The Long Trail: My Life in the West

by Ian Tyson

  In 1961 Ian & Sylvia headlined the inaugural Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, along with the Travellers, a Jewish socialist outfit that was basically a Canadian knockoff of the Weavers. My claim to fame was designing the festival’s poster, which won an art directors’ award. That’s the poster that hangs in my kitchen to this day.

  That same year Pete Seeger played Massey Hall in Toronto and invited us onstage. It was our first performance in a big concert hall like that — Massey Hall is a very august and revered venue, and I’m sure we were scared stiff. I don’t think we were playing very well back then, but it didn’t matter. Folk was huge, and the shows were permeated by an incredible energy. It was like a runaway train. It was gonna go no matter what we did.

  CHAPTER 4

  New York

  It was a rainy Manhattan autumn afternoon in 1962. I had borrowed our manager Albert Grossman’s flat, somewhere in the east 50s, in order that I might write a song. I’d run into Bob Dylan the day before at my hangout, the Kettle of Fish in the Village, and Bob had sung me his latest. I want to say it was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but memory does not serve me well in that regard. It could have been any one of his songs. At any rate, I’m listening and figuring, Hey, how hard can this be? I know how the cold winds blow. I should give it a shot. I had tried to write songs before, but it was all just incomplete scribbling.

  In Albert’s dingy flat I took out my Martin D28 and commenced strumming, drifting back out west to open country and my beautiful Greek girl from the Okanagan Valley. We had gone our separate ways, she to California and me to Toronto and New York City, and it was uncertain when or if we’d meet again (she hadn’t yet married my friend Jack). The winds and seas were metaphors, though at the time I wouldn’t have known a metaphor from a prairie gopher. I called the song “Four Strong Winds.”

  Sylvia and I had come to New York with our friend Joe Taylor, a Dixieland jazz freak who wrote for the Toronto Star. Joe had got caught up in the folk thing like everyone else, and being a really helpful guy with a car, in 1961 he offered to drive us down from Toronto.

  We’d heard of this place called Gerde’s Folk City and wanted to check it out. Gerde’s was an open-mic folk club, only they didn’t call them open mics in those days — they called them hootenannies or some damn thing. All the important folk promoters and managers were hanging around Gerde’s listening for new talent, and all the up-and-comers would strut their stuff onstage at the Monday night hootenannies. If you got up and had something to say, they sure took notice of you.

  Greenwich Village was a very competitive place by the time we arrived. Back in Toronto, if you could hold a guitar and pretend you were playing it, you had a gig. Not so in the Village. You needed the chops, and everyone was scrambling to improve as musicians. On Sundays Washington Square would fill up with Jewish kids playing bluegrass, practising standard songs such as “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” on guitars and banjos. They’d form these little groups and play together for part of the afternoon before splitting off like amoebas and forming new groups to play with. That’s not easy music to play, and if you could really play along, you were king.

  Sylvia was also ambitious, aspiring to constantly improve as a singer and musician. I knew a lousy work ethic would get me nowhere in New York. For the first time in my life, I could smell success.

  Sylvia had rented an apartment down on the Lower East Side, near the Williamsburg Bridge. I didn’t have my own place in New York; I commuted back and forth to Toronto, chasing girls in both cities. I was always scuffling for a place to stay in New York. There were two hotels in the Village I stayed at; back then if you were half a day behind in your rent, they changed the lock on the door and you couldn’t get your stuff. That happened to me a couple times. They didn’t mess around.

  Our social scene in the Village revolved around Gerde’s, the Kettle of Fish and the Gaslight Café, a dingy little coffeehouse directly downstairs from the Kettle of Fish. The Gaslight was run by Clarence Hood, an elderly Southerner from Mississippi, and his big, husky son, Sam. We played the Gaslight quite a bit and I liked Clarence and Sam a lot. Clarence always seemed a little out of place in New York. Looking at him and listening to his Southern accent, you’d have thought he was a hardware store owner in Georgia, not a coffee shop owner in Greenwich Village. He was a very courtly guy.

  Peter, Paul and Mary were hanging around the clubs and coffeehouses with us, as were the singer-songwriters Tom Paxton and Fred Neil. We spent a lot of time with Dave Van Ronk, an established folksinger who had his own apartment (few people at the time owned their own flats). He was the social kingpin in the Village.

  I also became friends with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the original Brooklyn cowboy and a very influential figure in the Village. He had just returned from Europe, where he was a big star, when I met him. Jack had left home in Brooklyn pretty early, joining a travelling Wild West show when he was about fifteen. He was a product of the Woody Guthrie era, but like me he didn’t buy into the socialism side of it. In New York we spent a lot of time together at the old Hotel Earle on Washington Square. Both of us took great pride in our cowboy hats; Jack says I creased his hat for him by using a grapefruit to weigh it down in the sink. He returned the favour by teaching me his guitar method. His flat-pick style was very sophisticated, a blend of bluegrass and jazz. I think Jack influenced my guitar style more than anybody. We’re still very good friends to this day.

  But it was Dylan who got everybody’s attention, because his style was so unconventional. When I met him after he’d come down out of Minnesota, he was loaded for bear. He knew exactly where he was going. He had focus. Of course it turned out he was a genius.

  Truth be told, I didn’t get Dylan at first. I didn’t think he was that great a guitar player and I thought he was a terrible harmonica player. It took me quite a while to realize he was a great player — his style was simple yet powerful. When he started cranking out all those songs, you stood there amazed. But he was just one of the gang at first. He ran with Suze Rotolo, a good friend of Sylvia’s.

  In her memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze claims I was responsible for turning Dylan onto pot. I don’t remember the details, but it may be true. I remember getting my dope from a cute Italian groupie from Chicago who took me by the ear. She was a pot smoker who dealt a little, and we ran together for a few months.

  “You turned Bob Dylan onto pot,” my singer-songwriter friend Tom Russell would later say. “Dylan turned on the Beatles. That makes you the king.”

  ———

  Ian & Sylvia. (JONN ANDERSON)

  Ian & Sylvia’s hard work paid off quickly. After hearing us play around town a few times, Albert Grossman took us under his wing in 1962 and landed us a contract with Vanguard Records, a big label that had concentrated on classical music but was moving into folk.

  Albert didn’t have any money when we first met him, but he knew the jackpot was just around the corner. He was the architect who had put together Peter, Paul and Mary. He had also started managing Dylan right before he started working for us. Ramblin’ Jack wanted Grossman to manage him too, but Albert wouldn’t touch him because he could see that Jack was a wandering soul who wouldn’t take direction. Albert was very territorial about his artists and his confrontational style rubbed certain people the wrong way, but he knew what he was doing, especially when it came to record contracts. He was a sharp guy.

  After we signed the record deal, I knew I had to keep improving on the guitar. I learned a lot from John Herald, lead guitarist for the Greenbriar Boys. He played on our records and had a real melodic flair. John was one of the first urban folkies to develop that bluegrass style of hard, clean flatpicking — influenced by Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, who were big in the 1920s. I would often head over to John’s tiny flat in the Village to rehearse fairly intricate arrangements. I could never keep up. He was miles ahead of me, but I was playing decently.

  Everyone in the folk scene started playing twelv
e-string guitars after the Rooftop Singers put out “Walk Right In” in 1962, the same year the first Ian & Sylvia record came out. Twelve-strings were the big fad, and I joined in for a couple years, playing a Gibson with a long peghead. But it was an unwieldy thing, hard to play and even harder to tune. Tuning that guitar was an art in itself and I didn’t have the time to learn. Still, I managed to pull it off — until some kids stole my twelve-string while Sylvia was moving from one New York flat to another. They grabbed it right out of the moving van. That’s the only guitar I’ve ever had stolen.

  My flatpicking guitar style was a key part of the unique Ian & Sylvia sound. But Sylvia’s concept of harmony was clearly the bedrock of our duo. I couldn’t sing harmony — whenever I tried I would end up out of tune. So she sang harmony to my lead, and our voices created a unique style of folk interpretation, like nothing else around, as we performed Scots-Irish ballads and the occasional spiritual or French-Canadian song.

  There was another secret to the Ian & Sylvia sound: Vanguard’s recording studio, a musty three-storey ballroom inside a funky old hotel called the Manhattan Towers. That room had the magic, a completely natural quality of reverb. The room loved Ian & Sylvia’s sound — particularly the vibrato in Sylvia’s voice — and Ian & Sylvia loved the room. All Vanguard used was a German tape deck and a Neumann mic that hung down from the ceiling. Joan Baez and Odetta recorded there too. The records from that room are all incredible. It seemed you couldn’t do anything wrong in that space. We had John on guitar and Bill Lee — Spike Lee’s father — playing bass, and whenever we played in there, the guitars were just singing. The room enhanced and forgave.

  When we weren’t recording, we were performing. We did a three-week run in New York at the Blue Angel, a high-class nightclub on East 55th Street for emerging stars, with Barbra Streisand, who was an unknown at the time. She did a pretty good job but we struggled every night, as I recall. I didn’t know how to put on a show back then. I wasn’t extroverted on stage and didn’t know anything about the aesthetics of performing — where to place songs in the set list and how to present them. It would take a long time for me to learn.

  The Village was its own little kingdom, its own insular world, and it took me a while to figure out that Ian & Sylvia were getting big. I clued in when we started playing at this Washington, D.C., club called the Cellar Door, a tiny, suffocatingly hot place that became very influential in the folk circuit. It had no air conditioning and no monitors and seated only about 140 people, every one of them soaking wet. We packed the place with college kids every single time.

  The second time we played the Cellar Door, Vanguard had a brain flash — which was unusual for that label — and arranged for us to have a Saturday album-signing party. At the signing our fans mobbed us as if we were stars. That was my first inkling that we were huge. From that one club we got booked at the Ivy League schools, as well as clubs in California such as the Golden Bear and the hungry i. All that meant we were making big money, something neither Sylvia nor I had experienced before.

  After we put out the albums Four Strong Winds and Northern Journey in 1964, Ian & Sylvia were really hot. We toured the U.K., played the Newport Folk Festival and even sold out Carnegie Hall. Robert Shelton, a music critic for the New York Times, raved that Ian & Sylvia were “well equipped to outrun any temporary decline of interest in folk music” and that we had “one of the finest blends of male and female voices in the folk revival.”

  Something else happened in 1964 that would affect Ian & Sylvia — and the rest of the folkies — in a big way. A British band called the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show in February, and pretty soon rock and roll was hitting America like a tsunami. I remember driving to a gig in New Jersey with Sylvia, our guitarist Monte Dunn and bass player Felix Pappalardi. We were listening to the radio and this song started playing: She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah … It was a new, appealing sound, and the guys loved it. I thought the lyrics were dumb but I loved the music too, especially the harmony. Sylvia was less sure about it. Maybe she sensed that these British up-and-comers were going to be our downfall. Sure enough, Monte and Felix eventually left us to join or form their own Beatlesque rock bands.

  Our publicity still. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)

  Sylvia and I, meanwhile, grew increasingly fond of each other. I had been running with lots of girls and Sylvia had her fair share of boyfriends, but over time Ian & Sylvia evolved into something more than music. We got married on June 26, 1964, at Toronto’s St. Thomas’s Anglican Church on Huron Street. Afterwards we moved into a big house in the Rosedale area of Toronto.

  While our affection for one another was very real, the truth is that Sylvia and I had completely different interests. Had we not been inextricably bonded by our music careers, we probably would not have married — but if we hadn’t married, there would have been no Clay Tyson.

  Sylvia was an urban person through and through. I liked the bright lights of New York and Toronto too, but I needed to get out of the city on a regular basis. I wanted to be around horses and cattle again. Ontario had a small-town rodeo circuit, and sure enough, I got hooked back into riding and roping calves.

  In 1965 I came up with a plan to spend more time outside the city: I’d buy a bit of land. That year I went with my friend Jake Banky to look at a cattle farm near Bowmanville, Ontario, and ended up buying the place, even though I didn’t have a clue how to run a farm. I got horses and a nice little herd of Hereford cows, and I hired this handy old guy, Dick Weirmer, to take care of it all.

  Going to Bowmanville was like stepping into a time capsule. It wasn’t far from Toronto, but driving those fifty miles you’d go back a hundred years. Old men who lived in big brick farmhouses would drive around in horses and buggies — not to be colourful, but just because that’s what they did.

  I was haying on the farm the day Clay was born in June 1966. It was a complicated birth ending in a C-section, and he’d been born by the time I arrived at the hospital. It sounds strange, but I always think of Clay in horse-breeding terms. He’s almost a fifty-fifty cross: he looks like his mother and he looks like me. He’s got red hair, which comes from Sylvia’s side. But he’s got my dark eyebrows and eyes and he’s built like me. His way of dealing with the world came from us both too; that’s where I really see the cross. His love of conversation and debate comes from his mom, but, like his old man, he can be irascible on occasion.

  After Clay was born we’d always take him along on tour with help from Hazel, his faithful Jamaican nanny. Hazel played a big role in raising Clay on the road, an arrangement we never had any trouble with until Christmas Day, 1967. We were scheduled to fly to California for four weeks of gigs at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and the Troubadour in L.A. Hazel was going to come along, as always, but this time the American border officers at the Toronto airport refused to let her fly into the U.S. Poor Hazel didn’t understand why she was being denied — she probably didn’t have the necessary visa — and the experience made her very distraught. The thought of playing a month of gigs without Hazel’s help was upsetting for Sylvia too. She knew it would be exhausting, since Clay was regularly waking up a few times each night. We had little choice, though, so we boarded the plane for L.A. while Hazel stayed behind.

  After we arrived, we rented an apartment at Huntington Beach. Sure enough, after playing a few gigs at the Golden Bear and having to wake up with Clay at night and walk him around the parking lot to calm him down, Sylvia snapped. She couldn’t operate on so little sleep. She came back to the apartment one day and started hollering at me — which was very unlike her — so right away I scooped up little Clay and took him to the beach. For the next couple of weeks Clay and I spent our days on the beach hanging out with my buddies from the folk clubs and picking kelp off the sand. The weather was perfect. Sylvia probably worried about what we were doing down there, but we were just hanging out. Clay was a well-behaved little guy.

  California felt very innocent back then. Sylvia a
nd I used to visit this folk DJ up near Long Beach who pretty much embodied the California ethos. His big old potbelly hung over his cut-off shorts, his beard had four days’ growth and he had sand on his feet. It was that kind of existence in California back then, laid back and carefree. I don’t remember any hassles.

  It was the height of the sixties, though, and many of the people making money in music back then did a lot of psychedelics and other heavy drugs. During that California trip my guitar player, Monte Dunn, rented the apartment next to ours. He stayed there with another rounder musician, Tim Hardin. Both of them were heavily into drugs. We wouldn’t see them at all during the day. They were like slugs under a log, refusing to stick their faces out into the sunlight.

  Tim eventually died of a heroin overdose when he was thirty-nine. LSD wrecked a lot of musicians too. I took acid a few times and liked it, but when I came down I could tell that my motor had been severely tried. I knew it could be really dangerous, and I never became a regular user.

  As time went on and opposition to the Vietnam War intensified, folk got more and more politicized — and we suffered because of that. Ian & Sylvia had always been relatively apolitical. We had toured a bit with Lady Bird Johnson and Faron Young in 1964 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s reelection campaign, but for the most part we did our best to steer clear of politics.

  Sylvia felt that protest music made for good protest but bad music. I felt similarly. I never went along with the Woody Guthrie socialism and union stuff. It just didn’t resonate with me. I couldn’t get my head around “This Land Is Your Land” because I knew loggers, cowboys and fishermen, and not many of them were socialists. When I worked on the pipeline with Jack Bruce after art school, I witnessed corrupt union politics firsthand and saw how the union tended to screw things up.