The Long Trail: My Life in the West (12 page)

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.

Each July during the Calgary Stampede, Ranchman’s became crowded, hot and sticky — full of girls chasing guys with gold buckles. I always looked forward to seeing one of our fans during Stampede week. Casey Tibbs — the most charismatic bronc rider of them all, a legend of rodeo — would tap on the back door of Ranchman’s, I’d let him in and he’d sit in a dark corner and listen to us play. Calgary was a big town for Casey; he won the saddle bronc championship at the Stampede two years in a row, in 1949 and 1950.

Casey had a girl in every port, and when he came to Ranchman’s he’d bring along his blond Alberta girlfriend. He had put on weight — no longer the slender young
athlete who had won the world saddle bronc riding championship at nineteen. But he was a cool guy, and I knew old Casey would be there to see us every year. We always seemed to play better when he was around. I wrote a song for him before he died in 1990.
I’m the number one fan of the rainbow man
, I wrote, referring to his trademark colourful garb.
He’s the wildest of ’em all
.

A mysterious Irish horse-shoer named Noel Hope also hung around Ranchman’s. He was a fan of mine, and he’d often come out to the ranch to visit Twylla and me. One time he even flew out in a helicopter. He wanted to make a grand gesture, and it worked — he landed right in the corral. The ponies freaked, but Twylla thought it was great. She would cook us dinner and Noel would ask to hear the old Irish songs. Twylla also loved the old ballads and cowboy songs, and I’d play for them both.

Twylla was the one who got me into recording western music again. She believed in my songs when no one else did, and in 1983 I put out
Old Corrals and Sagebrush
for Columbia, singing about horses, ponderosa pines and the old Double Diamond Ranch in Wyoming. My friend Jay Dusard shot the cover photograph — a fine black and white picture of me sitting on Smoky, my circle horse, in front of the Diamond V weigh scales.
Old Corrals
was a cowboy record through and through, recorded in the basement of my ranch house. I dedicated the album to Alan Young.

When I first met Alan, he partied hard but also knew how to handle his life and work. He was likeable in so many ways and had plenty of loyal friends. But in the 1980s his life began to unravel. The drinking got heavier and heavier. Uncle George rodeoed and drank whiskey too, but he kept
his eye on the ball the whole time. Alan just couldn’t — the party always won out. It would cost him.

In the early 1980s Twylla and I made a habit of escaping the lousy Alberta winter by taking our vacation in January and February. We’d get some local guy to take care of the ranch — usually Twylla’s brother Gord — pack up the truck, head south and find a little cowtown with a good bar and a restaurant. We’d hole up there for a day or two and then go on to the next cowtown and do the same thing. I didn’t have to worry about playing gigs, and because there were no cellphones, my agent, Paul Mascioli, couldn’t get hold of me. We’d just drive, totally carefree, all the way from Longview down to Prescott, Arizona, and on to Tucson.

Those winter getaways are some of the best memories of my life. We saw a lot of old friends and made a bunch of new ones, including Jay Dusard and another western photographer, Kurt Markus. We met them through the cowboy underground —Jay in Prescott and Kurt in Colorado Springs, where he was working for
Western Horseman
magazine.

Kurt had been an up-and-coming tennis player when he got whacked in the eye with a ball, which ruined that career. He wasn’t a cowboy of any kind, but he had married one of Dick Spencer’s daughters back when Dick owned
Western Horseman
. The magazine sent Kurt on an assignment to shoot some old cowboy in Nevada. He disappeared into the sagebrush of the ION — southern Idaho, eastern Oregon and northern Nevada — where he discovered a lost world of buckaroos, all-night saloons and whorehouses. That culture was still very much alive in northern Nevada, even
in the 1980s. There was hardly any barbed wire north of Elko, all the way to the Idaho line. Kurt had found the Old West (just as Bing Crosby had a generation earlier when he bought the sprawling PX outfit, out on the Owyhee Desert, to contain his four Hollywood sons).

Environmentalists hadn’t shut down the big cattle outfits yet, and operations such as the Allied Land and Cattle Co. could run cattle on federal rangeland in Nevada for a token fee. Herds of twelve thousand mother cows weren’t unusual. Those operators would hire a tough cowboss and eight buckaroos, get ten horses for each kid, and send ’em out into the sagebrush with a chuckwagon cook to brand calves for three or four months. Every now and then the cowboys would head into town, buy a new hat, get drunk and go to the whorehouse. When Kurt found this lost world, it completely blew his mind. Being a really smart and inquisitive guy, he snapped pictures of everything, and in the process he became a brilliant photographer.

Kurt really showed me the ION, the buckaroo West. I’d fly into Boise, Idaho, where he would pick me up in his old brown Chevy van with his bedroll and saddle in the back. We’d head out to visit all the classic ranches — Maggie Creek in Nevada and Whitehorse in Oregon. Cowboys really liked Kurt because he’d stay out there with the buckaroos, freezing his ass off in some snowed-in cow camp when it was twenty below. They didn’t know who the hell I was, but because I could ride and was with Kurt, they accepted me pretty quickly.

When we headed into the desert together, I was very careful to back-trail my landmarks. Out there you can get lost, really lost. Some of the kids I rode with told me they’d
gotten lost and spent many hours finding their way back to camp. I didn’t want to end up like that.

Half the time when Kurt and I were riding, I wouldn’t even know he was shooting. That’s what makes him great: the cowboys didn’t know he was shooting either. He was like a quick-draw gunfighter. A bucking horse doesn’t wait for a photographer to give it the cue, but Kurt could get the shot right away. He’s the only guy who can do that, so he quickly made a name for himself in the West.

I was still working on making a name for Ian Tyson in the West. I went on tour with Ricky Skaggs — a fabulous picker — in both 1983 and 1984. The day before one of those tours, I broke my toe. My dog was messing with the cattle at the round pen; I went to kick at him and hit the gatepost instead. But on tour, my band and I more than held our own. One kind Ottawa reviewer even said we played better than Ricky. In 1984 I put out another record, titled
Ian Tyson
. (Stony Plain Records later merged
Old Corrals
and
Ian Tyson
into one album,
Old Corrals and Sagebrush & Other Cowboy Culture Classics.)

Something strange happened in the 1980s. Cowboys became increasingly fashionable, thanks in part to John Travolta’s
Urban Cowboy
, which came out at the beginning of the decade. But there was little reality in the urban cowboy trend. Those guys in the bars in Houston and Galveston weren’t cowmen but day workers in the oil industry, working in processing and compressor plants during the day and putting on their cowboy hats at night before heading to the dancehall. It was all about dressing up. I think that’s why I
started emphasizing authenticity so much in my music. There were too many fakes around, too many people trying to convince the world they were cowboys.

It was the start of a weird dichotomy for me. I didn’t like the phony cowboy movement at all, yet I directly benefited from it. Suddenly everybody everywhere wanted to know about buckaroos. When I went to Toronto with my band to play some club, young people came out in large numbers to hear us. Some of the girls were even wearing Dale Evans gingham. It was all pretty weird, considering I couldn’t even get a job in Toronto a few years earlier. Now journalists were bugging me for interviews, wanting to talk about the West.

A cowboy renaissance was blooming in North America, and Elko, Nevada — one of the towns Twylla and I regularly hit on our winter road trips — would soon become ground zero for the movement. In 1980 it was a cowtown and railroad town with fewer than nine thousand people living there. There was a lot of Basque influence, from settlers who had come from the Pyrenees (between Spain and France) for the express purpose of herding sheep in the American West. I love that culture, and parts of it are still preserved in Elko. For example, Picon punch — a Basque drink made with a bitter orange liqueur — is the local drink of choice.

In January 1985 I travelled to Elko for a new event: the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, organized by Utah folklorist Hal Cannon along with buckaroo poet Waddie Mitchell. Oral traditions were alive and well in that part of the world back then, since there was no TV and not much radio reception on those remote Nevada ranches. Hal, Waddie and a few other cowboys thought it would be great
to get a few grants and celebrate those traditions by throwing a big party where cowboy poets could recite their verse. Hal had heard
Old Corrals
and invited me to come down and play.

The poetry gathering — or simply “Elko,” as it came to be known — was also partly a reaction to the urban cowboy trend. “Though we didn’t know it at the time, 1985 was ripe for ranching culture to reclaim its own story, to find the touchstones of its culture,” Hal wrote in an essay many years later. “Cowboys had always allowed their story to be told publicly by others — songwriters, scriptwriters, novelists — but increasingly that story, told in popular culture, became a monolithic Arthurian myth, far from the breadth of the real life.”

That first January, Hal and Waddie set up sixty chairs in the Elko Convention Center. Then they got nervous and put half of them back because they thought there weren’t going to be enough people to fill them. Sure enough, their prediction had been way off — but not in the direction they expected. Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand people showed up for the damn thing. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time — again. My satchel was stuffed with western songs I’d written but hadn’t yet found a market for. Elko changed everything for me.

Magic happens sometimes, and for me it happened that January. I had gone down with the perfect band. They looked great all dressed up. Neil Bentley, the chubby little bass player, wore a bowler hat; he played the role of storekeeper. Then there was drummer Thom Moon with his big handlebar moustache and black hat; he was the outlaw. Jeff Bradshaw, the pedal steel player, was the hillbilly. Myran
Szott on fiddle was the dapper westerner who always wore a good hat and a sports jacket. And lead guitarist Gary Koliger was the wild Jewish guy from Edmonton. He didn’t have a costume, but the buckaroos loved him anyway because he was crazy. All those guys could play. It was one of those bands that just have it.