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

out my first solo album,
Ol’ Eon
, on A&M Records in 1973. The only reason I was on A&M was because of Albert Grossman’s power. To this day I think
Ol’ Eon
is a good record, but it didn’t get much attention. Nobody would give it a break. I couldn’t find that breakthrough song that gives a musician an identity. That’s how the industry worked back then, and still works to this day — you need the big song. Johnny Cash had “I Walk the Line.” Johnny Rodriguez had “Pass Me By.” Marty Robbins had “El Paso.” And I just couldn’t find that Ian Tyson song.
    Canada had decided that its country hero was going to be Stompin’ Tom Connors, who won the Juno award for best country male vocalist every year from 1971 to 1975. He obviously struck a chord with certain Canadians, but I didn’t identify with his music. (As well, I thought the Toronto crowd’s acceptance of his work was pretty condescending and patronizing. To me it seemed that they regarded Connors’s material as hick music.) I was pretty bitter about Stompin’ Tom’s popularity at the time. He had as much right to be successful in show business as anybody, but I didn’t have the maturity to deal with other people’s success.
    There’s a lot to be said for hanging in there when you’re not getting the recognition you think you deserve. Some musicians, like Jack Elliott, do that effortlessly, soldiering on through different fads and “eras” without any anger,focusing on perfecting their art. That perseverance usually pays off. But I didn’t get that at the time.
Why the hell do I have to hang in there?
I wondered. I wanted recognition
now
.

    Solo. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)
    I was also jealous of Gordon Lightfoot’s success. I’d helped him a lot when he was scuffling to get established in Toronto, and Ian & Sylvia had recorded a couple of his songs (“Early Morning Rain” and “For Loving Me”) when we were hot in the mid-1960s. I talked him up to Albert Grossman’s partner, John Court, who came up to Toronto and checked Gordon out, and they signed a contract. But it seemed that once Gordon became successful, he treated his old friends like unnecessary burdens from the past. He had all those hits in the 1970s, and I always felt he should have repaid the personal debt by cutting one of my tunes. Eventually, in the 1990s, he did cover one of my old Ian & Sylvia songs, “Red Velvet” — the song Johnny Cash was also a great fan of.
    Sylvia and I kept drifting apart. We had very different ideas about how we wanted to live. When I wasn’t recording the TV show, I spent most of my time at the farm. She preferred Rosedale. Our musical careers had brought and held us together, but now that Ian & Sylvia was finished, our marriage slowly dissolved. We spent less and less time together even though we were technically still married.
    Another woman entered my life as this was all going down. I was playing an old club in Montreal with the TV band when Katie Malloch came down to check us out. I think she was stringing for the CBC at the time — she would go on to host a variety of successful CBC shows — and wefell hard for each other. Katie thought it was very romantic to be running around with a cowboy in Montreal. I’d go visit her there and she would come down to my farm when she could. For some reason my little bay mare took an instant dislike to Katie and bucked her off, breaking her wrist.
    Clay also visited me regularly at the cattle farm. He did well out there. Even as a boy, Clay had a real aptitude around livestock. Clay knew about Katie — sometimes they were at the farm at the same time — but it’s hard to say what he felt about our affair back then. I wasn’t being very sensitive about the whole thing, that’s for sure.
    Katie and I liked each other a lot, and eventually I told Sylvia. That was the breaking point. Sylvia could accept a lot of things but she couldn’t accept that. I don’t blame her.
    Clay was eight or nine