The Long Trail: My Life in the West

by Ian Tyson

  By November the futurity pre-works were in full swing in Lawton, Oklahoma, but Bill was still procrastinating as to which colt he would show at Fort Worth. Politics were involved — and probably cash — and at the last moment Bill decided to show another stallion. Doc’s Summer Wages would be shown by me, a non-pro with no game plan.

  In cutting you need two herd holders, who keep the herd centred, and two turn-back men, who prevent the cow you’ve cut from bolting. The turn-back men are extremely important, and I had no turn-back team ready for my first go-round. Thankfully Buster Welch showed up to fill the role and I rode into the herd. Yeller worked well, but I moved my rein hand just enough to get us eliminated; we did not advance. For us the big show was over. (Many years later, Bill Freeman would advise my friend Bill Riddle, “If you’ve got three good ones before the futurity, you’re probably going to ride the wrong one.” Hindsight is 20/20.)

  After the Fort Worth futurity, I hoped Doc’s Summer Wages would find success a year later at the Canadian futurity for four-year-olds. He did just that, winning both finals, open and non-pro. And he did it with a tendon that had been torn and healed — what horsemen call a bowed tendon. Doc’s Summer Wages wasn’t overly stud-like, but he was a charismatic horse with a flair for showmanship. In the arena, when I would bend over to put on his front splint boots, he would remove my hat with his teeth and wave it at the crowd.

  One summer evening I was drinking a few beers with my friend Einar Brasso, a Calgary Nissan dealer who had an acreage at Priddis, just southwest of the city. We got to thinking what a great idea it would be to let Yeller breed one of his mares. What a grand gesture! Yeller was all for it, but when he mounted the mare, he fainted dead away in his freshman excitement. I thought he’d had a heart attack. “My God, we’ve killed him!” But presently Yeller recovered and finished the job.

  Since Doc Bar and San Peppy bloodlines were very popular in the 1970s, I set about advertising Yeller as a breeding horse. We were able to attract some nice quarter-horse mares in Alberta and Montana, but few of outstanding quality. At the time I thought the Doc Bar blood could upgrade any mare, but really it’s the mare who brings sixty percent of the quality — or lack of it — to the cross. As time went on, though, Doc’s Summer Wages sired some nice colts, probably about a hundred in all.

  As for Doc’s Able Mable, she foaled her second Mr. San Peppy colt at the King Ranch in Texas in 1981. A blaze-faced bay colt, Second Summer — I soon took to calling him Bighead — could not have looked any more different from his brother Yeller had he tried. That fall I picked him up at the Giesbrecht farm outside Chilliwack, B.C., and was amazed at his vitality. He’d hitched rides all the way from south Texas to B.C. with Lord knows who, and the little guy looked bright as a freshly minted loonie. The next morning I hauled him home through the Rocky Mountains. Bighead was a pleasure to start, a big, strong two-year-old with a great attitude. I can’t recall him ever bucking, and he loved to work cattle.

  Though these horse projects were still an extension of my ego, I was continuously moving away from the “make ’em do it” mindset. Great cowhorses make themselves, pretty much. If they have the bred-in athleticism and you take the time to show them what you want — the very basics, the straight stop, correct shoulder position and so on — in time they’ll put it all together.

  After I moved to Pincher I was playing gigs on and off at Ranchman’s, the Calgary honky-tonk I’d been playing when I decided to move to Alberta in the first place. I kept taking week-long stints well into the 1980s. It was a steady paycheque, about five thousand dollars a week. I had a pool of local musicians on call and was usually able to cobble together a band.

  Ranchman’s is a Calgary institution, the kind of place where out-of-town journalists swing by to see what’s happening — and not much is. It’s a good place to get drunk but it wasn’t a good place to play creative music. Nobody listened; it’s widely known that music is the least of concerns for everybody at Ranchman’s. The owner, Harris Dvorkin, is a good saloon operator, well set up for liquor sales, but when it comes to music, he doesn’t get it. The only reason I kept playing there was because it was good money. If you weren’t feeling negative going into that place as a musician, you damn sure started getting negative on the way out. It made me sympathize with musicians in the jazz era who had to contend with people clanging away in those supper clubs, ignoring the band.

  I wasn’t completely focused on music at Ranchman’s, either. An incredibly attractive kid named Twylla worked there. When I met her in 1978, she caught my eye right away with her prairie charm and spectacular figure. She worked in the bar’s self-serve, a glorified cafeteria that was a key part of the operation. The cowboys loved it because you could have your bacon-and-eggs breakfast there at two in the morning and sober up.

  Twylla worked the self-serve by night and attended high school by day. At seventeen she could pass for twenty-one, and she had a maturity beyond her years. She had known tragedy and pain during a very troubled childhood in Rosebud, Alberta. Her dad hanged himself in the grain elevator he ran; afterwards, one of her brothers shot himself. The family moved to the city, but Twylla didn’t get along with her mother at all. She ran away and was fast becoming a street kid when she found a refuge at Ranchman’s, where Dvorkin took her in and hired her. Being a country kid, she worked hard.

  All the guys at Ranchman’s were after Twylla, but our physical attraction was immediate and mutual. I cut her out of the herd and ran her off. The Dvorkins were a lively bunch, with family members and friends coming and going at crazy hours. Half the time Dvorkin didn’t know where anybody was, and Twylla would sneak off to see me whenever she could. When Dvorkin figured out what was going on, he was very upset about it; ever since, we’ve been at odds with each other off and on.

  The south end of Calgary was abuzz with gossip about Twylla and me when we hooked up. At forty-four, people said, I was too old for her and she was too young for me. I didn’t think that was the case then and I still haven’t changed my mind. I wrote a song about it (“Nobody Thought It Would”) for my 1994 album Eighteen Inches of Rain:

  Nobody gave us a Chinaman’s chance

  Just a honkytonk romance, a tumbleweed dance

  Who would have figured it would turn into love?

  I was doing the classic Ian Tyson thing at this point: I really had no plan. What I did know is that I wanted to keep running with Twylla. She was both glamorous and capable. I thought the happiest years of both our lives lay ahead, and I was right.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sagebrush Renaissance

  I wasn’t following new music at all in the late 1970s. In fact, I only listened to two records while I was at Pincher Creek. The first one was by Mary McCaslin, one of the first contemporary western singer-songwriters. McCaslin was a California valley girl who fell in love with the desert and open range; she went on to give her take on the romance of the West in songs such as “Prairie in the Sky.” Her records have a very appealing sound — usually just her voice and guitar, along with a bowed bass and a bit of French horn. The second record was by Al Stewart, the Scottish singer-songwriter who wrote “Year of the Cat.” I have no idea why I had that record, but it grew on me after a while.

  When Twylla came down to visit, all we’d listen to were those two LPs or the funky old Calgary radio station CFAC, which had a great Saturday night dance party complete with schottisches, reels and waltzes. As a result, I completely missed the British rock and roll era. Queen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin — I missed them all. I didn’t know about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young either. But while I was out in the sagebrush running steers with Alan Young and Uncle George, Neil Young decided to cut one of my old Ian & Sylvia tunes on his 1978 album Comes a Time.

  The way Neil tells it, when he was a kid he’d go out to Falcon Lake in Manitoba and repeatedly listen to “Four Strong Winds” on the jukebox, putting in quarter after quarter after quarter. It came as a surprise to me when he decided to cut it. People
think you’re notified when somebody covers your song, but that’s not true at all. They don’t have to notify anybody. If the song is copyrighted under ASCAP, the royalties accrue over time and then a year and a half later you get a cheque. Comes a Time was a big album for Neil, and I got a handsome cheque in the mail. I was grateful because I didn’t have much money at the time — I was scuffling.

  The only reason I got that big cheque was because Albert Grossman’s lawyer, David Braun, had taken good care of me when I was a naive folk star in the 1960s. Back when I wrote “Four Strong Winds” I didn’t know a thing about music publishing and copyrights. Neither did Sylvia. Braun saved our bacon by putting clauses in our contracts that required the copyrights to revert from the publishing company back to me after a certain number of years. By the time Neil covered “Four Strong Winds” the copyright had reverted to me, which meant I got all the royalties instead of having to split them with the publishing company.

  Truth be told, I thought Neil’s version of the song was a little weird, and it took me a little while to get used to it. I thought the harmonies were strange, but I realized later that they were exactly right for that time. I was just too out of touch musically to see that at first.

  I kept my music career alive by putting out a record of my own in 1978 — my first since 1973’s Ol’ Eon. Released on a funny little Toronto label called Boot Records, One Jump Ahead of the Devil was a mishmash of songs I’d recorded in Nashville, Toronto and Alberta. It wasn’t bad at all though I was pretty half-hearted about music when the record came out. At least I was keeping the ball moving.

  I was still at Pincher Creek in 1979 when I got the call from my realtor friend, Frank Watts, letting me know he’d sold my Ontario farm. (The neighbour with the landfill had finally decided to buy the place.) Between the land sale and my “Four Strong Winds” royalty cheque, I now had a fat chunk of money with which to buy some Alberta land where Twylla and I could settle down together.

  John Scott, a friend of mine and a livestock supplier to the movie industry, told me about a bare quarter-section up for sale a few miles east of Longview, about an hour southwest of Calgary. It was right off the Cowboy Trail, a highway route that cuts through the heart of Alberta ranch country.

  Enamoured with the possibility of having our own ranch, Twylla and I went to check it out. There was mud everywhere, but on the mud pan sat a beautiful log house. Behind it was a little coulee. To the east I saw miles and miles of flat buffalo range. To the west, a big front face of shining mountains, the same mountains that had wooed me to Alberta in the first place. The ranch itself was a little more prairie than I wanted — I preferred more foothills. But the foothills were close, and I really liked the idea of living in a log house. This has potential for a horse ranch, I thought, and I decided I wanted to live there. Twylla liked it too, although she said she didn’t really care where she was, as long as she was with me.

  We moved in during the winter of 1979 and promptly set about building the T–Y (“T bar Y”) Ranch. Uncle George had registered the name with the provincial branding office while we were at Pincher. The T was for Tyson, the Y was for Young (Alan, not Neil) and the bar is where we all went to drink.

  Twylla threw herself into the cowboy lifestyle and the building of the ranch, something that wasn’t hard to do, since she was a country girl who wasn’t scared of hard work. During the week she worked at an upscale western store in Calgary, and on weekends we’d pound fence posts and string barbed wire. It was a really happy time for both of us. To some degree I was probably a father figure to her, since she’d lost her real father — whom she was very fond of — to suicide as a kid.

  Twylla’s tough family situation even improved a bit once we moved to the ranch. We always had Christmases at our place and Twylla’s mother and brother would come on over. Her mom would disagree with this and disagree with that, but at least Twylla had her family back. The ranch healed old wounds.

  I especially loved when Twylla’s grandmother Mrs. Hertz came to visit. In 1929 she had emigrated from Estonia to Oyen, Alberta, just west of the Alberta–Saskatchewan line — right in the middle of nowhere. That was back when the railroad lied to all those poor homesteaders to get them on the boats from Europe to the prairies. But Mrs. Hertz was a tough old gal, and she made the best of it, scratching out a new life and starting a family on the prairie. She was a good one. One time I roped a wild cow going across the backyard, and she thought it was the greatest thing in the world. “That’s what they do here,” she said ecstatically. “If the cow gets away, they rope it.”

  When we first arrived at the ranch, I was regarded as something of an outsider by the local community. It wasn’t long before I fell in with a group of local cowboys: Bob Spaith, a sculptor; Steve Hoar, another sculptor; Rich Roenisch, yet another sculptor; and Gaile Gallup, who’d go to art school later and become a painter. It’s not that unusual for a group of cowboys to be artists as well, although it’s less common in Canada than it is in America. Some guys are rawhide braiders, some guys do horse dentistry, and a lot of them are artists.

  It’s hard to say how the cowboy–artist connection started. Maybe it goes back to the horse. Or maybe it goes back to Charlie Russell, who amazed all of us in the West with the genius and romance of his paintings. In any case, it’s tradition now. Art is woven into the tapestry of the cowboy life. And it’s not just a hobby, either. Cowboys need other arrows in their quiver because they can’t make it on cowboy pay alone, and they often get screwed over by the ranches where they work. The owner will say, “You’ll always have a home here, Bob,” and then, six months later: “You’ve got two weeks to get the hell out of here.” It happens all the time.

  The local cowboys I met all worked at nearby ranches. I bred a lot of colts at the ranch back then, and each September I’d have a really cool branding where we’d all get together and break out the Scotch and brand colts. Later, people got married and had kids, and eventually some got divorced, but at the time it was a cool, freewheeling group. We were the “wild bunch.”

  After we moved to the ranch, Clay came out a few times a year to visit. He and Twylla quickly became good friends (as Twylla rightly pointed out, she is much closer to him in age than she is to me). I’d also keep in touch with Clay by visiting him in Toronto when I went there to play the Tommy Hunter Show each year. Now a teenager, Clay had joined a boxing club in Toronto, which did wonders for his self-esteem. I never did see him box but I hear he was a pretty handy welterweight. His coach was an excellent influence on him.

  The boxing phase was very good for Clay, but he still wasn’t doing well in school. In high school he dropped out altogether. Looking back, I think his struggles were largely a result of Sylvia and me breaking up. Our divorce had been very hard on him, and after he dropped out he left home and became pretty angry — and I’m sure some of that anger was directed at me. He had issues with his mother too. Sylvia and I weren’t talking much at this point but we were cordial, and I remember being surprised to hear her say that she didn’t see him much more than I did — and they lived in the same city. When he cleared out, he really cleared out. That’s the Celts for you.

  After he left home, Clay studied music, learning to play the piano and bass. He tried to make it in the Toronto music scene but had a rough time with it. He would have had a better shot if he’d been there in the 1950s, like I was. It was a lot easier to get started back then; you didn’t need as much talent and there were fewer musicians. By the time Clay was trying to make it, in the 1980s, the music scene in Toronto was very competitive, and having parents who were famous didn’t help him any. It’s a very common phenomenon in show business: the sons and daughters of famous people have a difficult time — they either try too hard or don’t try hard enough. Clay was like his old man; he didn’t know who he wanted to be.

  He played bass for an alternative band called Look People in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were absolutely crazy. Somebody described their sound as “
demented jazz circus orchestra music.” The drummer would play naked — except for his socks — on Queen Street West. Look People put out a few records, toured a lot and achieved a certain amount of notoriety, especially in Europe, but didn’t have much financial success. When Look People toured in the West, they asked to stay in the little line shack behind my house. “You can all stay, but please don’t burn the damn thing down,” I pleaded.

  As for me, I kept doing week-long stints at Ranchman’s every month or two through the 1980s. I was a regular fixture there — me and Wayne Vold, a singer and bronc rider Twylla had been friends with since she started working there as a teenager. He and I quickly became friends too, and we eventually became neighbours when he put together his little outfit on Tongue Creek, north of our ranch, around 1990.

  Harris Dvorkin had high hopes of turning Wayne and me into stars, but playing Ranchman’s was still a drag. On winter nights I’d drive in from the ranch on icy roads in my dinky little Toyota and perform material I’d written, but I was just putting in time to pay for fence posts. Sometimes the crowd’s indifference got to be too much and I’d snap at some loudmouth. I wasn’t a young kid anymore but I’d get in a couple of licks — and then the bouncers would be right on me. At least I got the satisfaction of popping some guy a couple of times; it really helped alleviate my annoyance with the place. Honky-tonks like that can be fun for a couple of nights, but not six nights a week.

  We did a lot of drinking those nights. I had the waitresses trained. When I was two-thirds of the way though the last set, they’d start bringing up the brandies and the cognacs. Then we’d pack it up and I’d drive home drunk. In all those years I never got busted. That wouldn’t happen now since the cops have cracked down on that old saloon culture. If you get caught drinking and driving these days — especially coming out of a saloon — you’re screwed. And I guess that’s good.