Free The Long Trail: My Life in the West by Ian Tyson

too. Sylvia’s ego wasn’t as easily bruised as mine, and she was way more even-tempered than me. I don’t think she was upset about the Beatles or the Burritos or any of it. I was angry because we had fallen out of fashion — and I didn’t know what to do about it.
    I kept drifting into country rock and getting to know more of the Nashville players. I really liked the Waylon-and-Willie movement and wanted to be part of that, but I never was. I was a bluegrass freak too. But the guitar playing was very demanding and difficult. Had I been able to play well enough, I probably would have ended up as a bluegrass musician.
    Instead I formed a country-rock band called Great Speckled Bird, named after the Roy Acuff song of the same name. Sylvia, Amos Garrett (guitar), Buddy Cage (steel guitar), Jim Colegrove (bass), N.D. Smart (drums) and David Wilcox (guitar) were all part of the band at various times.
    We recorded our only album in 1970.
Great Speckled Bird
is a very good record, and today it’s recognized as such, but we didn’t know how to reproduce that rock sound live. In the studio the engineers controlled the electronics, but onstage I didn’t have their help with my electric guitar. The other guys struggled with the tech too.

    Great Speckled Bird, from left: N.D. Smart, Buddy Cage, me, Sylvia, David Wilcox and Jim Colegrove
. (DON NEWLANDS)
    In 1970 we played the Festival Express, the Canadian cross-country train tour, where we did a lot of jamming with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and The Band. Jerry was a real social guy who sure knew how to keep those jams going. There was a lot of dope smoking and drinking on the train — everyone had a cigarette hanging out of his or her mouth, and Janis Joplin drank everyone under the table — but the jams were really quite good.
    The tour became a big political mess after the dopers and hippies tried to take over the event in Toronto and force us and the rest of the artists to do our concerts for free. I wasn’t interested in that at all. The press poured gasoline allover the situation, aiding and abetting the hippies’ cause, and then sanctimoniously claimed they weren’t taking sides. Thankfully Kenny Walker, the promoter, never backed down. He told the hippies to eff off, which was the right thing to do.
    I broke my hand on some knucklehead’s noggin when the train stopped in Calgary in July. My drummer, N.D. Smart, had started kibitzing with these farm boys who’d pulled up to a stop sign beside us. It escalated after we pulled over in front of the Cecil Hotel, on the east side of downtown. Both sides started throwing punches. The other guys backed down only when they realized who I was, but by then I had busted my left hand — a bit of a problem, since I had to play. I’ve always had a temper.
    We kept touring the U.S. and Canada, but the colleges we’d played as Ian & Sylvia hated us when we showed up with Great Speckled Bird. There was one exception: Berkley. They loved the band. But the Ivy League schools we’d famously played as a duo couldn’t handle the change from acoustic folk to country rock. It was like Bob Dylan plugging in, albeit on a much lesser scale.
    The sound systems weren’t very good in those days, which didn’t help. There was absolutely no balancing of monitors. Musicians live by monitors — without them, we can’t play good music — but we didn’t have the quality technology we have today. It was very primitive. The rock bands really did everyone a favour by blowing out all those crappy Shure sound systems. They’re all gone now, and good riddance. The Japanese saw the market potential and they started making quality equipment.
    The real problem in Great Speckled Bird was that I didn’tknow how to be a bandleader. When I worked with Sylvia alone, since she loved me and was an old-fashioned girl, she pretty much did what I told her to do. But when I formed a band with four or five other guys, it was a completely different