Before Jimmy Buffett appeared on Billboard’s charts, he was writing about different artists who did.
Buffett, who died Friday (Sept. 1) at age 76, labored as a Nashville reporter for Billboard from 1969 to 1970. He stop when his first album, Debut to Earth, was launched as a result of he was informed that persevering with, can be a battle of curiosity.
Among the concert events he reviewed was Isaac Hayes at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium, writing, “The Hot Buttered Soul Man combined his songs and his keyboard work on both organ and piano with a full and powerful voice range that created a style [that] was truly his own.”
In 2021, Buffett revisited his time as a reporter, telling Billboard throughout an interview that as a burgeoning artist, he couldn’t deliver himself to put in writing something unfavorable a couple of fellow performer.
“I can never give anybody a bad review because I knew how hard it was to get up there,” he stated. “Now, there has to be something toxic that [a review] says, but I can never do it because I knew how hard it was. I know performers who are scared to death to get up there and still do it. And I go, “Why are you that scared to get up there?” I imply, you ought to be doing one thing else for those who get scared to go up there. It’s one of many biggest joys you might ever have on planet earth to me.”
The finest a part of the job was the free music. Although unbylined, Buffett believed he reviewed Elton John’s 1970 album, Tumbleweed Connection, glowingly writing, “Although this is but his second LP, Elton John’s track record already speaks for itself and the album is sure to be one of the biggest of the new year.”
Talking to Billboard once more in 2022, Buffett recalled the fun of getting John’s album within the mail whereas writing for the journal. “People were sending me free albums because I was the reporter for Billboard, and that album came in a stack of records from I think it was MCA,” he stated. “When I got [to Billboard], my editor told me, ‘Just let them know you’re a Billboard reporter and give them your address and they’ll give you records so hopefully you review them or you’ll say something about them.’ So I went ‘free albums? No sh—!’”
He additionally wrote of his time at Billboard in his 1998 autobiography, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, calling it “the only real job I would have in my adult life.”
From the primary day, he was wined and dined as he traveled along with his boss, Bill Williams. “In twenty-four hours, I had gone from just another nobody songwriter who couldn’t get his foot into a music publisher’s door to the assistant Southern Editor of Billboard,” he wrote. “Hell, people took me to lunch. I had business cards. I flew to New York for editorial meetings. I had an expense account. I had a WATTS line at work on which I called all my friends after working hours, and I got free albums from the record companies. Not bad for a real job.”
Buffett even managed to interrupt some information, together with bluegrass titans’ Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ cut up.
After switching from masking nation music to pop, Buffett interviewed Otis Redding and James Brown, reviewed Led Zeppelin on the Palladium, and realized a bit of in regards to the significance of taking good care of enterprise. “What I mainly saw were a lot of wonderfully talented artists and writers who let somebody else worry about ‘all that stuff,’ and I saw the trouble it got them into,” he wrote within the e-book.
Billboard threw Buffett a going away social gathering when his album got here out, gifting him a guitar case. Even although that chapter of his life was over, it’s clear his time at Billboard remained a treasured reminiscence and set him on his means: “One of the true joys of my later success was going back and sharing it with Bill,” he wrote within the autobiography. “He was as proud as a parent when I finally broke out.”
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