Mason Williams is a successful TV writer. But that is like calling Paul Revere a successful silversmith.
To be sure, Williams was the head writer for the Smothers Brothers show during its most innovative days in 1967 and 1968. He is the script doctor recently called in to help save the Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour. He has written TV specials for Andy Williams and Petula Clark.
But Williams, at 30, is also a composer: his Classical Gas won a Grammy award last month as the outstanding pop tune of 1968, and his Cinderella-Rockefella was one of the year's hottest international hits (1,500,000 sales overseas alone). He is an accomplished guitarist and a pop artist whose life-sized photograph of a Greyhound bus is in the collection of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. He is, most recently, an author whose new anthology of verse and musings, The Mason Williams Reading Matter (Doubleday; $2.95), has present sales of 49,500.
Mind Doily. The charm of Williams' art is based on artlessness and deliberate anti-pretension. "I would rather move through a lot of small ideas," he says, "than play out one long thing forever. I am not making any huge mark, but I like speed. You do a couple of songs, get them out of the way, and move on to something else. I just don't do anything that isn't easy." So far, he says, "self-indulgence pays." His manager figures that his earnings will amount to about $500,000 this year.
As a musician, Williams is eclectic, spoofing and sponging from every bag. Classical Gas is, as he says, "part flamenco, part Flatt & Scruggs, part classical." It is written for six-and twelve-string guitars and a symphony orchestra of 37 pieces, but the result manages to preserve a certain purity. His Reading Matter is even plainer. Take, for example, his ode to the network censor, who, Williams writes:
Snips out The rough talk The unpopular opinion Or anything with teeth And renders A pattern of ideas Full of holes A doily For your mind
If the poetry seems painfully simple, it is explained in part by the fact that Mason taught himself "everything I have ever done. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid," he says, "and got to the point where I would try anything by myself. I just never considered that there were any limitations." He suspects that his parents' divorce, five years after he was born in Abilene, Texas, was behind that self-reliance. "My father was a Bible-Beltish tile setter who never drank or swore. My stepfather was a logger who gambled, drank, fought, and did just about everything else. They were total opposites, and I had to find my own way." He found it one night when he heard a fellow boarder at a Los Angeles rooming house playing jazz piano. "He seemed to be having so much fun I just flipped," recalls Mason. Thus ended his ambition to become an insurance actuary; he went to Oklahoma City College as a music major.