Buffett band members cut own album: Duo mixes jazz, Caribbean sounds on “Club Trini”

This story originally appeared in The Potomac News.

The mass of people, dressed like the cast of one of Don Ho’s nightmares, parted for something even more surreal.

An electric car, modified to serve as a small stage, rolled into view. It was decked out with fake palm trees, an inflatable beer bottle and fake, oversized bananas.

Welcome to Jimmy Buffett’s 1996 tour.

The fans, dressed in Hawaiian shirts, hats of various descriptions, grass skirts and bearing beer, beach balls and inflatable sharks, are known as Parrotheads.

The musicians in the car, playing a mix of Caribbean steel drum music and jazz fusion, are Buffett’s opening act: Robert Greenidge and Mike Utley.

“The whole point of Buffett’s show this year is to play more music,” Utley said, before their June 22 show at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland. Buffett also has been playing a few numbers out in the lawn on the tour himself, as a gesture to the financially challenged.

In addition to promoting their new album, “Club Trini,” Greenidge and Utley had more work to do that night. Long-time members of Buffett’s band, the Coral Reefers, they joined the rest of the ensemble on stage for the two-hour concert.

They were there when Buffett’s Caribbean country rock — best known for such late 1970s light rock standards are “Margaritaville” and “Come Monday” — stopped attracting normal fans, and shows filled up with Parrotheads.

“They entertain us. It’s unbelievable from the stage,” Utley, 49, said. “We work because they’re having such a great time.”

Things started to change about 1986, Greenidge and Utley said.

It began, improbably enough, in Ohio, especially Cincinnati and Cleveland.

“I don’t know, I think it has to do with cabin fever,” Utley said. “They have such hard winters there.”

Even when the weather was still cold outside, the band started noticing enthusiastic fans in shorts and grass skirts, making concert halls into a makeshift beach. And the phenomenon just spread from there. Now, it is an audience member dressed in a way that wouldn’t bring out the fashion police who stands out.

“It’s a cult,” Utley grinned.

“Very live, very live,” Greenidge, 46, added.

The “family” description may be old hat, but it seems to apply to the Coral Reefer organization. The two were interviewed as the musicians and crew all sat on an outdoor patio before the show, scarfing down Maryland crabs together, stars and techies elbow-to-elbow.

“We come out this early to hang out with the crew,” Utley said. “A lot of the people here are friends.”

The two first collaborated in early 1985 at the suggestion of MCA executive Tony Brown, now the company president. He created a series of jazz albums, mostly with a New Age feel.

Although Greenidge and Utley’s “Mad Music” album was different in tone than the rest of the line, especially given Greenidge’s steel drums, it was successful enough to spawn two more disks, “Jubilee” in 1986 and “Heat” in 1988.

Greenidge and Utley stayed busy — the two are successful studio musicians, and say being Coral Reefers is essentially a “summer job” — and eight years slipped past before the release of “Club Trini.” They feel it was worth the wait.

“I think it’s probably the best one we have done by far,” Utley said.

Both say they worked enjoying playing on a mostly instrumental album.

“When you play instrumental music, you have a chance to step out some more,” Utley said. Most of the Coral Reefer Band played on the album, and the album’s one vocal track is by Nadirah Shakoor, a Coral Reefer formally with brainy hip-hop band Arrested Development. The end result is an eclectic album that would be right at home in an upscale Caribbean restaurant.

Both men have been professional musicians for years. Utley’s last “real job” was janitor work one summer before college.

“That lasted about three days,” he said. Although he was studying zoology and planning on entering the medical field, he dropped out to try and make a go of it in music. “I said, I had to give myself a chance to do this. … I’ve been real lucky. I’ve taken my opportunities.”

Greenidge’s last real job was working at a print shop in his native Trinidad, but calling it a “real job” may be a stretch.

“The thing is, the guys I worked with were in my band,” he said.

In addition to ably playing keyboard with the Coral Reefer Band, Utley has produced eight of Buffett’s 27 releases. In the month-long July break in the summer tour, he put the finishing touches on Buffett’s forthcoming Christmas album, to be released in October and tentatively called “Ho-h0-ho and a Bottle of Rum.”

Although they have both played with some of the biggest names in music, including Greenidge with John Lennon on “Double Fantasy” and Utley’s work in “A Star is Born” with Barbra Streisand, they are inevitably linked with Buffett.

The two are philosophical about it.

“I don’t have any regrets,” Utley said. “There are other people I’d like to play with. But I have time.”