 |
  |
|
 |
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
A
Creative Life Mason Williams as a boy lamented Oregon's long-lost moose population, and later decided to do something about it. He wrote a poem, "Them Moose Goosers," inspired by his idea of a special group of Forest Service rangers parachuting into Canada to "goose a few moose down our way." Their shoulder patch insignia, of course, would be The Flying Thumbs.
Few people in the great heritage of contemporary American art are as diverse and unpredictable as Eugene's own Mason Williams. His genre-breaking composition "Classical Gas" is likely the most recognizable instrumental tune of the modern era. Every serious guitar student, young and old, knows his work. His music and humor have permeated pop culture for 40 years, sometimes up front, but more often behind the scenes, in Hollywood and here at home. He lives in Eugene and for many years organized and emceed Christmas music programs and other events at the Hult Center and other local venues. He played 15 concerts with the Eugene Symphony and a dozen more with the Oregon Symphony. And today he walks among us, buys groceries, stops to chat with friends on the street. Williams, 67, is a quiet man with a thunderous legacy. His music, lyrics and poetry have been performed by some of the most popular artists of the 1960s and '70s, and are still covered today by contemporary musicians and on soundtracks. He has written 250 songs and recorded 24 albums, seven singles and two EPs, and given at least 1,000 live performances in coffee houses and concert halls around the world. As a comedy writer, he has penned 174 hours of TV scripts and was head writer for the politically irreverent, prime-time "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," organized the outrageous Pat Paulsen for President campaign in 1968, and later wrote for "Saturday Night Live," winning many awards including multiple Grammies and an Emmy. He has written 1,000 poems, published 21 books and created dozens of pop art projects. And he continues composing and publishing music today, often in eclectic collaboration with international and local gifted musicians such as Art Maddox and Don Latarski. His latest album (2005) is Electrical Gas in collaboration with the British guitar phenomenon Zoe McCulloch on the local Skookum Records label. Musician Joe Ross reviewed Williams' 2003 CD Music for the Epicurean Harkener and said, "His vision is inspirational while evoking a certain sense of tranquility. Some of these licks we've heard decades before, but others have great potential to strike gold as hits of this century and soothe the soul as we harken back to a less hectic day of yesteryear." Williams doesn't perform in public anymore, due to a genetic disorder called Dupuytren's contracture that causes the fingers on his left hand to curl up. "I've lost an inch and a half of stretch in my left hand," he says. "It's bad on some chords. I can't grab certain ones like I used to. It's frustrating." We spent a rainy afternoon with him this winter at his modest home and studio on College Hill, where he lives with his wife, Karen, a criminal defense attorney and adjunct UO law professor. We talked about everything from music to politics to celebrity. Below is part of our conversation with him. More about his career can be found at www.eugeneweekly.comand more on Williams himself can be found at www.classicalgas.com and www.masonwilliams-online.com Why are you in Eugene and not basking in the spotlight in L.A. or New York? I'm not really designed to succeed in Hollywood. I'm a little hard to explain, but I'm not that interested in stories. I'm interested in ideas. I'm not interested in writing novels or writing movie scripts, so I don't expect to succeed — what Hollywood is primarily about is stories and personalities.
Another reason I'm not a celebrity is that I really don't want to be a celebrity. I don't like it. Insiderism leads to self interest, and so your philosophy is just for yourself. People can't comprehend that I came to Oregon because I like to live here, and wanted to get away from being a celebrity. Celebrity is kind of a weird state of being. You're not doing what you want; you're doing what your career wants. I say I want to be more like God was in the beginning. In the beginning God had a creative life and along came religion and then he had a career. When you have a career you are living your life through institutions, not the full spectrum of living that's out there. By not having a career, I have a really great creative life. I can do art, I can do music, I can do writing. The creative life is a choice. If something comes up, I respond to it. It's just that I don't do the things that I know would help me have a career. Did you know "Classical Gas" was going to be such a big hit in 1968? There's an old saying in the music business: You can tell if something's going to be a hit right off the bat. I didn't think much about it, but everybody else said, "Man, this has got something going for it," and the more you add to it bass, drums and in this case orchestra, the more you realize that maybe it's going to be something. I actually wrote it to play at parties. I went to a party in L.A. with Roger Miller — I was writing for his TV show — Jerry Allison, "JI," the drummer in the Crickets, Duane Eddy, Thumbs Carlyle and Sonny Curtis, and all these great Nashville musicians we hire. We were all sitting in a circle passing the guitar around and they all had great things to play or great songs to sing, and when they passed it to me, I didn't. So I said, boy, next time I'm going to have something hot to play. That was one of the motivations for me. And I said to myself, "It's going to go up the neck a lot." I need something I can play at parties, and this could be it. What made "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" so unique, and even revolutionary? Every now and then everything sort of flips over. The Smothers Brothers show was sort of ground zero in a public sense. New clothes, new philosophy, new music, new art — across the board. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be a part of that. It was exciting to us. I like to think of the Smothers Brothers show as kind of like a prism in that the whole counter-culture just went through the show and refracted out into the general public. CBS thought Tom and Dick would be like two nice, sort of wacky, fraternity college boys, but Tommy was waking up to all kinds of things. I wrote a lot of stuff for Tom and Dick and they were wide open to being arty too. Most television isn't very arty. They have shows on about art, but in the mainstream, it's not very abstract, let's put it that way. And my connection is a weird one. People don't realize I come from influences from the art world and a lot of my friends like Ed Ruscha were artists, and so I was always interested in challenging things. Ed's influence had a tremendous impact on my interest in art concepts. We challenged everything on every level, in art, music and comedy. That was what I wanted to do. People were waking up to the fact that there's a status quo and what you are getting on mainstream television is a sanitized version of everything. And no, it hasn't changed. What the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour showed was that there is a market for these interests — there's a big crowd of people out there who were interested in these other takes on things — and they eventually put it on at 11:30: "Saturday Night Live." Once you got everybody who goes to bed at 9 o'clock out of the way, the revolution was shown later, at 11:30. What was the CBS's response to the show's content? Whatever we'd do we'd more or less reach everybody so we'd get a lot of positive and negative feedback mail. The weirdest thing the network said to us was, "Look, we don't want bad letters, but we also don't want good letters. We don't want any letters at all." If you look at television, it's really imprinting what a Coke looks like in your mind and in the process it doesn't want you to be too happy or too pissed off. In other words, you're in this kind of stupor, just sitting there absorbing things, it's kind of like being in church. You're taking this in, but you're not necessarily over invested or under invested in it. That's the way they like it. You're more like a blank sheet or a blank check. They are after your interest. You learn all these weird aspects about television. Is there an equivalent today to the Smothers Brothers? The big difference between the Smothers Brothers and say, Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," is that back then there were only three networks, no cable to speak of. So when you were on television, you were talking to everybody, especially at 9 pm Sunday: The line-up was "Ed Sullivan, " "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and "Mission Impossible." So that was a pretty good three-hour prime-time run.
"The Daily Show" is really funny and has great observations on things, but it's like the WTO in Seattle. The protesters were there, but they were two or three blocks away and they could protest all they wanted, as long as they weren't interfering with the mainstream. So you have people who are interested in this form of comedy, and they are getting their news from Jon's show, but he's not reaching the whole crowd like the Smothers Brothers did. He's a bit marginalized. Today the little kernels of revolution are diffused. Jon's a bright spot in the world in one sense. And even if the networks were to have somebody like Jon Stewart on, they'd tend to have someone on after who is more sensationalistic, something weird. It's retroactive inhibition. You can wipe out what was just said with something right after it that steals the thunder. I've had a lot of people say, "I wish the Smothers Brothers was back on the air to deal with the administration," but when I was writing for "Saturday Night Live," Ronald Reagan was president and one of the weirdest things was we couldn't be funnier than he was actually. There was nothing we could make up that was as over the top as he was. He was hard to satirize. His reality was weirder than any take we could come up with. So what about the Bush administration? Well, this whole administration is strange. We could spend a whole interview on this. Last year I actually tried to get involved in the Kerry campaign, wanting to help out, having done the Pat Paulsen for President campaign, I know that comedy is a great thing to break the ice and also makes things more accessible. Kerry was hard to get to. Ed Begley Jr. is a friend of mine and a friend of John Kerry and even he couldn't get through either. I went down to see Peter DeFazio, and I said, "I hear John Kerry is in town. Did you get to meet him?" and he said, "No, his handlers wouldn't let me." Talk about your music? My early albums were full of songs, comedy, instrumentals, banjo pieces, it was all over the place. I was always trying to do abstractions — songs are so fraught with meaning. Instrumental music is the one place where people will accept an abstraction. They will just listen to it and enjoy it and never mind what it means. They will take it for what it is. An Oregon artist wrote that "Music is the envy of all the arts because no one ever asks what music means." But if you write a poem, paint a picture or make a movie, people will want to know, "Well, what do you mean by this?" People have become more used to abstract music from movie scores, they hear really avant gard writing in films, the background music, so in an odd way movies have made people more open to some of it. People get an education without realizing it sometimes. They're not sure what art is if it's not in a frame in a museum, sometimes. These things that go around all that are kind of far out. And your latest album, Electrical Gas?
I like the diversity of material on it. The one cut on there that's kind of interesting is "The Last Crusade," inspired by the troops in Iraq. It's an instrumental composition combining two cultural musical expressions — the integration of pop guitar in combination with nuances of an Iraqi "ood" — an Arab instrument. "Classical Gas" was a big hit in the Vietnam War. People who were over there told me, "This was the tune we'd play to psych ourselves up going into battle, because of the energy level of it," and "The Last Crusade" is like that again. It starts off like a Clint Eastwood Western, and slowly this other thing starts to color it. It's an abstraction of the conflict. What I like about it is that it does what the songs did back then. I worked hard to make it catchy, because that's the thing I remember about the tunes of the '60s, you wanted to hear them over and over again. This new album features Zoe McCulloch. This 19-year-old girl from South Wales wants to play compositions as opposed to jamming. Compositions are kind of an old fashioned concept. But it's my chance to investigate writing for surfer-Clint Eastwood-electric guitar — those kinds of tunes — and she plays well. The album is really serving me as a composer. She has room to improvise, but she also plays the notes I wrote. What's changed in the world of music? Music today is very diverse. There's a place for everything. Growing up I loved jazz but it had no foothold anywhere. Now everything has its own little niche marketplace and if you are entrepreneurial to be a part of it: with a lot of work you can be successful. There are almost no new art forms being created, and much of what's being created today is combinations of things, crossovers: dancehall reggae. I heard one report that says 50,000 CDS a year are put out, but only 5,000 of them sell over 1,000 units. My wife, Karen, says CDs are the wampum of our generation. What happened to the Christmas shows you used to do in Eugene? We did the last Christmas show in 2000. Doing a family show is in one sense harder to do. It's harder to find things that are funny without being tacky about it or too adult. I liked the challenge. In the six seasons we ran though 113 pieces of music, and a lot of it was original. I wanted it to be an extra payday for the players. We took it to Portland and sold out 15,000 seats over six concerts. What I wanted to do was expand, do Sunday shows, but not Friday, which is office party night. I was trying to get across the idea that it was a place to play for your friends and neighbors, more than to a crowd of strangers — and a chance to create things for them. Ken Kesey got it. He would write things for it and one thing he wrote ended up in The New Yorker. Karen Kammerer Cookson wrote a play for it. Don Latarski and I would write things for it. I was always featuring the little kids and middle schools and teenagers. I think of myself as the magician and the musicians and the talent are the magic and I'm just guiding them through the tricks. I thought that if I quit, the Symphony and the Hult Center would keep it going and find somebody else to be the spokesman or to present it, but as soon as I quit, they quit. They were thinking of it as only tied to me. I was hoping it would build up steam. I kept trying to drive home the fact that we have a marvelously talented community full of great players, and the University of Oregon — look at all that lends. Why did you do the River Show with Ken Kesey? My idea was let's put together a show that promotes interest in river conservation. In 1982 EWEB was planning to build several hydroelectric dams on the North Fork of the Willamette. I started thinking that, rather than get involved in the politics of it, which I didn't know that much about, I could get involved in the emotional side, because music is something that appeals to everybody. It wasn't very sexy or all these other things that a commercial show would be about, but it served its purpose. The money raised was used by the McKenzie Flyfishers and other conservation groups to help lobby a bill through the Legislature protecting the North Fork and its source, Waldo Lake. My River Show with Ken Kesey, my bluegrass band show, and my Christmas show in the community — these were a lot more interesting than just cranking out something that a manager or agent wants to market. It's a choice you make and it's a conscious choice. You know there's no equity in what you do in Eugene, unless you want to keep doing more of it. It's not like Hollywood where what you do is something where someone has a vested interest in keeping it alive and marketing it and keeping it before the public. Your thoughts on local music venues? There are a lot of choices, I'm happy to say. The McDonald is a great venue. A conversation Ken Kesey and I had over and over was that the Hult Center is supposed to be for everybody in town to use. But if you're not the Mozart players or the symphony or the ballet, if you're just some guy who wants to try something, it's pretty hard to figure out where to do it and how to go about it. The WOW Hall serves that purpose. I sure wish they had a rear end on it. Past that back curtain, there's nothing but the back door. You can't even have a piano on stage, because there's no place to get it out of the way. But they still do a great job. It's a place to play and an accessible venue, and that's where things are created. The WOW Hall has always been a great place for people to float through the community. I once saw Vassar Clements there. What's next? Philosophically, what I really want to be is like water: nothing at all, but potentially anything. All my life I've been drawing pails of water from the river, and now I am the river. I'll follow up on whatever comes my way. I'm glad I did the Hollywood thing because I've made a living off my publishing and my works of the past — and new things I've done too — but it's like having once been a gunfighter, you can finally retire to the ranch, and you can shoot at what you want.
What
You Might Not Know
• He was born in Abilene, Texas, in 1938 and spent his youth divided between his father's home in Oklahoma and his mother's home in Oregon. • He has been married four times and has a daughter Kathy, 41, who works as an accountant for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. • His wife, Karen Williams, is a criminal defense attorney who has represented clients in 300 jury trials and 10,000 judge-only trials. • He still has his first guitar, a Stella that he bought for $13. Other favorites are a Martin D-28 given to him by Tommy Smothers, and his Cordova classical guitar. • He began his interest in music at age 19 after getting bored as a math major working nights at an insurance company in L.A. Singing was his first love, but he later taught himself guitar by ear. • "Classical Gas" was originally named "Classical Gasoline." The copyist of the parts for the players on the score abbreviated the title and it stuck. The composition has been recorded by more than 100 artists, and has been played on the airwaves more than five million times, according to BMI statistics. • One of his giant art projects, a life-sized photo of a Greyhound bus, is in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. His largest art project, a sunflower created with a skywriter airplane over the desert, lasted less than one minute. • His quirky "Them Poems," including "Them Lunch Toters," "Them Stamp Lickers" and "Them Moose Goosers," have been performed by the Kingston Trio, the Smothers Brothers, Glen Campbell, Teddy Neeley, Richard Lockmiller, Jim Conners and countless school children required to memorize poems for class. • He has written comedy for Steve Martin, Roger Miller, Petula Clark, Dinah Shore, Andy Williams, Glen Campbell, Jim Stafford and many guests on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," from Liberace to Jack Benny. • He has performed and recorded with dozens of folk and bluegrass groups and artists, including The Imperials, The Lamplighters, The Wayfarers Trio, The Hootenaires and the Grateful Dead. • He was in the Navy Reserves and was called up to active duty in 1961 as a yeoman third-class on the USS Paul Revere.
Them Moose Goosers How about Them Moose Goosers, Ain't they recluse? Up in them boondocks Goosin' them moose.
Goosin' them huge moose, Goosin' them tiny, Goosin' them meadow-moose, In they hiny.
Look at Them Moose Goosers, Ain't they dumb? Some use an umbrella, Some use a thumb.
Them obtuse Moose Goosers, Sneakin' through the woods, Pokin' them snoozy moose In they goods.
How to be a Moose Gooser? I'll turn ye puce. Gitchy gooser loose and Rouse a drowsy moose! Mason Williams
Them Stamp Lickers How about Them Stamp Lickers, Ain't they champs? Drool, slurp, slobber, Lickin' them stamps.
Lickin' them Greenstamps, Lickin' them Blue, Lickin' that paper, Eatin' that glue.
Look at Them Stamp Lickers, Ain't they gung ho? Lickin' them thrift stamps, With they tongue-o/
Them lollygoggle Stamp Lickers, Ain't they a rage? Stickin' them licky-stamps, On that page.
How to be a Stamp Licker? Don't need a ticket. Get a stamp or two, Juice up and lick it! Mason Williams
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
