Flirt: The Interviews

Table of Contents

 

 

 

—You smell like a saddle.

—Thank you. I appreciate that.

—Ol' Eon, they call you.

—Some do, yes, some did call me that. Will you accept a slug of Courvoisier in that mug of coffee?

—You are credited – no, thanks, you go ahead – you are credited with reviving the lost art of cowboy poetry and cowboy songs. The
Atlantic Monthly
called you the “leading voice of cowboy culture.”

—Well, the men did all that. I'm simply the one pickin' and singin' and posin' for the nice liner notes. I'll calve the heifers at forty below come spring, but I'm no John Wayne or anything. It's not the money.

—I appreciate what you did for the men who rode the range. I appreciate your compassion for the Navajo rug. And I like your white hat. Maybe take it off.

—Not just now.

—What kind of dog would that be?

—Where?

—That black and white dog way out there chasing the mallard, over by the pond, the trembling aspens. See it?

—My wife's border collie. Somewhat haywire.

—Is it true you sang “Don't Fence Me In” at the funeral for the head of Woodward's department stores?

—My friend Chunky Woodward bred quarter horses up there on a half million acres at Douglas Lake. I owned the offspring of Peppy San, his world champion cutting horse, and I admired a man who could fly out of concrete downtown Vancouver Friday afternoon and scout the pine rail fence lines on his ranch, hike in bunch grass for all the weekend. I was honoured; folks wept in that big church, and that's good.

—Ever shoot a Hereford steer in the brain with a rifle while it's eating grain, and then cut its throat in your frozen brown field, your daughter's watching NBA basketball on TV, two days after your forty-fifth birthday?

—I know those who have, old cowpunchers; no one like you, though. Grief is unpredictable. I estimate it's a figure eight, a riata.

—When I first heard the songs –
your
songs, not yours and hers – I was new in Vancouver, back from card cataloguing an Indian Reserve school library, enforcing the Dewey decimal system, decorating walls with good-natured book jackets. Kindergarteners were flaccid from marshmal-lows for breakfast, canned icing. The kids there wondered after the clean bandages around my wrists. “Did you cry,” they asked. “How
much
did it hurt,” they wanted to know.

You have a daughter, the one who was little and blonde in that rug video.

—A young lady by now, I believe. I believe she paints.

—Back in Vancouver, city chick reborn, I fell hard for a sax teacher, fell hard for an Athletic Director, fell hard for a Restaurant Manager. Then I bought spike heels and a cameo choker and dumbed down and fell for four guitar players in a row and stopped at Danny. He had your records. He had a jumbo Gibson and extra-hard picks; he had an apartment in the East End off 12th Avenue.

—Could do worse. Could date stock brokers. Women like you, though: legs, dark hair that curls. Musicians. The mix is readymade and often too strong. You have no enduring regrets, I'm hoping. You've moved on, apparently.

—A band party had made me nervous. I dressed too filmic, flirted chaotically. I drank many somethings and pretended Emmylou with her Hot Band. I imagined all the boys wanted me but respected my music so much

– my “approach” so much, the legacy of Gram and legendary shit – plus the grey starting through one side of my long hair, that the boys could only be pleased when I strummed their knee with my fingers. The skinny drummer from Steinbach. My hose shredded. I swooned. Danny got me out of there, walked me off to his apartment against the coldest night, and tucked me in under his mother's cat-piss afghan.

Four a.m., still dark, he served a plate of buttered toast and scrambled eggs with hot salsa. I came around – magically nude – to the stereo playing. He wore a scruffy brown bathrobe, open to the waist. Cartoon hair tufted at his sternum. And the record played you, Eon: “Surely to goodness – ”

—“This time . . . it's forever.”

—Uh-oh. Might weep a little.

—Well, that is a lovely voice you have. I mean it. Just don't Emmylou your lyrics. Don't swallow the words, sweetheart. Hey, . . . wait. Hey . . . Hey . . . You still with me? Show me your pretty face.

—Look at that little dog. Look out there. Her dog's just running circles out there, pressing down the low hay, disappearing into it, happy to be crossing your huge green field, duck or no duck. I hear a chainsaw.

Do they call you tenor or baritone? Is that vibrato natural?

—They call me, as you pointed out, Ol' Eon. He's pretending sheep.

—You're much, much older than you look.

—I thank you again.

—Danny handed me a beer stein of cold grapefruit juice and stretched out his long legs beside me on the mattress and said, “You need someone to look after you,” which was both true and false.

—Like western music.

—Maybe. Danny opened for you with his buddy Stan Mitrikas, first at the Golden Garter Saloon in Edmonton and next at a paddock folk festival outside 100 Mile House. They were eighteen. Danny'd just left home – Thunder Bay and a drunk-choked dead brother – and they called their set-up The Luminators. Telecaster, Precision bass, tick-tock drum machine.

—I don't recall anybody's drum machine.

—He worshipped you, but you've heard that before.

—Picker boys. You understand their weaknesses as well as I do, evidently.

—Now, is it “One Jump Ahead of the Devil,” where you confess, “My pickers are about to leave me”?

—You've got the tune. And they always were and always did. Still do, given the right direction of wind and adequate velocity.

—Why is that?

—Why is what?

—Why are pickers always about to leave, why do they do that always?

—Well, at one time I was probably not the easiest person, not the easiest boss or bandleader. I refer to relationships with certain painkillers. Likewise, Lightfoot, the Hawk, likewise the world. I have known hard-pressed freelance steers and my legs betray those battles, my hips in particular. The ankle was rodeo-shot long ago. Pills.

—I wrote a paper in grad school – this is way past Danny – about you and Leonard Cohen.

—You'll have to lead me through the connection, would you?

—Cowboy poets. Mellifluous.

—I'm not seeing it. Good grade?

—I was pregnant. I was broke. I overlooked how Cohen, given his ethnicity, his pricey Montreal tailor, his haircuts and angel choir, is more rodeo clown. A cowboy parody.

—Parity is important, especially in a relationship. Or a record deal.

—Who's your tailor, Eon? How do you get that thing to happen to your jeans, where leg meets torso just like that? Don't be shy. You are the most handsome man.

—In showbiz?

—In everywhere. Danny would have hitch-hiked all night into any crevice of any province if you'd called to say, “I need a player.” Three years into us, he was playing the lounge of the Newton Inn in the botched end of Surrey. You were booked into the cabaret. At seven o'clock, while he was doing a high and heartfelt parody of Kitty Wells, you limped into the lounge and had a few kind words with him. “This is my girlfriend,” Danny said. “She's a singer, too.”

—Now, tell me I didn't make a pass. And if I did, I'm here to say I'm sorry but I've always had an excellent eye.

—I was twenty-five and puffy at every joint, my face a scabbed balloon. I doubt it. You asked him to join you later on the big stage, to sit in on standards, sing some backup, the high harmonies. Danny knew all the notes, all the parts and possibilities. Hundreds of hick couples scuffed around the dance floor. Cigarettes were legal and the cloud cover was low. Later, after
Danny sang with you on the stage, naked and gangled without the Gibson and its wide strap, me and Danny danced close to the high stage. He wanted to just go home. The women curved beneath you, but so did bolotied men. They all wanted your eyes to follow them, regardless of Stetson shadow.

—Danny. Still playing the bars?

—Nashville.

—Good.

—We're all thrilled for him. Stan electrocuted himself in the bathroom at the Hope Hotel, maybe you heard. Plug-in radio. Deliberate act of “fuck the world.”

—Well.

—Can we talk about “Summer Wages”?

—That came a ways before the cowboy songs.

—Of course it did, but it came back on
Cowboyography
.

—What did you think about that album? Be honest.

—Oh. Nice fiddle, the piano a little tinkly, thin sound overall, backup singers too angel-choir for me. And yet perfect, too, for all those reasons. The remix of “Summer Wages” was apt, given the album and its larger context.

—How so?

—It seems to me many of the themes and images and tonal patterns that show up in the later cowboy songs – I'm thinking here of the more lyrical and swooping melodies of your romantic ballads – existed, too, in “Summer Wages.”

—Not sure I follow.

—Come on. Men. Work. Cowboy pride. Women for pleasure not forever. The solitude of physical labour and the dislocation of seasonal employment. The unexpected melodrama of the minor chord. You're not seeing these as recurring patterns in your work?

—Could be there, I confess. I call them “knife and whore songs.” They're not for everybody.

—The hookers standing watchfully are symbolic of the stands of cedar timber, and vice versa.

—Hold on. Not so fast.

—Hey, I've
lived
with a towboater, man. I've
seen
the women outside the bars on Main Street. The Waterfront Corral. I played those bars and I saw the boys and their pay packets thrown up in the alley. I sang “Someday Soon” and saw losers fall in love on the dance floor of the American Hotel. The steel guitar sliced my inner ear and when the serious clapping faded and the hicks stuck their fat tongues down each other's throats, Charlie the Steel said to me and my voice, “See what you do? See it? You make people do that to each other.”

Is that a Calgary Stampede belt buckle?

—Austin, Texas. Home of the armadillo.

—Now, I thought they wouldn't let you back into that country. Some warrant in some state. Do I have this wrong?

—I've been pardoned.

—The towboater had never heard your lovely logging song.

—Not surprising. Lousy radio play in those days. Still. We have entered the age of the big black hat.

—So after our first weekend together –

—This is the towboater, now?

—Right. After the dozen croissants and pot of coffee and Seattle newspapers, I stayed naked, slimmed down and smooth, and took out my old Yamaki –

—Hey, they made some nice instruments. What year?

—Bought the year my sister died, with the 150 bucks left in her savings account. I've had guys offer one grand, cash, for that guitar, even with overweight heads and cracked neck and warps. Deep. Big. I developed a style of finger-picking – part pluck, part slap and pull and strum – that gave extra bottom and punch to the slimy folk sound. Where my fingernail hit the sound hole there was an ugly rip in the inlay, but the sound was good, percussive. I played for the towboater, facing him where he propped his sore neck on three pillows. I sang. He didn't know where to look. Embarrassed, shocked. Tired, I suppose. He said he liked the part about “slippery city shoes” since he'd just had a pair – 400 bucks, custom measured – of caulk boots made. Have you heard what they call it? “The folk scare of the early seventies.”