RAP TO THE RANCH

Content warning: This story contains themes and uncensored curse words in the text that might not be suitable for young audiences.

Rich Post was running late, and it was his kid’s fault.  

His son had delayed their departure from the Dallas suburb of Grapevine where they were from. The son had trouble getting anywhere on time, even for something important. This was important.  

It was May 30, 2015, and the Posts were on their way to Trees, a concert venue in Deep Ellum, where the younger Post was headlining a concert. Parking is scarce down there. When they arrived, Post, the father, was relieved to see that someone had saved them a spot. 

He didn’t know this guy, but he liked his car – a 2015 Jaguar XJL – and he liked his tattoo – an X-ray of the bones in his arm and hand. He went by Bric Mason, and he’d set up the concert that night for Rich’s son, Austin Post – better known as Post Malone.     

Post Malone is now one of the biggest musicians in the world. But in May of 2015, he was only starting to burble into hip-hop fans’ collective consciousness. He wasn’t signed to a label at that point. He hadn’t released a record. But his song "White Iverson" had gotten traction on SoundCloud – enough to sell out Trees with relative ease. 

“It was just packed,” Rich Post said. “And I just remember walking through the crowd and thinking, ‘All these people are just here to see my kid do what he does.’” 

Post’s set was brief even though he played “White Iverson” twice. The audience’s response was undeniable. They saw something they liked in this earnest, goofy 19-year-old, and they were going to make him a superstar.  

“During that show you could see [Post’s dad and step-mom] understand the event that was happening before their eyes,” Bric said. “You could see them just have this awakening. Like, this is real. This is big. This is life-changing.” 

And it was – both for the Posts, and for Bric. Post Malone is rich and famous. Bric Mason doesn’t really exist anymore. 

Red cows

Mason LaDue, 41-year-old rancher, lives on a spread of family land in Leon County, about 90 minutes east of Waco. He is the only human out here full-time.  

The land is 400 acres of post oak savannah. Stands of trees break up otherwise open stretches of fairly flat, sandy soil. LaDue has fenced off the pastures to divvy them up among a handful of bulls, and a few dozen cows and calves. Most of them are red Akaushi cattle, which are native to the mountains of southern Japan. 

“When a red cow looks good, I like the way it looks, better than a black,” LaDue says as he and I sit in his silver F-250 and watch them graze.  

“You get lost in a day watching them eat,” he said. “There’s some kind of ASMR thing about watching them eat.” 

The truck idles and the air conditioner runs, and I see what he means.  

No one out here calls LaDue "Bric Mason,” although they are the same person. 

“If I’m in the café out here and someone says ‘Bric,’ I wouldn’t like that at all because that means they know me from my past life,” he said. 

His past life was in hip-hop. Mason worked as a tour manager and promoter for more than a decade, collaborating with artists like Tum Tum, Curren$y, Smoke DZA and Wiz Khalifa. 

“He’s of the hip-hop community here in Dallas,” said Pete Freedman, founder of the now-defunct Dallas culture website Central Track. “He had a lot of influence, and he knew a lot of people. And he became this kind of conduit … for a ton of people in local hip-hop.” 

Reporter Michael Marks shares the story behind the story in next week's Talk of Texas newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Like Post Malone, Mason is also from the Dallas suburbs. He grew up in a house that abutted Lake Lewisville and graduated from Marcus High School in 2001. The ranch is the place that’s always felt most like home, though. 

“Even though I spent my formative years in Dallas, this is where all my memories are,” Mason said. “I’ve buried every dog I’ve ever had in this pasture here.” 

His maternal great-grandparents, Walter and Marie Springman, better known as Papu and Mamu, bought the land and built a house in the 1950s. They moved to the ranch from the Galveston area. Papu needed cleaner air for his health. He raised some cows; Mamu grew big batches of vegetables.  

“Papu could build anything, could invent anything,” said Clayton LaDue, Mason’s brother. “People would drop off a refrigerator that wasn’t working; he’d take it apart and fix it, give it back to them.” He’d go to scrapyards and pick up car parts and build a tractor out of it.” 

The LaDue boys, including their other brother, Justin, grew up going to the ranch with their parents. It was utopia for them. They could go to the fence line and hassle the livestock. Papu built a go-kart out of an old riding lawnmower, and Mason would drive his little brothers around. You could play a mean game of flashlight tag. There was plenty of opportunity for mischief, which Mason rarely squandered. 

“He’s like a Tom Sawyer-like figure,” said Andrew Brininstool, Mason’s childhood best friend. “He didn’t mean any harm by anything. I think he just ruffled parents’ feathers a bit.” 

Mason and Andrew shared a passion for pro wrestling as kids. They’d watch matches on cable on Monday nights, then re-create what they’d seen on the trampoline. 

“We would do stupid things like steal plywood from a construction site to powerbomb each other through,” Brininstool said.  

A Texas thing

Mason played football until his senior year of high school, when he got kicked off the team for habitual lateness and skipping workouts. So he was surprised when an opportunity arose to play at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark. 

“I knew some guys in athletics up there, played baseball and stuff," he said. "So they’re like ‘Yeah come up, try out.' So, made the team. And I just spite played because I got kicked off the team my senior year."

Playing in college felt a little like giving his high school coaches the middle finger, which was nice, but it only lasted a year. Division II ball was a different experience from high school football in Texas. 

“It’s not just cool pep rallies and Friday night lights; it’s 20 people in the stands,” Mason said.  

His time in Arkansas was not a bust, though. While he was there, he met two titans of the Houston rap world. 

“I had teammates that grew up with Paul Wall and Slim Thug. And they came up to watch a game,” Mason said. 

Today, Slim Thug and Paul Wall are Houston rap royalty. In 2001 they were still on the way up. They were on their way back to Texas after playing a show in Arkansas when they stopped by Ouachita Baptist and met Mason. 

“I was like ‘Oh my God.’ That was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life up to that point, was seeing these guys that I barely knew, because at that point their music was really hard to find. But I knew that they were cool,” Mason said. 

About a year later, he ran into them again back in Texas. 

He’d only lasted a semester at Ouachita Baptist and eventually enrolled at Blinn College in Bryan. While he was there, Mason spent a lot of time at a hip-hop record store called Da Shack. He was there so much that the owners ended up putting him to work, and he got his first peek into the music business. 

“Just started kinda looking under the hood, and being like, so wait a minute, y’all are buying CDs for $3 and selling them for $10? Hmm, really, $7 a pop there, huh?” Mason said. 

At the time, rappers and promoters would go to stores like Da Shack to push their music, so Mason started to meet members of the Texas hip-hop community. Paul Wall, who remembered him from their meeting in Arkansas, started taking him on the road on weekends. 

“He would call me and he was like ‘Hey, you wanna go to San Marcos and Austin with me?’ Alright. So I’d hop in his Lincoln Town Car,” Mason said. “He would bring 500 CDs on the road and some molds for his grill, and he would hit all the mom-and-pop stores. He would sell all his molds, he would sell all his CDs, and come home with $20,000-$25,000 cash.” 

To Mason, this was a whole new way to make money. And he loved it. 

“I [wanted] to be part of this because it’s easy. It’s easy to make money doing this. It’s effortless,” he said. “All I gotta do is talk. I don’t have to sweat. I don’t have to lift weights. I don’t really have to have a college education.” 

He also loved the music that Paul Wall and his contemporaries were making. 

“It was interesting, and it sounded different than what anybody else had going on,” he said.  

In Texas, there was a growing demand for chopped and screwed records, originated by Robert Earl Davis Jr., or DJ Screw. Producers would cut up and slow down a song to produce a gloopier, twitchier sound that evokes Houston. DJ Screw died in 2000, but his technique sloshed across the country long after he was gone. 

Around the same time, a wave of songs that all had accompanying dance moves came out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area in what was called the boogie movement. To Mason, part of the appeal of these sounds was that no one else could claim them. 

“It was a Texas thing. Simple as that. Just like a cowboy hat,” Mason said. 

Eat or get ate

These Texas sounds were deeply influential to hip-hop nationwide. And George Lopez was a big reason why. 

Lopez, who owns Dallas’ T-Town Music, is also a longtime producer, promoter and driving force behind the Texas rap collective DSR, Dirty South Rydaz. Lopez built a very successful business by shaking hands and pushing songs. 

“From 2001 to 2010, 2011, we were on the road. Five days a week, we’re in Denver, we’re in Eldorado, we’re in Memphis,” Lopez said. “I built my relationships for years. You just got a new record out, you’re trying to make it big overnight. It’s not going to happen.  

This music business is 100% about relationships. It’s all about who you know. It’s not even about how good your record is; it’s not about that at all. It’s all about who you know and who’s going to help you out.”  

In the summer of 2007, a Dallas rapper and friend of Mason’s named Tum Tum released the album “Eat or Get Ate” with the backing of Lopez and Universal Republic Records. The single was “Caprice Musik” – an ode to custom cars – and it was a hit. 

“All the cars in the video was my homeboys’ from the street,” said Tum Tum, aka Tony Richardson Jr. “No rented cars or nothing ‘cuz we always had old schools that we had fixed up.”

As soon as the video was done, Lopez sent it to a deejay he knew named Tony Neal, who was well-connected at the BET music video show “106 & Park.” 

“So all of a sudden, he calls me up around 1:30, 2 o’clock and says, ‘Hey man, your video’s going to be on ‘106 & Park’ today.’ I said what?! He said ‘Today,’” Lopez said. 

With “Caprice Musik” taking off, Tum needed more help. And Mason was available.

“The song’s trajectory was going up and up and up, and so he needed his own guys around him, and I just was the least-talented. The one with the best Blackberry, I guess,” Mason said.    

Mason hadn’t managed a tour before, but Tum knew that he could. He was a people person. So in the late ‘00s, Mason and Tum Tum traveled all over the country throwing extremely rowdy concerts. People would fight. It was life imitating art imitating life.   

“I always used to rap about what I was doing, like I used to go to the clubs and fight all the time anyway,” Tum said. 

One show in Killeen was especially crazy. A member of the audience jumped on stage during the show, and a brawl ensued.

“Tum claims he hit the guy with the microphone,” Mason said. “He hit me with the microphone. So it was just chaos.”  

Mason had a mic-sized goose egg on his head and a separated shoulder. It popped back into place sometime on the drive to Arkansas.

These early shows with Tum Tum taught Mason the basics of music and touring, just like Tum had learned from George Lopez. The lessons weren’t always so painful, but they were rarely glamorous.

“Before the internet, it was huge for rumors to start that this show ain’t coming, for real it’s a scam. And so you would have to be like naw, this show’s for real,” Mason said. “And so we’d have to show up to like the mall or the CD store that day so people could see you.”

Sometimes, though, people just didn’t show. 

“Of course you’d run into your janky promoter situations where it didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell and you know it,” Mason said. “We’d call those ‘plenty of parking’ shows. Tum Tum, he would say, ‘How’s the crowd tonight?’ I’d go ‘Welp, there’s plenty of parking.” 

Bric Flair

Another fundamental truth of the business appealed to Mason’s sensibilities: that rapping is like wrestling. 

“It’s like you get a character, turn it up times 10, and there you have it,” Tum Tum said. 

Tum and Mason both love wrestling. They’ve attended Wrestlemania together more than once. As a kid, Tum’s granddad took him to the Sportatorium, a temple of Texas wrestling set by the Trinity River.  

Yes, lots of rappers rhyme about real life, but always with a sense of spectacle that might make Stone Cold Steve Austin proud. Both wrestling and rap – at least the kind Tum Tum was making – rely on bravado. 

“That’s probably why rap was so attractive to me. It’s real gimmicky,” Mason said. “Like, there’s some real real real fellas in there, but it’s amplified.” 

Mason’s nickname, Bric, is a wrestling pun.    

“We were just coming up with stupid names, and I said “Brick Flair” instead of Ric Flair, like as a ripoff of Ric Flair,” he said. “And everyone just died laughing.” 

Here’s the joke: Nature Boy Ric Flair is one of the greatest wrestlers ever. Mason, Tum and some friends had just finished playing a game of basketball in which Mason had missed nearly every shot he took – a bunch of bricks. Bric Flair. 

“And everyone just died laughing,” he said. “And it stuck, it stuck real quick.” 

Naturally, it morphed into Bric Mason, and then a personal brand called 24kBric. The logo is now his cattle brand. 

Wiz

Bric and Tum Tum would run into plenty of other artists while touring around the country. One of the groups they hit it off with was Taylor Gang, the Pittsburgh-based collective headed by Wiz Khalifa. 

Wiz, a former military brat born as Cameron Jibril Thomaz, became his own galaxy in the music business universe after his 2011 hit “Black and Yellow” took off.  

He and Mason became close, a relationship catalyzed by a shared love for quality marijuana.    

In the days before you could legally obtain weed in some states, re-stocking on the road could be a major detour for a bus full of stoners. Harder still – finding someone with good drugs you’d actually want to spend time with. But Mason was that person. 

“There’s always people around with good weed, but people aren’t always the greatest vibe,” said Will Dzombak, Wiz’s manager and the co-founder of Taylor Gang. For a long time, Mason was saved in his phone as "Bric Dallas Good Weed.” 

“And Bric could actually be a friend where a lot of other people were opportunistic. Bric was not, ever,” he said. “And that’s one reason I think we got really close.” 

By 2012, Taylor Gang needed more help. Dzombak asked Mason to join them as a tour manager. 

Tour managers “know how every day of the whole tour is going to flow, what time breakfast is served, what time lunch is served, how we’re traveling, where to park the tour bus when it gets there, where the dressing rooms are, making sure the sound guys are on point. Kinda just everything and anything that has to do with the road,” Dzombak said.  

This was a good opportunity. But Mason was nervous to take it because it would mean less time with his best friend Tum Tum, who first took him on the road. They were close. They both had the words “LIVE LIFE” tattooed across their knuckles.

“And I kinda asked Tum for permission, because I didn’t wanna feel like I step-stoned on him. And Tum didn’t even stutter, he was like 'hell yeah, why would you even think of asking me? Tell me you’re gonna go do that, that’s awesome,'” Mason said.

“I’m not one of those ‘hold a person back’ type people. I’m not the type to get mad ‘cuz you hanging with somebody. That ain’t how I rock,” said Tum.

These tours with Wiz were big productions, with multiple buses to haul all the rappers, road crew and gear.

A tour is like its own separate world. Even though you’re always going somewhere new, it can feel like the same day over and over.

“So you leave a venue at like 1 in the morning. You arrive in the next city at like 6 in the morning. You know, you’re at the venue; there’s no real time to run out and do something,” Mason said. 

Mason tried to keep a tight routine to keep his sanity. He tended to wake up early, get ready, shoot the breeze with the roadies. 

“You kinda just spend your morning killing time. Then by about lunchtime most of the tour is up and at ‘em. It kinda turns into a frathouse by about lunchtime to the show,” he said. 

Mason did his job before and after the show. Once Wiz stepped on stage, he got a minute to breathe. 

“That’s where you can duck off, no one’s in the backstage area of the green rooms. You can have a moment, you can eat, you can not listen to people,” he said. 

He was making good money, plus some incredible perks. Companies that wanted to partner with Wiz would give him free stuff that he’d then give to his crew: food, hotels, rideshare credits. There was even a startup that offered short-term rentals for fancy cars.

“Man, we just abused the shit out of that,” Mason said. “I’d have a Mercedes G-Wagon for like a week.” 

When the Dallas Cowboys licensed Wiz’s song “We Dem Boyz,” they gave Taylor Gang a private tour of AT&T Stadium. As a Cowboys devotee, Mason was in heaven.  

“I’m just like, this is awesome,” he said. But Taylor Gang was comprised of Pittsburgh Steelers fans.

“They’re like ‘Dude, fuck this.’ And Wiz lit up a joint on the 50-yard line.” 

A knucklehead time

So here was Mason: young, healthy, often high, traveling the country with friends for a job, driving luxury vehicles. A charmed life, from many points of view. But not everyone saw it that way. Mason’s parents, for one, were disappointed in a lot of his choices around this time. 

“Oh, they thought I was wasting my life away,” he said. “Kinda like, 'what are you doing?'” 

Over the years, marijuana and moving violations gave Mason lots of legal trouble.

“He wasn’t doing anything crazy. He wasn’t doing heroin or things like that,” said Dustin Eash, a childhood friend who bailed him out of jail multiple times. “I think they all wound up being warrants, and he gets pulled over, and sure enough they’re gonna take you in.”

It wasn’t just that Mason kept getting in trouble. He’d continue to flaunt the rules while on probation, compounding headaches for himself and most of the people around him.

“It was a big knucklehead part of my life,” he said. “I stressed a lot of people out unnecessarily. My parents, my family, my lawyers, the judge, the probation officer – anybody involved, I was pissing off.” 

He wasn’t supposed to smoke weed; he would. He wasn’t supposed to leave Texas; he would. 

“Like, ‘Yeah I’m not coming in [to the probation office] this month, I’m at the Grammys.’ Like, fuck you dude, this is probation. This is bigger than the Grammys. And at that time, I’d be like ‘Ah, this guy’s crazy,’” Mason said. “But you know, I should have treated probation like the Grammys and the Grammys like probation. That was the story of my life.” 

Eventually, after multiple failed drug tests, a judge took it out of his hands and sent Mason to a state jail rehab in Gun Barrel City for six months.  

It wasn’t exactly prison – the rules weren’t nearly as strict – but Mason was still incarcerated. It was a mix of legal consequence and substance abuse treatment. 

“It was like a dorm setup, like two-man suites and then community bathroom, community shower,” he said. “You had shower time, you had bed time, you had day room time.”

Mason kept his head down and did the six months. He didn’t feel like he belonged there.

“It was insanity. Insanity. Like, this guy just drank a bottle of Listerine to get drunk,” he said. “My heart goes out, like I saw people really fighting for their lives, you know, really trying to do it.” 

That wasn’t Mason. He got out – and didn’t really change his behavior.    

Post

In early 2015, Mason went to Los Angeles to stay with Wiz while he was recording new music. One night, he was browsing SoundCloud, a site where musicians share music, and he heard something that caught his attention. 

“This song came up and I was like ‘Woah!’ And at that time it had very little plays. And the song was just really cool,” he said. 

Mason had never heard of the artist, so he did some Googling and discovered a blog post that said he was a Dallas native. 

Mason had to find this guy. Some social media stalking revealed that he also happened to be in LA at the time. 

“This guy was 10 minutes down the street,” Mason said. “I DM’d him on Twitter, said ‘Hey, I’m from Dallas too. I’m at Wiz’s house – your shit’s really cool; Wiz likes it a lot. Who are you?'” 

He was a 19-year-old named Austin Post, and he’d just started to release music as Post Malone. He showed up at Wiz’s house and hung out at the studio. 

“At the time he was still just ‘aw shucks,’ living on his buddy’s floor with no real purpose in mind,” Mason said.

The song, “White Iverson,” now has more than 1 billion streams on both Spotify and YouTube. No one saw this coming when Post moved from Grapevine to Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve 2014.

“He went out there with his best friend from high school, and they were gonna live in this mansion and make Minecraft videos,” said Rich Post, Austin’s dad.

After the Minecraft thing flamed out, Post pivoted to music, which was more successful. He became a star alarmingly fast, and Rich was glad that Mason was around.

“He was really kind and genuine anytime I’d call and talk to him,” Rich Post said. “You know, even sometimes when it wasn’t in his best interest to give me the information, he still did.” 

After that first night at Wiz’s house, Mason became a friend and mentor to Post. He never had an official role in his circle. But by this point, Mason had enough clout in the music business to open doors for the up-and-coming artist. 

“In March, South by Southwest was happening. Got him like, 15 shows for like $500 apiece, ran him ragged,” Mason said. 

There’s a video of one of these shows on YouTube. Everybody’s under a white pop-up tent. Post is on a stage that barely lifts him above the crowd. His hair’s in cornrows. He’s got a microphone in one hand and a Lone Star tall boy in the other while he raps “White Iverson.”   

Then it cuts to Post and Bric outside the tent, after the show. Bric’s got his arm around Post’s shoulders. The shot is in black and white, but you can see the light catch the grill on Post’s bottom teeth. They both look happy and sweaty. 

Even at this point, Mason had no financial interest in Post Malone’s career. They had no contract together; they hadn’t talked money. Mason was trying to help a kid from the same part of the world as him who he thought was legitimately special.   

“It was undeniable,” Mason said. “Like this kid, for whatever reason … this kid has it, and it’s not going away anytime soon." 

Given that, did the thought of a potential payday someday cross Mason’s mind? Of course. But for the time, he says he was happy to be along for a ride that was quickly going straight up. 

What's next?

After the South by Southwest shows, Mason booked the Dallas concert at Trees at the request of Post Malone’s management. This was Post’s first hometown show, and if you recall from the start of this story, it was pretty wild. 

“There’s shows from throughout the years in Dallas where if the number of people who claim to have been there were actually there, it could never have physically happened. And that certainly happened with the Post Malone show,” said Pete Freedman, the Central Track founder. 

Central Track, the arts and culture website, was one of the concert’s sponsors. 

“When [Mason] reached out to me about wanting to sponsor the Post Malone show, like yeah of course we would love to be part of that,” Freedman said. “I think part of me in the back of my mind was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to happen.’ But I also knew that if Bric was involved, it was.” 

The Post show sold out. Trees’ management was unhappy with Mason because of how rowdy the crowd was. It was a big moment in his career. 

“It was just like, we got it. We did something,” Mason said. “This is written in stone, this is a moment in time. And it was. It was very cool." 

After the show in Deep Ellum, people like Freedman were curious to see what Bric and Post would do next. And the answer was nothing. 

“We kinda went radio silent for a few months,” Mason said. 

There wasn’t a big argument, or an impasse over money. From Mason’s point of view, the relationship just dissolved.  

Post Malone declined an interview for this story through a representative. His dad, Rich Post, isn’t sure why things ended between his son and Mason. 

“I know that it wasn’t the way either of them probably wanted it to change. I just don’t know why it did,” Rich said. 

For a while they spoke over the phone, and Post would hit up Mason when he was in town. But Mason couldn’t travel because of legal trouble, and with time the relationship fizzled.

“You know, he’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. Hindsight 20/20, shit, I wouldn’t have wanted me around either,” Mason said. “I was kind of a liability at the time. I was on probation; I was a hothead.”

Whatever the reason for the falling out, what definitely happened in subsequent years is that the more popular Post Malone got, the more bitter Mason became.  

“It messed me up a whole bunch because the bigger he got, it was just like, I was the dude with Apple stock that sold it the day before they went public or whatever, right?”

Mason almost had a career with one of the biggest artists in the world, but he didn’t. Instead, at least financially, he had nothing to show for it.

He worked in music for a few more years. Some things worked; others didn’t. He managed a local hip-hop group called The Outfit, TX and took them on a nationwide tour with Yelawolf – a tour he described as a complete disaster.

For several years he threw an annual one-day festival called Bric’s Block Party.

“It wound up being an excuse to book all my friends, all the guys I’ve toured with,” he said.  

It was also a way to make money when probation kept him from going on the road. The block parties were a hit, featuring local artists like Tum Tum and Erykah Badu, as well as nationwide talent like Larry June, Curren$y, DRAM and Starlito.

Starlito, or Jermaine Shute, is a rapper from Arkansas and friend of Mason’s who spent time on major labels like Cash Money Records but has been independent since 2010.  

“One day I called [Mason] and he was like, literally in a field, hunting wild hogs or something,” Starlito said. “We were on the phone like, what the hell are you doing? And he’s like ‘Man, these hogs are chewing through my fence.’”

A couple years after the concert at Trees, Starlito called Mason out of the blue.

“He was like, ‘Did you ever get anything from that Post Malone thing? ‘Cuz the whole industry knows that was you, and you aren’t in a Maybach,'” Mason said. “So he just took it upon himself to kind of defend me. And they got into an online battle on Twitter.”

Starlito thought that Post Malone, a white guy, was appropriating parts of Black culture in “White Iverson.”

“I breathe, live and die for this culture,” Starlito said. “It’s a real thing in my world. And I saw it as parody. And for this day I feel like I saw it for what it is.”

On Twitter, Starlito called out Post, who flexed his success. Small-time hip-hop beef, in the scheme of things. But the fallout was the last time Mason heard from Post.

“Post called me like, ‘What’s up with your boy?’ And I was like, that’s a grown man, actually,” Mason said. “He’s older than I am. I definitely can’t tell him what to do. So that’s how he feels. A lot of people feel that way, you know.”

Mason’s resentment over the situation with Post festered with time.

“There was a time when … I’d see a billboard and just scrunch up a piece of paper,” he said. “I just, I couldn’t get away from him. He was everywhere.”

Mason got so sick he couldn’t listen to music, much less work in the industry. In 2019 he left for good.

“I just got sour. … I didn’t get that ride-off-in-the-sunset moment. So I left kinda hat in hand since I’m just not accustomed to quitting,” he said.

For Post Malone’s part, he hasn’t discussed Mason much in public, although one interviewer did bring up in 2017: Nardwuar the Human Serviette, a Canadian music journalist who asks his subjects obscure, deeply researched questions about their past.

“Thank you, Bric Mason,” Nardwuar says to Post in the video. They are standing close to each other in a small white room.

“Yeah, Bric Mason’s awesome,” Post responds.

“What was his role in ‘White Iverson’?”

“Um, kind of I guess he, actually I knew him before. So um, he’s just a good friend. Really supportive guy, helped me around Dallas, you know, getting shows and everything. Just a super sweet guy and always there and super supportive.” 

Where the medicine was

After more than a decade on and off the road, Mason was tired. He started spending more and more time at his family’s property in Leon County. 

“Whatever in my life I perceived as, it’s not working anymore, I knew where the medicine was for that, and it was out here. I needed it,” he said.  

It was about as far from a tour bus as you could get. Personal space. Quiet. A schedule of your own making.  

There wasn’t a specific point when Mason decided once and for all to stay out there for good. Eventually he just didn’t leave. When the pandemic came, and the ranch was the perfect place to ride it out, it solidified his decision. He was done with music. He was going to raise cows. In a way, it felt like what he should have been doing all along.  

“I’d say that ranching was something I wanted to do before [music] as well. It was kinda the original thought,” he said. “I even looked at schools for ranch management when I was starting to look at colleges.”

Once he’d made the decision, Mason knew he’d need a good horse. And he knew where to look for one.

As a kid, Mason went to Camp Stewart, a summer camp for boys in the Hill Country. It’s a 100-year-old property on the banks of the Guadalupe River.

“It’s majestic. It’s magical,” Mason said.

The camp is owned and operated by Jeepers Ragsdale, a world-class rider who was an equestrian coach at the Paris Olympics. He has about 75 horses on the property at any time and lent some to Mason.

“He needed a horse. I don’t sell horses,” Ragsdale said. “He rode some of my horses until he was ready to go.”

Ragsdale introduced Mason to Luis Chimal, a horse trainer and farrier who grew up on the Camp Stewart property. He’s younger than Mason, so their paths at camp didn’t cross. They hit it off, but Chimal wasn’t totally sure what to make of Mason when they first met.  

“He’s got that tattoo on his arm – I was like, that’s pretty cool right there,” Chimal said.

Usually, buying a horse from Chimal is a prolonged process. He gets to know the buyer and what they want, then matches them with the right horse. The transaction with Mason was different.  

Chimal had brought a horse named Bolero, an even-tempered dapple-grey grulla. He’d been well-trained and was above Mason’s skill level of riding, Chimal said – but that did not deter Mason. 

“I think he rode him maybe two, three minutes in a little round pen, little arena, and [said] ‘Alright, I’m taking him, that’s it,’” Chimal said.

Mason paid cash. He’s been happy with the purchase.

“He’s priceless,” Mason said. “He will live and die here forever. Period, point blank, I don’t care what happens. I don’t care if I go out in that pasture and he kicks me plumb in the face today, he is living and dying here.” 

More red cows

Mason and Bolero are tight now, but that took some time. 

“Our first year was pretty rough,” Mason said.

When they first got together, Bolero was a young pro, ready to do anything asked of him on the ranch. Mason was not. He had experience with horses before moving to the ranch full time, but safe to say he was out of practice.

“There would be some days in the beginning where … I would catch him, not even put a saddle on him, and if he did something right in the first five minutes, alright good. We’re good for the day. End on a good note,” Mason said.

It weighed on him that he wasn’t as skilled as he thought he should be. But Bolero didn’t seem to resent him for it.

“I knew where I was in my program, I wasn’t near the rider he deserved,” Mason said. "And I wasn’t near the horseman he required, and he let me learn that on him."

Improvement came with experience. Early on, on a sketchy job helping a neighbor wrangle longhorns near the Navasota River, they bonded after a near miss.

“Along the trail all of a sudden there was just like this hog wire sticking up out of the ground just in the middle of a bunch of crap,” Mason said. “I saw it, and I guess he saw it too, and he just – we jumped it. And that’s when I was like, this is a good horse.”

It was a long, hot day. They were both stinky and tired from chasing longhorns through the swamp. Mason couldn’t have been happier. He and Bolero were becoming a unit.

“Best day ever. I don’t even really drink beers, but that night I got home and cracked me a beer. I just felt like that’s what the Marlboro man would’ve done,” he said. 

Initially, Mason was interested in raising wagyu cattle – a premium beef breed from Japan he’d seen in grocery stores and sushi restaurants. But then he talked to a friend who’d just returned from Japan.

“And [he] was saying like, ‘Yeah, wagyu this, wagyu that. But what everyone eats out there … is Akaushi,” Mason said.

Akaushi cattle come from the Kumamoto region of southern Japan. They are generally brownish-red, can handle most any climate, and produce highly marbled cuts of beef. 

“They’re a little bit hardier; they have a little more depth, more body. They have a little bit more characteristics that I enjoy in a bovine species,” Mason said.  

It so happens that the leading producer of Akaushi cattle in the United States, HeartBrand Ranch, is in Flatonia, less than an hour from Mason. He bought a handful of pregnant heifers and slowly built to where he is now, with about 50 cows and five bulls.

“I’m not trying to be the best Akaushi producer in the world,” Mason said. “I want to sell good cattle. I like them to be red. I like them to have some marbling. I like them to look good in the pasture.”

He wants to do so by working with the landscape, not taming it. Synthetic herbicides and pesticides are out. There’s a commitment to protecting native grasses in the pastures and not overgrazing them.

The learning curve has been steep and humbling.

“At first I used to think there was a lot of pertinent information on YouTube. But then I realized anybody can get views,” he said. “You just have to be a sponge. The person that starts off doing this and thinks they can know it all by just purely research is sadly mistaken. Every day is a learning experience.”

Raising cows the way Mason wants requires patience, and good horsemanship. He’s improved at both. 

“I can see a big change just in him,” said Luis Chimal, Mason’s friend who trained and sold him Bolero. “And I can tell he’s been riding a lot, and working a lot, because his riding has improved a lot.”  

He also learned to ask for help. Some things maybe you can do on your own, but someone else can do it better. Like branding cows, for instance.

“Get the most steadiest hand, the strongest arm, the guy who wins all the arm wrestling competitions on the ranch, get him to do it,” he said. “Because it takes a real steady hand and a real sure hand to make a clean one. You can redo it – it’s going to look like shit, though.”

Mason’s neighbor, Luke Mahaffey, and his family often lend a hand. His parents come down a lot, too. They may visit even more soon: Mason’s finishing a house of his own out here, freeing up the one he’s been staying in for guests. He and his folks are as tight as ever, despite headaches in the past.

“I apologize all the time,” Mason said. “We’ve gotten closer because of it. I talk to my mother every day. And we’re close. We work so close with each other out here.”

It helps that he hasn’t been in trouble with the law since 2015. His brother Justin, a botanist and agronomist, is moving to the ranch, too. He’ll manage soil health and grow all sorts of fruits, veggies and grains.

“Peaches grow real good in this dirt. Herb gardens, of course. Rosemary, garlic, all that stuff. Wheat and barley, crush oats and crimps oats and all that,” Mason said. “Our goal as this ranch is to not really have to go the grocery store. As close as we can get to that, that’s the goal.”

Instead of riding into the sunset, Mason will stay exactly where he is, for good, with his family. He couldn’t have found the same fulfillment on the road. His friends, like Tum Tum, are happy for him.  

"I’m proud of him. He’s doing what he wants to do, he’s having fun,” Tum said. “We still chop it up, we still talk about UFC and wrasslin’ every week. Still my guy.” 

As for Post Malone, Mason’s got nothing but goodwill toward him these days. He’d like it if one day they reconnected and talked it out. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s OK, too.   

They’ve still got a lot in common. After about a decade of releasing hip-hop and pop hits, Post Malone’s most recent album, “F-1 Trillion,” is a country record.