by Ian Tyson
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.”
We agreed that we would visit Evinia in L.A. — we were corresponding off and on — and took along our copies of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. That book came out right when I was in the middle of art school, and it hit me and my associates big time. Kerouac’s road had western tinges to it, and I used to go to rodeos with that book packed in my rigging bag. I was a beatnik cowboy, I guess. I liked the idea of being an outsider hipster who loved literature and music but lived the outlaw life.
I don’t know where we got the gas money, but we drove Ron’s Dodge all the way to the Grapevine — the long grade between Bakersfield, California, and L.A. That’s where the car died. We decided to split up to hitchhike the rest of the way.
I stuck out my thumb and a rather cool-looking dude in a sedan stopped to pick me up. He wore a classy tan corduroy suit and cowboy boots.
“You a cowboy?” he asked. I was wearing a straw hat.
“Well, I’d like to be.”
“What happened?”
I said our car died.
“Can you ride?”
“Sure, I can ride.”
“My name’s Sam, and we’re doing a television series next week out at RKO Studios. Brand-new series called The Rifleman. I think it’s going to be a winner. I could probably help you out, get you a job riding up and down the street as an extra.”
I never went, but I later learned that the Sam I met that day was former Gunsmoke scriptwriter Sam Peckinpah, who went on do classic westerns such as Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch. Years later, in the early 1970s, at a get-together in Durango, Mexico, during the filming of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid with Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, I met Sam again. He remembered the whole hitchhiking episode. I was going to ride in that movie, but I got deathly sick on the plane going down. Again I had missed a chance to be in one of Peckinpah’s productions.
I eventually made it to L.A. and met up with Evinia. By this time I had started to realize I had been an asshole and I wanted to repair the damage. But too much damage had been done. We had a big fight, so I thumbed my way back to Vancouver and art school. I made it back in record time — about two days.
By this time I was really sliding off the dime and not taking care of my art. In order to graduate and get a diploma, each student had to put on an art show. I could barely do it. I didn’t have enough material because I was always off playing guitar. But somehow I cobbled something together, enough to graduate in 1958.
I did learn a bit about line and composition in art school. Even though I was goofing off all the time, I absorbed a lot by osmosis. It took decades before I figured out that I had actually learned about aesthetics during those years. I also became an admirer of the French impressionists as well as Charlie Russell.
After graduation I went pipelining west of Kamloops with my friend Jack Bruce, a skiing star from Banff I’d met while working for Brewster. He drove one of the big buses and I got to know him over the card table in the paint shop. (Jack somehow eventually met Evinia through me and they were married for a short time. She had many husbands and men afterwards, but she had her only child with Jack.)
I kept rodeoing while Jack and I pipelined. At the end of the season I got laid off. The labour foreman, an American guy from Washington, owned a ranch nearby. “Can you start some broncs?” he asked me, referring to the initial training of unbroken horses.
“Sure I can,” I answered, full of hubris and bravado.
I must have convinced him. Pretty soon I found myself batching it, breaking colts up at Deadman Creek. They must have been pretty gentle ponies — otherwise I could have got myself killed. I didn’t know anything about breaking horses and it was just dumb luck that got me through. I got ’em rode, though I don’t think I had much to teach them. It would have been wonderful if I’d had some experienced old hand to work with, but I had to teach myself. The experience gave me some lines for my song about Will James that I wrote in the 1980s:
A city kid, I asked myself
Now what would Will James do? And you know it was the damnedest thing
But it kinda got me through
It’s true. I just saddled them up and bumbled around as best I could. It was a start, and I’ve met lots of guys who had similar experiences. (“How’d you learn the trade?” I ask. “Just basic Will James,” they say.)
I spent about two weeks at Deadman Creek, but soon I was headed down to L.A. again. Somewhere south of the border, near Blaine, Washington, a cool old French-Canadian bootlegger offered me a ride.
“Where you headed?” I asked.
“I’m going east, Dean.” (The guy called me Dean because he couldn’t say Ian.) So I went east with him, drifting as always. The French Canadian and I laid over in Miles City, Montana, while he got his car fixed — a stay I’ll never forget, even though it was only a few days. In the 1950s Miles City was a hardcore cowtown; it had its own whiskey row, a long strip of old saloons. It was like walking into Lonesome Dove. The saloons were packed with bartenders and cowboys and whores, and they were all playing poker constantly. Everyone used big silver dollars to buy their whiskey. Fights would break out here and there. It was the quintessential West — the whole town was going full blast. It was the first time I’d seen a place like that. There was certainly no place like it anywhere in Canada.
Miles City made a huge impression on a kid who would eventually write and sing about the West. I wouldn’t see Miles City again until I was a cowboy star, almost forty years later, and it was quite a disappointment. They’re pretty redneck there, and the authentic cowtown flavour has been replaced by McDonalds and Subways. But back in the 1950s it was the old Montana.
During that layover waiting for the car, someone offered me a job breaking broncs up on the Missouri River. It’s a good thing I didn’t take it, because this time I probably would have got killed. Instead I kept drifting east with the French Canadian. We wound up in Chicago, where he had relatives. I was flat broke and he kindly drove me all the way to Windsor, where he bought me a bus ticket to Toronto.
After I got off the bus in Toronto, I called my mother and she sent me some money. Within days I landed a short-lived job at the Star Weekly, where I drew a few cowboy illustrations for novelettes the magazine was publishing. At night I played the coffeehouses.
In 1958 the coffeehouse scene was really taking off in Toronto, to the point where the city had more coffeehouses than folksingers. The demand far exceeded the supply, so I had no shortage of gigs. I was living high on the hog, considering that I got paid fifteen dollars a night and only had to pay seven bucks a week for rent.
After the illustrator gig I got a job as an artist in a glass factory, designing decorative art for peanut butter jars and Resdan shampoo bottles. I didn’t have to be in until ten in the morning, which worked well for me, since I was singing at night. One day my shift foreman — a real nice Englishman — told me about this girl he’d heard down in Chatham, Ontario. “I was at this wild party on the weekend, and I met this lovely young lady singer. Absolutely terrific — and very unique. You should meet her.”
“Sounds great.” I was always keen on meeting girls, though I had a jealous Italian girlfriend, Michelle, at the time. But I wanted to meet this other girl, Sylvia Fricker, and hear this unique voice.
Sylvia ended up coming over to Michelle’s folks’ apartment, above a drycleaner on Avenue Road, where Michelle and I had shacked up for the weekend while her parents were away. Needless to say, Michelle was very upset about this pretty young folksinger intruding on her territory.
Sylvia impressed me from the start. She played this weird little mandocello — I’d never seen one before and don’t think I’ve seen one since — and boy, could she sing. She could sing on pitch, which hardly anybody did in those days, because we didn’t have monitors.
Pretty soon we were playing the Village Corner club on Avenue Road, a tiny brick house that became our main venue. That’s where Ian & Sylvia broke out onto the Toronto scene. Red Shea played there once, and I remember him blowing us all out the damn door with his playing. Unlike the rest of us, he really knew how to play. (Years later he played guitar in my country-rock band Great Speckled Bird.)