The Long Trail: My Life in the West (21 page)

These days I have a perpetual cold, a constant low-grade condition. It’s not the flu, but if you’re a singer, it’s not fun. I started developing a Tom Waitsian singing method. I had to find a way, and I slowly figured out a technique that worked with my new croaking, gravelly voice. I call it “raven rock.” The ravens living near me seem to understand my new voice. They leave in the wintertime and come back in March or April. They lived in my little coulee a few years back and then moved a bit closer, into the rickety poplar trees, before moving right into the hayshed. I was surprised when they settled that near, since they don’t usually like to
live close to people. But they seem to think I’m one of them. I croak at them and they croak back, even though I don’t know what they’re saying.

It was all very well that the ravens were fans of my new voice, but I was still unsure about what my fans would think. I didn’t know whether I should keep going with music and do another album to follow up
Songs from the Gravel Road
, my 2005 release.
Gravel Road
had been overproduced and it got mixed reviews; many critics resented the jazz mix in there and thought it was out of character. But I liked that album a lot,
especially
the jazz songs.

Music critics tend to have preconceived ideas of what an artist should sound like. They want to put things in little boxes with labels. If you let that limit you as an artist, you’re making a big mistake. It’s not productive to worry about what the critics will think when you’re writing songs. If you’re going to be an innovator, you have to innovate, and realistically you can’t hit it out of the park every time.

At this stage in the game I’m interested in doing something new, fresh and creative. I like to tell stories and I want those stories to be clothed in interesting music. On
Gravel Road
, for example, I did a song about bronc rider Jerry Ambler, an Alberta boy who got killed in a car accident in Utah in 1958. After he died, his Hamley saddle drifted around the West until champion bareback rider Jim Houston rescued it from obscurity and gave it to bronc rider Cody Bill Smith. Finally the saddle journeyed to the Prorodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs. It’s a real cowboy story that I chose to tell from the point of view of the saddle, but I put it to a jazz setting. It might not have been the flavour of the day, but I like how it turned out.

Corb Lund also liked
Gravel Road
. He really got it. I first ran into him in 2002, backstage at an Ian Tyson tribute concert at Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary, where he played “MC Horses.” Corb is a great big, burly Alberta guy — looks like a football player — and very personable. He used to be a punker with an Edmonton band called the Smalls, but I’d never heard of him in that incarnation. He had heard me, though. His veterinarian dad used to play “MC Horses” over and over after my best-of record,
All the Good ’Uns
, came out in 1996. Corb got hooked on my music shortly afterwards, when he discovered
Old Corrals and Sagebrush
.

In 2003 I found out that he was playing at the Bowness Community Centre in northwest Calgary, and my neighbour Pete Wambeke and I hopped in his truck — it was December, cold as hell — and drove up to see him.

I’d heard about an Elvis-type phenomenon happening at Corb’s shows, and sure enough, when we got there the women were twenty deep in front of the stage, just like they’d been for me in Bend, Oregon, fifteen years earlier. There was a lot of energy and excitement in that hall, and Corb was very hospitable to Pete and me. He got us backstage and filled us up with booze and then asked me to get up on stage and sing “MC Horses” with him. I did, and the crowd went nuts. Corb eventually cut “MC Horses” on
The Gift: A Tribute to Ian Tyson
, and he did a great job with it.

The whole experience of seeing Corb live gave me pause, because he was singing western stuff when all that was starting to fade. He’s kind of like my successor, although he’s much more than that too. He’s very western but also very Canadian. It will be interesting to see just how big he gets.

With Corb Lund, Bowness Community Hall, Calgary, 2003
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

Corb became a good friend in a hard time, when my marriage was dying. He would drop by the ranch pretty regularly on his trips down to see his folks in Taber. We’d go riding or go down to the stone house, where he’d drink beer and I’d drink my wine. We discussed horses, music, American politics — and women, of course — long into the night.

My life was very bleak back then and I was drinking pretty heavily, just trying to tough my way through it. If I had been suicidal, quite frankly that would have been the time to off myself. I credit my supportive friends for pulling me through that darkness. My friends worry about me a lot — probably with good reason — and the ones who live in the area are always calling and getting me out for a meal.
But they also give me my space, because they realize I’m pretty good at being a bachelor. I don’t need to be around people all the time — never have — but a man does need human contact, and my friends have made a huge difference in my life in recent years. They’re very loyal and understanding. They’re there for me.

A new romance also gave me hope during that period. I had fallen in love with a woman who had been coming to my shows all over the West. We starting running together around the same time Twylla and I broke up, although one wasn’t the result of the other. I was very much in love with this woman, and the way I imagined it, she would eventually move up to the ranch and we’d live together. We’d meet up at an old ranch house in Colorado. The ranch was still running cattle and horses, so it was a very cool rendezvous spot for us. I lived for the weekends when I could fly to Denver and get with her.

Music also got me through the darkness. If I hadn’t had music, I’d be gone. But when I was in the middle of it all, I wasn’t sure if I would do another record, given my new voice. Corb, however, was adamant. “Do it,” he told me. “I like your new voice better than your old one anyway. Your old voice was getting boring.”

He was right about that. My old voice was a good one, but I’d been around too long with it, and I’m not Frank Sinatra. After I got over being terrified about losing my chops, I found that I could draw people in with my new delivery. My croaking made people sit up and listen. I was almost glad it had happened. At concerts I’m telling stories better — because I have to. And the singing comes off well too. When I’m sitting in the stone house in the morning, I
often feel as if I can’t sing at all. But when the time comes to perform, I’m like an old fire-engine horse off to the fire.

So I took Corb’s advice and started writing for
Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories
. There are a lot of end-of-the-trail songs on that record. When I was writing “Estrangement” on that spring morning in 2008 and thinking of Adelita, I wasn’t holding anything back; it was pretty heartfelt and powerful. I consider “Estrangement” the best piece of music I’ve ever written.

Somehow Adelita ended up in Huntsville, Texas (I don’t think I was informed of that fact when she went there). She was attending a farmer school called Sam Houston State University, which struck me as an odd move, akin to having all the scholastic qualifications to go to the University of Calgary but choosing a college in Prince George, B.C., instead. (Usually there’s a boy involved in these scenarios, but in this case I didn’t know the details.) She eventually transferred to Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, which has a top rodeo team. That’s a fine school if you’re a cowgirl. Adelita’s a Texan now — she even talks like one.

We both happened to be in Colorado at the same time just after I wrote “Estrangement” — me visiting my lady,
she visiting her boyfriend’s people, who live in the area. We went out for Mexican food together. She was kind of feeling me out, and I was doing the same with her. We didn’t have a whole lot to say to each other at that lunch, but at least we’d begun talking.

I guess I hit the wall hardest around my seventy-fifth birthday, in September of that year. My friends Bob and Ali O’Callaghan kindly threw me a big party here at the ranch, put up a big tent and everything. They spent a lot of money on it, and it was a fine, high-class affair. I croaked out a few songs and people danced their brains out. Clay came out from Toronto but Adelita wasn’t there. My Colorado lover didn’t come up for the party either, which left me feeling empty.

On the day of the party, my guitar player of ten years quit on me, with no notice, over a writing dispute. I had taught him a lot about music and life, and he had this idea that his creativity wasn’t being adequately compensated. That left us high and dry. Fortunately my bass player, Gord Maxwell, knew of a musician in the Portland area who was available. Lee Worden is a former Vancouver Island boy, like me, and he turned out to be a great guitar player, one of the best I’ve had. Thanks to Lee, we kept touring.

When I rode at the Fort Worth futurity a few months later, I didn’t know if Adelita would bother to come, even though she lived only an hour and a half away. But every time I rode she was there, which was pretty encouraging. She brought her boyfriend (whose name is also Clay) with her. After my first round we all went out for Mexican food — it always seems to be Mexican food — at Uncle Julio’s, along with Bill Riddle, my friend and coach. It was very
pleasant; I could see that she was making a real effort to connect with her dad.

Riding Didgereydo at the 2008 National Cutting Horse Association futurity in Forth Worth, Texas
.
(NCHA PHQTQS)

I got a letter from Twylla around this time. She’d taken off for the Bahamas, where she was in a relationship, soon after Adelita went back to school. The letter she sent me was full of regrets; she regretted what had happened, she said, and carried a sadness that remained with her. I was sorry about that, of course, but elated when I read those words, because by this time I thought there was no reason why we couldn’t be civil to each other. I sure didn’t want to be bitter anymore.

The letter had arrived just as I was realizing that the love affair with my Colorado lady would probably never grow into anything larger. The prospect of our living together was looking less and less likely. But Adelita and I were talking again, and that gave me hope.

T
he ravens have returned. This must be their sixth or seventh spring here at the ranch, and the male, jet black, is almost the size of an eagle. When I went to move bales in the hayshed yesterday, I heard the faint mutterings of their babies in the nest, high in the rafters.

Ravens are terrible nest builders, so a few years back I asked my old ranch caretaker, Norman Ring, to install a plywood platform for them. Being an old-fashioned rural Albertan, he thought I was nuts. He was raised to shoot ravens, not build platforms for them. But I like having ’em around, even though they can be noisy as hell.

To the west the coyotes are yipping up on the ridge. Past the ridge, in the mountains, the glaciers are slowly disappearing, but when the plains run out of water, the coyote will survive us all and move on. I’m told they have proliferated well into the east. Perhaps they have grown tired of the diminished West, figuring it’s time to leave the countryside and become urbanized. (Carrying this idea of a coyote
diaspora to absurdity, one can imagine them preying on the chicken coops and vegetable gardens that are springing up in Detroit and Brooklyn.)