The Mason Williams Interview

Try to Be Magical

​by Mason Williams

​The two people I met in my life who I thought were great men were Pete Seeger and Ken Kesey. Not only were they clever and could write great songs and great books, they were able to embrace all of humanity—warts and all, I guess you might say.

​All kinds of people would come by Ken’s place and visit and talk, and they were welcome. Pete Seeger was always trying to improve the welfare of the common man. He had a broad love of humanity.

​One thing I learned from my friend Kesey: he used to say, “Almost everybody can be clever, but what you really want to do is be magical.” He was part of my Of Time and Rivers Flowing. He told me, “I like your river show, because not only is it very entertaining musically, it’s about history and conservation of natural waterways. Those three elements make it magical.”

​I had a place up in Oak Ridge, and Ken lived in Pleasant Hill. I knew about him from his books, which I had read. I found out where he lived, and one day I stopped by just to introduce myself. We sat outside, and he had a parrot who was chewing wood off the side of his house. We had a couple of swigs of whiskey. I told him, “In the River Show that I am doing, since I play guitar and it’s mic’d, I’m stuck behind the microphone. What I need is somebody who could be more like an actor, someone who could be on stage and move around and have some motion. Also I need comedy bits that I could engineer for him to do.”

​Ken was my man. He said he wanted to be an actor more than a writer. He used to act on paper. Ken had a big room upstairs in his house. Zane and Sunshine told me you could hear him talking to himself. In actuality he was being these characters he was writing about. He was thinking about what they might say to each other, moving around up there and acting out what wound up being on paper.

​I would write ideas for Ken the same way I wrote for The Smothers Brothers. “Here’s a structure; beginning, middle, and end. You can improvise in the middle of it, any way you want to.”

​I wrote one piece, Shall We Gather at the River. There was a section of hymns. I said, “Ken, I want you to be the preacher and I’m going to call you Ken ‘For God’s Sake’ Kesey.” He used my lines as a structure, but then had some great lines of his own that he added, just as The Smothers Brothers did.