To thine own self be true

for the first time was my hearing Bob Dylan’s summer of 1965 talking blues single on the radio, which I promptly bought and spent hours trying to decipher the wild lyrics. As I deciphered the words, a story unfolded of an outsider, an adolescent coming of age in a crazy, mixed up, confusing world; in short, it reflected and spoke to my own personal experience and was a tremendous archetypal affirmation of the individual, the nonconformist, and the rebel.

Excerpt:

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doing it again
You better duck down the alleyway
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coonskin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
But you only got ten

Shortly after that, on a snowy Saturday evening that December in a Winnipeg Ness Avenue drugstore, I took the plunge and bought his folk-rock album (well, the A side anyway; side B was folk–him solo), the first significant expression of that genre. I had never heard anything resembling that album before; this was something as powerful as The Beatles’ music, but something which had so much more to say with lyrics that challenged you, stretching your brain and imagination!

The lyrics consisted of metaphors, similes, juxtapositions, irony, and wit and offered memorable characterizations and imaginative image-laden narratives. Dylan’s lyrics were totally unique, allusive, literate, surreal, and archetypal; they were essentially and memorably the most significant popular poetry of the day.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” was my first encounter with Dylan and later sent me back to his past folk albums and forward to the future albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde and Blonde, which completed his brilliant trifecta run. Dylan pretty much earned his Nobel Prize for Poetry from those three albums and established himself as the King of Folk, the King of Folk Rock, and the Ultimate Poet-Songwriter of the late 20th century.

I will conclude by adding that Dylan created much awareness and consciousness through his intelligent, no-nonsense lyrics. IMHO, it is impossible to truly understand the 1960s and ’60s sensibility without an exposure to Dylan’s amazing catalogue of over 300 songs consisting of many gems and masterpieces.

Coming by next year at this time in Canada. The problem being their mercury and disposal in landfills and home garbage.

I smelled a rat several years ago and stocked up on the oldies (and still have some for the future).

Much the same scenario as the EVs that have trouble with Canadian winters, long distance drives, and few and far-between charging stations.

O Brave New Tech Worlds that are as flawed as human beings in the face of obvious physical realities! O the recurringly dumb, dubious, absurd environmental choices!

in keeping the political faith in American folk music after 1966: a major moral and social conscience of America–the tragic genius, ultra-Romantic songwriter, and witty protest singer Phil Ochs.

“It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. Even though you can’t expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That’s morality, that’s religion. That’s art. That’s life.”

*For an extensive overview of Ochs and his career, see my April 10/20 blog entry “Remembering Rebel ’60s Folkie Phil Ochs”.

1. The great struggle of the time continues to be between truth and lies as 150 Republicans hang on to the lie that Biden is not president, as China totally falsifies its Covid death count, as Putin lies to Ukrainians about a Christmas ceasefire, as the climate crisis continues to be denied and unaddressed, as the AB UCPs wilfully deny the contamination of mountain mines on that geographic area, as well as innumerable other examples on the global and home fronts and in the relationships of people’s daily lives.

2. No, there’s nothing more real and satisfying than a physical kiss, hug, or other physical contact. This has been brought home by isolations created in families, friendships, and other situations. Pets have helped enormously in the meantime–again that real physical contact. And, you can really see the truth of this when kids enthusiastically hug parents, grandparents, and friends. There are the best expressions of abiding love and the vital, remaining human need for touch and physical contact of any kind.

3. The current age has also confirmed that Common Sense no longer lives here on government, political, and widespread social levels. The Canadian government has approved cannabis gummies that are getting into the hands of children, in the U.S. children have access to guns with a 6-year-old recently shooting his teacher, and in Edmonton bike lanes are a priority for snow clearing in winters and blizzards. Meantime, Trump and allies remain free and unindicted. This is very much the age of the Macbethian “Nothing is but what is not” and “Fair is foul and foul is fair” and Yeats’s “rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to born” (A.I. robots being given human intelligence, McCarthy becoming GOP speaker, Trump slouching toward the 2024 election., etc.)
Reason, rationality, let alone basic common sense and respect for the laws, do not live here anymore in any widespread sense.

“GOPs in the House, endlessly writhing around each other, feasting on each other; no one snake being holier or saner than any of the others. All power-hungry and self-consumed with ego.”

-R.D.

“The prolonged, selfishly agenda-ed, unconscionable public abuse of words.”
-R.D.

“Better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
-D.H. Lawrence

“The starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
-Immanuel Kant

“The majority is never right.”
-Henrik Ibsen

“My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
-Langston Hughes

“What other dungeon is as dark as one’s own heart?”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
-Goethe

“Once you learn to read you will be forever free.”
-Douglass

“We live in the flicker.”
-Conrad

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”
-Carroll

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”
-Voltaire

“We are all in paradise, but refuse to see it.”
-Dostoevsky

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
-E.M. Forster

“Wit is well-bred insolence.”
-Aristotle

“There is no denying the wild horse in us.”
-Woolf

“All truths wait in all things.”
-Whitman

“The fool doth think he is wise but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
-Shakespeare

“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky to have.”
-James

“Have you ever heard the earth breathe?”
-Kate Chopin

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.”
-Thoreau

“Before the law sits a gatekeeper.”
-Kafka

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
-Milton

The perfect liar and fraud in the footsteps of Trump!
A poetic-justice fit for the corrupt Republican party!

are built bit by bit. The sources are many and built up from the past to present. It’s true what Carroll and Jefferson Airplane said about feeding your head. Your body and spirit as well. You do have to keep ‘putting things in’, trying out different things and experiences. Awareness and consciousness are about expansion, growth. In those ways, one becomes ‘larger’ in Whitman’s sense.

Looking back, I’d have to say that my own trajectory started out as awareness, particularly in the early, formative years. But from adulthood on, my journey has been more about consciousness and consciousness expansion, the final stages of individual completion and fulfillment.

(Vanguard, 1966; photo: Paul Rockett, design: Jules Halfant)



(So Much for Dreaming–closeup/excerpt of jacket, Vanguard, 1966; authentic, rare flatsigned cover: “Sylvia” to left of Ian’s head, “Ian Tyson” on his neck; photo: Philippe Halsman)

(1967 MGM album)

(photo from the 1968 MGM Full Circle album; divisions in their marriage were beginning to show here–Ian had a ranch north of Toronto and Sylvia lived in their T.O. Rosedale home)

(Columbia, 1971)

(highly recommended book by John Einarson and the Tysons, McClelland & Stewart, 2011; photo: Paul Rockett, Elliott Contemporary; design: Terry Nimmo)

(Ian’s preferred image and authentic cowboy identity from 1975 on; the popular Cowboyography, 1987, Stony Plain LP; photo: Kurt Markus, design: Elaine Prodor Design)



(left: signed illustrated bio–1994 Gibbs & Smith, photo: Ellen Brodylo & Mike Morrow, design: Mary Ellen Thompson; right: 2010 Random House–written with Jeremy Klaszus, photo: Kurt Markus, design: Terry Nimmo)

…………………………………………………………….

Ian Dawson Tyson (1933-2022) and Sylvia (Fricker) Tyson (1940-) have been entertaining for decades with their unique voices and songs. Ian and Sylvia, as they were first known, began working together in early ’60s Toronto and eventually developed a wide-ranging fan base on both sides of the border. As a duo, they released many fine, interesting albums into the ’70s including their country-rock masterpiece Great Speckled Bird,

as well as writing many popular songs including “You Were on My Mind”, “Loving Sound”, “Someday Soon”, and the iconic “Four Strong Winds”–frequently voted the most favorite, popular Canadian song.

They started as a folk duo, eventually being supported by such famous musicians as Felix Pappalardi, David Wilcox, Amos Garrett, and David Rea. They explored folk rock briefly before transitioning into country rock, largely through Ian’s background and tastes. Along the way they had their own tv shows such as CTV’s news show Sunday, and  Nashville North, later retitled The Ian Tyson Show.

After they split in 1975 and Ian walked out of his well-paying tv show, Sylvia hosted a CBC radio show Touch the Earth, anchored the popular all-female folk group Quartette, and wrote a well-reviewed novel Joyner’s Dream. Ian, meanwhile, embraced his cowboy roots fully with a successful run of cowboy lifestyle albums for Holger Petersen’s Stony Plain Records. He authored two books about his life, and eventually, he and Sylvia did some reunion appearances (notably on a 1980s CBC special–available online) and told their story together in Four Strong Winds, shown above.

I first got interested in them early in 1967 (when I was still in grade 12) via their first folk-rock album So Much for Dreaming, and learned to cover several of their songs. I picked up their previous album Play One More, their last folk album, and later that winter–Jan. 1968, my fiance and I saw them perform in a big sold-out gymnasium at U of M; they were hot then, touring campuses, and the perfect epitome of a handsome, talented folk duo-couple at the height of the hootenanny era. They would send shivers down your back with their a cappella Appalachian songs like “The Greenwood Sidie”! I have never heard a couple sing tighter and more powerfully than they did that night.

We later went to see them in their country-rock glory as Great Speckled Bird at the U of A cafeteria in late 1970–an amazing show that left many of their purer folkie fans in the dust. But they had many great new songs (“”Trucker’s Café”, “Smiling Eyes”, “Love What You’re Doin’ Child,” “Calgary”, “This Dream”) and their best-ever back-up road band. They deserved a far better fate as tastes changed and their sales and concerts dwindled.

But they were both survivors and I’m glad I got to see Ian in his full cowboy sensibility playing live several times, including with ESO. The three books released (above) cover his and Sylvia’s life and work together and apart nicely. Much of their best Ian and Sylvia work is covered by Great Speckled Bird and by The Complete Vanguard Studio Recordings.

One of the top 3 folk acts of the time, they significantly influenced my early music, other folk songwriters like Lightfoot and Neil Young, and developed new understandings of the possibilities of folk music. They were truly beautiful, charming, tasteful entertainers and remain wonderful examples of Canadian performers, songwriters, and artists who came to the timely fore of Canada’s then-Centennial era.

(A recent release–2019–worth getting for their live band performances on disc 1 of many of their old popular folk songs–“Darcy Farrow”, “When First Unto This Country”, “Four Rode By”, “Nancy Whiskey”, “Four Strong Winds”, “Little Beggarman”.)