Audio By Carbonatix
If guitarist Mason Williams hadn’t ventured to Aspen in the winter of 1960, he might never have written the song that made him famous: “Classical Gas.” Williams, then a 21-year-old college student, was playing gigs in Oklahoma City with a folk group called the Wayfarers Trio. Since Aspen was a folk-music mecca, the threesome decided to drop out of school and check the place out.
“The first thing that happened was…it snowed like hell,” Williams recalls. “And we had come in our loafers. So we spent all of the money we had brought with us on some warm socks and some après-ski boots.” Broke, they auditioned for a gig at the Highland Ski Lodge, which offered them $10 apiece plus grub for a five-night stand. Singer Glenn Yarbrough stopped by one night and asked if they would come play a late set at his club, the Limelight, where the headliners were a hot new folk-comedy duo called the Smothers Brothers.
Seven years later, Williams was in Hollywood, working as head writer for the groundbreaking Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. After the first season was over, he spent a weekend composing a new song on his guitar. “I didn’t really have any big plans for it,” he recalls, “other than maybe to have a piece to play at parties when they passed the guitar around.”
But “Classical Gas” turned out to be much more than that. Thanks in part to several performances of the song on the Smothers Brothers show, it became a wildly successful single in the summer of 1968, reaching number two on Billboard‘s Top 100 chart. According to Broadcast Music Inc., the music-licensing organization, “Classical Gas” has been played on radio and television more than three million times, more than any other BMI instrumental.
Williams insists he never gets tired of playing the song, and he promises to perform it Saturday night at Westminster’s Ranum High School in a program of original music, country classics, fiddle tunes and folk songs. He’ll be accompanied by some of his longtime musical pals: fiddler Byron Berline, mandolinist (and Colorado resident) Jerry Mills, banjoist John Hickman, guitarist Rick Cunha, bassist Doug Haywood and drummer Dennis Caffey. Of the ensemble, Williams says, “We’re just a group of friends who get together and play for the fun of it.”
