Volume six number Three, Two Thousand Ten | fa l l

Hope at the End of the Rope: Montana

Ranch Helping Kids No One Else Wants
Crow Tribe Bets on Its Future
Tracking Backcountry Bad Guys

Cowboy Cool: Kicking it with Zarzyski and Gustafson

Raising a Pint at Wibaux’s

Beaver Creek Brewery
 art

COWBOY COOL
Legendary rodeo poet Paul Zarzyski and singer/songwriter
Wylie Gustafson team up to create music infused with
the heart of the past that’s grounded in the present

BY SCOT T MCMILLION | PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LEE

Poet Paul Zarzyski,

far left, and
musician Wylie
Gustafson, top,
visit with a reporter
inside Gustafson’s
home in Conrad. Zarzyski
and Gustafson have
drawn on their authen-
tic western experience
for Gustafson’s newest
album, ‘Hang-n-Rattle’.

56 M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 57
 C
onsider the cowboy, he of the work-thickened fingers and
the heart full of bruises. What smolders under that hat? What
simmers beneath the pearly snaps on his shirt? What makes him
sing, this creature of the West?
People have been trying to answer those questions, to give
the cowboy definition, ever since somebody first downsized a
sombrero and pointed a herd to the north. He is a national
icon, after all.
Fiction writers and Hollywood productions both offer a
schizophrenic view of the man in the big hat. Is he a nihilist
or an altruist? Is he a clown, like Howdy Doody, or a hero like
John Wayne? What is his true story? Is it “The Wild Bunch”
or is it “Brokeback Mountain?” Could both those movies have
a point?
“We’ve gone from Sam Peckinpah’s West to Ang Lee’s
Brokeback Mountain,” notes Paul Zarzyski, whose poetry has
been helping the West define itself for 35 years. “Boy, things
are changing. And you’ve got to roll with it.”
So he’s rolling. So is singer/songwriter Wylie Gustafson,
with whom he wrote seven songs on Gustafson’s newest album,
“Hang-n-Rattle,” a Western euphemism that means get tough,
cowboy up, get real.
58
And Zarzyski and Gustafson are the real deal. Between
them, they’re making a kind of music they call “rock and
rowel,” (named for that jangly bit on the end of a spur). Listen
to this music in a honkytonk and your feet want to go live.
Listen during a long drive, when you can focus on the lyrics,
and your life looks into itself. These are songs to make you
dance and make you wonder.
“It was among the best work I’ve ever done,” Gustafson
said of the CD, and he’s done a lot of them: 15 so far. “I felt
we’d hit a home run.”
Still, Gustafson said the new album has disappointed
some of his many fans. He’s been entertaining for so long —
everywhere from the Conrad rodeo to the Kennedy Center —
that people approach his music with certain expectations. For
one thing, while the new songs don’t skimp on the country
themes of horses and heartache, there’s not much yodeling
— and Gustafson sure can yodel. He provided the famous
trademark yodel for the Web service provider Yahoo and he’s
written a book on how to yodel. But his
musical roots spread both deep and
wide. When he rounded up cattle as a
teenager, he often serenaded them with
Rolling Stones songs.
And those roots pop up in the new
album.
“We both think that cowboy poetry
could use a good infusion of sex and
energy,” Zarzyski said.
So this album rocks more than it
sashays.
The songwriting partners say they’re
just trying to move the ball forward, in
an artistic sense, to recognize the West
as it exists, with a nostalgic nod to its
history. Accomplish that and you’re
looking at something that just might
have a future.
“The imagination is synonymous
with the future,” Zarzyski said. “I’m
Gustafson works with his horse Whiskey
at his ranch. Gustafson raises champion
cutting horses on his place.
not sure where this is going to go, but I’d sure like to keep
pushing the envelope.”
Here’s an example: The song “Double Wild” tells the tale
of a rodeo rider in love with a Mescalero Indian. He rides bitch
on the back of her Harley, mescal in the saddlebag, and that’s A Pony Called Love
the way they both like it. Zarzyski wrote the words. Gustafson
put the dance in them. Wylie Gustafson—Two Medicine (BMI)
Paul Zarzyski—Bucking Horse Moon Music (ASCAP)
Leather jacket skinny-dippers
Fingers swimming through her zippers
Whiskers rubbing up against her tattooed neck
Suicide shifting, weaving and a-drifting Love bucked me off on the second jump out
What he whispers in her ear could cause a wreck… With a suck-back twist, a squeal and a shout
Ah, the West is still wild as she ever was It’s a long swim back, no hope or applause
Through riptides and currents and a frenzy of jaws—
If there’s a message here, it might be this: Hang-n-rattle,
Roy Rogers, what’s wrong with riding bitch? It’s her bike, after She’s a heartbreaker
all. That pony called Love.
A changing West indeed.
And despite the tutting of some entrenched fans, the album
The last drops wrung from a valentine sponge
is gaining traction with the arbiters of cowboy cool. Its title
song won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America My blood must taste bitter on the tip of her tongue
and Zarzyski won another one for the poem “Bob Dylan’s Bronc No high moral ground and no place to hide
Song,” which he recites on the album. True West Magazine From the battle of tarantulas deep down inside—
named the team the “best living wild west troubadours.” The
Western Music Association named it the best cowboy/swing She’s a heartbreaker
album of 2009. That pony called Love.
“It’s like Lennon and McCartney in cowboy hats,” gushed
American Cowboy magazine. I’ve been hung-up, stepped on,
The duo has performed at the Library of Congress and the Kicked in the heart—
Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and appeared with sympho- She’s a rank one come-apart
nies in Tennessee and Washington state. They’ve performed sepa- She’s a pony called Love.
rately on National Public Radio’s “A Prairie Home Companion,”
and Gustafson has appeared more than 50 times at the Grand Ole
So it’s back down the road with my soul in a cast
Opry while Zarzyski won the Montana Governor’s Arts Award
for Literature in 2005, joining the likes of Norman Maclean, Not a highway alive that don’t lead to the past
Thomas McGuane and A. B. Guthrie Jr. As I sip from the go-cup of bottomless pain
And they met at Woodstock, the cowboy version. I see demons in the headlights…or could they be saints?
She’s a heartbreaker
History with a Hat That pony called Love.
Gustafson, 49, grew up on a cattle ranch near Conrad and
was playing in dance bands by the time he was in high school. Oh, she’s a soul-taker
He studied for a year at the University of Montana (“not enough That pony called Love.
to slow me down”) and later put in his time in the honkytonks
and studios in Los Angeles and Nashville before moving home
to Conrad. With his band, The Wild West, he’s created all those
albums and when he’s not performing (70 gigs or more a year,
from London, England, to Australia to North Carolina, playing
M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 59

The Hand
In South Africa, a white aristocrat grabs
the hand of an elderly black man
sitting in the dirt on the edge
of a lush crop. The white man
picks the black man’s hand up
as if it were a self-serve gasoline nozzle,
pulls it toward a reporter
and mechanically squeezes the wrist
to spread wide the thick callused fingers
and palm. The white man holds his own hand
open side-by-side. Do you see
the difference? he asks. What
does his hand look like to you? How
can you say we are the same?
Do you see the difference? he asks again,
the reporter stunned by what he is hearing,
while the black man sits inanimate,
his working cowboy hand
filling the camera’s close-up lens
with a landscape of canyons,
coulees and arroyos, buttes and mesas, mountains
and plains the black man might have ridden,
hands shaped by pistol grip, lariat, and reins,
had he been born of another geography
and time—just another wind-burned hand
of a cavvy man, sinew and knuckle,
flesh and blood, pocked, porous, scarred,
and dark as lathered latigo. The hand
alongside the aristocrat’s
tissue-paper appendage always reaching to take
even another man’s hand, and own it,
and hold it open, because he knows the fist
is as big as a man’s heart
and this is the difference he fears.
For Alan Thompson and Frank Phillips
From I Am Not a Cowboy (Dry Crik Press, 1995) and Wolf Tracks on the
Welcome Mat (OreanaBooks, 2003) © Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved.
These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author’s
written permission.
60
with everybody from Merle Haggard
to Elvis Costello) or writing songs, he
raises champion cutting horses and even
keeps a small herd of crafty, agile bison
that he uses to train his horses. “They’re
smarter than cattle,” he said. As horse-
men go, he’s got plenty of chops.
“But I’m all hat and no cattle,” said
Zarzyski.
That’s not entirely true.
Now 59, Zarzyski spent a lot of years
living rodeo. He put the spurs to some-
where between 800 and 1,000 bareback
broncs, won his share of paydays and
buckles, while honing his own chops
as a poet at UM under the tutelage of
the renowned Richard Hugo. Though
he grew up in northern Wisconsin and
retains the round-voweled accent of his
youth, he’s an authentic Western voice.
(We all come from somewhere. Even
Charlie Russell grew up in Missouri.)
He made his name as a rodeo poet,
but with his eight published volumes of
poetry, he reaches a lot wider. He’s no
rhyme slinger offering odes to flapjacks. Working on a Smith
Corona typewriter at his home near Great Falls, he can write an
ode to a bronc or a buckle bunny, but he can connect Auschwitz
to Wounded Knee, look at a calloused palm and trace out the
sorry heart of South African racism, rue the loss of love and
youth, and still take some time to laugh at himself.
One critic called him a “rodeo Ferlinghetti,” and the New
York Times Book Review said “his verses bristle with audacity
and whimsy. Mr Zarzyski alternates between bluster and lyri-
cism.”
He and Gustafson found each other in Elko, Nev., at the
annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering. That’s the Cowboy Woodstock
and they’re both there every year.
“Without Elko, Wylie and I wouldn’t be sitting here together
talking,” Zarzyski said.
“The first time I saw Paul, I was excited because he repre-
sented what I thought cowboy poetry could be,” Gustafson
said.
A talented and successful songwriter himself, Gustafson
said that in the past he often tried to make the words fit the
music. Now, working with Zarzyski, he’s learning how better to
make lyrics and melody complement one another.
“Paul was the one who taught me how important the words
were,” he said. “He taught me to think about every word, every
image.”
“And I learned what makes a song tick,” Zarzyski said.
“It’s exciting to see how the words come together musically.”
They both had to make some adjustments in the approach
to their labors but together, they landed “in the zone,” the
place you’ve got to be to make songwriting work.
“Hang-n-Rattle” was produced at the Cash Cabin Studios
by John Carter Cash at a time when both men were pulling
through a tough time in their personal lives. Gustafson’s
marriage was breaking up, and Zarzyski’s father was dying. But
the creative process, building something real, working together,
helped put the pains where they belonged.
Despite the grief, “we were surrounded by an aura of joy,”
Zarzyski said.
Music is a challenging business these days. Everything is
digital and most people expect it to be free. But Zarzyski and
Gustafson are committed to making a difference, to helping the
West understand itself as it stands today.
“We’re more a reflection of the contemporary West,”
Gustafson said. And while the West is not an easy place to
define, it’s one worth protecting.
“The more people we can get to celebrate the Western
culture, the better the odds are that we can keep this country
wide open,” Zarzyski said. “And we could use some help.”
Ride, boys.
Hang-n-rattle.
Hang-n-Rattle!
Wylie Gustafson—Two Medicine (BMI)
Paul Zarzyski—Bucking Horse Moon Music (ASCAP)
Aristotle, Plato, Jung and Freud
Were philosophizing good ol’ boys.
But the gist of all their words of wisdom
Begs the quintessential western question:
Did you come to ride, or did you come to hide?
Big talk comes cheap from a padded bar stool
But the roughstock gods don’t suffer no fools
Sundown, Steel, Pickett, and Brown
Watching every move as you screw yourself down:
Did you come to ride, or did you come to hide?
Did you come to ride? Or did you come to hide?
Make up your mind now
You’re born on the back of a high spinning rock
Life’s winding down with each tick of the clock
Well it’s high time, brother, you let it HANG-n-RATTLE!
Let ‘er HANG-n-RATTLE!
Crack the bomb bay doors and feel the wind a-whippin’
Fan a megatonner like ol’ Slim Pickens.
Fire in the heart, fire in the hole
Smoking explosions of rodeo soul.
Did you come to ride, or did you come to hide?
YEEEE-HAWWWW!!
Let ‘er HANG-n-RATTLE!
M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 61