The Long Trail: My Life in the West (13 page)

With Hal Cannon, co-founder of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada
.
(HEATHER NAFLEIGN)

Some of the folklorists got their noses out of joint when I showed up in Elko. They said, “Ian Tyson’s a professional musician, hardly an authentic Nevada buckaroo.” They didn’t want me there and did their best to keep me out. There was a lot of controversy about it at the time, but Hal and Waddie stuck up for me, saying I was the real deal. We finally circumvented the whole controversy by playing Stockman’s, a funky rundown casino, and blowing the roof off the place. Not only did people really listen to us, everyone loved us. The buckaroos and their girlfriends danced as if they couldn’t get enough. Better still, none of them had heard of Ian & Sylvia, which was like getting a brand-new start.

The poets read what they had written at cow camps. None of them were musicians; you don’t find many cowboys who play. You’re either a cowboy or a musician, and there are very few who do both. Cowboys don’t play instruments too well because their work is hard and their hands get all banged up. (There are some exceptions, of course, such as Mike Beck and me.) And then this Canadian cowboy shows up with five guys who can all play. That band’s chemistry was serendipitous, and you couldn’t stop it — it was like a tide. I must have had a hand in it, since I was the bandleader, but I know that the parts coming together like that was pure luck.

The next year we went back to Elko and played to even bigger crowds. The place was crawling with writers and media types representing everyone from the
New York Times
to
People
magazine. And it kept on growing every year. I realized,
Hey, I can make records of this music and there’s going to be an audience
. I felt that there hadn’t been a large audience
for western music since the 1940s, when I saw Tex Ritter and the Sons of the Pioneers in Victoria. In my mind the only people who would pay attention to my music were a few cowboys in a bar in Elko, Nevada. But suddenly cowboy poetry gatherings were sprouting up all over the place. Some of them were just dumb low-budget events that were run so badly they died off, but others survived. I realized I could finally leave my Ranchman’s days behind. The time was perfect for me and my songs.

Elko was the hub of the wheel, and the spokes went out in all directions. I started playing more gigs in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Back at home, my band and I played the local bar in Longview and had people dancing in the street — literally. The cowboys and the girls from nearby Okotoks all came to see us. The crowd kept getting bigger and bigger, spilling out onto the deck and into the street. The cops came and shut it down while it was still light out, even though the whole thing was pretty mellow. I don’t remember any fights. People dancing in the street is as good as it gets in Longview.

It would be a simpler story if I had gone to Elko, got excited about the possibilities of western music and returned home to write a bunch of songs. But that’s not how it went down. My serious efforts in that regard actually preceded Elko; my satchel was full of western songs when I got there. It’s really kind of spooky. It’s almost as if I was being prepared to be the poet laureate of that sagebrush renaissance.

For most of my life I’d just drifted whichever way the wind blew. Now I had found my true voice in the West. I don’t mean to trivialize Ian & Sylvia by saying that, but our
duo was based on Sylvia’s concept of harmony. Take that away and you’d be taking away the whole soul of the Ian & Sylvia sound. I hadn’t found my own voice back in the folk days; it took years for my vocal style to evolve into something that was truly my own.

As a singer you start out trying to emulate your idols (the same is true of writers and other artists). I had several idols — Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and Jack Greene, to name a few — and for a long time I was trying to sing like them. I was conscious of my vocal style, always trying to make it better, but I had to make my style my own. When a singer completes that evolution, the final voice is an amalgamation of a lot of influences, yet it somehow stops sounding like any of those influences and becomes itself. That’s what happened to me in the 1980s. My style was almost there when I recorded
Old Corrals
, and by the time Elko rolled around, I really had it down.

Then I forgot about style altogether. I just opened my mouth and sang. I told stories. For better or worse, I didn’t have to worry about finding an Ian Tyson style anymore. It was already there — I just had to use it.

As the West opened up to me, I wanted to learn more about it. A lot of people at Elko were writers, and the poetry gathering became a conduit for all this material I’d never encountered before. I’d return home from Elko with books by American writers including Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy and J. Frank Dobie. (I don’t think I read any Canadians back then. It wasn’t a conscious decision — I just couldn’t find anything that blew me away.)

Guys like McMurtry and McCarthy know how to write about the authentic West. McMurtry was ranch-raised and seems to come by it naturally in books such as
Lonesome Dove
, though I later learned that he based that story almost entirely on J. Evetts Haley’s biography
Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman
. The writers I like are all research freaks. McCarthy isn’t a cowboy and wouldn’t pretend to be one, but he does his homework. If I had to write a book about a subject I knew nothing about — ore boats on the Great Lakes, for example — it would be a daunting task to do it credibly, since I don’t know one end of a boat from the other. But McCarthy gets it right in books such as
Cities of the Plain
. I like his almost biblical narrative style, and he goes to great pains to describe the country and the flora and fauna, the flocks of birds flying at dawn. That really appeals to me; he’s influenced me a lot.

I remember hearing an interview with Charles Frazier about his novel
Cold Mountain
, a beautiful piece of writing. I was deeply impressed by the authenticity of that book and wondered how he could portray the Civil War so realistically and credibly. In the interview he gave his answer: “Research, research, research.” That was a big revelation to me.
I can do that
, I thought. I couldn’t do it back in boarding school on Vancouver Island, because it would be about math or something I didn’t care to know. But if it was about the West, I was more than eager to do the research.

I soon discovered fabulous bookstores in the U.S. such as Guidon Books in Scottsdale, Arizona. The store isn’t that big but it’s jammed from floor to ceiling with books on the West and the Civil War. That’s all the owner, Aaron Cohen, carries. If he ain’t got it, it ain’t been written. Then there’s
the Tattered Cover in Denver, four storeys of great books. It’s such a trip to go there. If the West is your mistress and lover, as Charlie Russell said, those are the places to be. I collected more and more books, building a western library. Today it’s probably as good as any collection on the North American West. It’s not massive, but every important book on the subject is in there.

Before Elko, most of my ideas about the West had come from my own experiences of it and from Will James — and obviously he wasn’t a very reliable source. Now I was learning about the profound impact the horse had on Plains Indian culture, the glory years of the fur trade in the mountain West, and the monumental years of the cattle drives in the nineteenth century. That cattle-drive period, though brief—possibly only fifty years — had a tremendous impact on people’s perceptions of the North American West. The cowboys herding cattle from Texas through Comanche country didn’t know if they’d get to Colorado with their scalps intact. The drives spawned countless stories of western adventure, and as a result the cowboy and his horse captured the imagination of the world.

I became increasingly fascinated by the life and loyalty of the professional drifting cowboy. As a horseback labourer he had no social status at all, except with the whores in town and maybe the bartenders. But as Elko-born Bill Kane, former cowboss of the Spanish Ranch in Nevada, recalls, those drifting cowboys were incredibly accomplished at their trade. And they followed a completely different code from everybody else, creating their own culture with its own rules.

The cowboy was almost like a knight, bonded to the brand. Back in the Charlie Goodnight days, if Comanches
attacked the trail herders a cowboy was fully expected to fight and to lay down his life if required. At the same time, if a ranch owner ever said something to ruffle the cowboy’s pride, he’d say
adios
, roll up his bed and ride away. Being a maverick myself, the history of that free life on the open range appealed to me.

Devouring all this material on the West turned me into a western historian, giving me a third career in my fifties in addition to my horse and music work. I was definitely a late bloomer, but when the light bulb came on for me, it
really
came on — as I’d soon discover.

R
ight from the start, 1986 was a big year at the T–Y. At 6:30 a.m. on January 3, Twylla and I sped to the High River hospital full of excitement. After a tough delivery, Adelita Rose Tyson emerged to completely capture our hearts — a five-pound, one-ounce gift. From the get-go Twylla seemed happy just to have the baby at her side. Looking back, it’s almost spooky how easygoing Adelita was, how she never cried at inappropriate times. She was an amazing baby, no trouble at all.

Within a week of her birth I was gone on tour, driving the truck and trailer south across the U.S. border. (Thankfully Twylla had support from her siblings.) The band and I were on the road almost constantly back then, building on our Elko success. Even before Adelita was born, Twylla had spent a lot of time holding down the ranch by herself — lonely nights with the chinook winds howling at the door and the coyotes crying on the hill.

On this particular occasion we were headed down to Salt
Lake City, with the drums hidden in the horse trailer. We had no visas, and because, as I mentioned earlier, border guys generally love to make life hard for musicians, we had to bluff our way across. The plan was to fly out of Salt Lake to New York City to play a party for Dan Lufkin, a New York investor I’d met at a Montana cutting contest the previous summer.

Lufkin is a real mover and shaker, but when I met him, I didn’t know him from a hole in the ground. It was a hot Montana day and he was there with his girlfriend, Lindy Burch, and some fancy horses.

“Would you be the Ian of Ian & Sylvia?” he asked me.

Here we go again
, I thought, and mentally rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I am.”

“I used to listen to your stuff. I really liked it.” He told me about a ranch he was building in Carmel, California. “Come on down sometime.”

“Sure,” I said, pretty sure he wasn’t about to follow up.

He then told me about a big birthday bash he was throwing in New York in January. “Do you have a band?”

“Sure, I have a band,” I said, though I didn’t at the time.

“Would you come play for us?”

So that’s where we were headed the week after Adelita was born. We parked the rig in Salt Lake, hopped a plane and played the NYC party. The society people didn’t know what to make of us. I remember one woman saying, “That’s the worst music I’ve ever heard in my life!” After all the society types went home, we played our hearts out for Dan and his architect buddy Jonathan Foote as they sat drinking hundred-year-old cognac.

That trip to New York for Dan’s party was an important one for me because I met Tom Russell — another western
singer and songwriter — for the first time the night after we played Dan’s party. Tom and I had been corresponding since the late 1970s. One of my oldest fans, an English writer named Peter O’Brien, had given Tom my Pincher Creek mailing address, and Tom followed up by sending me a letter expressing admiration for Ian & Sylvia. He’d been a big fan during the duo’s heyday in the 1960s. When we played L.A., he’d come to hear us at the Ash Grove, but I guess he was too shy to introduce himself. In his letter, Tom told me he’d written this song about a fighting cock, “Gallo de Cielo.” Send over the tape, I told him, and he did. I loved the song and cut it for
Old Corrals
. We kept in touch afterwards but I’d never met him face-to-face.

I went to the rough part of Brooklyn where Tom lived — I remember being a little nervous about venturing into the area — and we hit it off right away. He was really unconventional, not just musically but also personally. His style was very western. He usually had a gun tucked inside his waistband. We’re very similar, Tom and I. He’s had a lot of women, maybe more than I have. And both of us are musical outsiders. Tom didn’t fit into the New York scene but he struggled on, as I did. He was also a voracious reader, and his love for literature — Hemingway in particular — encouraged me to read more.

Soon after I got to Tom’s place, we went and bought a couple bottles of Cabernet. “I’ve got a great idea for a song,” he told me. “Here’s the concept: two people in a café make love on a real nice old Navajo rug after hours.”

“That’s killer.”

And off we went writing “Navajo Rug.” We finished it over the phone — Tom in New York, me in a Fort Worth
Super 8 just off Interstate 30. I didn’t know it then, but I had just started creating the pieces that would make up the biggest album of my career.

I kept writing songs all through 1986. At this point I hadn’t yet bought the quarter-section with the little stone house, so my friend Einar Brasso kindly let me use his log cabin in the Alberta foothills for writing. After I got up in the morning, ate breakfast and fed the horses, I’d drive southwest for an hour to the cabin, which was just off Chimney Rock Road. It’s pretty isolated. Once I got there I’d empty the mousetraps and get down to work. The songs just came to me in that cabin nestled against the front face of the Rockies.

Late in the morning I would pack a sandwich, cross the creek and climb to the first plateau above the cabin. The climb was just hard enough. I’d see eagles and sometimes a black bear on my way up. And I never made that climb without getting something from it, even if it was only a line for a song. I’d stay there until 1 p.m. or so and then I’d come down, drive home and ride colts. When I came in at night, Twylla would have dinner waiting. She cooked a hell of a London broil.