FOLK-ROCK GROWS FEATHERS
THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD married Canadian folk duo IAN & SLYVIA to a pounding rock group well versed in country music. JOHN EINARSON speaks with the band about their country- rock period.
P
OPULAR CANADIAN FOLK music duo Ian & Sylvia Tyson had already taken the bold step of releasing the country album
Nashville in early 1968 using the cream of that city’s country music session players. They followed that with Full Circle released in August ’68, which blended traditional folk with a country backing.
With the folk boom deflated by the British Invasion, Ian & Sylvia had managed to survive by playing folk-rock after the We Five took Sylvia’s ‘You Were On My Mind’ to the top of the pop charts. However following that they had suffered through lean years and by ’68 Ian & Sylvia were rethinking their direction.
Formed in ’61 in Toronto’s Yorkville coffee house district the duo had come to the attention of Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman who nurtured their songwriting abilities and put them on the college folk circuit. There they became the darlings of the folk crowd with folk classics like ‘Four Strong Winds’ and ’Someday Soon’, Ian & Sylvia enjoyed tremendous success in the early ’60s. But by the middle of the decade the duo found work harder to come by.
“The Beatles shut us down,” admits Ian Tyson. “It was over. We were the hottest ticket in California for about a year and a half but then I remember standing in The Troubadour and the announcer was publicising upcoming acts and when he mentioned Ian & Sylvia, some of the people
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booed. We had gone from the hippest people around to being booed.”
Raised in Western Canada, Ian had strong country roots and his earliest musical memories are of cowboy songs, and the Country & Western music he heard on the radio. “If a song had a western theme, it held my interest,” he maintains. At least one or two songs on every Ian & Sylvia album featured Tyson’s country or bluegrass leanings. Ahead of the country-rock pack, given their previous body of work and adjudging themselves eminently qualified to pursue the country path, Ian & Sylvia were determined to pursue a country-rock direction in February ’69.
“We went to hear the Burrito Brothers in New York,” Ian recalls. “They were tremendously loud and you couldn’t hear what they were doing over this huge gigantic wall of drawl and twang, but Gram was a real charismatic kid. I really liked what they were doing.” Energized, the two returned to Canada to form The Great Speckled Bird.
“We were all plugged into Buck Owens – us, The Byrds, Gram Parsons and the Burrito Brothers – that Bakersfield thing. I had my ideas of how this new thing should go.” The Great Speckled Bird was a high energy country-rock band featuring pedal steel as well as lead guitar and driven by a heavier drum sound than any of their contemporaries. The Bird’s line-up was a mix of Canadians, an American pedal steel guitarist named Buddy Cage, lead guitarist
Amos Garrett, American Norman “ND” Smart II on drums, bass player Ken Kalmusky and Ian & Sylvia on vocals. “There was a lot of talent in that band,” Ian acknowledges.
Indeed, the interplay between Garrett and Cage became one of several signatures of the Bird’s sound and Smart’s previous rock experience with The Remains and Mountain brought a stronger drum sound to the band. “That’s what made it country rock,” he boasts. Combining Ian and Sylvia’s folk-based harmony and songwriting plus the dazzling Buckaroo-style interplay between Garrett and Cage, the Bird dazzled in concert. “We knew we were unique,” states Garrett. “I don’t think it had a name yet, we weren’t even calling it country-rock.”
In November, The Great Speckled Bird arrived in Nashville to record their debut album for Grossman’s Bearsville Records with rock ’n’ roll studio wizard Todd Rundgren producing. “I don’t think Nashville had ever seen anything like Todd Rundgren before,” laughs Sylvia. “Plus he had a couple of The GTOs with him. I think the Nashville police took one look at them and decided they were trouble.” Bass player Ken Kalmusky had been dropped from the line-up and Nashville session star Norbert Putnam played in his place with David Briggs contributing piano. Rather than let the Nashville cats shape their sound, The Great Speckled Bird had already crafted their own approach before arriving in town and merely let the tape machine capture it. “Getting acceptance of the Nashville crowd was tough, but we earned that,” notes Smart
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