05669
Dec. 13, 2005

Guitarist finds God’s grace
in Buffett’s Margaritaville

‘Mish kid’ and ‘Parrothead’ Peter Mayer
has second career as a Christian rocker

by Evelyn Theiss
Religion News Service

CLEVELAND — Pop singer and guitarist Peter Mayer was in India long before the Beatles made their famous trip there in 1968.

        His situation was very different. He was a child of Lutheran missionaries, living in Tamilnadu.

        Mayer, as any self-respecting “Parrothead” could tell you, is the lead guitarist of Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. He’s been playing and touring with Buffett for 17 years.

        However, memories of his childhood in the south of India, and of his parents’ work there, are the basis of a second career — making music with a spiritual bent, including the recent CD, “Musicbox.”

        “Growing up in India stirred something in my soul that even now, in my 40s, makes me never want to be too far away from passing on the gifts I was given,” Mayer says.

        Mayer is one of eight children of Jim and Selma “Sammy” Mayer. (Last winter he played a benefit concert at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.)

        “By Indian standards, we were pretty wealthy,” Mayer said during a break from a 14-city holiday-season tour. “We were able to hire Indian helpers for around the house, so our life was comfortable. But it was poignant, because around us was such poverty. It was such a gorgeous country, with beautiful people, but we were face-to-face with the cold realities of people not having even the basic medical care they needed.”

        Mayer’s parents found an old piano for Jim to play, and always had classical records on the turntable. And of course there was lots of music at church, some infused with the Indian tradition of flutes and drums, shakers and bells.

        In 1965, when Mayer was 8 years old, his family moved back to its hometown, St. Louis. The 1960s music scene was in full bloom.

        “The Beatles, Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix — it was just an incredible time to grow up,” Mayer said.

        He began buying albums and learned to play the clarinet. His parents bought him a $50 Suzuki guitar and he taught himself to play. The first song he learned was Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird.”

        Mayer’s younger brother, Jim, played bass. They formed pop groups and played throughout their years at Lutheran High School South in St. Louis.

        In 1987, Peter joined Jim and a drummer named Roger Guth and headed to Los Angeles, where they signed with Warner Bros. Records. The name of their group was PM, and their first album was produced by Elliot Scheiner, who had worked with Aretha Franklin and Steely Dan. PM’s first single, “Piece of Paradise,” reached No. 8 on the Billboard charts.

        They began opening for acts such as Chicago and the Moody Blues. “We had a great time for six months, a year, but when it came time for a second single, we tanked,” Mayer said. “Then we heard from Elliott that Jimmy Buffett was looking for a band.”

        Mayer, who was familiar with “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” was not initially smitten. “But then we thought, what the heck, it’s going to be fun,” he said. “We headed to Key West (Florida), and then on to summer tours.”

        Some misgivings remained. “I was looking at it as a temporary thing,” Mayer said. “I was trying to leave, yet every year, the tour would roll around again.”

        In 1995, Mayer had a change of heart. “Something hit me,” he said. “I realized, we play in front of a million people each summer, we write and perform, and I decided to embrace it. I discovered that sometimes the things you think are stumbling blocks are stepping stones.”

        When he wasn’t touring, Mayer made his own music, recording as the Peter Mayer Group, with his brother Jim and Guth, both of whom also play for Buffett. Their first release was a pop album called “Green Eyed Radio.”

        “We got in a van and toured in a small-potatoes way, and little by little. our fan base grew,” Mayer said.

        In the meantime, Mayer and his wife, Patricia O’Reilly, were raising two children in St. Louis — Brendan, now 16, and India, 13. When Jim Mayer and Roger Guth decided to move to Nashville, from St. Louis in 1999, the Mayers moved, too, and became members of a Lutheran church there. The pastor, knowing Mayer’s musical talent, asked him to write some songs.

        “The language of church and faith came naturally to me — this was music my mother had sung to me when I was a child,” he said.

        Soon he began incorporating touches of his faith in the music he wrote and performed with his band.

        “In a way, that was frightening at first, because it always puts a strange, ‘untouchable’ label on you,” he said. “Part of that is because to some people, it conveys exclusion. … But for me, it’s clearly the opposite — because a person has faith and it is grounded in certain traditions and pillars doesn’t mean that I would exclude another person’s rock and pillars. Rather, I’d like us to find a common ground and source to God.

        “And I say this with total respect, but sometimes the songs I hear on Christian radio, some of them don’t deal with the many dynamics of faith, but rather the tenets of one belief.”

        Mayer said the songs he writes deal with faith and its struggles and joys, rather than one religious viewpoint.

        The spirituality that permeates his life, he said, is the result of his relationship with God, a relationship that took a turn when he was 14. A friend got involved with a charismatic expression of religion and asked Mayer whether he had really been “saved.”

        “It raised all these doubts with me,” Mayer recalled. “I told my mom I was really worried, because I didn’t know if I was saved. And she told me something that changed my life. She said, ‘You are in the arms of a loving God who will never let you go.’ And that relief was like cool water to me.”

        Mayer knows there are people who wonder if there is a contradiction between his spiritual life and his work as a Coral Reefer. How does his spirituality jibe with playing music for a man whose hit list includes some pretty racy lyrics?

        It’s a logical question, he conceded.

        “Jimmy lives life to the fullest,” he said. “He loves to have a good time, and there were some wild party years. In the early years, it was like being in the major leagues, and there were some choices I made that I would take back. Now things are under control. And I have to credit my good wife and incredible kids for hanging in there with me.”

        Besides, Mayer said, while Buffett celebrates with total abandon, “I know that the good in the way he lives his life far outweighs that. You never know where God’s grace will come from, and I’d never have guessed a source of it for me would be from Jimmy, but it has been.”