Fun Facts About JB

Fun Facts About JB

• While working as a journalist for Billboard magazine in Nashville in 1970, Buffett was credited with breaking the story about the disbanding of the pioneering bluegrass duo Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. He also penned a story about Willie Nelson.
• Down to Earth, Buffett’s debut album, was released on Andy Williams’s Barnaby label in 1970. It sold a reported 324 copies.
• Buffett moved from Key West to Aspen in the late 1970’s and has lived on St. Barts in the Caribbean, Palm Beach, and Sag Harbor on Long Island.
• Buffett’s album A1A, released in 1974, was his first album that referenced Key West and the easy going beach life. AIA runs along Florida’s Atlantic Ocean coastline.
• Alabama shows: Buffett performed at Coleman Coliseum in T-Town in Oct. of 1992. He also played there Feb. 20, 1979 and Sept. 15, 1977. Buffet played on Dec. 2, 1998, at the Mobile Civic Center and July 29, 1990 at Ladd Memorial Stadium. Other Mobile shows listed on websites include: Feb. 23, 1977, (Municipal Audi); Nov. 15, 1974, (USA); and Nov. 11, 1974 (Saenger Theatre). He also played shows at the opening of the first sanctioned Margaritaville in Gulf Shores, at his sister Lucy’s Lulu’s restaurants on Weeks Bay and in Gulf Shores and at Judge Roy Bean and the Flora-Bama and at both of his good friend Kenny Stabler’s Gulf Shores bistros – Lefty’s and The End Zone.
• Buffett is credited with inventing trop-rock, a genre that incorporates rock, reggae, country, caribbean, calypso and zydeco – sometimes in the same song.
• The Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads boxed set at one time was the eighth-selling boxed set in history and the biggest-selling MCA boxed set that year.
• The first Buffett branded beer, Lone Palm Lager, named after one of Mr. Buffett’s songs, did not sell as well as the brewers hoped. Consumer research revealed that the name bummed people out because it made them think about drinking alone. Re-branded as LandShark Lager, sales of the same beer took off.
• “All That Is Sacred,” a documentary that stars both Jimmy Buffett and novelist Tom McGuane, Buffett’s friend of 50 years going back to his Key West days (also JB’s brother-in-law), premiered at the Telluride Film Festival only 12 hours after Buffett’s death. The documentary is about Key West in the early and mid-‘70s and a group of friends that also included writers Jim Harrison and Richard Brautigan.
• While playing in 2007 at a sold out Madison Square Garden, Buffett got word that Flora-Bama co-owner Joe Gilchrist was in the audience and gave the late/great Gilchrist and the Flora- Bama shout-outs for supporting original music at his bistro. Gilchrist said NFL Hall of Famer Quarterback Kenny Stabler, who passed away in 2015, was the person who introduced him to Buffett.
• Keith Harmeyer, a friend and sometimes Buffett vocal coach explained Buffett’s magic formula: “His songs introduced us to the notion that just maybe if you were a little bold and a little more crazy and were willing to walk away from it all, you wouldn’t have to suffer most of your life just to enjoy a tiny bit of it. You could be in your own ‘Margaritaville’ all day, every day. That was a powerful and seductive idea. And so, his music became the siren song of a generation longing for the good life.”