The Long Trail: My Life in the West (6 page)

We agreed that we would visit Evinia in L.A. — we were corresponding off and on — and took along our copies of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
. That book came out right when I was in the middle of art school, and it hit me and my associates big time. Kerouac’s road had western tinges to it, and I used to go to rodeos with that book packed in my rigging bag. I was a beatnik cowboy, I guess. I liked the idea of being an outsider hipster who loved literature and music but lived the outlaw life.

I don’t know where we got the gas money, but we drove Ron’s Dodge all the way to the Grapevine — the long grade between Bakersfield, California, and L.A. That’s where the car died. We decided to split up to hitchhike the rest of the way.

I stuck out my thumb and a rather cool-looking dude in a sedan stopped to pick me up. He wore a classy tan corduroy suit and cowboy boots.

“You a cowboy?” he asked. I was wearing a straw hat.

“Well, I’d like to be.”

“What happened?”

I said our car died.

“Can you ride?”

“Sure, I can ride.”

“My name’s Sam, and we’re doing a television series next week out at RKO Studios. Brand-new series called
The Rifleman
. I think it’s going to be a winner. I could probably help you out, get you a job riding up and down the street as an extra.”

I never went, but I later learned that the Sam I met that day was former
Gunsmoke
scriptwriter Sam Peckinpah, who went on do classic westerns such as
Ride the High Country
and
The Wild Bunch
. Years later, in the early 1970s, at a get-together in Durango, Mexico, during the filming of
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
with Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, I met Sam again. He remembered the whole hitchhiking episode. I was going to ride in that movie, but I got deathly sick on the plane going down. Again I had missed a chance to be in one of Peckinpah’s productions.

I eventually made it to L.A. and met up with Evinia. By this time I had started to realize I had been an asshole and I wanted to repair the damage. But too much damage had been done. We had a big fight, so I thumbed my way back to Vancouver and art school. I made it back in record time — about two days.

By this time I was really sliding off the dime and not taking care of my art. In order to graduate and get a diploma, each student had to put on an art show. I could barely do it. I didn’t have enough material because I was always off playing guitar. But somehow I cobbled something together, enough to graduate in 1958.

I did learn a bit about line and composition in art school. Even though I was goofing off all the time, I absorbed a lot by osmosis. It took decades before I figured out that I had
actually learned about aesthetics during those years. I also became an admirer of the French impressionists as well as Charlie Russell.

After graduation I went pipelining west of Kamloops with my friend Jack Bruce, a skiing star from Banff I’d met while working for Brewster. He drove one of the big buses and I got to know him over the card table in the paint shop. (Jack somehow eventually met Evinia through me and they were married for a short time. She had many husbands and men afterwards, but she had her only child with Jack.)

I kept rodeoing while Jack and I pipelined. At the end of the season I got laid off. The labour foreman, an American guy from Washington, owned a ranch nearby. “Can you start some broncs?” he asked me, referring to the initial training of unbroken horses.

“Sure I can,” I answered, full of hubris and bravado.

I must have convinced him. Pretty soon I found myself batching it, breaking colts up at Deadman Creek. They must have been pretty gentle ponies — otherwise I could have got myself killed. I didn’t know anything about breaking horses and it was just dumb luck that got me through. I got ’em rode, though I don’t think I had much to teach them. It would have been wonderful if I’d had some experienced old hand to work with, but I had to teach myself. The experience gave me some lines for my song about Will James that I wrote in the 1980s:

It’s true. I just saddled them up and bumbled around as best I could. It was a start, and I’ve met lots of guys who had similar experiences. (“How’d you learn the trade?” I ask. “Just basic Will James,” they say.)

I spent about two weeks at Deadman Creek, but soon I was headed down to L.A. again. Somewhere south of the border, near Blaine, Washington, a cool old French-Canadian bootlegger offered me a ride.

“Where you headed?” I asked.

“I’m going east, Dean.” (The guy called me Dean because he couldn’t say
Ian.)
So I went east with him, drifting as always. The French Canadian and I laid over in Miles City, Montana, while he got his car fixed — a stay I’ll never forget, even though it was only a few days. In the 1950s Miles City was a hardcore cowtown; it had its own whiskey row, a long strip of old saloons. It was like walking into
Lonesome Dove
. The saloons were packed with bartenders and cowboys and whores, and they were all playing poker constantly. Everyone used big silver dollars to buy their whiskey. Fights would break out here and there. It was the quintessential West — the whole town was going full blast. It was the first time I’d seen a place like that. There was certainly no place like it anywhere in Canada.

Miles City made a huge impression on a kid who would eventually write and sing about the West. I wouldn’t see Miles City again until I was a cowboy star, almost forty years later, and it was quite a disappointment. They’re pretty redneck there, and the authentic cowtown flavour has been
replaced by McDonalds and Subways. But back in the 1950s it was the old Montana.

During that layover waiting for the car, someone offered me a job breaking broncs up on the Missouri River. It’s a good thing I didn’t take it, because this time I probably would have got killed. Instead I kept drifting east with the French Canadian. We wound up in Chicago, where he had relatives. I was flat broke and he kindly drove me all the way to Windsor, where he bought me a bus ticket to Toronto.

After I got off the bus in Toronto, I called my mother and she sent me some money. Within days I landed a short-lived job at the
Star Weekly
, where I drew a few cowboy illustrations for novelettes the magazine was publishing. At night I played the coffeehouses.

In 1958 the coffeehouse scene was really taking off in Toronto, to the point where the city had more coffeehouses than folksingers. The demand far exceeded the supply, so I had no shortage of gigs. I was living high on the hog, considering that I got paid fifteen dollars a night and only had to pay seven bucks a week for rent.

After the illustrator gig I got a job as an artist in a glass factory, designing decorative art for peanut butter jars and Resdan shampoo bottles. I didn’t have to be in until ten in the morning, which worked well for me, since I was singing at night. One day my shift foreman — a real nice Englishman — told me about this girl he’d heard down in Chatham, Ontario. “I was at this wild party on the weekend, and I met this lovely young lady singer. Absolutely terrific — and very unique. You should meet her.”

“Sounds great.” I was always keen on meeting girls, though I had a jealous Italian girlfriend, Michelle, at the time. But I wanted to meet this other girl, Sylvia Fricker, and hear this unique voice.

Sylvia ended up coming over to Michelle’s folks’ apartment, above a drycleaner on Avenue Road, where Michelle and I had shacked up for the weekend while her parents were away. Needless to say, Michelle was very upset about this pretty young folksinger intruding on her territory.

Sylvia impressed me from the start. She played this weird little mandocello — I’d never seen one before and don’t think I’ve seen one since — and boy, could she sing. She could sing on pitch, which hardly anybody did in those days, because we didn’t have monitors.

Pretty soon we were playing the Village Corner club on Avenue Road, a tiny brick house that became our main venue. That’s where Ian & Sylvia broke out onto the Toronto scene. Red Shea played there once, and I remember him blowing us all out the damn door with his playing. Unlike the rest of us, he really knew how to play. (Years later he played guitar in my country-rock band Great Speckled Bird.)

In 1961 Ian & Sylvia headlined the inaugural Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, along with the Travellers, a Jewish socialist outfit that was basically a Canadian knockoff of the Weavers. My claim to fame was designing the festival’s poster, which won an art directors’ award. That’s the poster that hangs in my kitchen to this day.

That same year Pete Seeger played Massey Hall in Toronto and invited us onstage. It was our first performance in a big concert hall like that — Massey Hall is a very august and revered venue, and I’m sure we were scared stiff. I don’t
think we were playing very well back then, but it didn’t matter. Folk was huge, and the shows were permeated by an incredible energy. It was like a runaway train. It was gonna go no matter what we did.

I
t was a rainy Manhattan autumn afternoon in 1962. I had borrowed our manager Albert Grossman’s flat, somewhere in the east 50s, in order that I might write a song. I’d run into Bob Dylan the day before at my hangout, the Kettle of Fish in the Village, and Bob had sung me his latest. I want to say it was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but memory does not serve me well in that regard. It could have been any one of his songs. At any rate, I’m listening and figuring,
Hey, how hard can this be? I know how the cold winds blow. I should give it a shot
. I had tried to write songs before, but it was all just incomplete scribbling.

In Albert’s dingy flat I took out my Martin D28 and commenced strumming, drifting back out west to open country and my beautiful Greek girl from the Okanagan Valley. We had gone our separate ways, she to California and me to Toronto and New York City, and it was uncertain when or if we’d meet again (she hadn’t yet married my friend Jack). The winds and seas were metaphors, though at the time I
wouldn’t have known a metaphor from a prairie gopher. I called the song “Four Strong Winds.”

Sylvia and I had come to New York with our friend Joe Taylor, a Dixieland jazz freak who wrote for the
Toronto Star
. Joe had got caught up in the folk thing like everyone else, and being a really helpful guy with a car, in 1961 he offered to drive us down from Toronto.

We’d heard of this place called Gerde’s Folk City and wanted to check it out. Gerde’s was an open-mic folk club, only they didn’t call them open mics in those days — they called them hootenannies or some damn thing. All the important folk promoters and managers were hanging around Gerde’s listening for new talent, and all the up-and-comers would strut their stuff onstage at the Monday night hootenannies. If you got up and had something to say, they sure took notice of you.

Greenwich Village was a very competitive place by the time we arrived. Back in Toronto, if you could hold a guitar and pretend you were playing it, you had a gig. Not so in the Village. You needed the chops, and everyone was scrambling to improve as musicians. On Sundays Washington Square would fill up with Jewish kids playing bluegrass, practising standard songs such as “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” on guitars and banjos. They’d form these little groups and play together for part of the afternoon before splitting off like amoebas and forming new groups to play with. That’s not easy music to play, and if you could really play along, you were king.

Sylvia was also ambitious, aspiring to constantly improve as a singer and musician. I knew a lousy work ethic would get me nowhere in New York. For the first time in my life, I could smell success.

Sylvia had rented an apartment down on the Lower East Side, near the Williamsburg Bridge. I didn’t have my own place in New York; I commuted back and forth to Toronto, chasing girls in both cities. I was always scuffling for a place to stay in New York. There were two hotels in the Village I stayed at; back then if you were half a day behind in your rent, they changed the lock on the door and you couldn’t get your stuff. That happened to me a couple times. They didn’t mess around.

Our social scene in the Village revolved around Gerde’s, the Kettle of Fish and the Gaslight Café, a dingy little coffeehouse directly downstairs from the Kettle of Fish. The Gaslight was run by Clarence Hood, an elderly Southerner from Mississippi, and his big, husky son, Sam. We played the Gaslight quite a bit and I liked Clarence and Sam a lot. Clarence always seemed a little out of place in New York. Looking at him and listening to his Southern accent, you’d have thought he was a hardware store owner in Georgia, not a coffee shop owner in Greenwich Village. He was a very courtly guy.

Peter, Paul and Mary were hanging around the clubs and coffeehouses with us, as were the singer-songwriters Tom Paxton and Fred Neil. We spent a lot of time with Dave Van Ronk, an established folksinger who had his own apartment (few people at the time owned their own flats). He was the social kingpin in the Village.

I also became friends with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the original Brooklyn cowboy and a very influential figure in the Village. He had just returned from Europe, where he was a big star, when I met him. Jack had left home in Brooklyn pretty early, joining a travelling Wild West show when he was about fifteen. He was a product of the Woody Guthrie era, but like me he didn’t buy into the socialism side of it. In
New York we spent a lot of time together at the old Hotel Earle on Washington Square. Both of us took great pride in our cowboy hats; Jack says I creased his hat for him by using a grapefruit to weigh it down in the sink. He returned the favour by teaching me his guitar method. His flat-pick style was very sophisticated, a blend of bluegrass and jazz. I think Jack influenced my guitar style more than anybody. We’re still very good friends to this day.

But it was Dylan who got everybody’s attention, because his style was so unconventional. When I met him after he’d come down out of Minnesota, he was loaded for bear. He knew exactly where he was going. He had focus. Of course it turned out he was a genius.