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

Going Where the Wind Takes You (narration)

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…