Word: buffett
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...Buffett often claims to be uninterested in money, but he has been uneven about sharing it. He gives freely to environmental causes and has a foundation that donates $1 from every concert ticket to grants for nonprofit agencies in the cities where he plays. At the same time, his band, though well paid, has long griped about having no pension plan. Buffett is now creating one for his veteran sidemen...
...knew what to do about it. Even in his beach-bum days, Buffett had been an effective businessman, handling his own bookings, keeping the club owners passably honest, locking himself in his motel room to go over the accounting ledgers. So now he spent freely to turn his concerts into spectacles, building elaborate stage sets with erupting volcanoes and such. He also tightened up the music and hired the Trinidadian steel-drum virtuoso Robert Greenidge. Eventually he brought in clowns on stilts and a storyteller for the children and sent bands into the parking lot to play for the fans...
...Prince of Key West. One night in 1971, Buffett was drinking, singing and passing the hat in the Chart Room bar when he met a radiant honey blond named Jane Slagsvol, who'd come to town for spring break from the University of South Carolina. The next night he saw her again, "wearing a tight, long pink dress that made a lasting impression on me." Jane moved in with Buffett and never did get back to school. They were married in 1977--the year Margaritaville hit--at an all-night Aspen blowout (the wedding band was the Eagles). But after...
...Buffett partied longer than his wife did, but gave up drugs and tapered off his drinking when, he says, "the hangovers started to feel like surgical recoveries." After Jane left, he retreated to Key West, wrote some fine, broken-hearted songs (and some mediocre, jolly ones) and kept touring, though his audiences were getting older and sometimes smaller. When radio stations wouldn't play his new records, he figured his career was winding down and set about creating an alternative revenue stream. He and a friend opened a T-shirt shop in 1984 and expanded it into the first Margaritaville...
Then something strange happened: the crowds at his shows started growing. College kids were showing up again. Fans began making a day of it in the parking lot, competing to see who could wear the most outlandish costume. Buffett's musical sidekick, harmonica-ace Greg ("Fingers") Taylor, saw the change when he rejoined the band after taking a year off to "learn how not to drink." Taylor and Buffett were riding in a limo through a Midwestern parking lot "and all these insane rituals are going on around us. Winnebagos with shark fins on top. People dancing. Buffett turned...