Here’s the first rant, which is actually more of a plea. It dawned on me that what I write on these pages gets seen worldwide. I’m not that worried about offending my local friends and enemies (just ask any of them) but I’m a little uptight about getting a bottle in the head in some foreign country where maybe they don’t understand that these pages present me in My Country ’tis of Thee with a rare means for escaping the humdrum requirements of compromise, appeasement solicitude and, god forgive me, political correctness (as THEY are fond of calling the currently popular rendition of Everybody’s Right and Nobody’s Wrong).

I love mailbox money. When I get a royalty check, it really does something for me. I wish I had a few published tunes that had been covered by somebody bigtime so I could walk downstairs each morning and get the check from my publisher. So far, nothing, but this is the way I think it’s supposed to work. (I say “I think” because, like everything else that concerns the artist getting paid, this whole process is cloaked in as many layers of mystery and legal obfuscation as can be concocted by the armies of those who would prefer to live off the efforts of others.

This came to me by email. I don’t know if it’s a transcription of one of Mason’s routines, or was lifted from print. I love this guy so much, I took it upon myself to put it up here and I hope I don’t make anybody mad by not even looking for clearance. It’s such a beautiful rant I figured everybody’s got to see it and we’ll figure out later how to pay Jackie for sharing it.

Most drivers, and it seems, especially men, hate to be given advice, admonishment or even praise about their activities behind the wheel. They would prefer to be left alone in their own world of driving, a world which ordinarily pivots around them and in which they never commit an error and the other driver is always wrong, pig-headed and should be deprived of his or her license.

Guys in jackets and ties walking into the pretty blue buildings downtown never get asked what they do all day, unless it’s by their wives, recalling “Angel From Montgomery,” and wondering if he can be gone eight hours and have nothing to report. Guys with ladders on top of their vans and tools in the back never get asked what they do all day. People don’t ask them because the assumption is there, based on the evidence of dress or implement, that these people work for a living. Most people could care less what someone else does all day, as long as it looks like what they do is productive and somehow conducive to an incremental increase in the GNP, or DNP or whatever it’s called these days. Try to make a living playing the guitar, though, and people are constantly asking you: “What do you do all day?”

I’ve taken some hits to the working musician body for including on my latest CD, Snake Eyes, and on the Blackburn-Beach CD, a Mercy Dee Walton tune entitled “One Room Country Shack” that includes the original lyric:

“I’m going to leave here early in the morning,
I’m about to go out of my mind [repeat]
I’ve got to find some kind of companion,
Even if she’s deaf, dumb, crippled and blind.”

Objections included, but were not limited to, the sexist nature of this lyric–the ‘any port in a storm’ mentality it conveys, and to the use of the unenlightened terms in the last line.

I don’t work with numbers. I never did well in math at school and, besides, my taste for figuring has been corrupted by the daily intake of the news which always includes improbable mathmatical and arithmetic backup for indefensible positions. Like my old man always said, “Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.” So, I’m not too interested in the arithmetic of the airport. I like to throw a few digits out once in a while, but they’re for illustrative purposes only and don’t purport to be accurate. I do know something about number perspective, though. When I say “rich people,” I mean those who make more than I do. When I say “poor people,” “slum-dwellers,” “inner-city prisoners,” “workers,” and “citizens,” I mean the rest of us. I know something about economics, too, even though I’m not a statistician. Some of my favorite terms in the field include: “pent-up demand,” “economies of scale,” and “too big to fail.” Finally, just so you know I’m qualified to deal with the subject at hand, I know something about community, the application of government to that community and the idea that economics is at the basis of successful community organization.