How Jimmy Buffett Managed His Growing Success

Jimmy Buffett was, shall we say, sometimes a complicated coconut to crack.

On the surface, thanks to songs like “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and “Margaritaville,” he was a character, the life of the party, your emcee for a guaranteed good time. For decades, he sold hundreds of thousands of tickets, year after year, to that gathering.

The attendees called themselves Parrotheads, a stray reference from the earlier years that stuck. But if you go further back than that, Buffett, who died in 2023 after battling skin cancer, was in one sense, a typical songwriter, at least when it came to his approach.

He wrote about the things that were going on around him, and got fairly introspective as well, something you can spot in abundance on his first two albums. The amiable guitarist worked hard too in his early pre-fame years. Key West, of course, played an important role and the cast of characters there also began to find their way into his initial songs.

It was some of those same folks who helped the singer begin to find his initial place in the music business, while occasionally also arriving as a rescue squad or extra set of ears when he needed them.

The Evolution of Jimmy Buffett

1973’s A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean began to really lay the foundation when it comes to the Buffett we know now. It’s there in the song titles, like album opener “The Great Filling Station Holdup,” which also had future fan favorite “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” on the flip side. “Grapefruit – Juicy Fruit” is there on side one of the LP as well.

Listen to Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Why Don’t We Get Drunk’

Author Thomas McGuane was inside Buffett’s circle and helped to illustrate a character sketch of the updated Buffett who was starting to take shape, with his words inside the liner notes for the Pink Crustacean album. “He is as dedicated as ever to certain indecencies and, shall we say, reversible brain damage,” McGuane colorfully notes. “Of course, he’s never washed dishes or owned a puppet show,” he added.

Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band — Greene Street Entertainment / Confluence Productions / Hired Gun Media

The Rise of the Coral Reefers

A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean is notable for other reasons too. It’s the first album to feature a reference to the Coral Reefer Band in the credits. While Buffett had been knocking around, recording with a variety of musicians leading up to this point, Pink Crustacean found him starting to assemble more of a regular crew.

That’s something that is examined in depth thanks to Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers, the new documentary which will be available to stream starting Oct. 30. Narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges, the film takes fans back to the ’70s and early part of the ’80s to examine the origin story of the original Coral Reefer Band.

Occupational Hazard boasts a wealth of rare footage and performances, surrounding interviews with band members and associates like Kenny Chesney, original guitarist Roger Bartlett, multi-instrumentalist Mac McAnally, producer Norbert Putnam, backing vocalist Deborah McColl and songwriter Keith Sykes.

Watch the Trailer for ‘Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers’

Jimmy Definitely Needed a Band

As Buffett wrote in the liner notes for 1975’s Havana Daydreamin’, things came to a head in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he and Bartlett were playing a duo show at a club called The Pier. They’d been out gigging together for more than a year. He’d scored his first Top 40 hit with “Come Monday” and the songwriter was realizing that he should be out there with more than just an additional guitarist.

As Bartlett tells UCR, the feelings, though romanticized a bit within the words Buffett shared in Havana Daydreamin’, had actually been around for a while.

“We played several big festivals as a duo, and one of them was like, 135,000 people,” he remembers now.. “For two [people with] acoustic guitars to go out there to that size crowd was a little daunting to say the least.

Watch Jimmy Buffett Perform ‘Come Monday’

“We were starting to play bigger venues when we first went out. We played listening rooms like the Quiet Knight in Chicago and we played Max’s Kansas City in New York City. If you can imagine that,” he continues. “After we played it, you know, it became a big punky kind of place. But when we played it, I think Bo Diddley was following us or we followed him in and it was still just a listening room kind of thing. So you know, how did we get here?

They Didn’t Just Bring the Party…

Occupational Hazard director John H. Cunningham came into the project as someone who had grown up with Buffett’s music. Beyond that, through other circumstances, he’d even lived in Key West. So he was the right person to explore the story of the early days of the Coral Reefers. But there were a few surprises, even knowing what he had known going in.

“I moved to Key West in 78. You know, it was a smuggling town at that time,” he shared with UCR in a separate conversation. “Shrimpers, conchs, and smugglers. That’s really all it was. There was no tourism, so I mean, I had a pretty good sense of what that era was like. But to hear the firsthand stories from [band members, about] what was going on, it was like, ‘Okay, this is is a little bit of an eye-opener. I mean, I knew they were having a good time.”

“That term ‘heavy artillery days’ came out through Deborah, which was how [late Coral Reefer harmonica player Greg] ‘Fingers’ Taylor characterized that time period,” he adds. “For anybody to characterize it as heavy artillery, being Fingers Taylor, I mean, what better person to describe it as such, you know, for that group?”

“But I was kind of surprised at just how hard they partied,” he says now. “I mean, they had a good time. They were living on the edge, and you know I look at it this way: they were in their 20s, early 30s and they were doing whatever the rest of us did — but a little harder.”

The Legacy of Jimmy Buffett

Though the singer has now been gone for three years, fans continue to enjoy the decades of work that he created — and the Parrothead lifestyle that grew out of the songs themselves. There’s reportedly an album of unreleased material on deck — and efforts are underway to turn his recording studio (which continues to operate) into a place that people can also visit.

“It really evoked a sense of escapism, for a teenager [hearing the songs] — or really at any age,” Cunningham offers, regarding the late singer-songwriter’s music and how special it became. “I mean, you could be sitting at a day job at a desk, hating life, and just listen to one of these songs and let it take you away. Guys like Bob Dylan would say Jimmy was one of the greatest songwriters in history. I mean, he loved ‘ A Pirate Looks at 40,’ for example.”

Occupational Hazard similarly offers fans a chance to go back and get a glimpse of the early days, the music and the fun that Buffett and the Coral Reefers had in that era. As Bartlett details — and the film itself shows, there was a camaraderie that flowed throughout the ranks of the group, which came as no surprise to the guitarist, who’d already experienced a good amount of that.

“He had ‘Come Monday’ on the radio and he’d been traveling alone [before he formed the Coral Reefer band]. And you know, like the [lyrics in the] song, ‘Grapefruit – Juicy Fruit,’ ‘Oh, it gets so damn lonely / When you’re on a plane alone,’ you know, you go out and have exceptional times.”

“I mean, his career was was burgeoning, and to go out and do all that stuff by yourself is not as much fun,” he says. “You need a drinking buddy and I was definitely that.”

Just hearing about Bartlett’s adventures with Buffett before the band arrived, it’s clear (as Occupational Hazard underlines), that everyone had a good amount of fun.

“We went to the Playboy Mansion, you know, and were welcomed, you know, with open arms, and we attended a birthday party for for Dan Gerber of the Gerber baby food family. You know, we went to play gigs. We and we’d stay in, you know, instead of you know, I was used to staying in like the Motel Six of the day. You know, instead we. We’d stay in the the this the Fairly Hotel in San Francisco, where you know my bathroom had a a TV set on the wall and a phone right by the toilet, you know, and you know, so that seems like we were on the upward trajectory.”

Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers will be available on Oct. 30. Find more information on the film’s official website.