The Mason Williams Substack Essay

On the iridescent irreverence of Mason Williams, the Smothers Brothers and the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

Since the last time I was in touch there’s been an explosion of new subscribers here. To those who are new to ‘Listening Sessions,’ I wanted to say how grateful I am that you are here and that I hope you find my writing on music informative and interesting. Many of those new here came through the kindness of Kees Moumen of Elvis Day by Day and Piers Beagley of the Elvis Information Network in sharing my essay on Elvis Presley’s Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite earlier this month.

While Elvis is a recurring theme here (stay tuned for a summer essay on Elvis’ soundtrack recordings from 1960 to 1964), I keep things pretty varied and eclectic here. My hope is that ‘Listening Sessions’ offers a little something for everybody (Elvis reference alert!).

This time around, my essay is on Mason Williams, best known for his smash hit ‘Classical Gas.’ He was also the head writer of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and also worked with Tom and Dick prior to their groundbreaking CBS show. It’s been fun writing about his music but also getting the chance to touch on television and culture, and also argue that Williams was far more than just a one-hit wonder. I hope you enjoy it!

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“As Tom [Smothers] said a little earlier, I have been a writer on the show since it began and I really have loved working on the show because the people are beautiful and talented and they have a lot of integrity and they do have a sense of responsibility about what they present to you as entertainment. And we’ve done good things on the show and we’ve done some great things but you have not seen them because of the … censor.”
- Mason Williams, from the April 13, 1969 episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

When something is new and fresh, it invariably has a daringness, a nerviness, that once it becomes old hat or, more to the point, expected, loses much of those qualities. Countless examples from the evolution of music through the centuries attests to this truism. And so it is as well with the late-night or variety-show host. That the individual or individuals hosting will use their platform to skewer a portion of the political spectrum is expected, even a prerequisite these days to hold such a job. Choosing to be agnostic about politics would today be the bold, quizzical choice. Not so in the late sixties.

By the time CBC aired the Easter 1969 episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour—a week after the holiday as the network refused to air the episode that was meant for the Sunday after Easter—the show was toast. Tom and Dick Smothers would characterize the network’s action as firing them as opposed to merely cancelling their groundbreaking and (to network executives, and certain politicians and members of the public) nettlesome show.

A five-minute segment from the Easter show which opens with Tom in an Easter bunny costume and ends with Mason Williams reciting his poem, The Censor, retains an edge—an open declaration of contempt aimed at those who gave the Smothers Brothers their platform in the first place and who, after discovering that the clean-cut, sport-jacketed, bickering, folk-singing siblings weren’t (Tom in particular) going to simply offer vanilla and safe entertainment for the masses, did everything they could to drive it into the ground.

There is a bit of the vanilla in the clip, cenetring as it does on Williams, whom Tom notes had just won two Grammy Awards (Best Instrumental Composition and Best Pop Instrumental Performance) for ‘Classical Gas,’ miming his intricate arrangement of ‘Greensleeves’ on guitar. While the recording may be described as easy listening, it is better-than-average easy listening. As Williams “fingerpicks” away, he is framed by two dancers, aglow in sixties neon, whose contemporary ballet is superimposed on the footage of Williams. Once ‘Greensleeves’ concludes, Williams gives the speech that begins this essay. He then strums a chord on his guitar flamenco style while his right hand holds a pair of scissors, the blades framing his face. He then recites his poem, The Censor.

Of the censor, it says, in part, “and with a kindergarten / arts and crafts concept / of moral responsibility / snips out / the rough talk / the unpopular opinion / or anything with teeth.” The work of the censor ultimately, in Williams’ words, “renders … a doily for your mind.” It’s an razor-sharp, if slightly pretentious, sentiment.

Earlier in the third and final season of The Comedy Hour, there was a brief sketch in which four of the show’s writers play network censors. Each reviews the show’s script and after laughing at whatever they read, tears that portion of it away and tosses it on the ground. By the time the last censor gets his hands on the script, it is all of one double-sided page. He turns it over and then says, “nothing funny in this. Here you are boys, we’re through censoring your show” as he presents the thoroughly bowdlerized script to a chagrined Tom and Dick.

Two of the writers who took part in the skit are instantly recognizable: Bob Einstein and Steve Martin. The other two: Murray Roman and Carl Gottlieb, aren’t so much even as they, along with Einstein and Martin, were important contributors to the arch edge that made The Comedy Hour a cultural hotspot of the late-sixties counterculture. There were others: Rob Reiner, Don Novello, Lorenzo Music, Leigh French, Jim Stafford, John Hartford, Jennifer Warnes and Pat Paulsen. Mason Williams too and maybe, save for Tom and Dick (he was the first person they hired for the show), most of all. And yet Williams, if known at all these days, is synonymous with one thing and one thing only: ‘Classical Gas.’

Williams was The Comedy Hour’s head writer, the co-composer, with Nancy Ames, of its whimsical and (naturally) irreverent theme song and it was through him that, among other things, Martin was hired for the show and Paulsen, the deadpan master, ran as a candidate in the 1968 presidential election. A guitarist, a poet, an artist, a writer and a comedian, Williams was the kind of versatile, limitless individual that was fundamental to the explosion of new and unfettered creativity that was the ethos of the late sixties.

Williams had been a musician since he was 18, finding in music a lure that mathematics and insurance—the fields he had initially thought would provide a career—couldn’t possibly possess. He had crossed paths with the Smothers Brothers a few years before the premiere of The Comedy Hour in January 1967.

In an interview he conducted with Gary James for the Classic Bands website, he described how, like a lot of folk acts at the time, he incorporated humour into his songs and live performances (his debut album, Them Poems, released on Vee-Jay Records in 1964 is essentially a comedy record). His comedic side would prove fortuitous. “Tom [Smothers’] sister was a waitress at the Troubadour and Tom said, “Hey, is there anybody down there who plays anything that’s funny in an odd way or got anything new to offer?,” Williams recounted. “She said, “Well, there’s this guy, Mason Williams, that has some goofy poems and screwball songs. And Tommy invited me up to his house and a week later I made my first album with [Tom and Dick], Tour de Farce.”

Tour de Farce: American History and Other Unrelated Subjects was released in 1964 and was the fourth album by the Smothers Brothers, already well established as one of the most irreverent of comedic acts in what was a golden era for comedy and for comedy on record. Williams, who also hit the road with Tom and Dick, was credited with one cut on the album. By then, the Brothers Four had recorded his ‘Brandy Wine Blues’ and the Kingston Trio had offered a medley of Them Poems.

While the former is a fairly generic country blues, the latter bursts with precocious wordplay and cheek—a stylistic solidarity with Williams’ future employer in which tradition is lampooned while also demonstrating an appreciation and mastery of it.

The Smothers Brothers’ Mom Always Liked You Best!, from 1965, included five songs and poems by Williams. ‘The Last Great Waltz’ is full of the cleverness that was fast becoming Williams’ stock-in-trade. It’s a fantasia about a gentleman who waltzes and finds a partner with not one, not two, but three legs—as Tom and Dick sing about them one-twoing and then one-two-threeing, there’s a rapid switch in the time signature that doesn’t faze the brothers at all. ‘Long Time Blues’ is a country-pop song that foreshadows the fusion that would soon release Glen Campbell from session-musician obscurity (he would also become part of The Comedy Hour’s extended universe).

Music was to be a major part of The Comedy Hour. There were, of course, the sketches that Tom and Dick built around various folk songs. There were also the musical acts that appeared on the show. In this sense, the show was not much different than The Ed Sullivan Show, which preceded The Comedy Hour on Sunday nights. Neither strayed too far from featuring the most palatable of the popular groups of the time, including Jefferson Airplane, the Association and Paul Revere & the Raiders. Where The Comedy Hour went further, however, was providing Pete Seeger his first network-television exposure in over a decade and a half. There was the explosion—a far more powerful one than expected—that concluded the Who’s performance of ‘My Generation.’ Tom and Dick tried (unsuccessfully) to have Harry Belafonte sing ‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ to footage of the mayhem at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

On the second-to-last episode of the second season of The Comedy Hour, Williams appeared to perform his first single on Warner Bros. Records. Against an orchestra of cut-outs of Williams playing every instrument, he plays ‘Classical Gas.’ It was a piece that had taken shape over several months in 1967 as Williams snatched stray moments to work on it.

Tom appears at the end of Williams’ performance of ‘Classical Gas’ as Williams, acting out the ritual at the end of a classical performance, bows and gestures to the cardboard orchestra of himself. Tom is at the piano. He rises, bows to Williams and then bows to the two-dimensional doppelgangers of his show’s head writer.

In a note posted to a website marking the 40th anniversary of ‘Classical Gas,’ Williams credits Tom with getting him signed to Warner Bros. as part of the label’s push to get in on the rapid maturation of pop and rock music. The song would appear on his debut effort for the label titled, and an apropos title at that, The Mason Williams Phonograph Album.

Like many of the albums of that time, it involved a veritable army of musicians—41 in total are credited on the back cover and many of them were among the finest of the Wrecking Crew, including keyboardist Larry Knechtel, bassist Lyle Ritz, guitarist James Burton and drummer Jim Gordon. Indeed, it’s Gordon—among rock’s most cautionary tales—who turbocharges ‘Classical Gas’ with a slinky bossa-nova beat at the beginning, kicking into a rock beat in the middle section, using cymbal crashes to pump up the drama on the crescendos and adding a funky fill on the turnaround to the final A section. Mike Post’s arrangement fills out Williams’ intricate, catchy and indelible theme with a bright, brassy chart. There is a muscularity to ‘Classical Gas’ that elevates it far above the kitsch and schmaltz usually associated with instrumental pop music from the late sixties.

Surrounding ‘Classical Gas’ on The Mason Williams Photograph Album is the kind of stylistic promiscuity that makes it a fascinating artefact of 1968. In fact, it has the kind of go-for-broke mentality that links it to contemporaneous Warner Bros. releases like the Beau Brummels’ Bradley’s Barn, Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, the Everly Brothers’ Roots and Randy Newman’s eponymous debut. They all reach for some sort of transcendence and even as Williams’ reach exceeded his grasp, the attempt is sincere enough to make it a half-hour well spent.

What strikes first after a short overture—remember, this is 1968—that ends with Williams announcing, “the Mason Williams Phonograph Album,” is that when he sings on ‘All the Time,’ a gleaming song of orchestral sunshine pop with a powerful rise on the bridge, he sounds more than a little like Glen Campbell. That connection becomes even stronger on a version of ‘Long Time Blues’ that's more fleshed out than the Smothers Brothers’ recording from three years earlier. On the chorus, Williams is accompanied by background singers (the way their voices are stacked foreshadows the sound of the choir on the Beatles’ ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’), emphasizing the Nashville flavour of the song as well as Williams’ affinity for country music. It is also the song on the album—‘Classical Gas’ notwithstanding—that is the most expertly crafted. The chorus is catchy and the hook that leads back to the verse is irresistible.

‘Wanderlove,’ more bohemian and serious, was a song that had previously attracted a few covers. The Smothers Brothers had included it on The Smothers Brothers Play It Straight, the second and last attempt on record to pitch them as musicians without the accompanying mirth and Rod McKuen—another figure, like Williams, who flourished in the wide-open late sixties—as well as Claudine Longet recorded it. Anchored by a riff on the strings, it seems to want to flirt with psychedelia and yet, save for an extended percussion coda, the harmonies and resolutions are strictly within the expected. The song, through, suddenly shifts into ‘She’s Gone Away,’ the kind of introspective pop with a rhythmic drive and layering of voices that made the Association a leader in sophisticated, if something slightly sugary, pop. Here, Williams delves more into the unexpected—consider the shadings added at the end of a line like “well I know she’s sitting somewhere / with some of her friends.” ‘She’s Gone Away’ is also a standout for the spotlight it affords the chicken-picking style of Burton.

‘Here Am I’ is the kind of baroque pop piece that had become ubiquitous by 1968 and brings out the earnest side to Williams that may lead some to dismiss his music as one of the lesser relics of the time but the interlude with a fuzz guitar as well as the vocal chorale at the end are unpredictable twists—the kind of stylistic risks that make The Mason Williams Phonograph Album interesting, certainly more than the three short tracks interspersed throughout with the ’The Prince’s Panties’ being the most regretful by far.

The album’s closer, ‘Sunflower,’ is an instrumental built around whistling and a harmonica. It sounds like a spaghetti western set in sunny California but has its roots in an art project Williams prepared in the summer of 1967: to film a plane skywriting a huge sunflower. The attempt was filmed but the film proved useless. A few photos preserve the fleeting effect (check them out here). According to Williams, “the sunflower itself was spectacular … two miles wide and three miles high. It lasted about 40 seconds.” ‘Sunflower’ is evocative not only of the ephemeral wonder of skywriting but the quixotic yearning that led Williams to try such a thing on a grandiose scale—it cost every dime he had at the time, a cool $5,000.

During the contentious summer of 1968, Williams pursued another art project. He had seen an experimental film called God is Dog Spelled Backwards, a montage of 2,500 or so artworks, each appearing for just a frame or two set to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Williams got in touch with the filmmaker, Dan McLaughlin, a student at UCLA, and asked him to cut a new version of the film set to ‘Classical Gas.’ The finished product appeared as the song shot up the charts. It premiered on The Summer Brothers Smothers Show, The Comedy Hour’s summertime replacement show hosted by Glen Campbell (the template for what became The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour). The film, spellbinding to watch, affixes ‘Classical Gas’ as perhaps the least likely example of the counterculture.

During the final season of The Comedy Hour, which was an open battleground of what was permissible speech on network television, Williams released two albums: The Mason Williams Ear Show and Music by Mason Williams. Neither had the commercial impact of either ‘Classical Gas’ or The Mason Williams Phonograph Album but both clarified where Williams fits in late-sixties culture.

There’s a movement away from sunshine and baroque pop and a greater emphasis on country. ‘(Whistle) Hear’ from The Mason Williams Ear Show is the kind of stream-of-consciousness frolic that had became a sub-genre to itself in country. While Williams is not nearly as zany as Roger Miller or down home as Jerry Reed, the song is full of twisty wordsmithing (here’s a sample: “he heard thud bang beep-beep click / boom chuck-a-yuk-a-ya a-word tick-tick / boing buzz honk-a ding-ding / rump-a-bump-a-pipp-a-rag-a / ring-a-ling-a-ling-ling”). Two duets with Jennifer Warnes (then known as Jennifer Warren or simply Jennifer) are included on the album as well. ‘The Last Great Waltz’ is another revisit of Williams’ early days with the Smothers Brothers and ‘Cinderella-Rockafella’ is extremely wry—one can almost see Williams arch his eyebrows as he sings. The what-you-see-is-what-you-get ‘One Minute Commercial’ is ironically comical in how its tuneful mastery is just tossed off.

Music by Mason Williams was released just before the boom was lowered on The Comedy Hour. His version of ‘Greensleeves,’ which prefaced his poem decrying the censors against whom Williams et al lost the battle but ultimately won the war, led off the album. It ends with ‘A Gift of Song.’ It neither contains irony nor irreverence. It gets to an essence of song. “A gift of song is a gift of love,” starts the third verse. It continues, “it falls to Earth, we do not know where / but who receives a gift of love, it follows then that he must share.” The repeat of the verses is sung by Williams with a large chorus. The melody and the production—immense and holy—is similar to Peter, Paul & Mary’s ‘Day is Done.’

The trio performed that song on the third-last episode of The Comedy Hour. The audience surrounds Peter, Paul & Mary in a set-up the invokes a folk-singing circle. Donovan, Warnes, and Tom and Dick join in too. On the repeat of the chorus, the audience—they’ve been singing along since the first chorus—begins to come down from their seats to mingle with the musicians, everyone joining to create a massive choir. The moment is profoundly honest, everyone in harmony with each other—similar to the profundity of the remarkable final scene of Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, to be released in September of 1969—distilling the allure of music, of oneness, of the Smothers Brothers, of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, of Mason Williams too.

If you’re not yet a subscriber of ‘Listening Sessions,’ I hope you'll click the button below to subscribe and get each edition delivered straight to your inbox. I publish a long-form essay on music three times a month, every 10 days or so.