As a wordsmith or tunesmith, Coral Reefer McAnally has tales to tell

By John Katsilometes

Thursday, May 14, 2009 | 5:31 p.m.

He’s born to tell stories, this Mac McAnally. Set those tales to music, and they become hit records for the likes of Jimmy Buffett and Kenny Chesney.

There’s the tale about how a Christmas Eve search for a couple of D-sized batteries for his daughter’s She-Ra toy inspired the song “Down the Road,” a duet with Chesney that topped the Billboard country music charts this year and earned both artists a nomination for Best Vocal Event by the Academy of Country Music.

There’s the story about how McAnally’s grandmother “anointed” him to “preach music” when he was still a child in the teeming-with-churches, dry-county town of Belmont, Miss. As McAnally recalls, it’s good that Grandma added “music” to “preach,” because, “I wouldn’t have been much of a preacher. I was into music, though.” He loved writing, and reading short stories, but knew he would not be the next Faulkner, “(But) when you put the music to words, you can make the words really special.”

There are the stories about performing solo, as he is tonight at Green Valley Ranch Station Casino’s Ovation Showroom, and as a guitarist with Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, the indefatigable conga line that hits the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday night. McAnally is still impressed by the Parrothead Nation’s seemingly instinctive capacity to mobilize. “They’re very organized. We just played a show at Pizza Hut Park in Dallas, and most of ’em had three-day parking passes, showing up in RVs, the port-a-potties had fins coming out the sides. The concert was just an excuse for all these people to spend three days together at this event.”

My favorite story is McAnally’s wholly unexpected connection to Wayne Newton. The man who has written songs for and/or performed with the likes of Kenny Chesney and Jimmy Buffett (and Ricky Skaggs, Chris LeDoux, Hank Williams Jr., Reba McEntire, T.G. Sheppard, David Allan Coe, Charley Pride, Randy Travis and Little Feat, among many other successful recording stars) and just signed to Toby Keith’s Snow Dog Nashville label also has a history with The Wayner.

“At the time it was very early for me in my career, I’d had a record deal at 19 years old, and I was recording in Muscle Shoals (Miss.), and I played guitar on an album for Wayne Newton,” McAnally recalled. “He took a liking to me and he said, ‘Any time you’re on the west side of the United States, I’ll bring you to a show.’ Well, I got booked with Kenny Rankin in Lake Tahoe, and Wayne flew me down to Vegas to see his show. This was when he was at the Desert Inn, in 1977, and I showed up wearing my grandfather’s hand-me-down overalls. It was just crazy. I’d never seen anybody fly in their own plane, and he introduced me that night as being a lot better than I actually was. He was just such a throwback, he had this huge band with 300 songs on call, and they had to know all of them so they could play them on a moment’s notice. I’d never seen a show like it. I still love Wayne.”

A little more verbiage from the longtime Coral Reefer:

On his acumen as a singer-songwriter: “Gosh, the fact that I’m not a bum in Mississippi who requires around-the-clock care from his family is a bonus. I’m just glad to have a music-related occupation. My family is musical, I was exposed to a lot of music in the house, in church. But when I was 15, writing the early stuff, I was just playing and mumbling words. It took me three or four times before I felt comfortable putting ‘songwriter’ in front of my name.”

On the night he wrote “Down the Road”: “In the defense of idiot, without the savant, it was Christmas Eve in 1987, and I was literally just thinking the kinds of thoughts dads think, all the hopes and dreams you have for your children. I was not thinking of recording a hit or a No. 1 single. It was probably, in the world of modern music, as organically as someone can have a hit single. At the time, I was trying to put together one of these no-assembly-required, assembly-required toys. It was a She-Ra thing -- you remember He-Man and She-Ra? I got this for my daughter, Erin, who would have been 7 years old at the time. It was sort of a mountain fortress, and for it to be a fortress, it needed to light up. I was working with it and had to go off and find some D batteries. That’s where it started, and 20-some years later, Kenny calls me and asks me to record it. So then it was two guys in a recording studio with acoustic guitars. We finished it in 90 minutes. I thought, ‘If Kenny hadn’t asked me to sing, it might be a hit single.’ ”

On Buffett’s still-powerful draw: A rolling ball of fun is what the Coral Reefer Band is. Jimmy is an ambassador of fun. He’s always just trusted what he’s felt like doing, and there is some universality in trusting your instincts. He’s real, he’s just that guy that he is. He’s not going to try to write songs, as a 60-year-old, that are going to get played on the radio, but we’ve got new songs that people have heard four times that they are singing along with, so it gives you room to enjoy “Cheeseburger In Paradise” and never get tired of it. Of course, there are 17 or 18 songs we play that, if we don’t play, there’s going to be a riot, but it’s not just a nostalgia act. It’s not just a rote repetition of hits. “We’ve Got a Lot to Drink About” is a new song that speaks to what is going on now, and the audience sings along to that.”

On the strangest thing he’s ever seen while touring with Buffett: “The strangest? Hah! One time (the Parrotheads) built a giant soapbox derby-looking structure and put wheels on dildos and raced them. They had a wooden hill, and they literally raced them down this hill. It wasn’t an officially sanctioned event or anything (laughs). But they’ll construct anything that occurs to them, and this is what occurred to them. You asked for strange, and that was really strange, even for Parrotheads.”