Fins Up In Atlantic City: The Coral Reefer Band Keeps The Party Going

Since its publication in 1943, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic novella, The Little Prince, has served as fertile breeding ground for all kinds of poignant quotes, including the following: “What is essential is invisible to the naked eye.”

These words have been applied to a wide range of topics across countless latitudes and attitudes, and they apply equally well to the indelible spirit of the late, great Jimmy Buffett.

And while Buffett sailed on from this world in September 2023 – let’s all say it together, “FUCK CANCER!” – his spirit was alive and on full display on January 24 at Hard Rock Live in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the Coral Reefer Band played their third public show since Buffett’s untimely passing. (Is there ever a good time?)

A lot has changed since May 6, 2023, the date of the Reefers’ last full concert with Buffett; but a lot has stayed the same, and this could not have been more evident to anyone at the Hard Rock. While the pre-show festivities did not include traditional parking lot staples like tiki bars or wheels of fortune, they were complete with thousands of smiling guests donning Hawaiian shirts, with many of them playing blackjack against dealers wearing brightly colored leis. There didn’t appear to be many, if any, coconut bikini tops, though.

Most of the band, led by longtime guitarist and singer Mac McAnally, remained the same as well, including slide guitarist Peter Mayer, his brother Jim Mayer on bass, pedal steel guitarist Doyle Grisham, vocalists Nadirah Shakoor and Tina Gullickson, drummer Roger Guth, percussionist Eric Darken, trumpeter John Lovell, steel drummer Robert Greenidge, and of course Mr. Utley on keys – Mick Utley, that is, son of longtime Coral Reefer keyboardist Michael Utley.

Also joining the band were renowned songwriters and Buffett collaborators Scotty Emerick on acoustic guitar and vocals and Will Kimbrough on electric guitar and vocals, both of whom have written songs that Buffett covered. Toward the end of the show, Buffett’s daughter, Savannah Buffett, came out to thank the crowd and sing backup with the band.

Emerick kicked off the night in a trio with McAnally and Darken, opening with two Toby Keith songs – “Beer for My Horses” and “Weed with Willie” – that he co-wrote with the late country singer. They also played more originals co-written by Emerick, including “Like My Dog,” covered on Buffett’s posthumous final studio album, Equal Strain on All Parts, as well as the Buffett classic “The Wino and I Know.”

Followed by a short set break, with some chants for the Philadelphia Eagles, and in another Buffett show tradition, the screen above the stage began showing old video of Buffett cavorting through Philadelphia, doing everything from eating a cheesesteak to running up the steps of the Art Museum a la Rocky Balboa, along with video from Parrotheads all across town and in the pre-show parking lot over the years. (These sorts of videos had been a part of his stage show for decades.)

As the band returned to the stage, McAnally said what everyone in the crowd felt in their hearts: “There’s only one person that ever lived that could get us all together this evening.”

The feeling in the room is best described by paraphrasing Kacey Musgraves — who Buffett cited as a modern country artist who’d caught his attention — on her 2018 album Golden Hour: it was happy and sad at the same time, like smiling with tears in your eyes.

As with most Buffett shows, the band played many songs fans know by heart – songs like “Fins,” “Margaritaville” and “Come Monday,” Buffett’s first hit from 1974 – with McAnally and Emerick trading lead vocal duties. Other old songs sounded great when led by other Reefers, including “One Particular Harbor,” led by Nadirah Shakoor, and “Southern Cross,” a cover that had become a Buffett staple, this time with Peter Mayer filling in admirably for Stephen Stills.

The band played one of Buffett’s last great originals, “Bubbles Up,” to thousands of watery-eyed fans, and also covered “Scarlet Begonias,” one of a handful of Grateful Dead tunes they’d played over the years, finally closing out the night with a Kimbrough-led encore cover of “Brown Eyed Girl.”

With these and other covers, Buffett proudly wore his influences on his sleeve. Himself an author and unabashed Francophile, he name-dropped Saint-Exupéry – also a pilot – in 2002’s “Far Side of the World,” where he also tipped his hat to the author’s memoir Wind, Sand, and Stars, and referenced the little prince in “Ti Punch Cafe” on his final studio album, 2023’s posthumous Equal Strain on All Parts.

Buffett himself also influenced many others, even more than some may realize. Jenny Lewis invited him to join her band for their cover of the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle with Care” in 2016, and for their part, most of the Wilburys themselves had crossed paths with Buffett in one way or another.

In a 2009 interview, Bob Dylan named Buffett as one of his favorite songwriters. Dylan had covered “A Pirate Looks at Forty” with Joan Baez in 1982 and soon after spent a day sailing and getting stoned with Buffett in St. Bart’s, as Buffett told Rolling Stone in 2020. Roy Orbison sang on “Beyond the End” on Buffett’s 1985 album, Last Mango in Paris, and Buffett routinely covered Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” in the last decade of his life.

Buffett also wrote of how the death of George Harrison affected him in the author’s note to his novel, A Salty Piece of Land, beginning to write it the day after Harrison, himself an avid sailor with history in the Caribbean, died, also from cancer.

In that note, Buffett also observed, “The memories of good people and good work are timeless,” and with more shows on the calendar this year, the Coral Reefer Band is proving that true to all of us. Fins (and bubbles) up!