New Orleans nurtured Buffett through the decades via football, fun, friendships, and a long-running affiliation with Jazz Fest
New Orleans nurtured Buffett through the decades via football, fun, friendships, and a long-running affiliation with Jazz Fest
Editor’s Note: Back in March of 1993, Jimmy Buffett talked to New Orleans OffBeat magazine’s Keith Spera, who now works for the Times Picayune in that same city. Always articulate, Buffett told us why all Gulf Coast music lovers know what it means to miss New Orleans.
“I was going to school in Poplarville [Mississippi] and I got a job at Trader John’s [in the French Quarter], so that had to have been 1967. That was kind of like the minor leagues, and that little club fed other places. The major leagues was the Bayou Room on Bourbon Street. If you weren’t good enough to get into the Bayou, then you went to Trader John’s. But a band had tragically been killed in a car wreck on the Causeway that had worked in the Bayou Room. We went down and auditioned and got the job.
“Tuesday through Sunday, we started at seven in the evening. We played until three in the morning, half hour on, half hour off. And then Mardi Gras, we started at 10 in the morning, and we went until four. I think that’s the hardest job I ever did, doing literally 20 hours of playing. It was amazing. I was 19 years old or something like that.
“In those days, the biggest thing to do was to try not to get as drunk as the audience. Occasionally, we didn’t make the cut, and that wasn’t fun. I learned early on that it was a responsibility to be onstage. I had seen bad drunk performers, and I really didn’t want to be one. I slipped occasionally, but that was a different time. You’d get off work at three and you never got home ’til the sun came up, so you slept all day. And you could get a muffuletta for a dollar and a six pack of Dixie, so it wasn’t a bad life.
“I used to come down before the Trader John’s gig and play on the streets around the Seven Seas and Las Casas de Marinas. I busked probably in the summer of ’66 and got that job in ’67, and in ’68 I was back working on the street. I always had a good time doing it. It’s just what you did. Between gigs, you played on the street. For me, it was fascinating. You were living that kind of romantic life—the reason most people who had any artistic tendencies went to New Orleans. It wasn’t any kind of degrading or down-on-my-luck or broke thing.
“There were definitely songs [that earned tips]. They were all covers. I don’t even know if I’d started songwriting then. Hey, it was the 1960s. A lot of Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction.” Folky stuff. Protest songs. I remember there was a song called “The Song of the Salvation Army.” There was one Mason Williams song called “Them Poems.” Certain catchy songs. There were other people playing that had the real jobs and there were groups that I looked up to. I’d pick up material from them and apply the stuff that really worked on crowds and worked it into my set. Humorous drinking songs.
“I’ve always been a shameless entertainer. Chances are, if someone was stopping and listening to you and you made them feel good, then they would put some money into your guitar case.
“And right down the street in those days, Frogman [Henry] was still on the street. And the Nevilles were at the Ivanhoe Piano Bar. There was a lot of music on the street in those days. There was a great piano bar on Iberville, and they had this guy play some Frank Sinatra stuff. And then there was always Las Casas. They had conga drums chained to the wall in the front room, and you could rent the conga drums and play along with the jukebox. I always loved that.
“I learned what I was best suited to do. I’m not the best singer or the best guitar player, but I could front a band and run a band. I was the only one in the band who had credit at the music store because I had another job, so I became the leader of the band, and I liked it.
“I was thrown into the spotlight of being the leader of the band ’cause I was the only guy that had credit at Werlein’s to buy the sound system. All I wanted to do was be a background-singing bass player, but then I had no choice.
“My personal history goes back to New Orleans when I was a kid, because my grandfather was a captain for the Delta Steamship Company. I remember coming over to meet his ships. When I decided to go out on my own, New Orleans was just, to me, the haven of lunatics from the South, and I fit right into that category.
“But it’s nice to see with my 14-year-old daughter, it’s a place that it was equally magic for me when I was her age as it is for her, and there aren’t many places around that you can say that. One of the great things about New Orleans is that its cultural thread has maintained through generations. That’s what I really love about it.”
Editor’s Note: Spera, who now works for the New Orleans Times Picayune, also wrote a beautifully crafted Buffett story in the Sept. 2 issue of that newspaper. The info below is from that story.
“The ethos of Jimmy Buffett boiled down to Key West and New Orleans,’’ wrote Spera. “It was New Orleans that launched his career and nurtured it through the decades via friendships, fun, football and a long-running affiliation with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.’’
Spera wrote that in the late 1950s, Buffett spent a summer working for his uncle, Jack Rappaport, selling 3D glasses out of an office at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans. “This is where it all started,” Buffett said during a 2012 Jazz Fest performance. “New Orleans was my Paris before I got to Paris.”
Spera added that one of his chain of Margaritaville restaurants was in the French Quarter, and his Margaritaville Record label released albums by New Orleans bands’ the Iguanas and Evangeline. Louisiana slide guitarist Sonny Landreth was a Coral Reefer, and the late Art Neville of the Neville Brothers married his wife Lorraine at Buffett’s house in Key West. Buffett performed at Allen Toussaint’s 2015 memorial.
Spera stated that Buffett’s performance at the 2006 post-Hurricane Katrina Jazz Fest best captured his emotional connection to New Orleans. “Buffett was essentially the grinning uncle who cracked open the whiskey after the wake,’’ Spera wrote. “He choked up during the first verse of “City of New Orleans” but quickly recovered. He reaffirmed his ties to the region, singing about gumbo and crawfish pie. He slipped a reference to FEMA trailers into “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”
Pictured: The New Orleans Jazz Fest honored Jimmy Buffett in 2011. The poster, by New Orleans artist Garland Robinette, “Busking Out: Becoming Jimmy Buffett,” depicts Buffett on a street corner playing for tips. The poster includes a “Will Play 4 Gumbo’’ sign and a rendering of Buffett in the background walking into the future.