Mason Proffit - Wanted

I should probably pick some newer music, but I just haven't felt like it, I guess.  I'm not saying I've been on a Mason Proffit binge or anything, but I have been listening to some old stuff that's made me think of things to say on here.  Maybe that's just because I'm more familiar with it?  I don't know, and I don't really care.  I just noticed I have this album the other day, and I remember buying it not all that long ago.  I bought it because it wasn't like thirty dollars, and I remembered that at a lot of shows long, long ago this was a pretty sought after record in the Cleveland area.  I remember the first time I heard about it, too.  Not the first time I heard it, the first time I heard about it.  There's a big difference.

I've mentioned before that when I was younger (like a teenager) I wanted to be serious about music.  I didn't want to just listen and bop my head and yell, "Crank it!  This is jammin'!"  I wanted to know why it was "jammin'" and I wanted to talk to other people and see if they agreed why I thought it was "jammin'" or not. That conversation really generally degenerates into something like "You just don't know what's good" pretty quickly (my favorite retort was always, "Maybe not, but I know what's bad!").  Every now and then I could find some oddball music nerd like myself that would gladly spend an entire party ignoring all their friends so they could pontificate about what was good and right about music, and what was wrong and inherently evil about the music industry with someone that hadn't heard every one of their theories until they wanted to strangle said music nerd.  Hey, I always knew how he felt, my friends were pretty sick of me, too!

Now Mason Proffit's Wanted isn't a particularly rare and sought after album, but in the late 70's, very early 80's it was out of print and so when you heard someone going on about how Two Hangmen was one of the most powerful statements of the human condition ever, and it was also one of the first songs that blended the not lame parts of Country with all the goodness Rock music had to offer.  The fact that it was kind of obscure and that when you did find a copy it was kind of beat and/or expensive kind of assured certain fanboys of being able to hold the album a little bit above your head.  Anyone that stayed up all night around this part of the world would eventually hear Two Hangmen, and you'd generally have to admit, it was a mostly cool song.  Not quite what some record nerds would have had you believe, but it's pretty good.

The funny thing to me is that while it's fun to talk about some supposed masterpiece that someone else hasn't heard, when that someone finally hears it, they often wish they could get right back into that conversation and say, "Hey!  That record is only about a half hour long, and there's a lot of slow, hippie peace bullshit to wade through!"  Now, don't get me wrong.  I like hippie peace bullshit as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't doubt that even though these guys were on a tiny label called Happy Tiger, I bet they had some other influences adding strings and fucking up their drum sound.  Drum sound is important to me, and the problem here is that it sounds like someone stuffed a pillow in the kick drum.  I hate that.  It just makes it thud.  A lot like the thud of hitting a pillow instead of a drum.  But the strings that get added just remind me of how Damnation of Adam Blessing often had the "hard" part of their Hard Rock sound softened by some label guy that thought the kids didn't like the really hard stuff, and that if a little violin worked for Mozart, it would work for Rock bands, too.  It doesn't.  It just gets in the way.

So getting back to not hearing what other Rock Nerd is talking about, these days you can just pull it up on your phone and try calling the guy out with your shitty 1/8" speakers.  Which isn't fair, but I'm sure it's done. In the case of Mason Proffit, I had to wait a long, long time to find the record inexpensively enough for me to be interested since I had heard Two Hangmen and wasn't sure if I remembered thinking it was totally amazing at 4:00 AM back when I was 22.  As it turns out, I'm probably much more patient with this record these days that I ever would have been back then, but I'd love to get back into that conversation and ask the guy what he thought of Sweet Lady Love, which has a pretty nice, slippery guitar and I think a little smaller pillow in the kick drum.  I think it's much better than Two Hangmen, and it's easily my favorite song on the album.

You know, it's funny the bits of conversations I can remember from decades ago.  These days I think I still take music more seriously than most people, especially because I mostly listen to music made for fun.  I mean, seriously, when's the last time you analyzed a roller coaster ride or a backyard picnic?  You probably don't. They're just fun.  Some are more fun than others and that's all you think about.  But me, I have to sit and remember some conversation I had at a backyard picnic thirty years ago and wish I could sit down with this record nerd I was talking to and see if he still thinks Wanted is a great lost classic, or just rightfully kind of lost.  Hey!  Dude that was talking to me!  Read my blog, maan!