15 – Here Am I – Mason Williams – 1968

            Here Am I - Mason Williams

          I love this song from the same album that gave us “Classical Gas”. Mason Williams, head writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, has some great, “heavy” lyrics.

As the universe spins

To a desolate end

In the Doldrums of Destiny’s Sea

So should I accept being

As reasonless as

The firmament’s futility

…but here am I holding your hand

In a garmentless promise

Of nothing we stand

With only the raiment of time

It is ours to endure

Or endear and end up

Embracing what ever we find

…and here am I holding your mind

            I don’t know how seriously to take this, but I always liked the instrumental break that follows the verses, a loopy, very sixties sound. Swirling strings, French horns, and electric guitar. On a best of Mason Williams CD I have, they cut off this last part, the best part I think, as a sixties time capsule, but I also have the CD of “The Mason Williams Phonograph Record”, which has the complete song for my Zune listening.

            When I hear it I am back in the basement of our house in Algonquin, which had two garages under the west end of the house, one of which my dad had converted into a pool room, housing our Sears pool/ping pong table. The walls were peg board, painted dark blue with fluorescent colored plastic daisy stickers on them. Yeah baby…. psychedelic!!!!

            I am sitting against one of the walls where I have created my first set of headphones, made out of two speakers from the earpieces of two phones, tied together with string, hanging from a nail on the wall, connected to our Montgomery Ward record player upstairs, which player was housed in a trunk my mom had “antiqued”.

In the mid-60s “antiquing,” meant painting the surface with a greenish paint, then after it dried smearing it with a cloth with a brownish paint, to give it an “old” look.

            My dad worked for Illinois Bell as an installer/repairman and had installed phone jacks in every room of the house. Some outlets were disconnected and I wired them together and connected them to the speaker outputs so I could take my “headphones” to my room or to the living room or to the pool room and listen to the record player.

However, since most albums were only about 20 minutes per side, you got a pretty good workout running to the player and turning over the album (unless you put a stack of albums onto the spindle that dropped them one at a time onto the turntable).