Ian Tyson book - jealous of Lightfoot

[RM]

Originally Posted by charlene

It will be fascinating to hear him speak of his life and career and hear him sing on Thursday night.

No report ??

[youngstranger]

Originally Posted by jj

good point...i often get paired up with golfer(s) who seem to more like 30/70

I hope they are hitting between 30 and 70 too so you don't have to listen to it for too long!

[charlene]

Originally Posted by RM

No report ??

I'll get back to ya on that...garden work to do while the temps are mid 60's and no rain..

[Auburn Annie]

""We're going to record 'em ourselves at the ranch and put 'em online," he said. "I think we'll go with iTunes — whatever that is, I don't know. But I have people who do know what it is."

Wish Gord would do that.

[charlene]

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.”

[charlene]

STEPHEN BRUNT
Ian Tyson ever the rodeo rider, with no bull
From Friday's Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sport...rticle1767794/
Published Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 6:08PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 7:54PM EDT

There have been cowboys who sang and singers who claimed to be cowboys, but the fact is and was that there’s a whole lot of pretend in between.

Ian Tyson, though, is close to the genuine article.

Two central narrative lines wind through his biography, as spun out in his just published memoir The Long Trail: My Life in the West. They are equal and inextricable and at key moments they intersect.

One is musical, a career that took him to Greenwich Village before Bob Dylan was Bob Dylan, that included the years as half of Ian & Sylvia, the composition of tunes for the ages such as Four Strong Winds, Someday Soon and Summer Wages, the brief country rock flowering of Great Speckled Bird, television hosting and a later-life incarnation as a cowboy troubadour.

The other is rodeo, the only sport that exists in contemporary, professional form that also has direct links to work, and to a distinctive way of life. Doctors and pipefitters and sportswriters don’t spend their off hours indulging in a recreational, competitive version of what it is they do for a living. Rodeo cowboys, in their purest incarnation, do.

Tyson, who was born on Vancouver Island, began rodeo riding as a young man, before music became his central focus, and has continued to ride and compete almost until this day. In fact, he was lying in a Calgary hospital, his ankle held together with pins after a saddle bronc stepped on him, when what would become his other calling really took hold.

“After the surgery, I was put in a broken-leg ward for two weeks, along with a telephone lineman and a couple of other cowboys,” he writes. “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…”

The book – and this probably comes as no surprise to those who know Tyson best – is short and straightforward and to the point. It contains what must be the most unique reference to Émile Zola’s Nana in all of literature (won’t wreck the surprise here), and it details Tyson’s life and loves and his early infatuation with the world of cowboys, first through the books of Will James, who became the subject of one of Tyson’s songs and whose own life on the range turned out to be largely fictional.

“Will James was mostly bull,” Tyson, 77, says over lunch.

Yes, he is a man of strong, unadulterated opinions, definite politics (Steve Earle cursed Tyson’s right-wing leanings in concert the other night before playing a beautiful version of Summer Wages), a rugged individualist of the old school, living on a ranch in southern Alberta. He still makes music, though his voice these days is a raspy ghost of the magnificent instrument of old, and he still keeps horses, still rides.

Tyson has little time for the modern, glitzy, cash-driven incarnation of rodeo. Professional bull riders, he says, are more akin to bikers than to cowboys.

“The new generation of those guys, those athletes, they want NBA money, which is ridiculous, I think,” he says. “So the big rodeos like Calgary, which is a big oil-and-gas deal, it’s not cowboy. … Calgary’s just a [expletive] circus.

“The last few years I haven’t followed it, because I don’t want to follow it.”

But pure, organic rodeo is still out there, he says, in the small-town competitions that survive, in the working cowboys who still ply their trade on some of the big ranches, in team-roping and cutting-horse competitions (Tyson was part of the latter until a couple of years ago, and made it all the way to a final in 1989), in the mystic relationship that can exist between man and horse. “The horse is really at the root of the cowboy thing,” he says. “It’s not at the root of the modern rodeo thing.”

Still out there, in the imagination, in lore and literature and in song, and for those who know where to look, still out there for real, though try to catch it while you can.

“It’s all part,” Tyson says, “of the disappearing West.”

[charlene]

http://www.facebook.com/notes/richar...50108147596164

FYI #7 — Ian Tyson rides again!
.by Richard Flohil on Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 12:24pm.

Songwriter, performer, rancher, and irascible and charming in turn, Ian Tyson writes a tell-most autobiography and aims for the best-seller lists. Richard Flohil has known Ian Tyson for longer than most, has yet to ride a horse, and admires the grumpy old man for simply being himself.

WRITE A BOOK, TELL YOUR TRUTH

AND THEN HIT THE PUBLICITY ROUNDS

It’s been Ian Tyson’s big week in the Big Smoke. Honoured at the Canadian Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Big piece in the Toronto Star by Greg Quill. An even bigger piece in the Globe and Mail — on the sports pages, yet — by Stephen Brunt. Big coverage in the National Post. A Nick Patch story on the Canadian Press wire. A Sunday morning interview on CBC by Michael Enright. A shot on Canada AM.

It all marked the release of The Long Trail: My Life in the West, the iconic songwriter’s autobiography, and you gotta hand it to the Random House publicist, Scott Sellers.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, and since everyone else has written about Tyson this week, I’m adding a few words, if only because I go back a lot further than most. And although I’ve done press for Tyson on and off for the best part of 20 years — because he records for my client Stony Plain Records — it won’t be a puff piece.

Back in 1965, when I was considered — most inaccurately — as some sort of blues expert, I was invited to something called the Mariposa Folk Festival, held north of Toronto at a place called Innis Lake. I co-hosted a “blues workshop” featuring Son House, John Hammond, Sippie Wallace and the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, along with Mr. House’s manager Dick Waterman (starting a friendship that continues to this day).

And, in a life-changing experience over three days, I heard and met Gord Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Phil Ochs, Buffy Ste. Marie, a newcomer called Joni Anderson, the Staple Singers and the Rev. Gary Davis. And the incomparable duo of Ian and Sylvia.

Canada’s first international pop artists

When you discount Guy Lombardo and Percy Faith — Canadians who had gone off to the United States and rarely returned — you can make a case that Ian Tyson and his wife Sylvia Fricker were Canada’s first international pop stars. By the time they played Mariposa in 1965, they had already played the Newport Folk Festival twice, not to mention Carnegie Hall. They had an apartment in New York and were managed by mogul Albert Grossman, who also steered the careers of Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, Odetta, and later went on to handle Janis Joplin and The Band (It’s not widely known that Tyson was responsible for getting Grossman to sign a young kid from Toronto called Gordon Lightfoot).

Ian & Sylvia were young and handsome and remarkably self-assured. Tyson wore shiny black cowboy boots, which I thought were incomparably cool (and I’ve worn cowboy boots ever since), and Sylvia’s regal grace — and long brunette hair — made her a memorable fantasy figure.

As we all know, true love — and success in the music business — doesn’t last for ever. Half a dozen albums on various labels (Vanguard, Ampex, MGM, Columbia) followed, with diminishing returns.

After a couple of years with a music show on CTV, Ian (now divorced from Sylvia) went out west, worked as a ranch hand, played with a pick up band on weekends in a Calgary bar, and worked towards building a ranch to raise quarter horses. With the income from Neil Young’s version of “Four Strong Winds” — the first song Tyson had ever written — he bought his first spread.

The call of music was too strong, and ever since Tyson has had two careers — the ranch (which he’s now downsizing) and music. There are now a dozen CDs on Stony Plain (including reissues of earlier records on Bearsville, Boot, and A&M_ and a touring schedule that sees him playing between 40 and 60 concerts a year.

Along the way — and he’s certainly frank in his book — he’s had some pretty heavy affairs, a costly divorce that’s seriously damaged him financially, and some uncertain relationships with his two kids.. The passage of time, a crappy sound system at a country festival, and a virus all turned his once-smooth voice into a hoarse, grainy, croak. (Oddly enough, the broken voice helped the story-telling nature of most of his songs — and, in the last couple of years, has improved considerably.)

Why Ian Tyson doesn’t give a shit

Tyson is often his own worst enemy. He’s pissed off dozens of people who have supported him — music industry people, radio folk, journalists and fans alike. He’s moody, irascible, doesn’t suffer fools for a second, and has been known to throw a few punches in bar fights. His politics — save for a deep commitment to ecological issues — have often been to the right of Atilla the Hun, although he does seem to be mellowing these days.

Most times, Ian Tyson just doesn’t give a shit. When asked why he wrote the book, he just says that he needed the sizable advance Random House offered him. When asked how he wrote it, he responded, using a word you’ve not heard for 20 years, by saying “I hired a stenographer.” He rarely misses an opportunity to grumble at the CBC, complains commercial radio won’t touch his records with a barge-pole, and hangs up on interviewers if they haven’t done their research or want to know about the Ian & Sylvia days (“that was 50 years back” he grumbles).

But despite all that, the songs really tell Tyson’s story, and often better than this slim, sometimes self-serving, book does. He practices two hours each day to keep the arthritis in his hands at bay, he’s still writing (though he says he’s uncertain whether he’ll make another record), and he includes a couple of fine new songs in his live show.

Tyson walks proudly, although he’s had a couple of new knees and a hip replacement, and he’s broken way too many bones being thrown off horses. He’s a westerner, heart and soul, and he puts up with Toronto, dreads the Alberta winter, likes to travel (a recent trip to Morocco has yielded a wonderful new song), and he knows his Prairies history better than almost anyone alive. At 77, he’s still in it for the long haul, because he is aware of the alternative.

Flawed, flinty, funny, outspoken, charming when he wants to be, Ian Tyson is who he is, take it or leave it. And “legendary”, for once, is the perfect word to describe him.
_____________________________________________
Interesting factoid of the week:

Like all good writer, Ian Tyson reads. And he’s had a subscription to The New Yorker for years (“Don’t like their pop writer, though”). And he masturbated for the first time while reading Emile Zola. True – it’s in his book.

Quote of the week:

“The fact that I can still move people with my stories — I live for that. I get a couple of hours of real bliss on stage, until the pain in my hands gets bad. Old age is not for wimps.” — Ian Tyson.

Videos of the week:

There’s a dearth of Ian Tyson video — but this compilation of images that accompanies one of his very best Western songs, “MC Horses” is well worth watching. Nobody writes a story like Tyson can.

YouTube - MC Horses ~~~ Ian Tyson

More than 20 years after he wrote “Four Strong Winds” Ian and Sylvia reprised the song on a 1986 “reunion” CBC TV show. Check the finale with (from left to right!) Murray McLauchlan, Judy Collins, Gordon Lightfoot and Emmylou Harris.

YouTube - Ian and Sylvia - Four Strong...

Richard Flohil is a Toronto writer, publicist, editor, promoter and a music addict with 10,000 records and CDs in his living room. This is a personal column about the music worlds he lives in — the stories he hears, the music he listens to, the artists and backstage people he meets.
Declaration of interest: He’s handled publicity, on and off, for Ian Tyson for some 20-odd years.
http://www.richardflohil.com/

[Bill]

It's interesting to read all these perspectives. When I interviewed him in Ft. Worth back in 1992 he was very gracious (and had surprised the crap out of me by calling my house himself to set up the meeting!)
Of course I was interviewing him about guitars and that westerny music culture...no questions about the Sylia days, and only glancingly about Lightfoot because he told me about working with and learning from Red Shea.
Like Lightfoot, he seems to have often been his own worst enemy, but ya gotta love the rugged individualistic authenticity of a guy like this.

[charlene]

some pics from the event - I'll suss out some performance pics.. (I can't save the pics at this site for some reason) Here's the link:
http://www.snapnorthyork.com/index.p...206729&lang=en

[charlene]

http://www.cansong.ca/en/events/2010IYCRMM.aspx

[charlene]

show is up at CBC radio 2
http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts/20101021iycrm

[stephenw]

Thats interesting. How can someone be so frank about his feelings like that? Especially in the public.

[jj]

this will be enjoyable time spent, thanks a ton, char! ...the wait it over