The Long Trail: My Life in the West (5 page)

Marrying cowboys with art wasn’t exactly new; Charles M. Russell, the greatest western painter of them all, was doing it way back in the 1880s. But while today it’s easy to find probably twenty different Charlie Russell art books — full of scenes with violent action upfront and, in the distance, faraway mountains diffused with blue and rose — Charlie’s work was still pretty underground when I applied to art school in the 1950s.

I’d discovered Charlie in Victoria, after my summer wrangling in Banff in the late 1940s. I had come back with something like fifteen cavities and had to go get them fixed. In those days it was a painful business. The dentist’s office had an old, beat-up copy of
Good Medicine
, a book of Charlie’s illustrated letters, full of cowboys and Indians and coyotes and horses.
This guy’s even better than Will James
, I thought. I loved that book.
Good Medicine
got me through all that drilling.

Somehow, at twenty-one, I got accepted into art school, so in the fall of 1954 I moved to Vancouver. The whole city was basically made of wood back then — a damp, mouldy place. I rented a room in an old boarding house in the west end, the area where most of the other students lived. Our rooms had hotplates in them but usually no fridge. It was pretty primitive, nothing like the glitzy high-rises of today.

The Vancouver School of Art was very post-impressionist in the 1950s, as I quickly found out. Literal art such as Charlie Russell’s — the stuff I liked — was very much frowned upon. Instead we studied the cubists, the abstract expressionists and the post-impressionists.

I shared studio space in a big old dilapidated wooden building near Victory Square with Nancy Patterson, a brilliant artist who won all the scholarships. I couldn’t come close to competing with Nancy as a painter, since she was miles ahead and actually applied herself to her craft. Instead I hung out with her boyfriend, Gordie Cox, a stocky little disbarred jockey and wannabe hipster from Hamilton, Ontario. While Nancy diligently worked on her art, Gordie and I occupied our time by goofing off and stealing jars of peanut butter from the stores on Robson Street. We were poor art students, living from hand to mouth.

Whenever we got some money, we’d go to beer parlours where the waiters had to buy beer from the bartender and sell it around the room, carrying it on wide-rimmed trays. All the beer parlours had a side for men and a side for “ladies and escorts,” based on a weird puritanical take on morality. And there was absolutely no music, not even a jukebox. The beer parlours were very controlled — you didn’t bend the rules in there. If a Native man got out of line, all the waiters
would put down their trays and converge on the poor bastard, kicking the living shit out of him before throwing him in the alley and returning to work. They didn’t fart around or even bother calling the cops. They took care of it themselves.

I mostly went through art school the same way I went through high school — daydreaming. Most of my effort focused on a spectacularly beautiful Greek girl who came to the school a year after I enrolled. Dark, gorgeous and wild, Evinia arrived in Vancouver fresh from Vernon, where she’d broken hearts the length and breadth of the Okanagan Valley. With her jet black hair and dark eyes, she looked like a Bollywood star. Her dad, Curly, was an iconic guy in the Okanagan, a classic immigrant success story. He had arrived in Canada with no money and started a Greek cafe in Vernon, which eventually became profitable. He and his wife had just the one daughter, and they gave her everything she could possibly want. She came to Vancouver driving a brand new Impala convertible that her daddy had bought her.

She was like me, like the rest of us — trying to figure out who she was and where the hell she wanted to go. It didn’t take long for Evinia and me to fall for each other. We had a volatile love affair that ultimately ended in a catastrophic breakup. I’d also been trying to get into the pants of another spectacular-looking art student — and I succeeded. When Evinia found out about my shenanigans, she broke it off and split for California without finishing art school. She was very hurt. Evinia was an accomplished heartbreaker, but she didn’t like being on the other end.

Evinia remains an amazingly beautiful woman and, some fifty-five years later, we’re still friends and soulmates.
I’ve had my women and she’s had her men, but since that first breakup we’ve never gotten jealous about each other’s romantic involvements over the years. We’ve remained buddies through it all.

All through art school I worked odd jobs off and on, anything I could do to get by. I bused tables at the Terminal City Club, an upscale businessmen’s establishment (much later I would return there as a star performer). During the summer breaks I returned to Banff, this time to drive cabs and small buses for Brewster, the tourism outfit I’d worked on the pack string for when I was fifteen. In my downtime I’d go to the Rundle Rock paint shop, across from the entrance to the Banff Springs Hotel. That’s where all the other employees — mostly students, like me — hung out waiting for calls, and while we waited, we played blackjack. Those games went on 24/ 7. Most of my pay was gambled and gone come September, thanks to cards (that’s where my song “Summer Wages” came from).

Brewster’s dispatcher, Rod Adams, was a gruff, tough character right out of the movies. “Tyson,” he’d bark from behind his desk, “get down to the train station for a pickup!” In addition to his dispatching duties, Rod also made sure the blackjack games didn’t get totally out of control. And if anyone wanted time off, they had to go through him.

Rod liked cowboys, and one day in 1956 I asked him, “Can I get off for a day and go to a rodeo?” That request would completely change my life, though I didn’t know it at the time.

He grunted his response. “I guess you can go.”

“Can I have the fifteen bucks I need to enter?”

Sure enough, Rod kindly covered my entry fee, and a girl who worked at the Banff Springs Hotel drove me to the Dogpound Rodeo near Cremona, a little farm town north of Calgary. When we arrived under a grey sky, I entered as a local, as usual.

Soon the rain started pouring down, soaking my big thoroughbred mare. We came out of the chute and I started fine, but the rigging shifted too far forward on her withers. I spurred off to the side and landed on my feet. What happened next was a complete fluke.

The rankest saddle bronc will not step on a person. Unlike bulls, horses abhor stepping on a human body. They might kick you in the air as you’re coming down, but they won’t step on you. But this time my ankle, her foot and the ground collided — and my ankle exploded. I knew right away that it was gone.

“Would one of you guys give me a hand?”

I got no sympathy from the other cowboys. “You’re not hurt,” they said.

The girl from the Banff Springs drove me into Calgary to the old General Hospital, where the doctors cut off my boot before operating on my ankle, sticking in a few pins. These were the early days of metal reconstruction but those doctors did a fine job. That mare had really messed up my ankle and the operation couldn’t have been easy. I have the pins in my ankle to this day.

After the surgery I was put in the broken leg ward for two weeks, along with a telephone lineman and a couple of other cowboys. The kid in the bed next to me had a guitar, and I started to learn this song I kept hearing on the
radio. The singer was an Arkansas-born guy, about my age, whose name was Johnny Cash. The song that kept playing on the radio started like this:
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine …

It was 1956, I was twenty-two years old and “I Walk the Line” was huge — but hard to learn on the guitar. It had a few key changes, which was unusual for country music of that time. The song also had a very distinct picking style. Later, when I went to New York, nobody played that way. Joan Baez and the other folksingers did Carter scratch, where you’re playing with your fingers. But Johnny Cash’s guys, the Tennessee Two, played a very simple percussive style with a flat pick. That’s exactly how I started playing, learning by trial and error in that broken leg ward until I could keep up with Johnny.

Before I found myself in that Calgary hospital, I never had any idea of seriously learning music. I had tried a little guitar when I was younger but, as usual, I didn’t take the trouble to apply myself. I often wonder what direction I’d have gone in had I started playing in my teenage years. I got a real late start, but in those days guitar players weren’t a dime a dozen as they are now, so being a late bloomer didn’t set me too far back.

Music absorbed me in a very gradual way. I belonged to a generation that was waking up to music in the 1950s, and I’d gotten interested in jazz and big bands while working in the forest service. I remember piling into somebody’s car and going to hear Tommy Dorsey’s big band in Vancouver, driving all the way down from Harrison Lake. There were
no bridges across the Fraser River then, so we had to take a ferry, all the loggers standing on deck in their black mohair suits. Tommy Dorsey absolutely blew us away. That was probably a sixteen-piece orchestra, and Tommy Dorsey was a great trombone and trumpet player. I think Gene Krupa was on drums. On another trip we heard Stan Kenton with his big band.

And then there was Rolly Borhaven, a handsome logger I’d met. He wore a moustache and goatee and had that whole Prince Valiant look of the time. Rolly was a ladykiller and played the guitar. We’d spend a lot of our free time at the legion halls, and invariably Rolly would get up with his guitar and sing Wilf Carter. Carter was the folk superstar of the time, with his original guitar style and wonderful voice, clean and pure as the Rocky Mountains. His songs were ridiculously corny —
There’s a love knot in my lariat
, for example — but melodically brilliant. His sound was like no other, and it seemed to come right out of the high country.

By the time I had enrolled at art school, rockabilly was the big thing, a tectonic musical shift from jazz. I remember hearing Bill Haley and His Comets play “Rock Around the Clock” in the 1955 movie
Blackboard Jungle
. That had a huge impact on me — I can hear that snare sound to this day. That simple southern rockabilly was like nothing else I’d heard. It was open-chord guitar, a big change from the jazz guitarists, who all played closed chords, bar chords, suspended chords and diminished chords. Bill Haley and the rockabilly guys were playing open G and C chords, the ringing stuff. I was totally into rockabilly before I thought anything about folk. Hell, I didn’t even know what folk was.

After Elvis broke out in 1956, I realized I could sing. I loved Elvis’s style. No white kid had ever sung like that before, and I found that I could imitate him pretty accurately.

In art school, before I broke my ankle, I’d played a few gigs with Taller O’Shea, a small-time West Coast bandleader. His band would travel the Native reserve circuit; they played a kind of mutated western swing with a lot of Ukrainian content and Wilf Carter influence. It was a distinctly Canadian sound and I didn’t dig it that much, but Steve Cresta, a sometime art student, played accordion in O’Shea’s band and got me the gig. I knew about three chords. The only reason they let me join the band was because I could sing and was a good-looking kid. I played a few gigs with a few other bands as well — band members were always changing around, and everybody knew each other — but never anything too serious.

By the time I got discharged from the broken leg ward in Calgary with pins embedded in my ankle, I could play more than three chords. I convalesced at my parents’ place out at Mount Tolmie on Vancouver Island for a few weeks before returning to Vancouver for the fall semester. Once back at art school, I really wanted to be part of the music scene. I bought a cheap Hofner guitar from a pawnshop on East Hastings and kept practising.

Pretty soon I was playing in a rockabilly band. Radio stations were all jumping on the rockabilly bandwagon, and the DJs would put together bands, sending them out to play high schools on weekends. The big DJ in Vancouver was Red Robinson of CKWX. With my playing improved, I joined one of Red’s four-piece bands, the Sensational Stripes.
We did a handful of gigs, including two or three high school dances. We also opened for Buddy Holly once, because it was a union requirement that a local band had to open for the big acts. Eddie Cochran also played that show.

I loved the rockabilly scene but my tenure with the Sensational Stripes was short-lived. The girls seemed to like me more than Jimmy Morrison, the kid who fronted the band by imitating Elvis. My good looks got in the way of his success, so he went and fired me for it — at least, that’s how I’m telling it.

In my last year of art school, in 1958, the coffeehouse scene started blooming in Vancouver and everywhere else. The folk seeds were being sown. Roy Guest, an English guy I met, got me my first coffeehouse gig at this little place he’d opened called the Heidelberg. Roy was one of those guys who bummed around the world with his guitar. I don’t know how the hell I got through the first gigs. I didn’t know anything, but Roy taught me a couple of folk songs and encouraged me to keep at it.

Finally I started getting gigs in Chinatown, at the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret on East Hastings. There were a few cabarets like that in the area, and they weren’t like the beer parlours at all; the cabarets had live music, dancing and hookers. I remember one of the hookers introducing me to B.B. King’s music for the first time. I loved it, of course — my ears were open.

After a while, a rockabilly Chuck Berry–styled guitar player I’d met—I think his name was Johnny Rommis— gave me a bit of career advice. I had the ducktail haircut and
all that shit, and he thought I was a good-looking kid who could really make it in music.

“You can’t do it here, though,” he told me. “You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“L.A. or Chicago. Toronto maybe.”

So that’s what I did. At Easter in 1958 I got drunk with my friend Ron Cameron and another buddy, and Ron conjured up an idea. “Let’s bugger off to California in my Dodge.”