Tyson's autobiography feels an awful lot like sitting around a barroom and listening to an interesting-looking old geezer talk about The Good Old Days. How much the reader enjoys this will depend largely on how one's interest in and tolerance for stories of the Great Folk Scare of the 1960s, Ian & Sylvia, and yarns about cowboying.
It's interesting stuff, but Tyson never really opens up about his inner life. He remains largely a mystery -- a man with two failed marriages and a string of short-lived love affairs, who can still turn around and write heartbreaking love songs; a city boy whose early interest in horses became an obsession in his later years and looms as large on the stage of his life as does his musical career; an indifferent student who never showed any great interest in the written word other than the cowboy tales of Will James (or at least doesn't share any such interest with the reader), who suddenly blossoms into a first-class lyricist.
Fans of his later solo work will pick up some inside information about where some of his lyrics came from, and that's about as intimate as Tyson gets with his reader.
It's interesting stuff, but Tyson never really opens up about his inner life. He remains largely a mystery -- a man with two failed marriages and a string of short-lived love affairs, who can still turn around and write heartbreaking love songs; a city boy whose early interest in horses became an obsession in his later years and looms as large on the stage of his life as does his musical career; an indifferent student who never showed any great interest in the written word other than the cowboy tales of Will James (or at least doesn't share any such interest with the reader), who suddenly blossoms into a first-class lyricist.
Fans of his later solo work will pick up some inside information about where some of his lyrics came from, and that's about as intimate as Tyson gets with his reader.
