Bobby Mason is best known for being one of the contestants on "Survivor: Panama". But for those who really know him he is the mighty BobDawgsta, a 40 swillin' wino & member of the westcoast rap group The Darkside Crooks. Being a fan of Survivor, I was excited when he saw my site & hit me up to share in the bond that is the 40oz.

Bruz: You got voted off Survivor in part due to your swillin down a whole bottle of wine by yourself, true wino stylez, while sleeping in an outhouse! Care to set the record straight on what went down?
BobDawg: Yes, I'd like to set the record straight. This is what happened: I swilled down a whole bottle of wine by myself, true wino style, while sleeping in the shitter. That's pretty much how it went down. All I was missing was a brown-bag and some gloves with the fingers busted out!

Actually, here's the full story. I was in the outhouse with my boy Bruce "The Factor" Kanegai and we split the bottle of wine. There were originally four bottles and the broads in my camp, Danielle and Courtney, knocked out 1 bottle before anyone even knew they had been opened. They were like 2 college freshmen lushes and were in the middle of bottle #2 when I stumbled across them and suggested that we save the wine til we (meaning I) was done working. They didn't want to wait so I said two-tears in a bucket, fuck it and joined them. I called Bruce and Cirie over and we killed bottles 2 and 3, then Bruce and I went back to work cleaning fish while we still had some light left. Bottle 4 was supposed to be shared at night once we got back to the shelter but when I got there I found that my spot in the shelter had been stolen by a bunch of insecure little weaklings. I had 2 choices: stay up all night and sit in the rain or start draggin' these weak-ass foos out of the shelter by the ankles and hand out a few beat-downs. I ended up trying to sit in the rain but that shit was killin' me (by this point I was buzzed from the wine and thought I might die if I went to sleep). So I decided to walk to the outhouse and sleep in there... but first I was gonna drink the last bottle of wine because, fuck them. When I got up there, I realized Bruce had the same idea I had, just about 30 minutes earlier. He was in there, I knocked and told him I had wine, he let me in, and we went to work. Tried to savor it but I'm a wino by heart, I wiped the foam from my dry-ass lips and knocked in out like a champion. Bruce is a 5th degree black-belt and he's a killer. I, of course am the mightiest being ever to walk the earth, Mr. BobDawg. The clowns in my tribe are lucky we just decided to take the wine and not start taking them out because it would have gotten ugly.

Drinking with your boy in a fucked up situation is one of the best things you can experience and I wouldn't trade that time for anything. That was my favorite time from the whole game and Bruce is my best friend from the show to this day. That dude is 59 years old and we were sucking down porterhouses and knocking back shots of tequila 2 weekends ago. True rider.

B: What was your biggest highlight on the show?
BD: The outhouse time was tough because we were in a tough position and we were freezing our asses off. But that's probably the strongest memory I have of being there. The best time I guess would have been when I stepped in to the fish-chopping challenge and brought the team back from certain defeat by my sheer mightiness. Those clowns were hatin' on me from the moment I got out there and never wanted me to be in any of the events and even when it was obvious Bruce was too short to handle the cleaver, they started yelling at me when I swapped him out. Then of course I started gettin' my O.J. on and started knocking off heads and then I became the hero for a day. That was probably my biggest highlight from the show. Then I got voted off that same episode.

B: How & when did your rap group the Darkside Crooks come together?
BD: We've been together about 6 years now. One of the homies was getting a degree in musicology and had to do a 40 minute music peace to pass the course. Like a true wino, he waited til the last second and 2 nights before it was due (literally) he asked a bunch of the homies to come down and play instruments and lay some vocals. We went down there that night and got loaded and started messing around with trumpets and drums and next thing you know, we're piss drunk and freestyling. Never really rapped before but it came out cool and we helped the homie out. After that we caught the bug and started doing songs for fun, mostly based on scenes from Star Wars (that's where the name Darkside Crooks comes from). After awhile, we had a bunch of songs and were getting better so we started doing shows and eventually shot some videos and now we're performing and selling the album. You can get it at www.cdbaby.com/cd/darksidecrooks3.

B: Several songs mention 40s, so just how does the 40oz influence the DSC?
BD: Pretty much every song we've ever done, we've done piss drunk. Being loaded gets us in the mood to just let it rip. I'm not the most talented rapper, I'm just a foul-mouthed wino/heathen and knocking back a couple of 40s gets me in the zone where I can really just let my inner-dragon roar. I remember I was in the middle of my 3rd bottle of loco cabayo and I couldn't get my lines right so I just said "I can rhyme shit with shit and it would still be the shit." You can't come up with stuff like that sober. That was the 40 talking. Plus, it's a good source of carbs...

In the DSC, my bro handles the brew drinking these days and he's basically untouchable there. I've seen him put down 3 64s on top of regular beers and I've seen him chug a 40 during a drinking game (he called Earl right after but that shit was crazy). Stik Fig is the resident weed-smoker and I'm the whiskey dragon, though I'll knock out a 40 or 2 from time to time.

B: Share with the rest of the class a tale of your most drunken belligerence.
BD: Man, where to start. I've always rolled with big, tough dudes that weren't the type to get into fights unless someone was looking for trouble so I've only had a few drunk rumbles. We'd get loaded and start doing shit like doing the Jame Gumm dance from Silence of the Lambs or something like that and foos would just stay clear. One time we were playing Hockey on Sega Genesis, just knocking back some frosty 40s when I decided to take it up a notch and broke out a bottle of grape Cisco. We were supposed to get dressed for a party but when the fellas came looking for me, I had gone back to my room, stripped down to my wife-beater (ribbed, for her pleasure) and boxers and was standing in the dark looking at my Kirby Puckett for some reason and I refused to come out. They finally got me to get dressed and I ended up at this party throwing a brew on some clown that I thought was talking shit about me behind my back (he wasn't) and I threatened to kill his ass if he ever did it again (he didn't) then I chased a train down the tracks as we were walking home. Except the train was heading towards me not away from me and I had to do some shit like in the Fugitive and jump to the side. I don't know why that story comes to mind and there's more too it but I'm rambling now.

B: What's your favorite 40 & why?
BD: St. Ides. Mostly just because of the memories. When I got to college, there were no 40s in the town of Amherst. There was some random Budweiser 40s and stuff like that, but no 8 Ball etc. I'm from LA and this was the middle of the Snoop and Deathrow and Ice Cube's reign and I was looking to represent for the Westside and you can't do that with a Budweiser. So we convinced the local store owners to start ordering it and we'd promise to buy a case a week. No one out there had seen a 40 before and we became local drinking celebrities cuz we'd show up at parties drinking a 40 with 1 stuck in each pocket so we could barely walk, and we'd ignore the keg and drink our own shit and never share. That created so much mystery, foos started copying our style. So I moved from King Cobra which was easy to drink to Colt 45 PowerMaster, to the nastiest shit I could get my hands on, St. Ides. That way, after I gave someone a sip, they'd never ask again. It worked. No one would ask for a sip of my 40 again and since no one knew what Crooked I was like, they built it up in their minds and I was thought to be the only dude around that could polish it off. My rep for drinking the ill shit grew and I just got attached to it, drinking something other people couldn't mess with.

Now that I'm older, I drink alot of whiskey but I break out the 40s on special occasions, like Saturdays. I usually get 3, and break it up - one Mickeys because it's easy to drink, one Colt 45 or O.E. because I'm a grown-up and that's just some classy shit, and one St. Ides for old time's sake and to show foos I still have my stripes. My favorite wino way to enjoy it is ice cold in a brown-bag with a long ass straw...

BobDawg's links:
BobDawg's MySpace: www.myspace.com/mrbobdawgsta
The Darkside Crooks: www.myspace.com/darksidecrooks
Purchase: The Darkside Crooks - "The Wino, the Warlock, & the Shogun" CD/DVD