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Artist Profiles - Ian Tamblyn

Article 79 of 89     


This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the December 13, 2006 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.External Link Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.

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What will you do to hold onto his ideal?

by Catherine Joyce

As a young man in Fort William on Lake Superior, Ian Tamblyn began to live by a motto he shared with a close group of friends. "Give the gift that hurts." What may have started as a joke when they phoned each other at 4 a.m. ("Are you up? Are you awake?") soon became the philosophy that would inform his musical career. Push the limits. Go the extra mile. Become the lone voice in the wilderness calling others to attend.

After almost 40 years as a modern-day troubadour - musician, song writer, playwright and producer - Ian Tamblyn is still pouring his lyric gift out onto the increasingly crowded air waves, asking "What will you sacrifice for the world you love?"

Artist Profiles
Ian Tamblyn plays a benefit concert at the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield last January in support of Pontiac NOP candidate Celine Brault leading up to the 2006 federal election. File photo.

The question might stand for the arc of Ian's life, from its beginnings in a family of high expectations. With his father the youngest president of a Canadian university; Lakehead, Ian grew up performing, first as a choir boy and bell ringer in the Anglican Church, then in school choirs and musicals. Then, by the mysterious conjunctions of youth, Ian met an opposite way of life on weekends when he began visiting a school friend's family farm.

"It was a revelation. They played country music with old George on a Gibson guitar. We went to Saturday night dances where Myrna Lowry was singing. I came home and joined the Columbia Record Club. I remember it was 1959 and the first two records I bought were by Johnny Cash and Lefty Frizell Singing 'Long Black Veil'."

Soon Ian stopped going to church and Singing in the choir. At 14 he was kicked out of Fort William Collegiate and sent to Scollard Hall, a school for "Hard to Educate Boys" run by Dominican priests. In a scene right out of Dickens, he slept in an austere fifth floor dorm with 17 other boys.

"It was that crucial age from 14 to 18, that time of catastrophe and confusion when everything seems like an impossible dream. At 16, I began writing stories and reading them in small coffee houses. I remember a friend saying, 'Tamblyn, you need to start playing the guitar.'"

By 18 music had become his life. With a seminal group of friends at the Folklore Centre, in Port Arthur, Ian listened to every kind of music from Dylan to the Blues to the Beatles and electronic. "There we were in Thunder Bay and yet the whole world came to us through music, books and film. We embraced and devoured it all."

In 1971. with an Honours degree in English and Philosophy from Trent University and his first album, Moose Tracks, self-produced, Ian set out on his first road trip with his university sweetheart and life mate, Amanda Shaughnessy, "We took off in a 1948 Chevy. Wherever we played, they'd call ahead to the next little town to book us a gig. The car died in Whitewood, Saskatchewan but we made it all the way to San Francisco." By 1972 the two had settled in Chelsea, where they raised their family.

And so began one of the most remarkably sustained and consistent musical careers in Canadian history. Quiet, with a purity of voice and purpose that challenges even as it enchants, Ian Tamblyn has become the witness for a disappearing landscape, its myths and its people.

"There is a hauntedness in the land that I cannot escape. For 40 years I have been chasing the Spirit of North. It is alive in the complex shoreline of Superior, in the white elemental vastness of the Arctic. I ask myself and in my songs I ask you: 'What will you do to hold onto this ideal? What would you sacrifice to preserve what you have just witnessed, which has cost you nothing?"

The question still stands and after 26 albums, Ian Tamblyn is still living by it.

Check out his website at www.tamblyn.com.