Free Mason

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.

Once he had taught himself the guitar, Williams quit school and formed the Wayfarers, a folk group that played the church-social and Holiday Inn circuit in Texas. Along the way, he met another struggling young guitarist named Tommy Smothers. After a tour in the Navy, Mason became a backup man for the brothers' by then successful nightclub act. He was also Tommy's roommate; the two of them used to write down ideas and gags, songs or shows and store them in a stationery box. Williams also began to record random thoughts in 500-page accounting ledgers left over from his pre-actuary days. He has filled up nine so far. Many of the jottings went into seven books he printed for friends at his own expense and into his new Doubleday collection. For example, "There are no empty Tabasco Sauce bottles." Or: "I think it would have been nice to have shared a room with Beethoven and when someone remarked, upon hearing one of his compositions, 'Isn't that great!' I could say, 'Yep, my roommate wrote it.' "

Presidential Prank. Williams wears a beard, buffalo-skin trousers, patched epauletted shirt, leather jacket and a neckerchief. But there is a lot of the actuary left in the man. He always carries a briefcase, and his workroom wall is covered with precise flow charts that plot work in progress. There are 23 projects pending. Right now, only one of them involves television. "TV," he says, "is not a medium anyone will let you work in creatively any more. People in the networks are afraid of original ideas." He does not disdain TV, however, to plug his book and a new record album in countless guest spots. Some of his merchandising and stunts are done largely for fun. He was the prankster who masterminded the parody presidential campaign of his Smothers show colleague, Pat Paulsen. He is now redecorating the guest quarters of his Los Angeles home (he is divorced) into a stereotypical motel room--"just so people will feel at home." He has already laid in a selection of travel folders, a Gideon Bible and some tackily painted landscapes.

Williams is also a virtuoso of more sublime happenings. There was the time he and a camera crew drove into the Mojave Desert just before dawn. As the sun rose over the horizon, a skywriting pilot named V. E. Noble received a radio signal and began tracing a stem, leaves and petals to form history's largest "sunflower." But the fierce glare frustrated attempts to record the $5,000 gambol on film. Explains Williams, eyes aglow: "The idea wasn't to see it, really. The idea was for people to hear about it and say, 'Yes.' " It is all a part of the philosophy of joy, hymned in his Life Song:

Isn't life beautiful Isn't life gay Isn't life the perfect thing To pass the time away.

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