Buffett played Margaritaville in Key West six hours after writing it

Buffett played Margaritaville in Key West six hours after writing it

Jimmy Buffett moved to Key West in late 1971 after having just performed a series of shows at Coral Gables’ influential Flick Coffeehouse with Jerry Jeff Walker, and his earliest performance on the island was a two-set show Buffett gave at Crazy Ophelia’s Café on January 27, 1972. Buffett said in an interview that he later that he later scored gigs at Howie’s Lounge and the Chart Room. The review of the Ophelia’s show makes it clear there was already some buzz on the island about the “young Nashville folk gypsy.’’ Bill Huckel, founder of the Solares Hill newspaper, wrote that Buffett “picked and plucked at the strings of his guitar and the hearts of a hushed crowd.”
Huckel was impressed enough to dub the musician with the mantle of “a spokesman for this generation. This guy made everyone feel like one big, happy family.” The warm reception at Crazy Ophelia’s kicked off the Key West phase of his career, which would come to define his persona and tie him to the island forever, even though he was often on the road.
“Mostly, [my success] happened working from the road. A lot of people have the misconception that when I came here, I stayed in a house in a rented room and stayed drunk for ten years and became a star. That’s absolutely not true,’’ Buffett told the Key West Citizen in 1981. “I was quite vigorously on the road, doing concerts. The only way for me to survive was to do concerts.”
Buffett was actually in Austin, Texas, when the inspiration struck for “Margaritaville.” He and a friend had stopped for lunch at a Mexican restaurant before she dropped him at the airport for a flight home to Key West, and they started drinking margaritas.
“And I kind of came up with that idea of this is just like Margarita-ville,” Buffett said. “She kind of laughed at that and put me on the plane. And I started working on it.”
He wrote some on the plane and finished it while driving down the Keys. He reportedly debuted the song that same night at Ophelia’s.
“I was on the Seven-Mile Bridge, and, ah, somebody had broken down. And we were stuck there for an hour, and I just sat out there on the Seven Mile Bridge, just looking out, and I finished the song there, and I got to Key West. And I was working in a little club on Duval Street called Crazy Ophelia’s. I went in, and I had to work that night, and I played the song. People liked it. I went, ‘Wow, this is pretty good.’ And, you know, it was, it was fresh. It was maybe six hours old. But it was four years before it got recorded.”
By 1973, Crazy Ophelia’s was gone. However short-lived, the café was influential, both as a center for Key West’s anti-establishment community and as the place where a young Jimmy Buffett got his start on the island.
(Source: The Florida Keys History Center)