Buffett looks at 50 years since going to Key West

From the Miami Herald: “Jimmy Buffett looks at 50 years after his 1st Key West gig“

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 as a distinct sound of music and 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.

“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.”

“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!’”