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 Entertainment | February 2005 
For Jimmy Buffett, There's No Time To Chill
 Howard Cohen - Herald.com
 Jimmy Buffett is barefoot, on a hangar-sized floor in a Palm Beach rehearsal studio. The room is dotted with sound equipment, rigging, instruments, a mural of a coastline and about 15 musicians who make up his Coral Reefer Band.
Buffett is rehearsing for his A Salty Piece of Land Tour, which opens Saturday at Sunrise's Office Depot Center. The theme from television's Survivor, cued as a concert intro, booms around the cavernous space, and the choice seems fitting. Buffett is certainly a survivor in the stormy seas of popular music.
Buffett, who lives in Palm Beach with wife, Jane, with whom he has three children ranging in age from 25 to 10, lives it like he sings it. With his schoolboy's heart and novelist's eye - to snag a line from one of his more recent songs - he has managed to build a multimillion dollar empire and lifestyle encompassing recordings, books, a string of cafés from Key West to Negril, an Internet radio station, the record label Mailboat and popular concerts. He also owns Palm Beach's two Krispy Kreme doughnut shops, perhaps the only entry in his portfolio to struggle lately.
And if you thought his career couldn't get any bigger, boy, were you wrong. Thirty-five years after the release of his first record, Buffett scored his first No. 1 album with last summer's License to Chill, featuring duets with his admirers, who just happen to be today's top country acts: Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Martina McBride and George Strait. The down-home CD - if your home is a hammock swaying between two palm trees - has sold more than 1.2 million copies in a world of machine-driven hip-hop and R&B.
Ever the shrewd businessman, Buffett sought a distribution deal with Nashville giant RCA to distribute License to Chill, in hopes of boosting its profile. But he's done it on his terms. It's a one-album deal, and he's free to do whatever he wants.
''That spirit he has as an artist is infectious; it's a blast to work with him and his management company,'' said Joe Galante, chairman of the RCA label group. Merging that independent mind-set and the corporate entity, Galante says, proved to be ``a perfect blend.''
More astonishingly, the CD has even managed to accomplish a feat more elusive than finding that lost shaker of salt: It put Buffett back on the radio for the first time since Margaritaville sunbaked the airwaves in 1977.
In addition, Buffett's latest novel, A Salty Piece of Land, has clung to the New York Times' Top 10 bestseller list since its November release and was held out of the top spot by a phenomenon called The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
No worries. With Buffett's three previous No. 1 bestsellers, he is one of only six authors to have reached No. 1 on both The New York Times' fiction and nonfiction lists. And Brown won't be strumming a six-string in front of almost 20,000 Parrotheads the way Buffett will on Saturday.
Among Buffett's next batch of projects: co-producing Hoot with Frank Marshall. The movie, based on a Carl Hiaasen book, begins shooting in South Florida in June.
So we sit in a dressing room earlier this week at the rehearsal studio awaiting Buffett's arrival. He rolls into the parking lot driving his gold Volvo an hour late. He apologizes. On this morning, like every morning, he was surfing. His phone went dead, time slipped away and, well, what can he say? He lives the life he sings about on such songs as his autobiographical Son of a Son of a Sailor, and that's easy to forgive.
And he speaks French, too. Who knew?
Q: What about Spanish?
A: I speak Spanish a little, good enough to get by. That's my goal now that I know I don't have any big career moves ahead of me. I'm trying to better my French and Spanish by 60, which gives me two years. That's one of my primary objectives now that there isn't much left to do. [Laughs.]
Q: You've gone all this time without a No. 1 album or an industry award. Now you won a CMA [for the Alan Jackson duet, It's Five O' Clock Somewhere] and have a No. 1 album. How does that make you feel?
A: Very happy, pleased and proud. This is a personal achievement. . . . I'll admit I got a big buzz when I heard that it was No. 1. And all the people hanging on in the business who are my age, I think they got as big a kick out of it as anybody else.
Q: You're up for a Grammy, too, which would be your first if you win. Are you going to attend the ceremony?
A: No.
Q: Chances are you'll win, though. It's for Country Collaboration with Vocal [for Hey Good Lookin' which features Clint Black, Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, Toby Keith and George Strait.] With all those names on the record, that's a lot of votes.
A: [Laughs.] I don't know the politics of the Grammys anymore since I left Billboard. It's nice, but what was nicer was the royalty check I got last week! I'm pragmatic about that [Grammy] stuff because it was never there for me so why would I get excited about it now? With all the award shows out there . . . awards are now avenues on which people can sell things on TV. ... It has diluted the significance of those awards.
Q: So can we expect a License to Chill II?
A: No, we'll do a Jimmy Buffett record. License was fun, but with Mailboat I said I want to make things you can add to your collection. I'm back to that kind of philosophy. I'm looking at material. I haven't written as much because most of the time has been consumed by that book, but I have two to three songs I'm working on. The great thing is I don't have to write everything any more. ... If I can get three to four good Jimmy Buffett songs on an album I'm happy. What I look for is material where you couldn't tell the difference.
In the normal world of the music business after a No. 1 record I'd have two records and a Greatest Hits album out by now, but I don't have to play by those rules anymore. I've got other things on my plate, which drives a lot of people crazy. The record company can't help but think records. I'm not even signed; it's just a distribution deal. I can do whatever I want. They are not used to dealing with anybody that gets to the level of independence I've gotten to. That's the greatest reward - the total independence to do what I want.
Q: Have you always been a smart businessman?
A: I guess so. I seem to have enough sense to listen to other people who have been successful and learned from their mistakes. I made a bunch. Overall it's about controlling one's own destiny, which means you control your own business. To put it in today's terminology: if you have success at this you are a brand, and you have to protect your brand. It's all set up for everybody to steal from you so I didn't reluctantly become a businessman. I did it because . . . it was essential.
Q: Why did you look to a major label to distribute License?
A: When it came down to it, I said, 'This is good.' In the country music world I had three failed attempts at this. Let's try again! [Laughs] This might be the time it might work. Mailboat is one guy sitting in an office, and we do pretty good but [License] is bigger than that.
Q: You and country don't seem far removed.
A: It's not a big stretch for me to go sing country. It was enjoyable to do it. If anything, I always tried to be more of a pop singer than I naturally am. It was fun to go back and sing the way I'd normally sing.
Q: Has country finally caught up with you?
A: It all started with Alan and Five O' Clock, and when I would introduce him on my stage in front of my audience I'd hear the reaction to him and realize how the country audience used to look like it had completely blown out the window. It's across the board, as close to pop music as there is. When I was coming up and covering country it was hard-core play-at-the-fair. Now it's college kids and teens and that, I think, is a very positive thing. It's chic to like country. My nieces go to boarding schools in Connecticut, and they are huge Kenny Chesney fans. That did not exist 10 years ago, certainly not 20.
Q: And now Kenny has recorded a beach album, last week's No. 1 Be As You Are, in which he tries to be you.
A: It's flattering. Some people say I should be pissed off about it but I'm really not. The beach is free. As I said before, I was the first singer to go to Key West, but I certainly wasn't the first writer. As shameless plagiarists we all steal from everybody else; that's part of the process. I consider that a good thing. Hell, I stole from Harry Belafonte and Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell. ... It's the highest form of flattery, and I'm fine with it.
Q: Talk about your tour.
A: What's interesting about this tour is we are looking at new arrangements of old songs. That, in its simplest form, is what we are doing.
Q: Songs You Don't Know By Heart.
A: I think we're a better band now than when we recorded a lot of that stuff. There was a lot of polish and sugar-coating to Nashville production then. I listen and go, Ewwww, turn those strings down! It's kind of fun to go rearrange these songs, and with technology the fun thing is you have 15 to 20 new arrangements of old songs and, hell, you have an album. Songs You Don't Know By Heart.
Q: How did you go about writing A Salty Piece of Land?
A: A page a day. That's what Herman Wouk told me. Write a page a day, and after 30 days think about what you got. It was truly the best piece of advice. It took five years. I wrote in the morning. I'd get up at 5:30 and write and hopefully get a page a day. That's all I looked for.
Q: Did you know how the story would progress?
A: It was supposed to be a short story, then took a turn to a novel. It didn't lead me, it drug me to where it wanted to be. The pitfall is as it gets larger you are living in a world of imaginary people, and you have to go back to your real world. You can't explain to somebody you have been up with Tully Mars and Cleopatra Highbourne on Cayo Loco. They don't give a s--.
During a project when I'm writing I'll jump onstage and do my shameless job just to get adored. I have such respect for writers who don't have the escape hatch I do, who have to sit there and pound out books and wait for somebody to review them and hope they are accepted. That's a hard road to face. I go out and play, and I feel better, and I can go ... write again.
Q: So what led you to become a performer? Is it filling some void?
A: No, it was about girls at the time, the dazzling spectacle of show business that plugged right into me. It was an escape out of a rather mundane existence. . . . I had a fun time, and I might have wound up a boat captain somewhere, which would not have been bad. But it was the '60s, and things were popping. When I saw these guys playing flashy guitars and singing and girls are swooning in the audience I thought, 'Why don't I want to do this?' It wasn't career dedication calling me. It was 18 years of stifling Catholic education unleashed.
Q: Beyond the work, what motivates you these days?
A: My children. Those are the big factors in my life now, not whether my voice holds up. It's that transition of getting older and spending more quality time with the kids. ... Those are the kind of things which we never thought of as performers and are now the realistic things which actually govern your life as much as everything else. |
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