This is an edited version of the Miami Herald Article entitled "King of Carnival" that was originally published in the beginning of April 1997

King of Carnival
BY MICHELLE GENZ

Jimmy Buffett's only Top Ten song, Margaritaville, was 20 years ago. Yet he has remained astonishingly successful. Though radio stations rarely play his music, Buffett sells out 30 concerts every summer, and his albums can still go platinum. His works of fiction -- he has written two books -- have a nice long stay on The New York Times bestseller list, thanks at least in part to his fans, dubbed Parrot Heads, who devour anything he dishes out -- including the food at his two restaurants. Despite its effect on his image as a lover of lethargy, Jimmy Buffett's name regularly appears on Forbes magazine's list of the world's richest entertainers. In the sparkling morning sunshine, Buffett is cruising south from his Palm Beach home in his shiny red Porsche, his assistant, Mike Ramos, at the wheel. Buffet, who defined and was defined by the hedonistic island life of the Keys, maintains a formidable work ethic. If he is thinking of any island today, it's probably Manhattan, and a street there called Broadway, where Buffett ultimately wants to take the new musical he has just co-authored. For now, the theater on his mind is the Coconut Grove Playhouse, where the new play premieres April 8, the beginning of a one-month run.

Ramos slips into a space on the street in front of the theater. The Grove is still woozy in its pre-lunch lull, there is little traffic. Still, within minutes, a woman with a toddler in the back seat has slammed on the brakes of her Bronco to gawk, putting together the man and the marquee over Buffett's right shoulder. The sign on the side of the playhouse says this: Don't Stop the Carnival, music and lyrics by Jimmy Buffett; libretto by -- no kidding -- Herman Wouk, the 81-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning author of war novels like The Caine Mutiny and The Winds of War.

Wouk is less willing to chat up the press, so Buffett, born to tell stories, is on the job. Wearing an oxford shirt and jeans, his hair gone gray and thinning, Buffet is wrapping up a radio interview on the cell phone. The assistant, Ramos, 32 (he calls Buffett ``dude''), hops out of the car to greet a waiting photographer. There has been publicity about the musical since the first news conference last September. Six months later, when rehearsals began in March, Herman Wouk flew in from California; 60 Minutes sent a crew to tape a segment. For the first time, Jimmy played a tape of the music he wrote, performed by him and his Coral Reefer Band. At the end, Wouk embraced Buffett, as the cast stood up and cheered. Buffett has regarded Wouk's novel, Don't Stop the Carnival, about a New Yorker who flees the rat race and buys a hotel in the Caribbean, as his island bible, re-reading it four times over the years. But Buffett wasn't even sure Wouk was alive when he set out to find him to propose the project. At that time, Buffett was having a spate of literary success himself. His novel, Where is Joe Merchant? was on The New York Times bestseller list for seven months, with three weeks at No. 1. Nevertheless, when Buffett faxed Wouk's agent, Wouk faxed back: ``Thanks for your interest. But who are you?''

He knows now.

``I've checked on you,'' he told Buffett on the second contact. ``You're pretty good at what you do.''

He does a lot. This past year was one of Buffett's most productive ever. By the time he turned 50 on Christmas Day, he had released two new albums, the acoustic-based Banana Wind, his third album of original songs in as many years; and Christmas Island, a holiday album. Both are already close to going platinum, with sales of a million or more. In 1996, he gave 30 concerts, all of them sellouts; a typical crowd is 25,000. He met with producers at various studios to talk over a movie version of Where is Joe Merchant? Meanwhile, Tales from Margaritaville, his collection of short stories, continued to sell in paperback; the tally: 750,000 after selling half a million in hard cover. Another collection is in the works, tentatively titled Daybreak on the Equator. All the while, Buffett sold cheeseburgers in tandem paradises: Key West and New Orleans, at his Margaritaville Cafes. With staff totaling 300, the cafes draw tourists by the thousands, only some of whom are the loyal Parrot Heads who more or less fanatically follow Buffet's concerts, subscribe to his newsletter, order his goofy hats, and wear them with gusto. It is a diverse following, from frat boys to soccer moms to ``suits,'' to the demographic that a writer for Rolling Stone calls ``balding white people having fun."

Response to news of Buffett's musical has been tremendous, the Playhouse says. Advance ticket sales have been the greatest in its history. With a cast of 28, and a nine-piece band, the show is being mounted like a Broadway production. For Buffett, having the musical open in Miami is natural -- the only place he would consider for its premiere, he tells reporters, because of its ``ambience,'' and the ``Caribbean mix'' in its culture.

It was the sun that first drew Buffett to Florida after his first marriage went sour, and the perpetually gray Tennessee winter stressed him to the point where he shot six holes in his refrigerator, which made for good lyrics later. On the promise of a job at a coffeehouse at the University of Miami, he went to the TWA counter with an expired Diners Club card, held his thumb over the expiration date, and bought a ticket to Miami. The job fell through on arrival. But he found another folk singer's spot, called Bubba's. For six months, he lived in Coconut Grove with a friend and worked at Bubba's. One November day, he climbed into his friend's '47 Packard and drove the old Overseas Highway to Key West. There he found a gig working the cocktail hour in Howie's Lounge on Duval Street. Three years and two albums later, he had his first hit song: Come Monday, a hum-able, countryish love song. He knew he was getting somewhere when he heard it, Muzak-like, piped into a department store in London. It topped out at No. 30 on the pop charts at home. Three years and four albums after that, another hit, the one that would define him for life: Margaritaville, which ultimately reached No. 8. I blew out my flip flop, Stepped on a pop top became the summary bummer of a sun-warmed hippie, and about the bleakest lyric in the Buffett oeuvre.

``Is Cheeseburger in Paradise comparable in poetry to Paradise Lost? No,'' says David Wild, senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine. ``But the guy had a sense of humor in the '70s, when it was not exactly the golden age of wit.''

For his part, Buffett has never been apologetic about his cheeseburger and Coppertone lyrics. "There's enough of the serious stuff out there for everybody already,'' he says.

Buffett spoke to us for two hours on a recent weekday at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, which happened to be the day of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The irony, that party-guy Jimmy was working that day of all days, was not lost on Buffett. Tropic: Why did you choose to live in Palm Beach? Buffett: I've lived there four or five years. Cause it's comfortable living and I didn't want to raise my children in Key West. My wife wouldn't live there. Besides, I spend more time in the islands than I do in Key West these days, and it's easier to get there in my airplane. Palm Beach is closer to the Bahamas. And it has good schools.

Tropic: How was your education?

Buffett: I wasn't a very good student, and I didn't go to very good schools, and I did OK.

Tropic: You went to the University of Southern Mississippi. Where the heck is that?

Buffett: Hattiesburg. Never been to Hattiesburg? ``Where Tomorrow is Yesterday.'' I know all Mississippi well. Too well. Hattiesburg is about 70 miles from New Orleans. The only reason I wound up there was to stay out of the war and still work. So I had a draft deferment, I worked in New Orleans, in the French Quarter, and commuted to this little school where I took four night classes. I was rarely there. I had a band, and we did frat dances.

Tropic: You still passed?

Buffett: I graduated. [Laughs.] I was not the ideal student, like I say.

Tropic: What was your early goal in life?

Buffett: I just knew I had to get out of Mobile, Ala. I wasn't going to stay there and work in the shipyards. That's all I knew. My parents moved to Alabama when I was about 2. Mobile was a very Southern provincial town. But the great thing about my background was that my grandfather was a sea captain. And my whole family had very Caribbean roots, because when he was a sea captain, he ran from New Orleans all through the Caribbean with lumber, sugar and salt. So I would hear these stories about the Caribbean since I was a kid. My grandfather's a great storyteller and he'd always bring these exotic presents back. It made me want to run away to the Caribbean. And eventually I did. [Laughs.] I made it.

Tropic: How were you shaped by growing up in the Deep South?

Buffett: My Southern upbringing was not as redneck or stereotypical as one might imagine. My dad worked at the shipyard, my mom was a writer and had been off to school and all. New Orleans was always the mecca. We'd get fake ID's and drive to New Orleans cause you could drink there when you were 18. It was the wildest, wickedest city. And I went there and started a band. New Orleans, in the middle of a segregated redneck culture, was the wildest kind of nonsegregated city in the world. Before then, I was a pretty straight, Catholic altar boy. When I was 17, I was still serving Mass. In a year's time, after I arrived in New Orleans, I was living with a hooker. I made a BIG swing. I made up for a lot of lost time.

And the interesting thing is, with Savannah, with my oldest daughter, we go back to New Orleans -- I've got a club there, plus I just love to go, and she said, ``You know what's great about New Orleans is, it doesn't change much.'' And you know, it really hasn't. I can't think of many places that I can share with my daughter that were fundamentally the same when I went through my rite of passage as they are when she goes through hers. And she really connected with it and the life of the Quarter. Of course it's changed, we're in the '90s. It's not the '60s. But that architecture, that period. It arrests something that's very unique.

Tropic: Were you close to your father?

Buffett: We were, on and off. We were very close in our later years, which I'm very glad of. But during adolescence, no, we were not. But, who was? But my parents were always very supportive of me. When I went away to become a musician, in the little town where I come from, I know there was a lot of social pressure exerted on them because of my decision. But they never transferred it to me. They always came to my gigs.

Tropic: You now have kids ages 3, 4 and 17. What's it like to have tiny children again?

Buffett: I love it. It came at the right time. I didn't want to have kids early because I think your life completely changes. It does, there's no doubt about it. And your priorities have to change. And I was selfish, to be quite honest. There was a lot more that I wanted to do, and travel. My wife and I were in our 30s when we had our first baby. Then we were separated for a long time, then we got back together and out popped ``The Pud'' and then came Cameron. So, boom. Tropic: Out popped the what?

Buffett: The Pud. That's what we call Sarah Delaney. We'd been apart for a while, for seven years, then we got back together, and, boom! the family was there. But it was the right time. I was done with most of my bad behavior. I had a pretty good run, and I don't apologize for it. I think I was very lucky to live through some of the things that I did. I had friends who didn't. But I don't think you can ever legislate morality and you just pray that you make it through and pray that your kids make it through.

Tropic: You knew you wanted to be a singer in college?

Buffett: I screwed around in college, because college was so boring and I didn't really know what I was going to do. And I was playing in a band, meeting chicks and having fun. Are you kidding? Was I going to leave that and go to work for Sears in Atlanta? Hell, no. The very funny thing was when I finally did graduate from college, I saw this amazing transition in people: It was time to get serious. You've had your fun in college, now you've got to go get serious. So they'd all be filling out résumés and worrying about job placement. And I was still playing in a rock-'n'-roll band. And I went, I'm just going to ride this and see. I finished college, and I was broke and in debt, and I got a job playing supper clubs in the Midwest and I bought a Volkswagen and I toured the Midwest playing steak houses. But I loved it.

Tropic: You loved it?

Buffett: I absolutely loved it. You have to love it more than anything else and be absolutely committed.

Tropic: Were you very ambitious as a young man? Buffett: Yeah. Tropic: At what point? After college? Buffett: I don't know if I had as much ambition as I had work ethic. I realized you just couldn't ``be'' an artist. However that came into my being, I don't know, but it did. When I was 13, I worked as a shoeshine boy because I wanted my own money. We weren't poor -- I was kind of middle-class, working-class family, my mom and dad both worked, but it was about wanting my independence. I was a shoeshine boy, I was a bag boy because I wanted my own car, I wanted my own money. So I had that before I ever thought about music. So when music came along I had work ethic. Not only that, I had credit at the music store. No other musician I knew did. I had bought a couple of guitars, paid them off. They financed a sound system for us. So I wasn't going to let these yahoos in my band tear up my sound system. So I pronounced myself the leader of the band, because it was my PA system. If they busted it, I was going to pay for it. I knew they wouldn't pay. I'm still a pretty shy guy. What I wanted to be was a background singer. But once I became the leader of the band, I sort of liked it.

Tropic: There was a renaissance of interest in your music about five years ago.

Tropic: What niche are you filling? What is it your audience wants to see?

Buffett: I don't know.

Tropic: You have to know.

Buffett: They want to come for two hours and escape. The culture needs escapism. I'm a child of the Mardi Gras. I grew up in a culture where you were supposed to celebrate life and on a couple days a year you got to be equal with everybody else. And what made you equal? Your ability to have fun. Because the society wasn't equal. Economically, or socially or racially, it wasn't equal where I grew up. But Mardi Gras, those two days, you sort of put all that s - -t aside. And you put on a mask, and you went out, and it didn't matter whether you were the guy that owned the bank, or the guy that swept up at the bank. On Mardi Gras day, everybody had fun. What we do, if there's any kind of method to my madness, is, I have simply taken that carnival culture and taken it to other people who don't necessarily know about it, or understand what they're getting. When we go up to Cincinnati, Ohio, I mean, I sell five shows out in Cincinnati.

It's escapism. It's totally escapism. Cause that's what I sell. And I'm not selling anything that I don't believe in. [Laughs.] In this day and time, that's saying something.

Tropic: How do you challenge yourself? You make it sound like it comes pretty naturally.

Buffett: Coconut Grove Playhouse! Doing a musical, my God! [Laughs.]

Tropic: It's a challenge; is it a nightmare?

Buffett: Nothing is ever easy. Do I regret anything about it? Absolutely not. No. I am so happy to be sitting in this theater because in my wildest dreams I never thought I'd be here.

Tropic: Have you always wanted to write a musical?

Buffett: I love musicals. I loved going to them as a kid. I remember going to South Pacific with my mother and my sister and I can still sing Dites-Moi Pourquoi for you. And the book Don't Stop The Carnival had been a part of my history with the Caribbean. I mean, I bought a hotel because of that book. And I had my own nightmare on the island of St Bart's with that hotel. And now again, I'm just following some romantic fantasy. That's what I do. I like following romantic fantasies. Some of them work out, some of them don't.

Tropic: How many times had you read Wouk's book?

Buffett: Now? [Laughs.] I'd say probably 150 times now. Before then probably four times. It's a book I'd go back and re-read. Herman went away and didn't realize the impact he'd left on the Caribbean culture. Hotel owners that I run into, anybody that lives and exists in the Caribbean knows Don't Stop the Carnival. It's like a bible. But he had no idea that this was going on.

Tropic: When you first proposed the idea to Herman Wouk five years ago, what was his reaction?

Buffett: He didn't know who I was. So I sent him some tapes, and I sent him my book. And the great thing was, he sent back the music and he liked the music, but he loved the book. And that meant more to me than anything, I mean, Herman Wouk liked my book. Are you kidding? And he agreed to see me. And I flew out to California and we sat down and had a meeting and from that day, under what we now refer to as our magic tree, we struck up an immediate friendship. And he said to me, ``I want to ask you one question. Why would you want to do this?'' And you know all I said? I said, ``I think it'd be fun.'' And that truly was my answer. I didn't have to think any further than that.

Tropic: Did you approach the score as you would putting together an album?

Buffet: I approached it as a show. I love Calypso -- I can listen to a great Calypso band, I can have two or three glasses of wine, and I can dance the merengue all night, but that's me. You have to disassociate your own personal thoughts about things because you've got paying customers out there. Again it comes back to my close personal attachment to the audience. Who's the audience going to be for this? How much of this can they take? Calypso music, yeah, I can listen to it all night, but I know an audience can't. It's like, I love to cook, but I'm not going to cook like I like to in my restaurant in Key West because I'd be closed in a week. You got to know what you're doing. So Calypso is going to be the backbone of the music, but I wanted to go off in tangents. I wanted to go to Reggae, I wanted to go to soca, I wanted to go to zouk, and a little bit of merengue, so you could break up the pace. I'm not a great singer, I'm certainly not a good musician -- I'm passable. I'm a fair writer, but my strongest suit is I can read an audience and pace a show. I've been doing theatrical things in my show for the past five years.

Tropic: How?

Buffett: Skits, backdrops. We write skits that are part of it. The audience loves it. I can't go out there and do a run-through show. Every show, they challenge you to make it different. And I work for my audience, that's the way I look at it. If I wanted to do the show that I wanted to do, it would be nowhere near the show that I do for the audience, but they're the paying customer. And I don't mind doing Margaritaville for the 400 millionth time. I really don't. I hear a lot of other people, ``Ugh, I don't want to do the song.'' Well, it's your song. You know, that's what they're paying to come see.

Tropic: What is the show you'd want to do?

Buffett: Ballads. I like ballads more. If I was going to do my own Jimmy Buffett concert, I'd go out there with my guitar and do what I consider the more interesting stories I've put to song. I don't think Cheeseburger in Paradise is a particularly interesting story, but everybody loves that song, and I'm not going to argue with them.

Tropic: You have plans to take your musical to New York.

Buffett: Oh, we definitely have plans to go to New York, if it's good enough.

Tropic: Does that mean reviews, or packed houses?

Buffett: Packed houses. I don't care about reviews.

Tropic: If ticket sales start sagging, will you pop up more often?

Buffett: Ah, but sales aren't sagging. They're there. No, I would do it cause it's fun. The other thing we're going to do is kind of give away nonspeaking roles, cannon fodder, body parts, and have a contest like you do for rock 'n' roll and you can be in the play. So we're going to do things like that, that normally the theater doesn't do, that we know from rock 'n' roll. I just want it to go, like one night, ``The part of Tex Acres will be played by Jimmy Buffett.'' [He roars as the audience might.] Yeah.

Tropic: Do you like the songs you wrote for the musical?

Buffett: I like what I wrote. It's a challenge to my style. But it's not what I like that counts. When I was working on it down in the islands, in Georgetown, and I started playing for them, and they started dancing around, that's when I know I'm on the mark. The maids in Georgetown told me I'm on the mark.

Tropic: Does Wouk like it?

Buffett: Oh, yeah, he's the first one who told me it worked. I'll tell you one last very funny story. I didn't realize Herman's impact on the Jewish community when I first started working with him. I just knew it was Herman, the writer of Don't Stop the Carnival. But he's a very revered figure in the Jewish faith, particularly in the Orthodox faith. When we were going to finalize the deal for the musical Herman brought his attorney in and his wife, who's his manager, Sarah. I brought my three kinda key business guys in and we went down to the meeting and they're all huge admirers, these three guys, they're are all Jewish and kind of in awe of Herman, very nervous, like kids about to meet Michael Jackson or Madonna, like a fan. They're sitting on the couch for this business meeting, and I had just sent him this song called Calaloo that I had written, which is a very key part to one of the characters. Herman walks into the room. He's got on a straw hat, and he's singing, ``Cal-a-loo!'' and he's doing a merengue. I looked at those guys on the couch and I said, See?

Later, I asked him, "Did you do that for effect for those guys?" And he said, ``Well, maybe a little bit.''