Going Where the Wind Takes You (narration) - Jimmy Buffett

Well if you wanna go down that song line

It’s pretty apparent to me where I got the idea to

write ballads kinda based on Wino there

He went to Paris, at 40, 12 old men

African friend and the list goes on

So we’re getting down to the bottom of the treasure chest here

and we have a few things left to play for ya'

And uhm

So let’s just dig around down here

In the bottom of the Mobile pile and see

Oh, Oh

Here’s one, let me get this out

And as you might guess, this one probably needs a story too

To tell you where this song came from

Whoever said you can’t ever go home?

Sometimes you have to go home

even of you don’t want to

That’s a little lesson I learnt around this time

As a sailor, you go where the wind takes you

I intended for it to blow me far from the port city of Mobile

to seek fortune and fame

Still, my embarkation point was also my disembarking point

The winds had taken me back to the starting line

I figured the Universe had a reason for that

So i just went along with that and wound up

in the studio with Milton and Travis,

where the actual road to success began

Milton was the wizard who found me work around town

became my first manager and blazed the trail that

eventually led to Nashville

Though Mardi Gras and the new world started in Mobile'

It was not a town prone to a nightlife reputation

Other than those two weeks before Lent

in New Orleans was where we went to kick up our heels

Mobile tended to move to it’s own

beat and that hasn’t changed to this day

it drifts along at a timeless, predictable cadence

But there were actually two big events on a national scale

besides Mardi Gras

The senior bowl game and the America’s Junior Miss pageant

Southerners love beauty pageants and since Atlantic City

claimed the Miss America pageant

Little Mobile somehow attracted the

America’s Junior Miss pageant to town

Milton was also very active in civic functions and tried to use

his influence to get a home town talent on the Junior MIss

pageant and national television

He pitched the idea to the people who ran the pageant

that it would be great to feature a local boy, me, on the show

Well, they were not seeing it his way,

this was a big deal to showcase Mobile and

they wanted stars and I was just a bar singer

Milton did however get me a gig,

He explained to me that I wasn’t going to get my national tv

debut as part of the pageant

But, he did get me a job playing to the contestants

at breakfast, the morning of the final day of the show

Let’s just say that back in those days, I did not do a lot of

breakfast shows

So when Milton revealed to me that I would be performing at 7am

I kinda flinched for a moment, but only a moment

Because when you’re down at the bottom of the success ladder,

you better do anything you can to

get yourself a few rungs up that ladder

seperate from the pack

So, I got up at 6 am,

Tuned my 12 string, drank a cafe au lait, ate a few beignets

then played breakfast for the Junior Miss contestants

They seemed to like it

So here’s a live version of that infamous breakfast buffet in Mobile

wih yours truly and the Junior Miss

contestants singing along to Caiifornia Dreaming

And by the way I don’t think I’ve ever done another

breakfast gig other than maybe the Today Show since then…