Ian Tyson

The Jan. 17 earthquake affected many businesses in the Valley and some have yet to recover. Royal Grounds was shaken but refused to give up. Two days after opening, the Toluca Lake coffeehouse was devastated by the quake. Despite the damage, the owners stayed open and pitched in to help others. "We didn't know if it was an omen or some sign that we should carry on," said co-owner Ian Tyson. "It definitely took the wind out of our sails."

In 1984, 10 minutes before the start of the Los Angeles Olympic Games, a representative of L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates rushed into my control booth at the Coliseum to say, "We think there's a bomb in the torch. You can't light it." Fortunately, it turned out to be a false alarm, but enough of a jolt to panic me and my staff. Paddy Sampson, executive producer of Saturday's opening ceremonies of the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, had no such scare.

Country singer Suzy Bogguss went through a divorce earlier this year, but not the kind that made a star out of Tammy Wynette. The relationship that fizzled for the Illinois-born Bogguss was the one she'd had for 12 years with Capitol Records. She's still happily married to songwriter-producer Doug Crider. "It was difficult not to think of it as a divorce and to feel a little bit like a failure," Bogguss, 42, said earlier this week by phone from Chico, Calif.

" Blow you you old blue norther , Blow him back to me ... " --"Someday Soon," a song by Ian Tyson All Bobbie Beavers has left of the past are four photographs of a little girl who may despise him for deserting her 30 years ago. If you're out there Vikki Lynn, your dad is sorry. Bobbie abandoned Vikki and her mother, Jean Alice Sutherland, in the San Fernando Valley in 1961 when Vikki was 14 months old.

Visual artists who use words as their medium have long played a prominent role in art. Early Cubists integrated words in their paintings; Pop artists such as Jasper Johns used words and images with equal fluency. Others followed, all of whom regarded verbal and visual language as intimately, intriguingly linked. Ed Ruscha brought the word to a new iconic status in pictorial art. For some, like Jenny Holzer, words have supplanted images altogether.

FOR nearly half a century, Johnny Cash was like a mighty black oak in the musical forest: strong, unbowed by the severest of winds and seemingly immortal, easily overshadowing the bending willows and pines that surrounded him. But in the years leading to his death Sept.

1. Bob Dylan (Pacific Amphitheatre, Oct. 1). A wonderful surprise. Instead of the burnout his fans have come to dread, we got burning guitar licks nobody knew he had, and a degree of vocal alertness we feared he had lost. 2. Midnight Oil (Irvine Meadows, Oct. 2). A prime rock band on a prime night. 3. Rosalie Sorrels (Ball Junior High School, Anaheim, May 8). This old-line folk singer touched her audience deeply, both with her singing and her eloquent, insightful spoken narratives.

Among all those clever but silly country hits concerning achy breaky hearts and old flames with new names, Suzy Bogguss' potent versions of such substantial songs as Nanci Griffith's "Outbound Plane" and Ian Tyson's "Someday Soon" stand out like a turkey dinner in a doughnut shop. Over the course of three albums, Bogguss, who will play the Crazy Horse tonight, has established a reputation as a particularly thoughtful singer with impeccable taste in material.

If your notion of a poet is Wallace Stevens or James Merrill, you may approach a gathering of cowboy poets with some trepidation. What if some buckaroo bard decides to rhyme riata with frittata or boot with Newt ? Chatsworth writer Catherine Dain remembers her first visit to the mother of all cowboy poetry fests, the 10-year-old gathering held in Elko, Nev., every January.