AceShowbiz - Jimmy Buffett knew it was time to sober up for concerts when he realised he was cheating fans out of the best gig.

The "Margaritaville" hitmaker admits he has played a series of hangover gigs and he always felt terrible about cheating fans.

"I've done it and I'm not proud of it... they call it take-the-money-and-run shows, where you might not be feeling your best and you know that you can get away with something and the audience won't know it because they're so happy to be there anyway and I felt terrible when those things happened," the singer tells Rolling Stone. "I never wanted to do another."

"You can do the amazing hangover show because adrenalin kicks in... but when all of a sudden it was two days and you're still feeling funky... I thought, 'Recovering from this is taking, like, surgical recovery days. I don't wanna do this anymore', and I just didn't. I scared myself a few times."

Buffett started sobering up in his 40s and turned to therapy for a little help and now, at 73, he's amazed he wasn't a rock 'n' roll casualty, like so many of his friends.

"You think you're bulletproof at that age... but to me, at that point in time, I didn't want to make my family ashamed of me, and that was a very strong deterrent from doing that and to make that change in my life at that time."

"I had friends who are gone along the way to that (sic)... and I always wanted to emulate those guys... Jim Morrison was 27 years old when he died and Mama Cass was 32 and I'm sitting here at 73... I forgot about how young people went away and I just feel lucky I got through it. I made some kinda right decision at the right time..."

But his decision to clean up his act meant he had to steer clear of some good friends, like writer Hunter S. Thompson. "We had an amazing relationship but there were times I didn't wanna be around him because I knew he was going there...," Jimmy explains.