Caribbean Country Boy

In his early days as a singer-composer, Jimmy Buffett did some of his best work in grocery stores. "I was a good shoplifter," he recalls, emphasizing good in his soft Alabama accent. Buffett barely earned beer-and-cracker money in the 1960s, playing hotels and red-walled cocktail lounges.

Things are better now. Buffett, 30, belongs to a wave of laid-back Dixie performers, including Oklahoma-born James Talley and Tennessean Sid Selvidge, who are just now getting wide recognition. Buffett's seventh album, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, is 20th among country LPs, and last month he packed off on tour as the opening act with the Eagles.

The pairing is a sunny one. The Eagles' sounds are quintessential Southern California, while Buffett's music is countrified Caribbean. He lives aboard a 33-ft. ketch called Euphoria, and island-hops through the Antilles. His music, like his lifestyle, is a gentle blend of folksy Southern rock and infatuation with the Caribbean. Buffett writes, often puckishly, of Gulf Stream idyls, Latin crimes of passion, and tequila-filled days. His themes, presented in simple rhythms and sung in an engaging baritone, have the languorous appeal of a fishnet hammock. As he sings in Wastin' Away Again in Margaritaville:

I don't know the reason I stayed here all season With nothing to show but this brand new tattoo But it's a real beauty a Mexican cutie But how it got here I haven 't a clue.

Buffett's seagoing impulses were bred in Mobile, where his father was a naval architect at a local shipyard. His grandfather, to whom Buffett dedicated an album, was a retired ship captain who first sailed aboard a whaler at the age of 14. Buffett himself left home at 18, bounced through a series of Southern colleges and took guitar lessons. He began touring the Southern honky-tonk circuit and recorded his first album in Nashville. Says he: "It was a terrible record."

Gypsy Soul. When a gig in Miami fell through in 1972, Buffett stayed in Florida and settled in Key West. The shrimpers' bars suited him perfectly: "I could go out at night and come home with a hell of a story." From the sandy Key West beaches sprang a string of albums during the next few years. Among them: AI A, named for the access road near his home, Havana Daydreamin' and the waggishly titled A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean.

As "sunbathers and turistas" discovered Key West in droves, Buffett moved on in his ketch. Says he: "I've found other places and other sources just traveling around the Caribbean. There are a lot of incredible characters down there, as migratory and as gypsy-souled as I am." Buffett petitioned the Cuban government for permission to sail into Havana harbor. It was denied, but he plans to try again.

He hopes that success will give him more private time. "I've had to do 200 concerts on the road each year to support a band and pay my bills," he notes. "It's got to the point where I don't have to do that any more." Buffett has set up his own publishing company and negotiated a new contract with ABC Records. None of it seems to be going to his head. "Every now and then when I'm in a grocery/ I'll take a little but not much," he sings in Peanut Butter Conspiracy. "Cause you never know when the hard times will hit ya/ And I don't want to lose my touch."

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