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

story.
    This was an unruly bunch. Being on time didn’t mean anything to them. On the road you’ve got to be a road warrior, you’ve got to stand and be counted. If you’re supposed to be at the bus at a certain time, you be there at that time — not ten minutes late. These guys all thought otherwise. They looked at our tours as a laissez-faire communal dope-smoking party. You can’t run a band like that.
    The guys were just immature and so was I. Since then I’ve learned some crucial life lessons about being a bandleader. You’ve got to be completely honest and consistent day in and day out. Your word has got to be law and your word has to be good, all the time. If you take the easy way out and bend the truth, even over a silly detail like scheduling on the road, it’ll come back to bite you on the ass. The band members expect you to be above reproach, even when they’re not.
    If one of the band members tries it on with you, you call his bluff right away. By the time I caught on to all this, Great Speckled Bird was long gone. Bands are as good as their weakest link, but in the trio I play with now (Gord Maxwell on bass and Lee Worden on guitar), there is no weak link. Maybe I’m skewed in my opinion, but I think the western boys are more solid, more responsible — especially if they’re country boys.
    All these lessons I learned about being a bandleader apply to riding horses too. You need consistency and youcan’t lose your temper. You need to be able to read things that are coming up. And with both musicians and horses, you lead by example.
    Despite my failings as a bandleader, Great Speckled Bird broke up only when Jesse Winchester’s people rustled my guys. I don’t think Jesse himself could have engineered it, but his people came to the Montreal hotel where we were playing. A few days later the majority of my band was out the door.
    Time heals and people eventually grow up. That’s where patience comes in. All of us Great Speckled Bird guys are pretty good friends after all these years.

CHAPTER 5
Horses
    B y the time Great Speckled Bird broke up in the early 1970s, I was doing a weekly half-hour country music show out of Toronto. The show had originally been called
Nashville North
, but in the second year CFTO-TV changed the name to the
Ian Tyson Show
. I’d open each episode with a song with the band (the remnants of Great Speckled Bird) and then we’d bring on the guests, singers such as Willie Nelson, Faron Young, Johnny Rodriguez, Mel Tillis, Dolly Parton and Conway Twitty.
    While Sylvia sang on some of the episodes, both the station and I were kind of squeezing her out. I wanted to learn how to sing solo country music. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it or not and I figured the show would be a test for that. My goal was to find a good generic country music style — a radio-friendly style — and there was no way I could do that in the context of our duo. The duet is a pretty restrictive format because you always have to blend and there’s little room for extemporaneous vocals. You’re alwaysthrowing your voice up against the other voice to get that clean harmony sound. That’s true of all duos — not only Ian & Sylvia, but also Simon and Garfunkel, the Everly Brothers and so on.

    With Conway Twitty on
The Ian Tyson Show. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)
    It was important for me to go beyond Ian & Sylvia, and the station wasn’t interested in belabouring the duo sound either. It was time for Ian & Sylvia to end, but the move would strain our marriage. I’m sure Sylvia was offended, though at the time it seemed that she took it all in stride. Or maybe that was me just being oblivious.
    As it turned out, I handled the solo work on the showjust fine. My band rehearsed constantly; we were hungry and worked hard, and we garnered great ratings. I didn’t have my true vocal style down yet — that would come later, in the cowboy recordings — but we knew how to play country music. We had focus.
    I put