKS AT 50
“What got me to Key West, of course, was Jerry Jeff Walker because I had left Nashville, gotten a divorce, and nothing was going on there,” Buffett said. “But I was working, booking myself in places or through word of mouth on the folk circuit around the South and the Southeast. The great Gamble Rogers, people like that there, were on that circuit through Nashville, the Carolinas, St. Augustine, the Flick and Bubba’s in Miami. So I climbed my way up on that circuit and one of the places there was The Flick, so I had an offer to go to Miami for The Flick.”
The Flick coffeehouse itself is long gone, closed in 1974, a decade after opening. Today, The Flick location is the Titanic Restaurant and Brewery, across from the University of Miami’s baseball stadium on Ponce de Leon Boulevard in Coral Gables. But in its mid-’60s, early ’70s heyday, The Flick was where rising talents in the acoustic folk, pop and rock fields like Buffett, Joni Mitchell and her ex-husband Chuck Mitchell, David Crosby, John Denver, Michael Martin Murphy, Bobby Ingram and Walker honed their skills before welcoming audiences.
“After the first album came out I went touring across the U.S. but until ’72 I was basically staying alive by working gigs in South Florida,” Buffett said.
“I met Jerry Jeff when I was a reporter for Billboard magazine in Nashville,” Buffett said. “l had done a story on him and he actually wound up staying at my house and we got a little — we got very — drunk that night. So much so that he was calling home in those days. The operator came on and he was using profanity to his girlfriend or something. They cut my phone off.
“The phone company called me in the morning, and I had a hangover, and they said, ‘Are you ready to behave or what?’Jerry Jeff said, ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am. If you ever get to Miami and I can do anything for you let me know.’
Buffett chuckles at the memory. We’ll never know if Jerry Jeff delivered on his promise to the insulted operator. The country songwriter behind the 1968 classic “Mr. Bojangles” died in 2020 in Texas at age 78. But he was about to change Buffett’s fortunes forever.
“Cut to Miami. I got this job. I called Jerry Jeff and said I was in town and I’m working at The Flick,” Buffett said. He was the opening act on a five-bill act that included Fred Neil and Vince Martin.
“I went in to the club to go to meet the owner and he said, ‘No, it’s not this weekend.’ I went, ‘No, it has to be because I don’t have any other job!’”
GOING TO KEY WEST
Buffett had no money. And no place to stay in Miami. But he had Jerry
Jeff Walker.
“He said, ‘Come stay with me.’ So I stayed with him and [Teresa] Murphy [Sadler], his girlfriend at the time in Coconut Grove and for two weeks was helping him work on his car. We’ve finished working on the car and he said, ‘Come on. Let’s go to Key West. Have you ever been? And we’ll be back in town for that show.’ So we got into a 1947 Packard and drove to the Keys,” Buffett said.
Buffett, 75, who was born on Christmas Day 1946, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and raised in Alabama, earned his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.
Buffett said he had been as far down as Islamorada in the Florida Keys during his college years. But when the shaggy-haired struggling singer looked out the car window when the southbound Packard got beyond Islamorada, Buffett’s mind raced.
“From Islamorada down I was just like, yeah, riding on a bridge on the ocean. For someone who grew up on the Gulf Coast, I thought this is the most amazing, longest bridge in the world,” Buffett said. “I knew the history of the Flagler railroad from that point. But when I left Islamorada on U.S. 1 and got to Key West, going over the Bahia Honda Bridge and the Seven Mile Bridge and looked, I was going, ‘What is this place? I don’t know what it is but I like it!’
“When I got there Jerry Jeff basically dropped me off, introduced me to a few people around, and I quickly got a job at a place called Howie’s Lounge that’s not there anymore,” Buffett said.
Howie’s Lounge used to be at 109 Duval St., a few blocks from where Buffett opened his flagship Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville restaurant and gift shop at 500 Duval in 1985.
He played the cocktail hour, from 5 to 8. “That bar was like an oasis,” Buffett remembers. “I got a job as a mate on a fishing boat so I played by day, go raise hell all night, sleep for a few hours, and then get up at 4 o’clock in the morning and go catch fish. So I thought, “I have got this made. This is pretty cool!’ Buffett said.
Buffett’s first actual performance in the Keys was at Crazy Ophelia’s before moving up to Howie’s Lounge and then The Chart Room, he said. He started to meet integral figures at these local Keys joints who would figure prominently in his life like American writer Thomas McGuane (who married Buffett’s sister, Laurie, in 1977) and Tom Corcoran, who would share writing credits on Buffett’s songs, “Cuban Crime of Passion” from Buffett’s third album and first proper Key West LP, “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean” in 1973. Corcoran also shared a songwriter’s credit on “Fins” in 1979.
At the time, Corcoran, who had arrived in Key West in 1970, was a bartender at The Chart Room and he had known Walker for about two years before he met Buffett.
FINDING HIS HOME
“I was the bartender maybe 4 in the afternoon,” Corcoran said. “I hadn’t