by Ian Tyson
I became increasingly fascinated by the life and loyalty of the professional drifting cowboy. As a horseback labourer he had no social status at all, except with the whores in town and maybe the bartenders. But as Elko-born Bill Kane, former cowboss of the Spanish Ranch in Nevada, recalls, those drifting cowboys were incredibly accomplished at their trade. And they followed a completely different code from everybody else, creating their own culture with its own rules.
The cowboy was almost like a knight, bonded to the brand. Back in the Charlie Goodnight days, if Comanches attacked the trail herders a cowboy was fully expected to fight and to lay down his life if required. At the same time, if a ranch owner ever said something to ruffle the cowboy’s pride, he’d say adios, roll up his bed and ride away. Being a maverick myself, the history of that free life on the open range appealed to me.
Devouring all this material on the West turned me into a western historian, giving me a third career in my fifties in addition to my horse and music work. I was definitely a late bloomer, but when the light bulb came on for me, it really came on — as I’d soon discover.
CHAPTER 7
Cowboyography
Right from the start, 1986 was a big year at the T–Y. At 6:30 a.m. on January 3, Twylla and I sped to the High River hospital full of excitement. After a tough delivery, Adelita Rose Tyson emerged to completely capture our hearts — a five-pound, one-ounce gift. From the get-go Twylla seemed happy just to have the baby at her side. Looking back, it’s almost spooky how easygoing Adelita was, how she never cried at inappropriate times. She was an amazing baby, no trouble at all.
Within a week of her birth I was gone on tour, driving the truck and trailer south across the U.S. border. (Thankfully Twylla had support from her siblings.) The band and I were on the road almost constantly back then, building on our Elko success. Even before Adelita was born, Twylla had spent a lot of time holding down the ranch by herself — lonely nights with the chinook winds howling at the door and the coyotes crying on the hill.
On this particular occasion we were headed down to Salt Lake City, with the drums hidden in the horse trailer. We had no visas, and because, as I mentioned earlier, border guys generally love to make life hard for musicians, we had to bluff our way across. The plan was to fly out of Salt Lake to New York City to play a party for Dan Lufkin, a New York investor I’d met at a Montana cutting contest the previous summer.
Lufkin is a real mover and shaker, but when I met him, I didn’t know him from a hole in the ground. It was a hot Montana day and he was there with his girlfriend, Lindy Burch, and some fancy horses.
“Would you be the Ian of Ian & Sylvia?” he asked me.
Here we go again, I thought, and mentally rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I am.”
“I used to listen to your stuff. I really liked it.” He told me about a ranch he was building in Carmel, California. “Come on down sometime.”
“Sure,” I said, pretty sure he wasn’t about to follow up.
He then told me about a big birthday bash he was throwing in New York in January. “Do you have a band?”
“Sure, I have a band,” I said, though I didn’t at the time.
“Would you come play for us?”
So that’s where we were headed the week after Adelita was born. We parked the rig in Salt Lake, hopped a plane and played the NYC party. The society people didn’t know what to make of us. I remember one woman saying, “That’s the worst music I’ve ever heard in my life!” After all the society types went home, we played our hearts out for Dan and his architect buddy Jonathan Foote as they sat drinking hundred-year-old cognac.
That trip to New York for Dan’s party was an important one for me because I met Tom Russell — another western singer and songwriter — for the first time the night after we played Dan’s party. Tom and I had been corresponding since the late 1970s. One of my oldest fans, an English writer named Peter O’Brien, had given Tom my Pincher Creek mailing address, and Tom followed up by sending me a letter expressing admiration for Ian & Sylvia. He’d been a big fan during the duo’s heyday in the 1960s. When we played L.A., he’d come to hear us at the Ash Grove, but I guess he was too shy to introduce himself. In his letter, Tom told me he’d written this song about a fighting cock, “Gallo de Cielo.” Send over the tape, I told him, and he did. I loved the song and cut it for Old Corrals. We kept in touch afterwards but I’d never met him face-to-face.
I went to the rough part of Brooklyn where Tom lived — I remember being a little nervous about venturing into the area — and we hit it off right away. He was really unconventional, not just musically but also personally. His style was very western. He usually had a gun tucked inside his waistband. We’re very similar, Tom and I. He’s had a lot of women, maybe more than I have. And both of us are musical outsiders. Tom didn’t fit into the New York scene but he struggled on, as I did. He was also a voracious reader, and his love for literature — Hemingway in particular — encouraged me to read more.
Soon after I got to Tom’s place, we went and bought a couple bottles of Cabernet. “I’ve got a great idea for a song,” he told me. “Here’s the concept: two people in a café make love on a real nice old Navajo rug after hours.”
“That’s killer.”
And off we went writing “Navajo Rug.” We finished it over the phone — Tom in New York, me in a Fort Worth Super 8 just off Interstate 30. I didn’t know it then, but I had just started creating the pieces that would make up the biggest album of my career.
I kept writing songs all through 1986. At this point I hadn’t yet bought the quarter-section with the little stone house, so my friend Einar Brasso kindly let me use his log cabin in the Alberta foothills for writing. After I got up in the morning, ate breakfast and fed the horses, I’d drive southwest for an hour to the cabin, which was just off Chimney Rock Road. It’s pretty isolated. Once I got there I’d empty the mousetraps and get down to work. The songs just came to me in that cabin nestled against the front face of the Rockies.
Late in the morning I would pack a sandwich, cross the creek and climb to the first plateau above the cabin. The climb was just hard enough. I’d see eagles and sometimes a black bear on my way up. And I never made that climb without getting something from it, even if it was only a line for a song. I’d stay there until 1 p.m. or so and then I’d come down, drive home and ride colts. When I came in at night, Twylla would have dinner waiting. She cooked a hell of a London broil.
Some of my best songs were written in Brasso’s cabin, including “The Gift,” inspired by an incredible painting Charlie Russell did during his last years. It was called When the Land Belonged to God. It’s a huge canvas that hangs in the Montana state capitol building in Helena. When I first saw it, in typical Montana fashion it had been put in a dumb place with bad lighting (it’s front and centre now), but despite the poor placement, it blew me away. It shows a herd of buffalo coming across the Missouri River, with a huge bull in the lead flanked by a couple of grey wolves. The water is pouring off the bull as he emerges from the bank, and you can see the whole herd behind him. The work is pure genius. The boys in the band used to kid me about it, because whenever we were driving through the area, I’d take a detour to see that painting and make them come and look at it with me. I just couldn’t get over the thing.
In “The Gift,” I imagine that Charlie takes over painting Montana sunsets from God. That was my little flash of genius, my tribute to the great Charlie Russell. For all of us in the West, he’s our patron saint.
God made Montana for the wild man
For the Peigan and the Sioux and Crow
But He saved his greatest gift for Charlie
Said “Get her all down before she goes — Charlie
You gotta get her all down, ’cause she’s bound to go”
I figure that Russell had a gift from above. And when I was writing songs in Brasso’s cabin for my new record, it was like I was getting a gift from above too. Those songs can’t have been as easy to
write as I remember them being, but I was definitely infused with a creative energy that came from somewhere outside of me. I just let it come inside and went with it.
One thing that didn’t come so easily was finding a way to fund the record. I was determined not to use government funding. At the time, artists in Canada were getting their records subsidized with taxpayers’ money, and I didn’t think that was right. Gordon Lightfoot felt the same way. We thought the subsidies were bullshit, and weren’t afraid to say so publicly. We also didn’t think the subsidy system would last long at all. In retrospect, though, I think I was wrong. The system seems to work, and these days all kinds of artists are making records with government money. But in my mind, if you want to make a record, you do it the old-fashioned way and pay for it without government handouts. Refusing government money is probably an obsolete stance, but I’ve been that way for a long time and can’t see changing.
I finally solved the funding problem by getting two private investors. One was Einar Brasso. The other was Dan Lufkin, my New York friend, who likes to use his wealth creatively and constructively. (The ranch he’d invited me to in the Carmel Valley is a prime example, a fairytale place about twelve miles from the ocean, with rolling hills and moss hanging from oak trees. Twylla, Adelita and I used to visit and take along two or three horses to ride. Dan’s ranch got all broken up after his divorce, but back then it was wonderful, a cowboy paradise.) Dan was very helpful when I approached him about investing in the new record. I don’t know that he thought he’d get his money back, but both he and Brasso would end up getting a very good return on their investment.
The title for the new record was suggested by Neil MacGonigill, a Calgary promoter and manager who was a business partner at the time. He pointed me to a poem by Gail Gardner, one of the early cowboy poets, called “The Sierry Petes,” which is a bastardization of “the Sierra peaks.” It’s a very famous old cowboy poem, and a very good one too. The lines have been altered here and there since Gardner wrote it in 1917, and in one version, a couple of cowboys are going to go get drunk on whiskey row when one of them says, “I’m tired of cowboy-ography, and I ‘lows I’m goin’ to town.” There was my album title: Cowboyography.
I had all the ingredients for a magical record. Now I just needed someone to pull all the pieces together. That person was Adrian Chornowol, a brilliant but tragic character if ever there was one.
I had been working on a dinky but fun television show called Sun Country since 1982; it was one of the last half-hour country/western programs. Twice a month I’d drive up to CFRN in Edmonton to record the show. Adrian was the music producer. A piano player from a musical Ukrainian family, Adrian had worked as my vocal arranger on Old Corrals. He could play anything on the piano, from Rachmaninoff to country. As a musician, he was strong, focused and clear.
“I can produce a great record for you,” Adrian told me. “The songs are absolutely terrific.” Something inside my head said, You know what? He probably can. And so I took him on as my producer. We recorded Cowboyography at Sundae Sound in Calgary in August 1986. From the start it was obvious that Adrian had a vision for the record. He didn’t know the front end of a horse from the back end, didn’t know or care about cowboy culture, but he knew how these songs were supposed to sound. He knew that, musically, this could be a very strong record.
I remember him at Sundae Sound that summer, sitting amidst the rickety equipment. He’d be there working on some detail—the bass-line track, for example — for a whole night, recording on that analogue sixteen-track. He was basically living in the studio.
In the afternoon I would drive in from the ranch. I’d sing and Adrian would tell me, “That’s a little out of tune there, Ian.” Nobody had ever corrected me like that before. Where my previous producers would just let me screw up, Adrian wanted to get it right. He also knew how to arrange harmonies. Lots of guys say they can do that, but Adrian really could do it. He understood phrasing, and he wasn’t shy about telling me how to phrase the songs. Most of the time he was right.
Looking back, I see a lot of naïveté in Cowboyography. There’s a lot of romantic stuff in there I wouldn’t write now — my outlook these days is much darker. But back then I was in a younger, romantic phase of my life. Twylla and I were very much in love, and I wrote about us in “Own Heart’s Delight”:
We make a good team, my lady and I
I couldn’t ask for anything more
If you don’t believe me
Just catch us tonight
We’ll be the best dancers out on that floor
Twylla and I got married on September 26, 1986, after the Cowboyography recording sessions but before the album’s release later that year. Our friends and family all came to St. Aidan’s — a beautiful little Anglican church near the Bar U Ranch, south of Longview — and got stuck in the parking lot. It had rained for nine days and nine nights beforehand, and the ground was a quagmire.
We had a nice little country service, Twylla in her white wedding dress and me in my blazer, blue jeans and cowboy boots. My old troublemaker friend Bugsy Bigelow had shown up out of the blue a few days before the wedding, on his way to Montana. “You’re going to be my best man,” I told him — and he was.
At the wedding reception at the East Longview Hall that night, I danced with Twylla as she held baby Adelita in her arms. Almost eight months old, Adelita had her party dress on. I can still see her waving her arm like a tiny monarch as all three of us waltzed around the room.
Cowboyography was the Ian Tyson record with the magic. It came along at exactly the right time, and who the hell knows how that mystery works? Success happens or it doesn’t — and most of the time it doesn’t. All I know is that I couldn’t have planned it better. Cowboyography coincided perfectly with the cowboy renaissance, and “Navajo Rug,” “Fifty Years Ago,” “Claude Dallas” and “Cowboy Pride” all got regular radio play.
Ironically, my business relationship with Columbia had petered out by this point. I didn’t even have an American label when Cowboyography dropped in November 1986. I knew a big label would just screw it up anyway. The big labels don’t know what to do with unconventional artists like me, and Columbia had more or less let my previous records languish, with minimal promotion. Instead of going that route again, I followed the lead of Baxter Black, an enterprising American cowboy poet who was merchandising all his books and cassettes himself and being very successful at it.
With Twylla and our daughter, Adelita. (JAY DUSARD)
With Roanie at the ranch. (JAY DUSARD)
Twylla and I put out Cowboyography on our own label, Eastern Slope Records. This was the golden age of mail order — well before Amazon and iTunes — and Twylla worked incredibly hard, stuffing records and cassettes into padded envelopes and sending them to stores all across the American West. In addition to running the mail-order business, Twylla also found some American distributor folks, such as Vickie Mullen in Washington, who helped get the records into the cowboys’ hands. It was a very grassroots operation. At the same time, Edmonton-based Stony Plain Records released the album commercially in Canada (its distributor at the time was RCA Records). Holger Peterson, Stony Plain’s owner, had been a fan of mine since back in the Ian & Sylvia days.
Our various distribution methods ensured that everybody in the North American West soon had an Ian Tyson cassette in his or her truck. The Canadian West may not be that big, but the American West is very big, and that’s a lot of pickup trucks. In the U.S. my name spread by word of mouth through the cowboy underground, originating, of course, from Elko. My friend Blaine McIntyre, for example, spread Cowboyography around by hand. An itinerant saddle salesman based in Brighton, Colorado, old Blaino would always have extra cassettes in his truck. When he went on his travels, he’d sell them for me.
I think Cowboyography would have had a shot at winning a Grammy in 1987 had it been nominated. But we didn’t have an American label lobbying on the record’s behalf, which is the downsid
e of the grassroots method. Eventually I got Cowboyography onto an American bluegrass label called Sugar Hill Records, but that turned out to be a big mistake. They didn’t understand the music and, like Columbia, they didn’t know what to do with it, a fact they more or less admitted. In Canada, Cowboyography won me all the music awards, including the 1987 Juno for country male vocalist of the year. In the 1970s I had hated the idea of hanging in there with so little recognition, but now that doggedness had paid off. Cowboyography broke the log jam, and eventually it went platinum (more than a hundred thousand units sold).
You would think Adrian would be riding high at that point, having produced such a successful record. You’d think he’d have gotten all sorts of projects as a result. But he didn’t — or he did and then screwed them up.
You couldn’t invent a life more catastrophic than Adrian’s. Back when we did Sun Country, the TV show, he seemed to have his shit together. And when we recorded Cowboyography, he totally had his shit together. He also produced my 1989 record, I Outgrew the Wagon, but after that the whole thing fell apart for him. I took him on tour; when we played New York, we had to watch him all the time or he’d disappear. He was hardly functioning because he was addicted to hard drugs. But we didn’t find out until later just how crazy his situation was.
In 1989 Adrian got knifed in his Edmonton home by a Native kid and his sister; they really sliced him up badly. After he recovered, he considered getting a sex change — he said he wanted to be a woman — though he never went through with it. Needless to say, his sexual life was totally screwed up. He changed his name to Toby Dancer and drifted out to Toronto, where he led the gospel choir at Emmanuel Howard Park United Church. Tragically, in 2004 Adrian died of a drug overdose in Toronto. He was only fifty-one.