The Long Trail: My Life in the West (19 page)

In my song I describe the sale of the MC horses without passing judgment on how the ranch was run. I’ve never been preachy in my songwriting. The writers I admire just say what’s going down; it’s the way they describe it that makes it art. In Michael Ondaatje’s
Divisadero
, for example, you can see the evolution of California and agriculture through what happens to the characters in the novel. In the same way I do my best to describe the land, the animals and the people who have made their homes in this beautiful, difficult territory. I’d rather tell a story than preach.

That’s one reason (among many others) why I’d be a terrible politician. For some reason, a few of my listeners have thought otherwise. Around the time
Eighteen Inches of Rain
came out in 1994, I received the Order of Canada and they wined and dined me in Ottawa. Soon afterwards, the federal Reform Party started sniffing around, wondering if I’d run for them. A bunch of provincial parties were curious about me as well. I never gave the idea much thought. I knew myself well enough by then to recognize that I’d be the worst politico in the country. I don’t have the right chemistry. You have to make big intellectual compromises to go into politics. Plus, I don’t suffer fools well. I don’t have the patience and I’m not a good schmoozer — two key requirements for a politician.

That’s also one of the big problems with my songwriting career. Schmoozing to sell your work is a big aspect of songwriting; that’s how you get important covers. I got one big cover in the early 1990s, thanks to Tommy Spurlock, a Fort Worth cowboy musician who played steel guitar for me. He was doing some sessions with country up-and-comer Suzy Bogguss when he said, “Why don’t y’all do ‘Someday Soon,’ that old song of Tyson’s?” They all gave him blank looks. Then they got the Judy Collins version of the song and cut it almost exactly the same way, with minor tweaking, for Suzy’s album
Aces
— and it became a monster hit. That cover made me a lot of money, probably between two hundred and three hundred thousand dollars. In purely financial terms I think “Someday Soon” has been bigger for me than “Four Strong Winds,” but that’s not because of any schmoozing on my part. Schmoozing ain’t my style. I’d rather be with horses.

A lot of my music comes right from the horses — both my experience with horses and research about horses. I wrote “La Primera,” my song about the Spanish mustangs coming to America in 1493, in the stone house, using J. Frank Dobie’s
The Mustangs
as well as other sources. It turned out to be one of those
Cowboyography-type
songs that just flowed. There are passages in there that just wrote themselves. I don’t know how that works, but sometimes it just happens. (A few years after I wrote the song, I got to visit the Pryor Mountains in Wyoming, where bunches of Spanish-type mustangs still run free.)

What I found fascinating while researching “La Primera” was how the Spanish kept meticulous records on the horses that came over from Spain. They even kept information on fowl and feral hogs. Hidden away in Mexico City museums, the records contain the names of all the horses, including the ones that died on the ships. They were all studs and mares — the Spanish didn’t geld their horses. Those were incredible animals, a mixture of Andalusian, Arabian and Barb, bred for beauty and strength. They were tough animals; they had to be, in order to cross the sea and carry the
conquistadores
into battle.

Horses had been indigenous to the Americas before the last ice age, but then they vanished, going the way of the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger. By bringing their animals with them on those early voyages, the Spanish returned horses to North America. Eventually a few escaped from their masters, and these
mesteños
— stray animals — proliferated like crazy because the environment was perfect for them. They had returned to their ancestral home, and I believe they knew the land in some unconscious, genetic way.

“La Primera” was on
Lost Herd
(1999), my best album in my opinion.
Lost Herd
is my songwriting at its best. It shouldn’t have worked so well, as it was recorded in three different places: Calgary, Nashville and Toronto. I haven’t a clue how it came off, and nobody else does either. There was no Adrian Chornowol involved; I produced most of the songs myself, and I’m probably the world’s worst record producer. The engineers and studios weren’t handpicked and I’d never been to the studio in Nashville before. But the record had a magic nonetheless. Go figure.

I wrote several of the songs for
Lost Herd
in Sonoita, Arizona, where I was looking to rent or buy a place to get away from the Alberta cold. I’d used a network of camps in the American West over the years — I’d stay in a cabin and take care of the place for a few days at a time, keeping the kindling box full — but I wanted my own camp. I had heard of Sonoita through the cowboy underground. Everybody said, “It hasn’t been spoiled yet.” At the time the place was just a highway crossroads amidst beautiful high-altitude grasslands, several thousand feet above Tucson and the Sonoran Desert floor.

I went down there after Ross Knox, a cowboy poet and friend of mine, put me in touch with Bruce André, foreman at the Vera Earl Ranch near Sonoita, a ranch built in the 1960s by the Beck family from Ohio. After I arrived I checked into the old hotel in Patagonia, just down the road from Sonoita and only seventeen miles from the Mexican border. I met Bruce and liked him right away. He’s a big, congenial guy, a kid from the Midwest who had always wanted to be a
cowboy, and that’s exactly what he became. He also studied engineering, and he built Mrs. Beck a steel corral complex, a marvel of engineering full of precision hinges and spring-loaded gates. Bruce does fine work but he also has a wild attitude. He was like the Alan Young of Sonoita.

The old Arizona brush cowboys were starting to disappear from the area and Sonoita was becoming all yuppied up. Bruce took me around to a lot of places that just weren’t for me — vacation houses for rich people from Phoenix, stuff like that. Finally, on the last day I was there, he said, “You know, there’s an old homestead inholding in the mountains that goes right back to the Apache days.” That caught my attention. “I haven’t been up there for a while, but maybe we should take a look.”

The place Bruce was referring to was a quarter-section completely surrounded by the Vera Earl Ranch. The building was what they call a territorial. That’s the ranch-style house down there, with a veranda that goes all the way around the low-slung building. Part of the house was adobe, and there was a swamp cooler — a refrigerator-like cooling device used in the desert — on the roof. When we arrived, the door was hanging wide open.

Shit
, I thought,
this place could be full of rattlesnakes
. That didn’t sit well with me, but I wanted the place anyway. It was owned by a schoolteacher, Rene Prentice, whose husband had recently died. I looked her up and cut a deal with her to rent the house, and she showed me where everything was. She was a typical American desert lady.

“Want a gun?” she asked as she showed me around. “There hasn’t been any trouble here so far, but you never know.”

“Sure,” I said. She passed me a loaded .38 and a box of cartridges.

The place was wonderful — real cow country. Perfect for songwriting. To get to the house you had to drive seven miles off the secondary highway up a very rocky trail, so nobody bothered me there. The only person who ever tracked me down was my saddle salesman friend, the peripatetic Blaine McIntyre.

The homestead backed right onto the Santa Rita Mountains and it hadn’t been developed at all. I did a lot of hiking there. There was lots to see: wild cattle, the occasional cougar and bunches of javelinas — hoofed little mammals that look like pigs. People said they’d even seen a jaguar there once.

I made some good friends at Sonoita, such as “Cattle Kate” Ladson, who ran the quarter-horse division on the Beck ranch. She was a typical cowgirl — all banged up, with knees that were shot — and she and her girlfriend were always in party mode. Whenever Kate was around, it was Pincher Creek all over again. I was riding well back then, so I helped her a lot with her cutting. She had an old roan stud horse, a real gentleman, that I’d ride and cut on.

A few times Bruce and I went across the Mexican border to Nogales. Back then the border turnstile into Mexico was wide open — you just walked right in. Nogales isn’t as bad as Juarez, but it’s pretty Wild West. If you want to get yourself shot, that’s a real easy place to get it done. But Bruce was something of a fearless outlaw, and a gun-hand too, which helped.

One time we were in a Nogales bar looking for guys who sold riatas (lassos), since they’re handmade down there.
All of a sudden the lights went out. “Holy shit, we better get out of here,” I said to Bruce. We did, and when we got outside, we looked up and saw a dead Mexican up on the power pole. He had got barbecued trying to steal power; that’s what cut the lights. Happens all the time down there, they say.

We decided to cross back into the U.S. The border turnstile was wide open going into Mexico, but it didn’t swing the opposite way coming back. We had to deal with the border guard. “Don’t tell him you’re from Canada, for Christ’s sake,” Bruce said.

I wasn’t keen on that plan, given my history with border agents. “Bruce, if they catch me in a lie, I’m screwed.”

We got up to the turnstile and the border guy said in his Texas drawl, “Y’all see that? See that dumb sonofabitch? He fuckin’ fried. Where you boys headed?”

“Sonoita,” Bruce said.

“Go on through.” And that was it — yet another time I got cut slack at the border because I’m a cowboy. They can tell if you’re real or not. They look at your hands and your colour. If you have a white forehead and you’re dark from the nose down, you’re probably a cowboy. If you’re a wannabe cowboy, they’re never as lenient.

I wouldn’t go down to Nogales with Bruce after that, because if they catch you lying, you
are
screwed, like I told him.

Those were good times in Arizona but it was the beginning of the end for Twylla and me. She came to visit me in Sonoita with Adelita once or twice, but she didn’t like
Cattle Kate or her girlfriend because she figured they were after me.

Adelita, Twylla and me in Sonoita, Arizona
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

At the same time I thought she was being overly friendly with Ross Knox. There was a heavy vibe between us. Nobody discussed it, but it was there. By this time Twylla and I weren’t sleeping in the same bed, and if we did, nothing was going on.

Both of us are pretty moody, and neither of us was putting the necessary effort into our marriage. Part of the problem was my busy cutting and concert schedule, but I
can’t blame it all on that. People change and marriages evolve, and that’s when you really have to work at it. I don’t care who you are — you have to work at marriage day in and day out. You’ve got to slog it out in the trenches. That can be hard to do, but if you don’t put in the effort, the relationship eventually becomes hostile. The sad truth is that Twylla and I both knew full well what was happening, but neither of us did a thing about it.

I wrapped up the decade by playing the millennium bash at Ranchman’s. That was a redemptive experience after putting in all those shitty nights there in the 1980s. I hadn’t been to the place in years, and this time people were actually listening — not just my fans who came to hear us play but the regulars too. The old gang had finally got it.

In the new year I took Clay on tour with me as an opening act for a few concerts in Ontario. On paper, having Clay Tyson open for Ian Tyson looked great. He’d left Look People by this point and was trying to do his own solo acoustic material, but it wasn’t fully realized. To make matters worse, he didn’t get along with my players. He was very opinionated back then, and the guys got sick of hearing his take on everything. It made for a rather uncomfortable tour.

Clay put out a CD in 2000, but he hadn’t quite matured musically and found his own voice. Eventually he got out of music and became a bicycle courier. Bike couriers have quite a subculture — a real fraternity. “We’re the last buckaroos, Dad,” he would say. I thought that was a pretty good analogy. Riding a bicycle on the icy winter streets of Toronto is a pretty dangerous lifestyle, just like riding cowhorses. Clay realized he’d get killed if he kept working as a bike courier, so he got out of it a while back. He’d developed an
interest in customizing bikes and decided to start up his own bicycle shop in the east end of Toronto. He loves it, and he’s done well for himself. When I visit him, I can see that he’s much more relaxed than he used to be — a happier person altogether.

I’m so glad that Clay discovered a type of work that he can enjoy. He’s a stand-up guy, and his sense of honour makes me proud. Last time I was in his shop, he was playing a Sons of the Pioneers LP. In typical Clay fashion, he was playing it on an old Victrola record player. He loves the old cowboy stuff, and I think he still plays a little for his own amusement. I’d love to be a fly on the wall and hear what he sounds like now. I have no idea what it would be like, but I’ll bet he probably sounds like himself.