Late Have I Loved You (eBook)

Four:
Mason Proffit

Terry and I began to prepare for this new venture. We listened over and over to the radically groundbreaking album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, by The Byrds. We also listened to Poco’s Pickin’ Up the Pieces, and The Flying Burrito Brothers. I went down to Arthur’s Music Store in Indianapolis and purchased an Emmons pedal steel guitar. We flipped a coin to decide who would play it, and I won—or lost, depending how you look at it! After being shown some basics, I started to learn how to play it. But I also got out my banjo and found a way to connect it through an amplifier. Terry set out to write some country rock songs, and I added the finishing touches with pedal steel and banjo changes.

Years earlier, Terry had been the one who taught me how to write songs. He was taking a poetry class in college to hone his lyrical skill, and he shared a lot with me. He had me write a song a day for almost a year. Then he would go through them, tearing them apart line-by-line and note-by-note: “Why did you use that word here, or that chord there?” he would ask. It was devastatingly painful. But it was absolutely necessary, and I owe him for sharing that discipline with me. Without Terry, I would not have learned how to be a songwriter. I first used some of those skills with Mason Proffit.

Next, we called the band together to practice. The final slate of The Sounds Unlimited had settled with my school friend, Tim Ayres, on bass, and Art Nash on drums. We tried to include my sister, Eileen, who had been part of The Sounds Unlimited, but she had been very sick and was reluctant to join. We had become a very tight-knit group of brothers. In rehearsals, the band immediately got the feel for the new material, with Tim and Art setting an airtight groove behind our instrumentations and vocals. They were the rhythmic heartbeat of the band. It had to beat steady and sure, and drive like a locomotive during bluegrass songs, but be as tender as a child during love songs. We also added a third singer to add the fifth in the vocals. And it sounded very good.

After a few gigs, the crowds were absolutely fascinated by the change. In fact, they went wild, first with musical intrigue, then with unbound enthusiasm bordering on mania as the band whipped the crowd into a frenzy. That was what happened when we played bluegrass numbers over a rock rhythm section for a song called “Two Hangmen,” a ballad with a counterculture message and a driving chorus. Had “Two Hangmen” not been banned by the FCC during the Vietnam War, it would have been a huge radio hit.

With an entirely new sound, we felt it was important to have a new name for the group. We put our brains together and came up with a name based on Creedence Clearwater Revival, calling ourselves the Mason Proffit Reunion. We shortened it to Mason Proffit not long afterward. We liked the name Proffit because Frank Proffit wrote the song “Tom Dooley.” We chose Mason because it had a gutsy folk feel about it. I don’t know if there was a subconscious tie to mason jars—but we liked it! Terry insisted that a recognizable visual image was necessary to package the group. Ultimately, the band settled on an American frontiersman or early plainsman look, complete with leathers, buckskins, and hats that gave us the appearance of a ragged band of buffalo hunters. We let our beards grow and our hair flow.

The next stage was to take this to Bill Trout. He recorded a demo, but since it was going so well, decided to make the demo an actual full-length album. This record, first titled Wanted, and later, Two Hangmen, started the band out on a small label and a whirlwind of concerts. Soon, we were doing three hundred concerts a year and a new record every twelve to eighteen months. After one small and another intermediate label, we ended up on Warner Brothers Records. The national touring circuit had begun in earnest, and I was only fifteen.

Of course, my education was a concern for our parents. At first, I still attended classes when the concerts were on weekends or in the Indiana/Illinois area. Many nights, I would be picked up at Warren Central High School to travel to perform at a concert further away, only to travel back just in time to attend class the next morning. Later, I had a tutor who accompanied me on the road. But it soon became apparent he was just as interested in the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, or at least the girls and parties that went with it, as he was in educating me. Because I loved to read, I had educated myself to a point where I knew more about many subjects than they did. It seemed a bit silly to me.

The band traveled by commercial air, but mainly by private bus. In those days the buses weren’t like today’s fancy coaches with lounges, bunks, and entertainment centers. They were seats with every other row taken out for more leg room. Concerts were often booked with twelve- to eighteen-hour rides between them. On those rides, there were only a few things to do: look out the window and daydream, sleep, get stoned, or read. I chose look out the window and read. And I read a lot.

Mostly, I read about religion. Riding across those midwestern plains and western deserts, I daydreamed about my own Native American heritage. Raised in Oklahoma, most of my ancestors were Scotch-Irish immigrants, but I had been told that there was some Cherokee heritage as well. So, I read about Native American culture and religion and loved what I read. I also read about my own Christian roots, as well as the Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, mystical Jewish, and Islamic faiths. After playing with Seals and Crofts (“Summer Breeze,” etc.), I read about Bahai. I was hungry for the God beyond the music and the ideas many of us were singing about.

As the band’s popularity grew, we played with just about every big name you can imagine either on the way up, or on the way down. We didn’t play with the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, and Dylan, but we shared stages or dressing rooms with just about everyone else. Beneath the glitter and the glitz, most of the band members were just musicians who wanted to make good music and be accepted and appreciated by others.

I remember Janis Joplin hanging out with the band before a gig at Ravinia outside of Chicago. It was right after she had left Big Brother and the Holding Company and had a hit with “Me and Bobby McGee.” She really liked our band and enjoyed swapping stories. She was sorry, though, that we couldn’t hear her set because we had to catch the red-eye express back to LA that night. But even though she was becoming a huge star, Janis was just a regular musician hanging out with other regular musicians.

Terry remembers Eric Clapton spending time with him when he was playing with Delany and Bonnie at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago. The opening act was The James Gang featuring Joe Walsh. The James Gang was doing their sound check and Eric came up behind Terry and said, “I really like your band.” Terry was surprised to be complimented by Eric Clapton! Then he pointed to Joe Walsh and said humbly, “See, there’s always someone better that you,” meaning himself. Terry was taken aback by his humility.

The Byrds frequently shared the stage with Mason Proffit, so the two bands grew to be a bit closer. I remember them coming to one of our gigs in Champaign, Illinois after playing together in Chicago. On the way down I-55 early in their career, The Byrds rammed the back of our band van repeatedly. Once they found out it wasn’t rented, they were most apologetic. Beneath that mountain of talent, they were truly nice guys.

John Denver toured with Mason Proffit early on his rise to superstardom right after the release of “Country Roads.” He would open one night for us, and we would open the next, alternating throughout the tour. After concerts we would all go back to the hotel and watch TV. I remember one night John Denver went across the alley to the theater and brought back a huge bag of popcorn for us all to eat. We usually watched either Johnny Carson or Billy Graham Crusades. After concerts it was usually all that was on TV. Everyone enjoyed both because they were both very entertaining and very good at what they did.

Lastly, I recall the Doobie Brothers opening for us on one of their first tours after the release of their hit, “Listen to the Music.” At first, they were a bit put off that they would open for a group that had no hit singles. But when they peeked out to a crowd of some eight thousand people, they looked back and said, “Oh, we get it.” And they were a great band. I remember Mason Proffit schooling them on how to travel on airplanes without acting like the Monkeys or a Beatles movie. Mason Proffit had been taught this lesson by John Hartford, and it was our turn to pass it on. So, we showed them how to be cool and not attract too much attention. Bands with long hair got enough attention already. Terry went on to be friends with one of the members who had a drug problem. He left the band for a while but is back now. Such stories are heartwarming. These are just a few of the countless memories I have. Nowadays, though, I don’t dwell on them; it’s unhealthy for monastic life.

Through all this, Mason Proffit was rising to the status of a cult supergroup. With anti-war, quasi-Jesus lyrics, country rock to a pulsating beat, and Terry’s almost evangelical preaching while the band vamped, we whipped the crowds into a frenzy that reached the level of mania. In some places in the South, it almost got Terry arrested. In most places, it resulted in the crowd going wild and...