Inverness native Jack Catlette sat on the porch of his fraternity’s temporary home in Hattiesburg in the fall of 1967 when a small Ford Falcon pulled up.
A fellow Kappa Sigma brother exited the vehicle and walked up to Catlette and introduced himself.
That man would go on to become a singer/songwriter, a best-selling author, a national phenomenon and a billionaire.
It was Pascagoula native Jimmy Buffett.
“I really didn’t know him, but he walked up and introduced himself and said, ‘We have a band, and we’re looking for a drummer who can travel, and I hear you play drums. We’ve got a high school boy who plays, but his momma won’t let him travel,’” Catlette told The Enterprise-Tocsin this week.
Buffett died last Friday of cancer at the age of 76.
“I didn’t know him but for a very short while, but he was a great guy, a good personality, just like you’d see him when he was on Johnny Carson and other places,” Catlette said.
Catlette, who had played in a stellar local band in Sunflower County during his high school years, did not become a Coral Reefer, but he did fill the rhythm section for Buffett’s college cover band for several gigs.
Catlette said he enrolled at the University of Southern Mississippi that year, declaring a major in drama.
“I wanted to be an actor I thought,” he said.
He pledged Kappa Sigma, and obviously word had gotten around about his drumming skills.
“(Buffett) invited me to come to the house and try out,” Catlette said. “I said, ‘Sure.’”
The band, which had Buffett on rhythm guitar, Rick Bennett on bass and a female singer named Betty Bridges, had been playing gigs in New Orleans the previous summer, Catlette said.
They played mainly folk songs, singing in coffee houses and some bars, but they were looking to switch to a rock & roll sound.
“I went down and tried out and played (for them). I remember playing Tobacco Road…They liked me,” Catlette said. “I got in the band, and we played at a place there on campus, I think it was in the student union. They called it Nats Nook.”
A photo of the band from those gigs made its way into the USM yearbook the following spring.
“That’s where the picture with me playing drums with them in the yearbook that year (came from)… So, I do have confirmation that I was in a band with him,” Catlette said with a chuckle. “We played there for about four nights, and I remember going to the radio station that was on campus with Jimmy and advertising us playing there.”
Catlette said the Margaritaville singer really wasn’t writing his own songs at that time.
“He was different, but I can’t say he was going to be a star,” Catlette said. “I had been in a really good band prior to that, and they were just kind of getting started. He could sing, and Bennett was a real good singer.”
He recalled a time when he and Buffett and other band members listened to the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band over and over together.
He also saw a wild side of his bandmates, witnessing some typical fraternity hijinks.
“We were just college guys, having a good time, doing cover songs,” Catlette said.
Catlette said he attended the Egg Bowl that year and got to visiting with some of his old friends from back home who were at Mississippi State.
That pull toward Starkville was too much.
When he returned to Hattiesburg, he told Buffett that he was going to be leaving Southern and leaving the band to go to State.
“We were booked to play at the Gunga Den on Bourboun Street for two nights,” Catlette said. “I think we were going to make like $20 apiece, and I wish I had stayed at least long enough to have done that, to say I played on Bourbon Street with Buffett.”
About a year later, Catlette said he was in Mobile, Alabama, on a date and driving downtown.
“And I looked up on the marquee of the hotel and it said, ‘Featuring Jimmy Buffett tonight,’ and I said, ‘I was in a band with this guy at Southern. Let’s go in and see if we can hear him.’ We went into the bar, and there wasn’t anybody in there but the bartender, Buffett and us. It was dark, and he was by himself then,” Catlette recalled.
Catlette said he learned that the band he left the previous year had dissolved, leaving Buffett on his own.
A few years later, Catlette was in New Orleans with his new bride, Martha, when he had his first encounter with Buffett’s first hit single.
“We were sitting at a bar on Bourbon Street, and I went over to the jukebox to play a song, and I looked down through the list of songs, and I came upon Come Monday by Jimmy Buffett,” Catlette said. “I turned to my wife, and I said, ‘Gosh, I was in a band with this guy at Southern.’ We played that song over and over again.”
It wasn’t until years later when Catlette had the opportunity to take his kids to hear Buffett play in Gulfport at the coliseum.
There were no backstage encounters. They just enjoyed the show.
And it was always a good time with one of Mississippi’s greatest sailors and musical talents, whether it was in the student union at USM, a fraternity house or in that larger Gulf Coast venue.
