Blog
Background to lyrics of Major Matt Mason
Written by Jimmy
A quick note on the background to Major Matt Mason. Its a song about a guy looking back from a pretty bad place to what it was like growing up in the 60’s in Southern California, where the ‘future looked so bright.’ Although sad, there’s some fun references throughout:
Verse 1
Sergeant Storm and Major Matt Mason
Sir Graves Ghastley and Diver Dan
Batman surfin’ off Redondo Beach
Livin’ in Tomorrowland
Sleepin’ nights with Major Matt Mason
Lunar modules spread ‘round my room
Flyin’ cars with Mister George Jetson
Robots dancin’ on the moon
Chorus
Callin’ out
to Mister George Jetson
Beam me up, I’m ready for Flight.
Lookin’ back, from tomorrow land
… my future never looked so bright.
Sergeant Storm and Major Matt Mason are two doll astranauts that every respectable 10-12 year old boy had. You could get all the space station, lunar module, etc… My mom made little sleeping bags for them so they could sleep on the lunar surface. Sir Graves Ghastly is actually from the East Coast, Wash DC area, but I moved so much I forgot. Now, Batman surfin off Redondo Beach is real, but it was actually Torrance Beach. We were let out of school early to go watch them film. Every school project was always about building the city of the future and everyone thought that would be about flying cars, mono-rails and robuts. It was never about the information or communications revolution — it was always just modernising the previous revolution around cars and transport. We we all pretty sure we’d travel to the moon before we died but it never would have occured to us that you could store music and videos in an iPod. This theme of micro vs. macro revolution in technology is critical, but I digress.
Verse 2
Sergeant Storm and Major Matt Mason
CCR blarin from my brothers van
Fireworks fired from Redondo Beach
Livin’ in Tomorrowland
Vietnam and Mister Dick Nixon
Body counts on the nightly news
These silly adults from Mother Earth
Were barely keeping us amused…
My brother was 10 years older, owned a VW van, played a lot of Clearance Clearwater and had a snake. TV was dominated by coverage of Vietnam and the US was stuck reporting out on body count numbers to try to show we were winning. Although this was all very real for my draft age brother, I was far more concerned about collecting all the Major Matt Mason collection.
Bridge
By now, I should have had a family
By now, we should have lived on Mars
But The Major didn’t know
the fall of Saigon would take my brother Joe
the Japanese would make my steel plant close
I’d shovel Columbia up my nose
And lose a bad decade with Jackie-Rose
And on and on and on it goes…
We all have someone that fits the bridge. This is a composite of a couple friends from that time who have either tied or lost their way. One called shortly before a drug over-dose to say, ‘Man, when we were playin’ with Major Matt Mason, our future looked so bright. What happened?’ That became this song.
Ironically, this is one of the first songs we did and on a parallel basis we were thinking about how to set up the label. I was blogging around finding references to Major Matt Mason and fell upon Olive Juice, which was doing something very similar in NYC and founded by Major Matt Mason, himself. Go figure.