By Greg Quill
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment...s-rocky-trails
Entertainment Reporter
Tequila and More Show
Toronto, December 3, 2010
Life hangs on Ian Tyson like a coat that's a little too big.
The once piercing eyes are grey now, and bloodshot. On this cool and bright fall morning, the Canadian folk and country music legend winces as he lowers himself slowly into an office armchair in the Toronto headquarters of Random House Canada, publisher of his just-released memoir, The Long Trail: My Life in the West.
His bones give him trouble. He has been thrown a few times too many, he says. Arthritis, the legacy of too many winters on his Longview, Alberta horse ranch, makes it hard for him to write, to firmly grip things, but, strangely, not to shape chords on his guitar. At 77 he'd like to take winters off, go down to New Mexico or Arizona, but there's no one to take over his chores back home.
“Help is hard to find,” he says in a hoarse, high whisper. His vocal cords, scarred a few years after a winter throat infection, have robbed Tyson of his distinctive, assertive tenor. The new voice, less strained and more melodic than it was on his last album, 2008's Yellowhead to Yellowstone and other Love Stories still takes some getting used to, he acknowledges.
“Lots of my people like it now . . . they say it's ‘interesting.' ”
To another singer, the loss of such a remarkable instrument, an irreplaceable signature, would be a catastrophe. To Tyson, it was just another bad fall.
“I just couldn't stop working,” he says. “I was in the middle of a very expensive divorce. I was broke. Everything was falling apart. I was in Sierra Vista, Arizona when it happened, and you could actually hear the shock, a great gasp in the crowd.
“But I kept on singing until everyone was relaxed, and the band was rocking . . . and I thought, ‘Maybe I can do this.'”
That brand of perseverance and bareback bravado is a constant underlying theme in Tyson's slim autobiography, more a collection of road stories, horse yarns, love stories, musical sidebars and heartfelt ruminations on the disappearance of the True West over the past 30 years, than an assiduously documented account of his life.
“I did it for the money,” he admits up front, as if to get the question out of the way. “They offered me a very generous advance, and I really needed it.”
Random House even provided professional assistance, Calgary writer Jeremy Klaszus, who pieced together the hours of Tyson's recordings. “I don't type,” Tyson chuckles. “And my hands hurt too much to write longhand. It takes me half an hour to write out a couple of song verses.”
His abundant achievements notwithstanding, Tyson comes across in the book as an impulsive and often self-involved romantic whose obsessions — music, broken love affairs, horses and the free-range cowboy life — were evident in the very first songs he wrote (“Four Strong Winds,” “Someday Soon”) as a member of Toronto's burgeoning folk music scene in the 1960s.
That he somehow foresaw and fully realized his destiny is remarkable in itself. If, as Freud said, true happiness is becoming the person we imagined we'd be as children, then Tyson, who seems in the book impressed by the way his father “approached life in a visceral, non-intellectual way,” and knew at age 6 that he would live a good part of his life in a saddle, can't complain.
But he does. There's a lot of grumbling in his memoir — about oil and gas development in his pastoral backyard, about getting taken to the cleaners in the divorce from the love of his life, Twylla, and having to part with half his land and most precious possessions to settle his debts, about the music business, about the hard Alberta winter, about too many nights on the road and ungrateful audiences, about protest singers, and about the gentrification of the West, for which he takes a modicum of blame for having idealized his lifestyle so evocatively in his groundbreaking, platinum 1987 album, Cowboyography.
A relationship with a woman in Colorado, tentatively hopeful at the end of the book, has subsequently “gone south,” he says.
“I do need a good woman,” he adds ruefully, as if he hasn't had his share.
“I'd kinda like to give up on love.”
Tyson has always been short-tempered. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. I once saw him rip apart a young interviewer for asking questions he didn't like, about Ian & Sylvia.
“That only lasted about two years before the wheels fell off,” he says. “Once the Beatles took over, the folk music thing disappeared, though it seems healthy enough now, a couple of generations later. I get so many questions about those early days . . . ”
Apart from Calgary songwriter Corb Lund — also a former rodeo rider — there's not much he likes about contemporary music.
“I don't get it, this new alternative pop roots stuff. I got bebop, I got disco, but a lot of what I hear on radio now is just inarticulate. The women all scream and the men sound like sissies.”
Tyson doesn't like wasting time. He still walks a good mile most mornings, after tending to his animals and a bacon breakfast, to the stone house on his property where he composes.
“I don't hold grudges for very long,” he says. Fences with Twylla have apparently been mended. His children — Clay, who, like his mother, singer-songwriter Sylvia Tyson, prefers city life, and Adelita, his daughter with Twylla, “has become a bona fide Texan, more's the pity” — are talking to him again after years of estrangement.
“I'm still buddies with all my ladies,” he adds. “You don't get many years to have a good time, and it's debilitating to wallow in bad feelings.”
What's worrying him these days is the ranch. “I'm trying to downsize, streamline the operation. I sold off a lot of land, and I could sell some more. I don't need a big spread to be happy . . . been there, done that.
“It's the endless goddamn winter that gets me down. That's a young man's deal.”
Music is something else. He performs 40 or 50 shows a year and he's still writing songs, he says.
“They don't come as quickly as they used to, but they're good songs. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'll have four or five new songs by Christmas.”
Despite the pain in his hands, he's playing better than ever, he says.
“My vision is clearer for some reason . . . I'm playing at a higher level.
“Working with music is like working with horses — there's always the next level.”