Jeff Hanna

Jeff Hanna has been in every iteration of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, from "Mr. Bojangles" to "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" to "Fishin' in the Dark" to their just released album "Dirt Does Dylan." We discuss all of these eras!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is Jeff Kenna, the Nitty Nitty Dirt band. Jeff,
good to have you on the podcast. Thanks Bob, happy
to be here. Man. So the band just released a
new album, Dirt. Does Dylan tell me the backstory? Why Dylan?

(00:29):
Why now? Well? Um, we we wanted to get into
the studio with this latest version, this latest lineup from
the band, and uh, we had not done any recording.
We thought, you know, we know, we talked about doing
a single source songwriter sort of you know, one source,
Bob Dylan in this case, and he was the name

(00:51):
that kept coming up. It just seemed a real natural,
uh spot, because he has a zillion songs and you
can go anywhere musically with his material. Um, so there
you go. That was kind of it. And we've we've
recorded some of us. We recorded you Ain't Going Nowhere
several years ago, which is one of our favorite Darling tunes.

(01:11):
Yeah that listen from the opening track on Sweetheart of
the Rodeo. Not enough people knew that back then, but
one of the great tracks. When are the great tracks? Absolutely? Okay,
So when you go to make a record today because
you've been in the business and excess of fifty years.
The old days, pre internet, you had to get a label.
They gave you the money. How did you do with

(01:32):
this time? This time? Actually, when we went into the studio,
we did not have the label. We just went and
took out a loan, you know, basically, and started recording.
We started recording this album. Wait wait, wait, what what
one sect? Did you literally take out a loan? No?
But okay, you'd ever know with people's finances, well, you know, Uh, no,

(01:52):
you don't. And we were lucky enough to have a
few bucks saved up from twenty nineteen. We actually started
recording this album uh in early March of and recorded
eight tracks. Jumped down the bus on marchall on March
eleven and played uh story. We jumped on the bus

(02:15):
on March tenth and played our first and last shows
of March eleventh. In March twelfth, that was it. Curtain
came down, end of story. We got guys that live
all over the country. There four of us live in Nashville,
but uh two of the two of the longtime guys,
Jimmy Fadden and Bob Carpenter. Bob lives in Los Angeles
and Jimmy lives in Sarasota, Florida. So then lockdown came

(02:40):
and that was it. We just sat for a while.
Ray Ray Kennedy, who's our producer, um and I'm sitting
in his studio right now. Uh he uh basically locked
the studio up as well. There was no activity. You know,
everybody kind of hunkered down, as they say, Okay, when
things started to loosen up, very specifically, when did you

(03:02):
get back in the studio. You know, I think I
think the first time I even came by the studio
was probably in you know, early summer of uh, you know,
we were all getting out and about, but it was,
you know, we were I don't know, we were pretty
careful about where we went. And Ray Ray had been
doing some work with Lucinda Williams he produces Lucinda and

(03:25):
and Steve Earle as well, and uh as as as
the summer started coming to a close, we started talking about,
you know, let's get back in there and listen to
these let's listen to him and we had the rough
mixes that we had done in early March, but we
we weren't sure if this album was ever again. We man,
we didn't know what was going on at all. Nobody

(03:46):
knew if they're ever gonna tour again, Nobody ever knew
if they were going to finish records that were you know,
in the process and the progress, and uh, we finally
got back in in I think guess it was fall
of and we started talking about The Times They Are Changing,
which we which was the last track we recorded in
the first batch of sessions, and it was like, well,

(04:08):
you know, let's finish that. It's all it's always timely,
it's it's one of Dylan's you know, best known, but
also just it's on point, always that tune, you know.
And that's when we started calling up our friends and
see if they wanted to come in and sang on
the song. So specifically who sang on I mean, I know,

(04:31):
but from my audience, who's sang on The Times They
Are Changing? Jason isbel Uh, the War Entreaty, Michael Trotter,
Jor and Tania Trotter, Um, Roseanne Cash, Steve Earle Uh
and my wife Matresa actually came in. Matraca Burd came
in and sang harmony with the track that we do
with Roseanne Okay, do you have ongoing relationships with all

(04:55):
those people or was that through Ray? How did those
people ultimately get on the record. It was it was
mostly just because I've known these folks. You know, I've
known Steve since the eighties when we got we both
we both kind of got to Nashville the same time
hit music Row in the early eighties. Steve roll Uh,
Roseanne I've known for a very long time. We've done

(05:16):
recording in the past. Um Uh, we're entreaty. Actually met
them um at Tell your RDE Bluegrass festival back in
Emmy Lou Harris introduced us and we hit it off
and we've been friends ever since. Jason Isabel I've known
for I guess I've known Jason for on ten years,
I think. So it was, you know, I I figured

(05:42):
that the appeal of the song would be enough, I
think to get them in the door. And they're they're
really generous, wonderful folks. Everybody that took part in the recording, Well,
that begs a question. But living in Nashville a long time,
you started in southern California. What's different about Nashville than

(06:05):
all these other music places. You make it sound like
everybody's living, you know, in the same little village and
they all come over. What's it really like, you know
before before COVID let's let's give that coffee up. Now
that's a good point. Um, well, i'll tell you. You know,
you and I have talked about this in the past.
But we started in southern California. We can go into
the sort of history of that later if you want.

(06:26):
But um, when we came up in the folk clubs
in the late sixties, there was a real community going on.
You know, all the folks that hung out at the
Ash Grove and the Troubuta or we would go to
each other's houses or apartments or back porches or whatever,
get out the guitars and start singing, you know, and

(06:48):
and you know, my my songwriter friends, we swapped songs
as as time went on and as people started becoming famous.
You know, uh, they've hit the road. We never see
each other. And Los Angeles says, you know, is a
much more you know, geographically spread out kind of scene.
So the little pockets of living up in the Hollywood Hills,

(07:11):
you know, Laurel Canyon, great example, gets used a lot better,
was a real deal. Um, that kind of change and
people started moving out to the valley or to the
beach or whatever, or they're just on a Jettera tour
bus somewhere. When I moved to Nashville in immediately it

(07:32):
was like, holy cow, this community thing really reminds me
of what it was like in l A in the
late sixties and early seventies. Um so, and I love
that and I still I still believe that that exists
to a large degree. You know, Okay, let's go back
to the record. So he decided to do Dylan, you

(07:53):
had certain trucks cut, you were finishing times. They are
a change, and did you have to do more recording?
And how did you ultimately choose is what songs to do?
The sonctuous is an interesting one. You know, his catalog
has hundreds of songs in it, and they're all great. Uh.
The the sort of acid test for us was if

(08:14):
we sounded good singing and playing them, you know, we started.
You know, there's so many of Dylan. So many of
Dylan's tunes to me sound great with an individual singing
them in terms of like cover land, um. And then
there are others that you know have maybe bigger, wider
chorus is more anthemic. Uh so we we know, we

(08:37):
just started breaking it down and we weren't you know,
we ended up with a period that really kind of
starts in the sixties and ends in like the mid
late seventies in his catalog. That wasn't by design. Those
were just the tunes that landed the best with us.
So we got in with you know, we got we
started with about eighties songs and by the time we

(08:59):
got to the studio, we whittled it down to about
thirty or forty. Then we started playing them and the
stuff again that that really you know, stuck to the
wall were the ones we stayed with. And so what
are some of your favorites on the album? Oh? Man,
my favorites. I mean it's really I love the times

(09:23):
they're changing. I gotta start with that. I mean that
that came out so great, and I love I love
the generational and and just you know that the just
you know, different voices coming from different different rooms and
it was just, I don't know, kill me. I'm very
fond of that. Uh. I shall be released with our

(09:45):
friends Larkin Poe, Rebecca and Megan Level. Those sisters are
just they're incredible and they came in and sang and
make and Megan also played lap steel guitar. Beautiful Job
Girl from the North Country, which features actually my son Jamie,
who's been in the band for you know, we got

(10:06):
the last year, but he started playing with us in Uh.
He sang lead on that, so you know, the father
son thing is deep. You know, we got the blood
harmony going. And I love that track. Ross Holmes, our
field player and Bob Carpenter, uh, who played accordion on
that track, just created this kind of Celtic cinematic landscape. Uh.

(10:33):
And I just I just love it for that reason.
And plus it's a great song. I love the tune
Country Pie, which is when I was surprised you did that,
because you know, nothing's really obscure, but that's not something
that comes to mind of the average person. No, it
does not. And but actually Bob Carpenter brought that up.
You know, I remembered it in passing from Nashville Skyline.

(10:55):
But it was one of those tunes like Randy Day
Women twelve and thirty five where they're just having a blast.
And he said, well, you know, if what if we
cut it, I don't know try to harken back to
the jug band days, which totally landed well with me
and Jimmy because we were the jug Me and Fat
and we were the drug band guys. And we ended
up recording it live in the studio. We sat around

(11:16):
one microphone and kind of moved in for our solos,
and it just was so much fun. It was. It
was really cool and I love it because it does
it sounds like jug band music with a little gypsy
jazz thrown in on the fiddle, the violin um, and
it's just it's a Dylan rob you know. He has

(11:37):
a great sense of humor, clearly, that's for sure. So
the album is done, how do you get a label involved?
That was? This is beyond, This is behind the scenes.
This is where guys like our manager, Brian Panics, and
our other manager. We've got three of them, Jason Hanky,
who's great, and Ken Levitan, who is that you know,

(11:58):
the head honcho over there at Victor Management. They put
their heads together and they sent around, They sent some
tunes around. We had a little amount a handful of
stuff that we had finished up, and uh, we ended
up with these folks up in New York called m
R I, which is interesting. We all went m A right,
that's perfect for a bunch of old Now is that

(12:19):
the m R I that's part of Megaphors? It is yep. Well,
Megaphord has got a long history of show of hard
rock stuff. I know, they did put out Sammy Kershaw Records, etcetera.
So so you make a deal with the m R I.
Needless to say, the landscape is completely different. There are
so many people playing. What are your expectations. Well, first off,

(12:44):
it's a partnership with our little imprint which is m
g dB Records. Um, we just you know, the fact
that they love the record really helped, you know, and
they want they pointed up Pony depth with some you
know promotion money and publicity money that really helped you know. Uh,
and they have a great distribution, uh team, So we're

(13:05):
really happy to be over there. It's funny my son Jamie,
who's like, you know, he and Ross Holmes are the
kids in our band. Um relative to all of us
especially they're uh, you know, Jamie is like m R.
I love that, you know, because they did the early
Metallica records, if I believe think you know, and it's

(13:25):
like this is so cool Dad, So yeah, I love that.
But they you know, they've they've done a bunch of stuff.
They I think they got there. You know, they got
their toes in the jam band world as well, and
all of it made sense. That's like, as you know,
anything goes in the world we live in. As far
as records, now, we've done it up and down every

(13:47):
which away, you know. So but it's it's just fun
to be putting out a record. Okay, let's go back
to the beginning. So you're born in Detroit, you end
up in Long Beach filling those details, Well, my dad
when I was eight years old, my dad was in
he started in the building car he was you know
that dad was several generations of Detroit guys. So he

(14:11):
was in a car business building them. Actually he was
an engineer and he was also an aeronautical engineer, so
he was like, you know, knew how to build an
airplane basically. So he got into the aircraft business. And
we moved to Phoenix in nineteen fifty when I was
eight years old and fifty five, and that was a

(14:32):
great place to grow up. I mean it was you know,
we were all like, you know, all the cowboys in
the movies and TV, and like there's all this desert
and sawaro cacti and cactuses and it was it was
really fun and you know, but it was kind of

(14:53):
like that period of my life was kind of like
being an army brat because but then my dad got
a job offer about six years later in uh In, Colorado,
So we moved to Littleton, Colorado, and uh he worked
for Martin Marietta back then, and then a couple of
years later he got offered a job with North American

(15:14):
Aircraft in uh. I believe they were based out of Downy, Um, California,
so home of the carpenters. And that's right exactly. And
I got some carpenter stories, but you don't need him.
Uh great folks, Uh, but he uh yes, So we
moved up. We picked up and left Colorado and moved
to kind of inland because I love the beach. But

(15:38):
we you know, the first morning I woke up in
Downy it was like, oh man, look at that fog,
look at that concrete. Where's the beach, where's the trees?
Because I just left Colorado, by the way, so I
was a little bummed out. Then we moved across town.
We were renting a house when we moved across town
to North Long Beach, and uh, I went to Jordan

(15:59):
High School, North Long Beach, California. Okay, filling in some details.
How many kids in the family. I had three brothers. Yeah,
well I had two more brothers. Sorry, And where were
you in the hierarchy? I was a middle kid, Okay.
With all that traveling, you know, either you end up
isolated as a kid, or you feel that you you

(16:21):
get the skill to fit in. And did you get
that skill? Did that help you ultimately in the music world? Well,
you know, first day of any new school for any
kid anywhere, I don't, you know, regardless of their social
skill set, it's tough, you know. Uh, But I think

(16:43):
I think the first day that I went to Jordan's
I met this kid named Bruce Kunkle, who ended up
being one of the founding members of the Dirt Band,
and we hit it off. In North Jordan High was
kind of sounds like a movie. I mean, it's it's
like Rebel without a cause. I think I think of

(17:05):
the I can't remember what was this lad? Was a
Jim Stark? Was that the name of the James Dean character.
I think it was. I want to say, I don't remember, yeah,
you know, and sorry, i'd look it up, but you know, anyways,
but I remember James Dean's character just come into that
new school, you know, and he's the outsider, and you

(17:26):
got kind of the you know, we'd call him the socias.
You know that the absolutely remember that you got. Okay,
now we're speaking the same language, Bob, the socials and
the greasers. And also throw in the surfers also, so
even though I'd never surfed, I became one. I became
a surfer, you know U And Bruce was one of

(17:47):
those kids. So we bonded. We started talking. It's like, hey, man,
you got a guitar, and yeah, I got a guitar.
I don't really know how to play it. This is
me talking to Bruce and he said, well I do.
So we were like also folkies. We love acoustic music.
So he showed me some chords and he showed me
where the chords went to, what part of a song,

(18:07):
and it was like the clouds parted. Man, it was
such a it was a huge moment for me. It
was an epiphany. And we you know, we became great pals.
Right then give us a year. This is nineteen sixty.
I think it started in the fall of sixty one, Okay,

(18:28):
and this is when the folk boom is really starting
to rage. Oh yeah, ultimately hooting Nanny on TV, etcetera. Okay,
so you start playing guitars with Bruce tell us the
next step in your musical evolution. We were like and
we were in the musical evolution. It was it was
kind of sample. I can't remember. Also, I had an
older brother, my brother Mike, and he would bring he

(18:51):
brought home at Kingston Trio Record and he brought home
he might have done that while we're still living in Littleton, Colorado,
kingson Tira Trio record, Uh, Peter, Paul and Mary. I
loved both of those groups. I mean they were then.
Joan Bayaz and Joan Bayez was like my gateway drug
because she was on Vanguard Records, and Vanguard Records always

(19:15):
advertised their other artists and their other releases on the
inner sleeve of the vinyl. So number one is I
love Jones voice, still love her voice. But she recorded
with a band called the Green Bar Boys, a great
bluegrass band. UH appeared on several several tracks on her records,
and that was like, man, I liked that music. That's

(19:37):
kind of cool. I've never really heard blue grass, so
she got me into that. But then I started looking
at these pictures and there's this guy Doc Watson on
the back of the record. Yeah, and there's Mississippi John
Hurt on the back of the record. And I'm like, oh,
both this is interesting, Claire, I think Clarence. Actually, I'm
trying to remember. There was another label called folk Ways,

(19:57):
which was another huge deal for us as folk puppies,
you know. Uh. That created kind of a deeper dive.
And then also Bruce and I weren't afraid to like
hit we neither of us had a driver's license at
this point, like fifteen. We weren't afraid like hitchhike down
to the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach was which was

(20:18):
a huge club in the sort of fledgling folk rock
and uh folk music, uh circuit, so we could see folks,
you know, or go all the way up to l
A and go to the Ash Grove, which was really
our hang as well. This is you can see people
like I got to sit ten ft away from Mississippi
John Hurt, you know, and watch that guy play when

(20:40):
I was sixteen, uh, and that was life changing for me.
Same deal with Doc Watson, same deal with Bill Monroe,
the New Law City Ramblers, you know down in long
A lot of those folks, oh Man, Sunny Terry and
Brownie McGhee two of my absolute favorites. A lot of
those folks would you know, play the ash Grove and

(21:00):
getting the car and drive down to Huntington's Beach and
play the Golden Bear as well. So you can see
him twice in the course of two or three weeks.
Lightning Hopkins, Merle Travis, it was it was man kid
in the candy store, and the irony was I mean,
I shouldn't say the irony, but that the interesting thing
for me as a kid, how fortunate we were, as

(21:23):
these surfer kids from l A getting to hear, getting
to have this experience that we didn't grow up in
Kentucky or in the Mississippi Delta or in the you know,
the hills in North Carolina and have those back porch experiences.
And yet there we were getting to see our heroes

(21:45):
up close. It was really great. Okay, so you're immersed
in the Sceme tell me more about your particular playing
and the Mason element of your career. Well, you know,
we at the tail end of my high school. Uh,

(22:09):
when I was a senior in high school, me and
my buddy Bruce in another couple of pals of mine
start had a jug band called the Illegitimate Jug Band
because we thought that was a cute name. Plus we
didn't have a joke. So okay. But for those of
us who were around back then, jug bands were a thing.

(22:29):
Of course on the East Coast you had the gym
Queskin jug Band and School Loving School Queskin was like
the Beatles. Okay, So explain for people who missed that
scene what a jug band was. Well, you know, musically,
you take a lot of the mountaineer roots, country blues

(22:52):
I'm talking about acoustic blues and ragtime music, and you
throw them all into a cattle kettle, you know, and
you at this gumbo. Uh. That's what jug band music
list us. And it was again the question jug band
were like they were so their imaginations were broad and wide,
and their talent was deep. I mean questing himself, great

(23:14):
guitar player, singer, Uh, Jeffrey Mulder, his future wife Maria
Dematto I believe her name was when she before they
got married yet Maria Mulder, Oh my gosh, Fritz Frisch, Richmond,
the guy that played upright, I mean sorry Washtub Base
and jugg Gregor jug player, uh mel Lyman on harmonica.

(23:37):
I mean, they were they were so good, just killed us.
So we learned a bunch of their tunes right away.
And then the Love and Spoonful came along, you know,
and there here here, these guys were writing their own
music and kind of you know, I mean, to me,
the two bands that I love the best in the
mid sixties American bands were the Birds on the West

(23:59):
Coast in the Spoonful on the East coast. They brought
it off from me and again me and Kunkle, you know,
we stuck out our thumbs and hitchhicked up to Hollywood
to see both the Birds and the Spoonful play at
this club called The Trip. That was an amazing experience
as well. You know, here's these kids, you know. A

(24:20):
year later, the Dirt Band were opening at the Golden
Bear for the Love of Spoonful, which is pretty cool, okay,
but you u you get together with two friends and
you form a band under what the impossible drug being,
if I remember correctly, and take it up from there
as the old legitimate jug band. But then, you know,

(24:40):
and a couple of months later, I'm going to college,
which was really brief Long Beach Community Community College, which
we call a long was Long Beach City College. We
all call it Long Beach Shitty College because you know
it made sense. Uh. And first semester, you know, I
spent more time sitting on the common with my acoustic guitar,

(25:02):
hanging out with these folks that are really just meeting there.
You know. Uh, it was so you know, it was
like a snapshot of of young folkies sitting on the
lawn ditching school. And I met this guy named Ralph
Barr And I met a kid named Les Thompson. I
met a kid named Jimmy Fadden Bruce Kunkle. By the way,

(25:24):
it was going to another school because he got better
grades than me. He went to Long Beach State College. Um,
and uh, so here's Bruce Bruce across town. But Ralph
and Les and Jimmy and I'm leaving somebody out jeus h,
it'll come to me. Uh anyway, so we're sitting around

(25:46):
and we're talking about where do you guys hang out. Well,
there's this guitar store in Lung Beach called McCabe's, and
there were two of them, the famous one that you're
you know, which is of the San Monica But yeah,
and there were there were two. At one point there
were three of them. There was one that was in
the Ash Grove and I think they lived they lived
in the True Bodover for a little while, and the
one that's been in Santa Monica forever. And there's Long

(26:07):
Beach McCabe. So we started hanging out after school or
ditching school and hanging out at McCabe's. And you know,
they were the guys. The proprietors were really kind to
us and let us drink their coffee and sit around
and pull guitars off the wall, and we all learned
a few skills as guitar repairman as well. So we're
sitting around and we're going, well, we got a bunch

(26:30):
of guys, why don't we have a band? Why not
start a band? Was like, well, none of us really
wanted to dive into like allectric guitars based and drums.
We love the Beatles like everybody, but you know, we
we were that was we were really acoustic snobs. So well,
and I said, hey, how about a joke band? You
guys ever played jug band music? And then yeah, we

(26:51):
like question. I said, Ah, so fun, it's really great.
I'll call my buddy Bruce up. So me and Bruce
and Less and Jimmy and rap uh got together and
you know, oh and eventually this guy, Jackson Brown joined
the band. I should point out that was the sixth guy.
Uh we uh so we just went to my mom's

(27:14):
garage and started, uh you know, practicing for nothing. By
the way, because we weren't playing any gigs. There's a
little club in southern California called the Paradox, which if
you know the song the Barricades of Heaven Jackson song
he name checks it, and a bunch of us you
know kids hung out in that club. Is a really

(27:35):
tiny place, but they had a talent contest going on.
So the jug Our jug Band, which we a long
story about the name, but if you want to hear it,
I'll tell you in a minute. We jumped up there
and kind of made up a name and jumped up
and started playing these talent contests, and when they kept
carrying us over a week, one week two, you know, Uh,

(27:55):
there was no one number, by the way, it was
it was yeah, anyways, it wasn't the voice. Um, well
what just because I can't remember where was the paradox.
The paradox was in the city of Orange, California, right
next to Tustin, California. So uh, as we jokingly said,

(28:17):
it was behind the Orange Curtain, right of course, you know.
So we were hanging out there and and uh there
was a guy that met named Steve Noonan that hung
out there who was among the first guys I knew
that actually wrote his own songs, Uh Jackson who I
met Jackson when he was fifteen years old. I was sixteen. Um.

(28:40):
And uh, the guy Greg Copeland, who was a great
poet and it was a fine lyricist, and he, you know,
has shown up on a lot of Steve's Steve Steve
uh sorry Noonan's records. Uh and I Jack Jackson and
he wrote them together as well. And Tim Buckley, the
great Tim Buckley. Those guys are hanging out and there's

(29:01):
you know, Mary McCaslin and Jennifer Warrens and uh a
lot of cool acts came and played there. It was.
It was a good comedy room too. You see, people
like Pat Paulson, this kid named Steve Martin showed up
there once in a while. But uh uh so we
kind of, you know, that's kind of where we honed
our skills. Was was the paradox. It is also the

(29:24):
first place that they actually paid us to play, which
which was May nineteen sixty six. Okay, at this point,
is it the nitty Gwitty Dirt Band? Yeah, it is,
it is, So tell us the story of the name. Well,
you know, we're sitting around trying to come up with
a name that didn't sound like everybody else's, you know,
I mean, you know, the Grateful Dead, We're Mother Something's

(29:48):
mother and Warlocks whatnot. But before the Warlocks there there
was a jug band name too. There there's something yeah
I can't either, but it's there on the Google or
the wiki. Yeah, you know, and the jug band thing
was it was a deal. Um, so we didn't want

(30:08):
to call ourselves a jug band. That maybe that carried
over from illegitimate, but it was like one of the
guys the thing was Ralph Barr said, how about the
dirt band, because dirt really made sense to us. You know.
We all had these dusty cowboy boots and uh, it
just kind of, I don't know, it's like depression era tunes.

(30:28):
You're seeing these the sort of Woody Guthrie era black
and white photos in your head, and a lot of
that music came up from that era, the thirties. So
that was great. So we're the dirt band for about
a week once again in my mom's garage. Um, and
I was going the tail end of my college career.
I was in a political science class and my professor

(30:52):
said something about let's just get right down to the
real nitty gritty, and I'm like, I don't. I didn't
hear another word he said. And I came into the
next rehearsal I went, I got it, you know, because
the nitty gritty just sounded like the sound of a
washboard to me. Plus they had this great sort of
getting right down to it, you know, and in terms

(31:13):
of nitty gritty, dirt band kind of worked. I can't
say it real fast or after midnight, you know, but it's, uh,
it's stuck. So there you go, Naty goody dirt band.
Love it or hate it there it is okay, so
you're getting paid at the paradox. What's the next step. Well, um,
we had a couple of different guys that were this

(31:34):
started sniffing around to be managers. There was a guy
named Billy James that was Jackson Brown's friend. Who was
you know Billy's I think he probably have heard of Billy.
Billy was in an our man at Columbia Records, and
he he has some ends in the record biz and
he was starting to manage folks. I think he was

(31:54):
kind of managing Jackson on the side. And then, uh,
Jackson was out to leave the band and this mutual
friend of all of ours, John McEwen, uh, started playing
with us. And John's brother was a fleet Bill McEwen
was a fledgling manager at that point. He had a
couple of acts, a couple of folk acts he was

(32:15):
working with. You know, he hadn't really busted into the
big time, but he he was enthusiastic, a really hard
working guy. So we went with Bill um and he uh,
you know, we made a little demo at gold Star
Studios up in Hollywood, I know, right, and uh, we
started going around. We would actually remember we went to

(32:37):
Capitol Records in I think the guy's name was al
Do Lory, who's an a and our guy. Uh, we
did a little demo for them, a little kind of
audition in the studio. The Dirt Band were really popular
at this point, I mean in southern California, lines around
the block. We're doing three sets to night Fridays and

(32:57):
Saturdays at the Paradox. Then we started playing down at
the Golden Bear song. We had not yet made it
up to Hollywood. But and what what was the material?
Originals were covers, Oh, it is all covers we wrote.
We wrote a couple of kind of jug bandison. Well,
this guy, the former member of our band, Jackson Brown,
has some great He wrote a song called Melissa that

(33:18):
was a great jug band tune. He had another one
called It's been Reigning here in Long Beach, great jug
band tune. So we started cutting Jackson stuff, but not cutting,
but learning because at this point we're not really recording.
So the repertoire a lot of Jim Quest and stuff,
a lot of you know, we got into some of
the like original stuff like the Memphis Jug Band, and

(33:42):
you know, we found a way to sort of uh,
you know, assimilate some sort of you know, skiffle band
songs and string band songs from the twenties and thirties
and incorporate them into our style now with John McEwan
on the five string banjo. We even did a couple
of bluegrass members but with a wash board in the
Washington base as a rhythm section. So these kids, again,

(34:04):
the kids are really god man. We got when Jackson
was still in the band, our friend and Moses who
was the editor at Tiger Beat magazine, which was Tiger
Beat was there was no Rolling Stone. So I remember, right,
my mom cut out this couple of pages from Tiger
Beat because there's a picture of us with Jackson and

(34:26):
the band, and they're writing about the doors as well,
and they're writing about the Buffalo sprankfields, just to give
you context. All there were we're team magazines and sing
Out magazine for the folkies of course, you know. But
h so we're getting this, there's this like buzz about
our band. So finally, after being courted by not a

(34:47):
half a dozen record companies, we uh, we ended up
at Liberty Records. Now Liberty was already part of them.
My Capital are still independent with Simon Waronker. I think
that they were I think it was Liberty Imperial. We're going,
of course we are Imperial records. Fats Domino were like,

(35:08):
I mean, we all had Liberty and Imperial Records in
our collections as kids, so we're pretty impressed, you know.
So they signed us. The first thing they did welcome
to the music business, was you guys are great, Let's
change everything. So the one one of the things that

(35:28):
that we got with a producer named Dallas Smith more
on Dallas in a minute. But they wanted us. They
didn't like they didn't think no anybody would buy the
jug band music. And we're going, wait a minute, have
you heard the Love and Spoonful? And they're yeah, but
they're they're electric. So how about some folk rock? You know,

(35:50):
folk rock was a big deal. You had the Birds,
and you had you know, and you had the Springfield
and you had the Turtles at the Association doing a
little of that as well. There's this this thing, right
and we're like, okay, we can sing those songs, but
we're a jug band. Can we do both? There? Like sure?
So we went in the studio. First day we walked in.

(36:11):
There's about a half a dozen session guys there. We're
all freaking out going what you know, what what if
we do? We're all still cocky teenagers, I might add.
And and some of these session guys were amazing and
we became friends over the years. These are guys like
the Wrecking Crew. Those guys are there. It's amazing. And
we met Leon Russell through that, we met our buddy

(36:35):
what's his name, sorry, from Bred David Gates. David Gates.
David Gates arranged this, arranged His first string arranging job
was on Buy for Me the Rain, So we'll get
to that in a in a second. So our first
album totally schizophrenic half of his jug band, the other
half is folk rock songs. Steve Noonan our buddy from

(36:57):
the Paradox, Jackson Brown. Both of them attributed songs um
and well. I think we actually did a couple of
uh Bruce kunkle Uh. There was a song called song
to Utah, who was his girlfriend who would become his
first wife as well. We did that and it was
it was fun. I mean, none of the music. I'm

(37:17):
not embarrassed by any of the music, although we sound
so like like we're ten when I hear it. I
was saying, we are singing. So did they let you
play on the album? Or we played on every track?
We played on every track, but it would be like
the six of us and a bass player and a drummer,
and you know, we're wailing away and all of a sudden,
it's like here play an electric twelve string Ralph or

(37:39):
Buddy Ralph bar Um John played banjo. You know, we
kind of process that he put a mute on it.
That made it some a little different kind of I
don't a little more psychedelic. So also there was that
everything was psychedelic. So the Dirt Band, all of a sudden,
that didn't hurt our popularity at all. The is that

(38:00):
loved us for our jug band music loved by From
Me the Rain as well. So our record was a
top ten single up and down the West Coast and
up and down the East Coast. I remember because he
cousin Brucey Morraw, Bruce Morrow, you know, uh played our records.
You know a lot of my friends that grew up
on the East coast, like you heard by From Me

(38:21):
the Rain on the radio or the West coast. There's
another story. The record actually got banned, so that killed
it at another if you want to hear the story, yeah, yeah,
well uh. The B side of the song was a
song called candy Man, which was written by the late
great Reverend Gary Davis. In the In the song it

(38:43):
said I'd do anything in this god almighty world to
have my candy Man home. So set that aside for
a second. Had nothing to do with Buy from Me
the Rain. The A side, Uh, there's a guy that
There was a program director somewhere in the either the
southern US or the Midwest, the work for a station
that was part of a big chain of stations owned

(39:05):
by a guy, Mr McClendon. I believe his name was
Gordon McClendon. Let's get this. Program director comes home one
night and his daughters in her bedroom with her little,
you know, miniature fort rpm record player, and through the
door he sings these long haired British guys singing, let's

(39:28):
spend the night together. You know, flings opened the door.
What the you know? What? How? What who is this?
You know? He comes into the station the next day,
gets on the horn and it's like there's this terrible
disease going through our you know, coming at us. From

(39:49):
the airways. You know, these this horrible you know, breaking
down the Moray's of America. The Rolling Stones were at
the front of it. So he calls his boss, Mr.
McClinton and says, we gotta do something about this. So
they they banned Let's Spend the Night Together. They banned

(40:11):
Strawberry Fields slash Penny Lane. They banned Devil with a
Blue Dress by Mitch Rider in the Detroit Wheels, and
they banned by from Me the Rain slash Candy Man
by the Dirt Band because we were blaspheming saying we
got almighty World, which you know, okay, and just well,

(40:35):
Newsweek magazine and Time both wrote about it, and we
thought pretty cool company Beatles Stones, Mitch Rider and us,
you know. But unfortunately, in terms of the business side
of things, the A side of the record didn't do
it there, you know, it was an innocent victim here.
So our record at that point, I think is around

(40:57):
forty it's in the mid forties. With a bullet, we'll
get ads were climbing the charts. Like I said, the
popularity is growing from the coast inward. The next you know,
forty five with a bullet one week with a parachute.
The next week dropped like a rock, done Gone. So
that was kind of depressing, but again, welcome to the

(41:18):
music business. And as we know, here we go. This
is how radio can work. And censorship. Okay, before we
continue the story of the band, what did your parents
say about you dropping out of community college and pursuing
this career. They really they were incredibly supportive. And I
should point out my dad was the fourth and four

(41:40):
generations of West Point graduates, so whoa, whoa whoa. Okay, yeah, yeah,
and also a peace nick I might add. My dad
was you know, he went to World War two and
came home with shell shock PTSD and A and A
and a shirt full of metals, including a purple heart.
But you know, when we got into Vietnam, he was like,

(42:03):
I started talking about it right away. I was like,
I don't want to go, you know, blah blah blah.
So none of us did. How did you get out?
I got because I flunked my physical uh you know,
and like the rest of the guys in the band,
we were lucky enough to to be able to get
around it, you know, hooker Crook. We didn't want to go.

(42:23):
I had friends that were two years older than me
in high school that never came home, and I was
like this, and then of course it wasn't World War two,
it wasn't signed up here as like what is this
war about? And that was just you know, unbelievable, you know,
and that's a that's a you know, you're conflicted. We're

(42:45):
all conflicted being from that generation about our buddies who
went off there and fought in Vietnam and why we
were so lucky to not have to go. Okay, So
the first record is all of a sudden installed. What
happens after that? Uh? First record installed? Then we did

(43:09):
it that, We did a second record. The first river
was eponymous, you know, dirt band on a sitting on
a steam shovel, get it, dirt band um. The second
record was called Ricochet, kind of using the same formula again.
We put out a single called Truly Right that was

(43:30):
written by uh, this group called Maston and Brewer, and
the brewer was Mike Brewer who came to fame later
as part of Brewer and Shipley. Really cool song. They
had the same vibe as they would later. You know,
we're just barely denting the charts. I think we gotta
pass because we'd have some popularity. Bruce Kunkle left at

(43:50):
the in the middle of that record. He wanted to
go electric. He he become a a real fan and
devote of the mothers of invention. He want. He was
a really imaginative cat still is really great guy, but uh,
he moved on and Chris Darrow at the after that
album came out, Chris Darrow joined up. This is late sixties, um,

(44:12):
And if you want to talk about Christophers I got
I'm happy to but well, yeah, you know, he's sort
of the unsungen here. We're sort of zel Us in
a million acts. How did you know Chris just from
hanging out? So we were fans of the Mad Mountain
Ramblers and the Dry City Scat Band, which is another
band that Chris was in, and then he and Dave
and and uh Solomon Feldhouse started a band, a guy

(44:34):
named Max Buddha started this great band called the Kaleidoscope,
who are legendary early world music. Played all kinds of stuff.
They are electric and acoustic, and you used like East
Indian instruments like the d and the size and but
also like you know, altric guitars and banjo and electric

(44:55):
fiddle and crazy god, what a great band. So Chris
had just left the Kaleidoscope and we bumped into him
somewhere and he said, man, you guys looking for another guy.
We're like yeah, and he said, I'd love to play
with you guys. He was kind of into jumping back
into the acoustic world again. As soon as he got
in the band. You know, he started playing fiddle and

(45:17):
that's kind of where the Cajun thing that influence in
our band came up. He has some really good original
tunes and I remember and we did we did an
album called Rare Junk, uh that you know about this time,
I should point out, you know, we're still having no
luck in the studio, although on on Rare Junk they

(45:37):
finally let us record our jug band songs by ourselves,
you know, with the caveat that we had to do
like three songs that had a room full of musicians,
sometimes a horn section or a string section. So we said, okay,
we'll do that, but just kind of leave us alone, please,
and they were like, we don't care. You're not selling records.

(45:58):
So we you know, we made a little foray into
what we might call a country rock. We recorded a
cover of Reason to Believe, the great Tim Harden song.
Our buddy Bernie Leaden came in and played acoustic guitar
on that. That's how that was our association with Bernie started.
You know, I'm glad that we sort of you know,

(46:18):
I look at those records now as our kind of
farm team training earn while you learn experience with our band. Um, okay,
let's stay with the earn. Will you learn? Needless to say,
in that era, having a record deal put you in
a completely different class from everybody else. So how did

(46:38):
you feel about yourself? How was the band surviving monetarily?
How often were you playing live? What kind of money?
What was going on? I couldn't even tell you about
the kind of money. I really don't have a concept now,
I can't. I just remember, Uh. At one point we
were this is by from and the Reins a hit, right,

(47:00):
So we had a really uh we had a booking
agent that had a really great imagination and they decided
I think it was a p A at the time. Gosh,
I can't even remember. I believe it was. We've been
with all of them at some point in another, some
settled letters um and they sent us up to San Francisco.

(47:20):
We played the film More by the Way a couple
of times. The first time was with a band called
Clear Light and also Blue Cheer, who were built as
the world's loudest rock and roll and they were, I
mean they were, they were amazing, So I understand we
had probably the quietest band they had ever played the
film More Us jug Band, Nobody's Plugged In and Blue Cheer,

(47:44):
you know which was It was fun. Man. We went
to San Francisco. I still got a film More poster.
We headlined that gig and it was really cool. And
then a few weeks later are Are The aforementioned agent
said want you guys to play at the Basin Street West,
which is a jazz club in San Francisco and opening

(48:07):
for the great legendary organist, Mr Jimmy Smith. Okay, that
made no sense at all, but they were doing they had.
They also represented Jefferson Airplane and and I think the
Airplane played on a bill with Gosh, I can't remember,
you know, maybe it was Miles Davis. It was also
just kind of wacky. The one thing that came out

(48:30):
of the Basin Street West gig that I really dug.
There was a band called the Blues Project that was
playing the film War that week, and that included a
guy named Steve Katz. Uh, Danny was what was Danny's
name the guitar player, sorry, uh, Jenny Calb and Al Cooper.
So Alan, Danny and Steve came in probably to see

(48:53):
Jimmy Smith play, but being ex Folky's all of them
as well, they dug the jug band music and Al
we really we became fast friends with Al. That still
remains to this day. So you know, that would that
would be that just became an ongoing thing and it
was great. That was the coolest thing about it, getting
to meet Al big fans of everything he ever did,

(49:17):
and uh, you know, and then we live and learn.
So we're by the way, we couldn't afford to stay
in San Francisco while we're playing the Basin Street. We
lived across the bridge in Mill Valley at this in
this little fucking motel called the Fireside In. It's the
first place I ever heard gunfire, actual real gun fire

(49:40):
outside motel room. One night. We were so I mean,
at this point, we really were like down to season stamps,
literally and we had no money because it was I
can't remember why. I just remember Jimmy Fadden, Jimmy Fadden's
little brother, Terry, God bless him. Jimmy calls Terry and

(50:01):
we said, you gotta get Terry up here. We need
a roadie. So Terry came up and the first thing
we said to him was do you have any cash?
And Terry he was this, he's still around. He's just
the best guy, really great kid. So yes, he loaned

(50:22):
us the twenty bucks that he had and we bought
some groceries, you know, a lot of peanut butter sandwiches.
We actually got into fried cheerios, which were pretty good.
You know. It was, you know, anything, we're scrambling. But
cool thing about hanging out in in Mill Valley was
right next to Saucelito. There was a club. I believe
the club was called the Arc. It wasn't like a

(50:45):
river boat or a house, and it was the art.
It was like a I think they bought one of
those old you know what do you call those wheels,
paddle wheel steamships, and it was docked so you walked
onto this, you across the little plank and that you're
in this club. Well, we saw a Moby Gray play
there a bunch because we were you know, we were

(51:08):
only playing weeks, so we'd have like Moby Grapes playing
for three nights and we're like, that's the best band
we've ever heard, and this electric thing is pretty cool
by the way, you know. So they were they were
a perfect example of like taking a bunch of guys
most of them started in folk music and really took

(51:30):
I don't know, maybe the song sense. There was something
about it that was just different. And they what a
great band, you know, mysterious, legendary, cool, cool group. You know.
At the same time we're we're doing these festivals, were
playing with the Jefferson Airplane again and playing with the
Doors a bunch uh the Buffalo Springfield. I remember playing

(51:52):
with an early version of Stepping Wolf. Um. It was
really cool, you know. In our jug band day, I
might add, when we were playing places like the Ash Grove,
we opened for Lightning Hopkins, Memphis, Slim Good, Lord uh
Man's lipscumb Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee again. So we're

(52:13):
learning a lot. This is like school for us. A
lot of the great bluegrass acts again, New Lost City Ramblers,
whom I loved, and they were an old timey group
that included uh what what was his name? John Cohen?
I love John Cohen and uh Pece Seeger's brother Mike Seegar. Ridiculous.
I mean that the as sponges. We were so lucky.

(52:36):
You know, we're absorbing all this stuff. But also, you know,
we're hearing these kids are these guys that used to
hang around and play folk music in the back room
became this band called the Rising Suns, which was Ray
Cooter and Taj Mahal. So we're like, oh yeah again,
they're taking this influence in this gift um and turn

(52:58):
it into their electrifying So we started. You know, we
bought a bass and and a half. I bought a
drum kit. I should point out real quickly that we
made this movie. We were in this film for three minutes,
but it took us three months to do it in
the woods and the wilds of Oregon. The film was
called Painter Wagon Major motion picture, actually the most expensive

(53:22):
film up to that point that had ever been made
by Hollywood. Saw it. Oh yeah, you know what, it's
a lot of fun to watch now, But it was
Lee Marvin, this guy that had been making these spaghetti
westerns named Clint Eastwood, and this great actress, uh, the

(53:44):
great late grade Jeane Sieberg. There was this crazy part
for her because she'd done all these amazing sort of
artie films, you know. Uh, she was a serious, serious actor.
So there we are. We're playing a drug band. Basically
we were, you know, it was all these mining was
the gold rushing California. That was the premise. So it's

(54:07):
all these uh you know, these miners up you know,
and we're slogging through these mining gold mining, you know,
trying to pan for gold or dig these tunnels. And
it's a comedy, a musical. And we did this song
called hand Me Down that Cannabians. And we were up

(54:27):
there for three months. There's a bunch of guys from
southern California. Three months in a town the population was
about I think, I don't know me, I'm exaggerating just
because I can. And we had nothing to do. We
were so bored, and we started kind of getting at
each other and you know, picking on each other things
that we didn't care about. We started caring about that

(54:49):
we didn't like, and there was this tug and pull
about musical direction. Well, I remember Chris and I that summer,
and I might you a little off on my timeline,
but Sweetheart of the Rodeo was out and music from
Big Pink was out, and I heard music from Big

(55:10):
Pink and I didn't want to play guitar ever again.
I wanted to play drums. I wanted to play drums
like Leo on Hell you know, and and Ringo was
really getting into that Tom Phil thing that he did,
so well, uh you know. I I've learned how to
play drums from one of the guys that played in
the Mothers of Invention, a guy named Denny Bruce, who

(55:31):
was kind enough to show me how to play along
to first record Ruby Tuesday. Um, good Bye Ruby Tuesday
by Da Dad Da dadda Dada, that Snare Phil and
that was it. Man. I wanted to learn drums, and
Chris is going, hey, man, we need to take the
band in a country rock direction. This thing is so happening,
you know, he says, my buddies, like Chris HILLMTT was

(55:53):
one of Chris Chris Darrow's buddies. So these guys are
doing this thing. It's so cool. And the birds and
like they hire Clarence White now, who's playing this great
b bender guitar, telecaster and everything shifting the place are
shift in here musically, and it made sense because we
all love country music, we love blue grass, and we
were just getting a little tired of making records for

(56:16):
a company that didn't really care about Joe band music anyways,
and we were kind of ready to move on in general.
So we got back to l a after after three
months in Oregon, which was lovely, by the way, except
for the part that we were so just bored stiff,
and we got our record companies like, you know, you guys,

(56:36):
have one more record on your deal, Let's do a
live album. We're like whatever, Sure, So we played the
Tributor for a week. Well, our opening act was this
band called Pogo, and Poco was Poco before you know,
Walt Kelly the Cartoonists, decided that he's going to sue
them if they didn't change their name Poco original lineup.

(57:00):
For me, honestly, I never saw the Beatles play, but
I felt like I was in the Cavern Club watching
the Beatles play. They were so damn good. I mean,
the harmonies were ridiculous and I was a fan already
of Richie Furres from the Buffalo Springfields. You got Ritchie,
you got Jim Messina on guitar, you had the great
Randy Meisner on bass and high high harmony, and George

(57:23):
Grantham singing drummer. I'm like, yep, George Grantham singing drummer,
Levin Helm singing drummer. That's the thing I filed that away.
So we're opening for Poco Dirt Band. Honestly at this
point we're on our last legs and the opening act
is the Beatles. So they would come off stage every
night and they're high five in each other and they're

(57:45):
just whoop, whoop, whoop, and the nicest guys I might add,
you know, and we're just like, we're struggling to try
to play some kind of sort of country rock, folk
rock stuff. The one thing that worked was working really
well was a Cajun song called Alligator Man. I played drums,
Chris Darrow played uh fiddle on it, and it was

(58:07):
really a Cajun rock tune. That thing would end up
mattering a few months later. So at the end of
that run, super depressed, we're like, what are we going
to do with the band. The band's tugging and pulling
in different directions. Uh, you know, some of the guys
wanted to sort of do the country rock thing. You know,
Chris and I are talking to each other going, we

(58:29):
can't really pull this off, you know, we it's not
And then our buddy Ralph bar and his wife Holly
wanted to do like a folk duo thing, and their
friend Dwayne Almand was going to produce a record on him.
So they're drifting over here. There was some you know,
business arguments about whether or not we're with the right

(58:51):
manager or not, as it just got toxic, and Chris
and I are gone, man, let's just start. Let's just
let's walk away from this thing. So we did, you know,
not a lot of arguments somebody had. Everybody was just
tired and burned out, as burnout as you can be
at twenty one. Um, So Chris and I started this
band and it was me and him and uh, this

(59:14):
great drummer named John Ware who would go on to
be the drummer for the first National Band and Emmy
Lou Harris's Hot band. Johnny Ware terrific drummer, great guy.
Another art student from Claremont where Chris lived, uh and
John London on base and John London whose real name

(59:35):
was John Keeney. He grew up his best friend was
Michael Nesmith. So John had been working on the set
of The Monkeys as as Michael stand in, and he'd
been playing in a band called the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
which was Michael one of Michael Murphy's Martin Murphy's first bands.
So these guys are cool, man. We we started working
up tunes and it's fun, and Chris and I are

(59:56):
writing a bunch of songs. Johnny Ware wrote a couple
and it was like we're often running. It was like
country rock cool, and I'm trying to come up with
a country rock band I name, and it's like, how
about buck Wheat buckwheats a cool, cool sound meaning buck
Wheat not the Little Rascal's character, uh or wheat straw,

(01:00:16):
or like, how about I don't know, Southern Pacific. That's
a pretty good name. Nobody liked that, so uh So
Chris and John, being way hipper than I were, said,
how about the Corvettes? Totally ironic? That does not sound
nothing can sound further from a country rock band name,
and I'm like, okay, these guys are a couple of

(01:00:37):
years a couple of years older, far far hipper than
I was. I went cool, what are the corvettes? And
then John London he brought Chris Derrek. I sorry. John
London brought Michael Nasmith into one of our rehearsals, and
Michael has been hired as a producer. He got a
production deal with Dot Records. He says, I want to

(01:01:00):
sign you guys to a deal, a singles deal. So
we cut some sides with Michael, which was really fun.
Got to know him really well, really great cat, one
of my favorite people ever. We're starving. They put out
a single I think, and it didn't really stick, and
they put they started to put out another one, and
out of the blue, our dear friend Linda ron Stat

(01:01:23):
calls us up. She's you know, the Stone Ponies are
broken up. She's now a solo act. She said, I
need a band. Would you guys be my band? She
loved the way Chris, she loved the way John and
John the rhythm section was great. We were friends. She
was kind to me. Bee. I'm like, I wasn't bringing
a whole lot, but I was a good harmony singer.
And then Chris's fiddle. She loved that Cajun fiddle thing.

(01:01:46):
And Chris Blay lead guitar really well. So it's Linda
Ronstat and the Corvetts. We hit the road and man, wow,
it was amazing for a thousand reasons, one being we
all had giant crushes on Linda, of course because he's
Lenda Ron's that and one of the greatest singers that
ever lived. And so I'm learning to sing harmony with

(01:02:07):
Linda and this is really cool. And we're doing songs
like silver Threads and gold Needles and oh, different drum
every night. She had a song called some of Shelley's
Blues that Michael wrote that I just loved. We're saying
a long long time. You know, she's god. She took
the only Daddy that Will walk the line great whale

(01:02:30):
and Jennings song turned it into only Mama that will
walk the line, and she mean it was just killer.
We The only time I ever played with the whiskey
was in Linda's band, So this is really fun. And uh,
several months go by, I think, you know, I think
it's around six months. We're doing the corvettes, and Linda
and I ran into John McEwen at a Poco show

(01:02:53):
ironically at the Golden Bear, and we looked at each
other and said we could do this. Let's give it
another shot. So we called up Les Thompson who was
in immediately he just as long as I get to
play electric bass, yes, less you can play electric bass.
Turned into a really good bass player, great bass player

(01:03:13):
by then, and Jimmy Fadden who was also picking up
the drums. So Jimmy and I are both playing drums,
and Jimmy was becoming a really great allectric guitar player
along as his legendary harp skills as well great harmonica player.
But we're like, we need to singing drummer. We all
agree we need to leve on or we needed George
Grantham and uh a friend of ours and Mitral friend

(01:03:35):
of ours knew this guy Jimmy Ibson who had just
moved out to California. He was from Philadelphia, went to
school in Newcastle, Indiana, and moved out to l A
to become a star. And he was having the kind
of experience that the rest of us were. You know,
so if he's been playing you know, these pick up gigs.

(01:03:57):
His his roommate was this guy named Kevin Kelly, one
of his roommates who was playing with that version of
the Birds. And then he had another roommate later on
named Danny Danny Lotomoser, who was a folk rock kind
of guy. So mutual friends. We got introduced to Ibby.
We called him maybe because we had two Jimmy's at

(01:04:18):
this point. Uh, and he comes over, we play drums
with us. Were like, this is really great, and he's like, well,
let's stick around after class. We're already impressed by his drumming.
Everybody splits. Me and Jimmy are sitting there with a
couple of acoustic guitars and he's a really good guitar player,
I come to find out. And we already knew he
could sing, but we started singing Everly Brothers songs and

(01:04:42):
it's like, oh man, we got It's like I gotta fill,
I gotta don However, you know, we would switched back
and forth and I was in heaven. Man, this is
like become my favorite singer, well next to Linda that
I'd ever sung with. And we had this thing. We
had this bland that was like like brothers singing together.

(01:05:03):
Turned out if he could play the bass, he could
play a lectric guitar, he could play a little bit
of clarinet, a little bit of pianos like man, and
he writes songs. So he'sa Meanwhile, what's happened to Chris
Daryl Chris darrells? He Chris stayed with Linda the Corvettes.
Bernie Letton came in and took my place in the Corvettes.
So this is the first time Bernie who eventually you

(01:05:26):
know the deal. Bernie stays in the band, played with
the Corvette for a while, then he went off and
played with the Burrito Brothers for a while. Chris continued
playing in that group, and then he got us. He
got signed I believe again either to you A or
Liberty EO By Perhaps I'm sorry I have a little

(01:05:47):
brain fire here. But he had a solo deal and
made some really really great records, among them artist Proof,
which is my favorite. I think he became friends. He
and Peter Asher became friends. Chris ended up and fiddle
on Sweet Baby. James uh Our buddy John London from
the Corvets played bass on Shoot. He played bass on

(01:06:08):
on the song Sweet Baby James on that record. Meanwhile,
John Lennon and John Ware started a Bama John with
Michael Nesmuth. So so you got the two Johnnies and
Mike Nesmuth. They got the first national band going, which
it was another one of the great underrated country rock
bands of all time. I think, uh so, yeah, so

(01:06:29):
the Dirt band re kind of re uh imagined as
this country rock band. And then how do you wind?
You rehearse? Now your deal is done with Liberty? So
what happens? Well, my deal I was done with Liberty
because I had to get out of my record deal.
They still had me under contract, and I pulled a

(01:06:51):
trick on them and got out of that. I called
up the president of Liberty Records and I kept calling
him and call him. There's no email back then. I
couldn't slide a note under his door because security wouldn't
let me through. And I'm like, because I wanted to
sign this deal with Dot Records with Mike Nesmuth and
his I believe it was Bud Dane, and I kept

(01:07:15):
calling and They're like, Nat, who who's this calling? He'll
call you back. Never called. So finally I got on
there and they said who's calling and I said, um,
Tommy Boys. Tommy Boys and Bobby Hart wrote Last Train
to Clarksville. They were huge hit singers, his huge his
songwriters in l A. At the point, but gets on

(01:07:37):
the phone Tommy, how are you, babe? And I'm like,
I'm great, And then I listened for a couple of
more minutes of small talk. I said, actually, this is
Jeff Hannah and he goes, oh, Jeff, how are you doing?
What are you up to? Long time no speak. He says,
I'm actually kind of trying to get out of my
record deal, and he goes, no problem, come by tomorrow.
You know, he signed a paper let let me go. Yeah,

(01:07:59):
I was was worth anything to him, but it was
a sweet thing to do. I appreciated that. So Bill
McEwen again, we go play the Troubadour and uh, people
like this, they liked this band. We Meanwhile, we rehearsed
for like three months. Les Thompson's dad had was at
Sea Bring jukebox distributor, and we rehearsed in his in

(01:08:22):
his warehouse in Long Beach. So we were a wood
shed and it was like I think it was the
first time since my mom's garage that we really would
shed it and it was fun. Man Jimmy Everson's bringing
in songs by this kid that he met at a
party named Kenny Loggins. We recorded four Kenny songs and
nobody had ever heard by the way or heard of

(01:08:43):
at that point. Did a couple of you know, originals.
I there was a song that I used to sing
with the Corvettes called The Cure that ended up on
the record. But a lot of covers Randy Newman living
Without You, Um, shoot, who else do we cover? Michael
Nesmuth So Michelle's Blues. That's one of the first songs

(01:09:04):
I learned to sing with Linda and I worked it
up with Jimmy Ibbotson and him singing lead, me singing harmony,
and that fit really well. Um, you know, and I
whatever we did, Buddy, how we did, we were huge
Buddy Holly fans. We did Ray Van on that record,
an old blues tune called travel and Mood some bluegrass.
We did the Great Earl Scrugs instrumental called Randy Lynn

(01:09:26):
Rag Clinch Mountain Backstep, Ralph Stanley tune. You know, it
was a it was a a mash up you know,
the dirt band was always instill our eclectic. Okay, So
how did you end up pack on Liberty and how

(01:09:47):
did Bill mceuwan end up being the producer? Well, that
was one of the deals. When Bill came back into
the picture. He had matured as a manager and as
a producer and he just kind us. He went to
these guys that said, look, come see these guys at
Drew Badur and we you know, they still hired us
because they liked us when we were a drug band.

(01:10:09):
He came in and love the band, and Bill said,
here's the deal. I want to produce him and they
were like, well, okay, fine, cut a couple of sides.
We cut a couple of sides. They loved it. So
he stayed on and Bill remained our producer through I
don't know four albums I think uh. And he was
a great managed, superman and incredibly and a visionary musically,

(01:10:34):
you know, and he knew his stuff. He knew to
use good mix. He got a great engineer, engineer Mr
Dino Lapis, who was a staff engineer at World Pacific
and Liberty and a couple of these studios where we
started out. But he knew how he wanted the band
to sound. He wanted to record this stuff. Well, he
wanted the drums and bass and the alleged guitar and

(01:10:56):
you know, the acoustic instruments. Great vintage gear wasn't vantaged
back then, but really great analog gear. And that record
signed awesome, I thought, you know, so we were proud
of what we were doing. And at the tail end
of the sessions, you know, we found this other song,
Mr bo Jangles. Okay, but how did you how did

(01:11:20):
he make a deal with Liberty which you've just gotten off. Uh,
he just said we're gonna start from scratch. It started
because Bud Dane loved the band. He loved this new
incarnation of the band. So they wanted to sign us.
Because just as folk rock and and sort of whatever
jug band music were popular in sixty seven, now it's

(01:11:42):
nineteen seventy and like country rocks, the thing, baby, you know,
the Palomino Club is jumping in North Hollywood. The Trouger
is now home to you know this band, Long Branch,
Penny Whistle, uh and Poke Poco. Now the Burrito Brothers
would come by now and again play and it was
it was a thing uh, you know, even even the

(01:12:05):
singer songwriter stuff, Lynda's stuff, Jackson Brown had just gotten signed,
uh Dan Fogelberg. This new vibe was very much in
line with the country rock stuff. So they wanted to
jump on that bat that bandwagon, and they we played
him a couple of tracks, played them Ravan and Shelley's Blues,

(01:12:26):
I think, and they loved them both. So so you
find Mr. Bo Jangles, Yeah, uh, never heard the song
in my life. Didn't know who Jerry Jeff was. We were.
I was coming home from rehearsal one night and I
heard I'm driving I lived, and I think I lived
in Seal Beach, driving a few miles from Long Beach

(01:12:46):
to Seal Beach, got my radio on his FM radio,
old school, no back, announcing they'd play fifteen songs without
telling you who it was, and I heard, probably flipping
the dial, I heard probably the last two verses in
the last chorus of Mr. Bo Jangles. But as soon
as I heard it, I pulled the car off the

(01:13:07):
road and you know, shut shut the engine off so
I could really hear it great, And I was really
got this lump in my throat hearing this story about
this old guy and his dog, and the melody was
beautiful and a great I mean, a compelling story. So
next day I came running into the warehouse and I'm like, guys,

(01:13:28):
you know, basically, I'm like, I got the final piece
to the puzzle here, Guys. I heard this great song.
And we have started using an accordion and mandolin as
well together on our records. And we started talking about
we were big fans of the band, and the band
had done that on the song Old Rocking Chair on
the on their uh, their second album, the Brown album,

(01:13:50):
and I like, we started talking about that would really
be the way to do this acoustic guitars. We brought
in this kid named Russ Kunkle to to sort of
set about the drums, and uh, Jimmy Fadden had a
really great drum arrangement, but you know he was he
was mad enough to like hand the sticks to Russ
for that one. We all did that, you know, we did.

(01:14:11):
We We occasionally have session guys come in because they
played better in the studio. So we cut the song. Uh,
Jimmy Everson, I didn't finish my story, so Jimmy Everson
immediately went that's Mr Bo Jangles When I said, what's
this song called? He had a forty five rpm in
the trunk of his car under the spare tire, scratched

(01:14:35):
all the hell, and so we we stacked We stacked
pennies on the needle of the record player to get
it to track better. Actually misheard a couple of the lyrics,
which we recorded it that way, you know, later on
became a huge hit with the wrong words in a
couple of places. But Jerry Jeff, whom we met later

(01:14:56):
forgave us because the sold a million copies. He was
a happy camper, you know. So um yeah, So we
we put the whole album together. Bill McEwen had this
cool idea where he left a lot of the in
studio chatter and count offs and laughter and just the
fun stuff. He left a lot of that on the record,

(01:15:17):
which we really dug you know. It was like, uh,
the curtain being pulled back a little bit. And later
on our fans really dug it as well. And he
actually had this recording of this old guy, this guy
who was his wife's uncle, Charlie, that he had recorded
on a portable two track recorder years before in in

(01:15:39):
Up in northern California, Uncle Charlie talking and playing the guitar,
and he brought us to his house and he said,
I want to play you guys something, and we little
joint pass it around, lowered the lights, and Bill had
this amazing you know. He had a great stereo and
I know you're a lover of this stuff, the ack

(01:16:00):
Apps voice of the theater speakers, and we're just like
leaning back in the chair like the old jbl ad,
you know. And he played he played Uncle Charlie into Mr.
Bo Jangles, this guy talking and then a dog starts
singing and then he cuts right to that boom ba
dabba dabba guitar figure and we're like in tears. This

(01:16:22):
is like I don't know how he came up with it,
but it was a genius move. So we love it,
and we're like thinking, we're thinking, but yeah, that's not
the hit. It's gonna be some in Jelly's Blues, or
it's gonna be house A Through Corner, or it's gonna
be Ray Van. So we put our single out. We
put out Shelley's Blues. I think it was the first single,
and it's going up the charts. That's doing pretty pretty good.

(01:16:45):
And now we started touring. We're touring on We're playing
college campuses. Man, I just watched that Carlin documented I
hadn't know if you saw it or not. Oh man,
huge fan of George's, but in that moment that came,
you know, when he's like, I don't want us saying
to a bunch of disinterested people eat eating their dinners

(01:17:06):
and drinking cocktails in these buttoned up, you know kind
of casinos or dinner theaters. I want to play two
kids going. I want to play the kids that are
like us, you know, they were the same sensibility. So
we started playing college campuses and these folks are loving us,
and we're like, we found this audience. The record starts selling,

(01:17:29):
but the single starting to lose its legs a little bit.
All of a sudden, the station in Shreveport, Louisiana, late
night Chuck starts playing Mr. Bo Jangles and the phones
light up. These people want to hear this song. They're
just like, you're regardless of the fact that's a four
minute waltz, can't dance to it about an old guy

(01:17:52):
and a dog. It's it's landing, it's resonating with people.
Super compelling, and we get this call. Then it starts
spreading in these other FM stations again late night where
it's free form radio, they start playing it. Record Comany
calls us, we're gonna pull Shelley's Blues and you're We're
like what, and yeah, we're gonna put out Mr. Bo

(01:18:13):
Jangles and we're going, oh geez, we're screwed. They're never
gonna and we will love the song, make no mistake
about that. Well, we'll figure our careers over their planning.
They're they're gonna go with this, you know, this slow
song and story song. People have to pay attention. We

(01:18:35):
were so wrong, you know, as my wife likes to say,
we had our elbows on the pulse of America. Totally
missed it. So they put it out. Things stayed on
the charts for several months, had slow burned, but a
good in the best kind of way, you know, slowly
going up the charts. Got up to number nine, stayed

(01:18:56):
there for a couple of weeks. Really actually, I mean
really the biggest single ever, had sold a million copies.
Finally got to talk to Jerry Jeff on the telephone
one night. You know, we're all drunk and you know,
backslapping on the phone. He decided to move to Austin, Texas.
I think he felt like this kind of this gave

(01:19:17):
him another It really turned up his self confidence and
it was happening, you know. I think he was on
his way to l A. And he made a left
turn and went to Austin. And the rest is Austin
history for sure. And we became buddies. We played a
bunch over the years. Love playing with Jerry Jeff. But yeah, there,
it was there. It was that album and you know,

(01:19:39):
and that led to other stuff down the road for us.
Um So how do you ultimately put together? Will the
circle be unbroken? Direct link to Mr bo Jangles. We're
playing these tours and uh, we start playing in the
South and we're all kind of kids, you know, long
haired kids from l A. We're going are They're gonna
beat the ship out of us? Down there is like

(01:20:00):
easy Rider. I was like, no, there was some of
that going on, and make no mistake, but uh, we're
playing these college campuses and it was so cool. So
we're playing Vanderbilt University and there's this kid named Gary Scruggs.
Gary Scruggs was Earl Scruggs as oldest son. He and

(01:20:23):
his his brother Stephen Randy, they're hearing Mr. Bo Jangles
on the radio and there they become fans of the band.
Sees the Uncle Charlie album, pulls it out of the
bend and he's looking at the back of the record
and he goes, WHOA, there's Randy Lynn Rag that my
dad wrote about my little brother Randy. This instrumental takes

(01:20:46):
it home. They love the album. So to get his
dad interested, he plays Randy Lynn Ragg for for Earl.
Earl hears it and it's like that boy can play
that five string and that band's sounds pretty good. Never
heard a washboard on it, Glad Scruggs record. So with
that as the hook, Gary, who knew the dean at Vanderbilt,

(01:21:10):
set up a meet and greet for us and the
Scruggs family and John McEwen, especially as just shaken in
his boots so stoked that he's gonna meet Earl Scruggs,
but also his hero is gonna be watching, so we
knew they were there. We played our set. We actually
killed it. It was a really good set, went backstage,

(01:21:31):
toweled off a little bit and in comes to Scruggs
family and we're hanging out and immediately this is like
long lost family these folks. The bond the friendships became
lifelong friendships. From that moment, we you know, finally talked
to Earl into playing a song on the five string.
And it was a great night, you know, and Louise

(01:21:55):
Louise Scruggs, one of the great figures in the music business,
went the pioneering women in the music business, and who
was Earl's manager as well. You know, we just had
a great time. And when we bonded on music and
Earl had just started the Earl Scruggs review had left
Lester Flat Flat Scruggs had broken up, and Earls wants

(01:22:17):
to play country rock kind of you know, with the
blue gass sensibility as well. So he's on his way
out the door after a couple hours of hanging out
and he says, well, if you boys would ever like
to do some recording, I'd love to get in the
studio with you. He closes the door and we're what
just happened. Earl Scruggs invited us to record. You know.

(01:22:40):
It turned out that he was friends with the birds already,
and you know, the music community in Nashville was not
his conservative and if you're painting in broad strokes, sure,
it seemed like everything was Roy Acuff and the grand
old opry, you know, and it was kind of the
country polity and thing. As far as country music mainstream

(01:23:00):
was going on, it was pretty commercial, not a lot
of acoustic based stuff. A few months later, um Bill
McKuen called each of us and he said, I got
an idea. He said, what if we take Earl's idea
of you guys recording with him and expand the concept

(01:23:20):
to where it's you guys and your influences get in
the studio, we're the band, and we're playing with guys
like Girl. We started talking about the wet if Stock, Watson, Merle, Travis,
who we already knew because of our jug band days.
We opened from Merle at the Ash Grove in l A.
And uh, you know, these different ideas. We wanted to

(01:23:44):
get Bill Monroe he did not want to play on
the record, and Bill McEwen and John, both of them
were fans of the great Lucrass singer Jimmy Martin. So
he said, well, let's let's try to get Jimmy Martin.
So me and John were we read our bands moved
from l A to Colorado. Now this is early seventy one,
Spring of seventy one. The Earl Scruggs review is playing

(01:24:06):
a club called to Lagi in uh In Bowlder, Colorado.
And I was gonna say, your buddy Chuck Moore as
your friend, and I love Chucky, one of my one
of my favorite people in the world. First time we
met Chuck, he's running in the place Earl Scruggs reviews
playing there. We'd already played there some so we were pals.

(01:24:28):
We could walk in for free. In the back door.
Earl's playing there. We watched the said it was great.
John offers to drive Earl back to the hotel. I'm
in the back seat of the car. John turns to
Earl and said, says haltingly because he's so nervous. He's like,
would you would you consider actually playing on our record?

(01:24:48):
And Earle took a second and said I'd be proud to.
And we're like dumb struck. Go back to the hotel,
hang out with Earl and the kids against some more
picked till the wee hours I went home, John stuck
around for a while longer. I think over the course, now,
this is what Gary told me, and this is what

(01:25:09):
Earle actually wrote in his book. He said, over the
course of the evening, Earl mentioned why not can get
some of the other old timers. This is before Bill
had called us, by the way, so I don't know
who had the idea. It doesn't really matter at this point,
does it. But what does matter is that Earl agreed
to do it. And he was so cool and so

(01:25:29):
gracious and so forward thinking in terms of music. So
with Earl Scruggs, we had Earl in our pocket. Now.
Next week John went to see Doc and Merle Watson
at the same club in Boulder, Too Loggy. John asked
Doc if he'd be interested. He said, hey, Doc, we're

(01:25:50):
doing a record with Earl Scruggs, which how would you feel?
And Doc was like, yeah, anything if Earl's on and
I'm in. And to his credit, Murrell Watson, the late
Great Murrell Watson, doc son great guitarist, said you know,
he said, you know, Daddy, I played some of their
stuff and you really like their singing as well. So

(01:26:11):
again the second generation the same as it was with
Earl and his family. His kids loved the band, brought
him in. Doc's kid loved the band, so you got
already it's we're setting kind of a tone for the record,
which is this multi generational thing. After that, we got
on the horn with Louise Scruggs and she and Earl

(01:26:33):
authored to you know, um opened some doors for us
when we came to Nashville. Meanwhile, Bill mcwhen with John
and Toe went and had a meeting with our president
of Liberty Records, who was a guy at that point
named Mike Stewart. We got this top tanks top ten
single Mr. Bo Jangles on the chart. Bill and John

(01:26:55):
came in there and said, we want to cut a
bluegrass record, and my set, uh okay, let me get
this right. You got you don't want to follow up
Uncle Charlie with a another country rock record. We do,
but first we want to do this bluegrass record. And
he said, well, I think the budget was like seventeen

(01:27:17):
grands something and it was under twenty tho dollars. I'll
give you, you you know, seventeen thousand to make the record.
Odd figure and Bill and John are like done, great,
So we go to Nashville. He said, I think you
guys are crazy, but I trust your instincts because boj
Angles is a big hit, you know, and Shelley's Blues

(01:27:38):
did pretty good, and how Supo Corner did pretty good.
We saw some albums and we kind of got you know,
we have our foot in the door at radio now.
So we went to Nashville. We we hung out with
the Scruggs family. We're meeting all these great folks. Jody Mafis,
who was the drummer from the Scruggs Review, his dad.

(01:27:59):
His parents were Joe and Rosalie Mathis, who were legendary
pickers from the Grand Old Opry and the UH and
the Louisiana Hayride as well. And it was like, man,
this is so cool. We're meeting all these folks who
are not what we're thinking. By the way, next generation
folks that pretty much invented the genre. Got to point out,

(01:28:22):
this is like fifties and sixties, and they like us
and they want to hang out with us. We're spending
all day at the Scrugs family's house, just picking and
hanging out. Meanwhile, Earls brought in the great Vassar clements
on fiddle and the great Junior Husky on electric bass.
Remember John Sanda too early says, who's this fiddle player?

(01:28:45):
Vassar kind of name is well and he goes. Earl said, well,
that's his name is Vassar Clemens. And John said was
he any good? And Earl said he'll do great story
and that was classic us, by the way, never lost
that teenage cockiness about like so and and uh. We

(01:29:08):
wanted to get the great Flatt and scrugs doboro player
Josh Graves, but he was playing with Lester Flatt and
Lester wouldn't let him play on the record. Unfortunately, later
on we finally got to record song with Josh and
went amazing. But we got uh, legendary country picker Mr
Norman Blake agreed to come in and play do bro.

(01:29:28):
So we got this band that includes you know, Junior
on upright basse uh and Vasser on fiddle. And by
the way, these guys were like again, instant pals, the
coolest cats, and they they didn't you know, they thought
nothing to hang in a bunch with a bunch of
hippies from l A or the mountains of Colorado, and

(01:29:51):
we just bonded with the music, and they were also
like wise cracking guys, and most of the session guys
I've ever met in life have been the funniest people
I've ever met, you know. Uh, So we rehearsed for
about a week. I think, you know, maybe it's I
don't know, maybe it's a little shorter. We went to
Jimmy Martin's house. Louis Louise Scruggs helped us get Jimmy

(01:30:11):
on board, and uh we went to his house and
learned how to sink some proper bluegrass harmony for the
sessions that we were going to do with him. And
here comes Monday, and we got in the studio and
we recorded. I guess I think for five days. I
believe it was all you know for audio files. We
recorded quarter inch thirty ips live analog tape and it

(01:30:37):
sounded like a million it was so good. But you
burned through tape quickly that way, and tape wasn't cheap
even back then. We're at Woodland Sounds Studios, one of
the great studios, legendary, still there today, thank goodness, because
Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings saved the place. They bought
it when it looked like it was going to get
hit by the wreck and ball. God bless them and

(01:30:57):
I love them so much. Um So we walked into
Woodlands set up and man, we set up set us
up in a circle so there weren't a bunch of
baffles separating the musicians. You know, typically you don't want
that bleed. You don't want to hear the banjo in
the bass players Mike, or the washboard and the guitar

(01:31:18):
players Mike. But we would just go, okay, Jeff face
the wall when you play the washboard. You know. We
figured it all out and it sounded so good. The
little the cross talk between instruments actually added to the
the musical integrity of the record. Plus we could see
each other, so this is like backporch stuff and it

(01:31:39):
was so much fun and visual accues. We're mixing the
record as as musicians, not as you know, the mixed
down later and Bill McEwen ran a separate tape machine
that caught all captured all those conversations, all those you know,
starts and stops, and you know, we we recorded all

(01:32:00):
this music and jump back on the bus a few
days later and left it to build all those tapes Okay,
it ends up coming out as a triple records set.
Trying to think would even have that many records? All

(01:32:21):
all things must pass? How did the record company agree
to have three records? And then the record started to
do this slow burn? What was the perspective from the inside.
From the inside, they were still you know, they and
we did manage I might add to get Roy a
coff on board, by the way, after he heard some
of the music he was in, so like, yeah, we

(01:32:43):
got the king of country music and mother Mabel Carter
who came in with Earl scrugs that that connection. So
the record companies like, yeah, okay, it's a bluegrass album.
They asked, got three five songs as pretty long, live
out of talking, a lot of blue grass, a lot

(01:33:03):
of where's the hit, no hits? Well, so Bill did.
They allowed him the latitude to go get a ah,
to go do some mock that you get to show
them some of the artwork that he was doing with Dean,
our friend Dean Torrance, who know Dean from Dana Jeane

(01:33:26):
Beach Boys, all that great guy, amazing graphic artists as well.
So Dean and Bill got in there and started designing
this stuff, and it was like, I think he showed
them kind of a rough. He played him the record,
but showed him a rough of the visuals for the record.
And they said, okay again because we're burning it up.
We're selling tickets in concert. You know, our our rep

(01:33:48):
is still pretty good. And they said, fine, as long
as you deliver another studio record within the next six months.
And we did. But this, you know, meantime several months
go by. This is like we've gone from summer into
the summer of seventy one to the spring of seventy two,
and Bill after months of you know, putting together the

(01:34:11):
package and do all that editing, of conversations that went
like beautifully you know, gosh, I mean seamlessly into the
tracks on the record. Uh, it finally comes out and
like you said, slow Burn, that's a record literally that
I think we took out an adder two and billboard

(01:34:34):
or you know what a cash box Back then, I
don't think radio and Records was even up and running yet.
Who's cash cash box and Billboard? And the f M
DJ's college stations especially who had nobody's telling him what
to play? They started playing Doc Watson doing Tennessee stud.
You know, that's my favorite you know what, I knew

(01:34:56):
that and it's one of my favorite songs of the record.
And if you can imagine, I mean, I gotta just
say I told you earlier. You know. I'm I'm fifteen,
sixteen years old listening to Doc Watson play the guitar
and sing lifetime hero of Mine and I'm leaning visual
literally we didn't have a separate Mike. I'm leaning over
Doc's shoulder singing harmony on Tennessee stud. He's like, where's

(01:35:22):
that harmony? Man? You know now, I'm like over here, ah,
you know, and that's I got that. Such a great track.
Jimmy Fadden invassor Clemence at fiddle. That's amazing what they
played on that. So college picks up on it. Yeah,
they pick up on that, and they're playing you know,
Lost Highway that was feature Jimmy it Wasson and and

(01:35:44):
and Honky talking with Fadden and they're playing all these
great scrub stuff Nashville Blues, you know, of course, the
title track Will the Circle Be Unbroken? I saw the
Light with Roy Acuff and people are listen, man, if
I had a any for every and people from the
rock and roll side years later. I didn't like country music,

(01:36:08):
you know, the southern kids, that was their parents music.
So they just, you know, they just didn't want to know.
You a little rebellion, rock and roll, that's ours. Country music,
bluegrass that's yours. Right here come these long Hairs all
of a sudden. The music looks like the Buffalo Springfield,

(01:36:29):
but it sounds like this other stuff. And here's these
young guys singing and playing along. Somehow, whatever influence we
might have had to help sort of expose those artists. Look,
I'm not stupider. Yeah, I'm humbled enough to know that
mother maybe ill Carter kids, it's Earl scruggskis is roy Aka.

(01:36:51):
But you know they a lot of the younger generation
weren't into that music. Doc Watson's folk boom career had
had cooled off a little it. But man, I'm so
proud after the fact that that that might have had
a hand in that and also expanded the world of bluegrass.
Those festivals changed, and we can talk about that later

(01:37:13):
if you want, But back then bluegrass festivals were strictly traditional.
Then acts like the Earl Scruggs Review, the Dirt Band,
John Hartford New Grass Revival. They start showing up. It's
like the dope smokers showed up, you know, or at
least started smoking dope in front of people. There's some

(01:37:33):
blue grass bands that okay, let's jump forward. You ultimately
do two more of those, uh will the circle be unbroken? Records?
You then start to have soft rock success at the
end of the seventies. My favorite of your recorded songs,
you have Harmony, which I really love your a co

(01:37:54):
writer on. Then how do you decide to have go
to Nashville, cracked the country market, have a string of
hit and then ultimately go to Russia. That's a lot,
that's unpacking a lot, but quickly I should I should
give a shout out to Bob Carpenter. But yeah, my
co writer on Harmony, and I think it's that's the

(01:38:15):
first time you ever wrote about us. My buddy George
Massenberg came into the studio and said, do you read
the Leftist Letter? And I said, what's that? And he
showed it to me and I subscribed, And you know,
and you were so kind. That wasn't even a single
lot I don't think should have been. And I wrote that, Yeah,
very proud of that song Nicolette Larson bless her Heart.

(01:38:36):
She sang on that as well. But yeah, so that
was on the Make a Little Magic album. We did that,
and Nikki sang on that, and we we'd had that
hit American Dream with Linda. Well, both those songs. This matters,
this part of it. They became pop is both of them.
It was like our first big hits since bo j Angles.
They also charted on the country charts without any real

(01:38:58):
effort on our part, but they I guess, you know,
the country radio was now opening up a bit. There
were bands like Alabama. They were making a big splasher radio.
And I remember somebody playing me an Alabama record and
I'm like, yeah, I get that. It's got sort of
an Eagles vibe or a dirt band vibe or Burrito's vibe.

(01:39:20):
It's the California. It's the California country rock that we
were playing in the seventies. Only now they're making these
records on music Row. So we went, we went to Nashville.
We made a record with a great producer, Mr Norbert Putnam,
who had done you know who was a legendary session
guy here for years. He was part of that you

(01:39:42):
know the Nashville Cats, the early six one five guys,
you know. And he had produced our buddy Jimmy Buffett
and and our friend Dan Vogelberg as well, made great
records with them. So we cut that. We cut the
song Dance Little Gene that was written by my buddy
Jimmy Ivison. Then we went in the studio also with

(01:40:04):
Richard Landis to cut some more tracks. Three more tracks
cut in l A. So we got in the studio
cut some stuff and he had just had this big
hit of what was the song, Oh Angel of the Morning,
Oh yeah, God, And that's a great record, by the way,
I love Juice Newton Killer made a brilliant record on it,
and he kind of using that formula with us. And

(01:40:25):
we did the song called Shot full of Love that
you said recorded. We did Andrew Gold song called Heartaches
and Heartaches. We did a again. This is where we're
getting at least have an opinion about the cover songs.
Um Marshall Crenshaw song called Mary Anne. We cut those
three songs, went back to Nashville. And this is, by
the way, this is now we're still on Liberty Records,

(01:40:48):
so we're not we're getting we got the guys in
l A that are kind of calling the shots for
their country music career. So they want to put out
the Richard Landis stuff, you know, sort of in partnership
with the the that which is now Liberty Nashville. Uh.
And we didn't really know those folks. Great folks, Jim
Fogel song, great record guy. So they put out Shot

(01:41:10):
full of Love. Then it becomes the top fifteen hit
for the band, and we're like, this is pretty cool.
But then same thing happened, like Mr. Bo Jangles Station
starts spinning Dance Little Jeane, which was a song that
was kind of like buried in the record. So they
started playing Dance Little Gene. But they thought, well, maybe
we need to remix it and put a steel guitar

(01:41:31):
on it, which we loved. And our friend Larry Sasser,
who was a great session guy, came in and put
and put steel on it, and we did a remix
with these two young producers, Paul Whorley and Marshall Morgan.
They put they took that version of Dance Little Gene,
went to radio with it and became the Dirt Band's
first top ten country single, and at that point Chuck Morris,

(01:41:57):
uh had become our manager, and he's he become buddies
with Jim Ed Norman who was running Warner Brothers. And
we're like, oh my gosh, finally because we were the
bunny was the we idolized the bunny. You know all
those you know, all those acts on Warner Brothers that

(01:42:17):
we were crazy about, including Ray Cooter and your Bonny
Rate and Jah in the early days, uh, you know,
in the offshoots everything, everything that was on Electra and
you know later on uh Asylum. So and here's Jim
Ed Doorman, who I met through my new friend Don

(01:42:38):
Handily years ago. And so Jim Ed been you know,
he'd been arranging strings with those guys and he came
from Texas when they were called Shiloh, that band California.
So Jim as the record company prisoner, Like how cool?
What could be cooler? And then our new buddies, Caul
Warley and Marshall Morgan, we're going to produce us. We

(01:42:59):
got in the studio and had a man an awesome
string of top ten singles with those guys. It was
like one after the other, you know. Unfortunately, Warner Brothers
never wanted to go deeper than three singles, which was
I think kind of stupid. You know. Joe Glani changed
that later with our c A and they went five deep,
because you make an album and they want you to

(01:43:20):
record five singles and then the rest is yours. So
the other two songs that didn't get recorded, we're typically
stuff that those are radio songs, you know, again the
record bills. But I love those albums that we made
with with Marshall and Paul and there, you know, we're
recording our own stuff and having you know, we're rolling

(01:43:42):
in it. We'd never had this consistency at radio ever
because rock and roll that's a that's a fish, that's
a fickle mistress there. You know, like Chris Rock said,
here today, gone today. You're having all the success in Nashville,
how do you end up going to Rush show? Well,
Russia happened just before Nashville. We were a man, this

(01:44:06):
is so strange. We were we were in the middle
of that sort of you'll call it yacht rock now
if you choose to period where we had to make
a little magic and American dream and you know, we
all had sun tans and Hawaiian shirts on our records
and we were pretty swave trying to emulate Don Johnson,
I think more than you know anybody else as far

(01:44:29):
as the visuals went. We uh, so we're making these
records and but we're still playing the same circuit. You know.
People were fans of the Dirt Band from you know,
not only American Dream and make a Little Magic, but
also from uh uh, the country rock stuff. So we're playing.
We were playing in Washington, d c h. And we

(01:44:54):
get it. We play there and a couple of days
later we got this. Our manager Bill got a phone
call from somebody said they were from the State Department
and he just laughed and hung up on him because
we're right, you got a wrong number or you're pranking us.
So they keep doing it. He keeps hanging out. Finally

(01:45:14):
accept the phone and said what do you want? And
they said, we represent the State Department and we are
part of a cultural cultural exchange program and we're interested
in the Dirt Band doing a tour of the Soviet Union.
This is sevent and we kind of said why us
because they looked at a bunch of acts that Beach

(01:45:36):
Boys wanted to go there, and they were like that
we could think of a lot of examples that might
have made more sense. But what they liked about our
band was we covered a lot of music. There was
rock and roll, but there was also some country music,
you know, multi culturists. We had an African American in
our band, the great Jackie Clark Uh, which is you know,
I'm trying to figure this out from the Soviet game.

(01:45:58):
Doesn't matter, great musician, great cat at. They said, do
you have a female singer in your baby? So we
do not. But so we asked a friend of ours
from mass and Jan Garrett to come take part, you know,
so she tore over us as well, and we didn't.
We went and did this tour of the Soviet Union
um and we got there first of May. May day.

(01:46:22):
Literally look out the window overlooking Red Square and there's
all this, you know WHOA We're seeing missiles going through
Red Square and a lot of marching going on, and
a lot of guys in overcoats, you know who are
following us. This is the KGB followed us everywhere we went.

(01:46:43):
It was kind of crazy because there was no communication.
We had no there's no internet, so the only way
we could make calls back home was by ordering literally
ordering a phone call at x one hours like three
days ahead, and we're having to send a telegram man
old school say, I mean a carrier pigeon back home

(01:47:06):
so our friends, your family could get the message that
we're gonna be make sure you pick up the phone. Also,
no answering machines, so we can talk for like three
minutes meantime. Though this is pretty fascinating to us, you know,
we're like, this is myself and Jimmy Fadden and John
McEwen and our buddy Jackie Clark, who, by the way,

(01:47:27):
came from the icon Tina Tina the Icon Tina Turner review,
great musician and Jackie played his ass off gud. He
was a great guitar player, singer, bass player, played piano
as well. Came from a church gospel background amazing, loved
wearing a cowboy hat and dressing in nudis suits and

(01:47:49):
like Manuel cluing, which I got a giant kick out of,
we all did. We all bought a bunch of suits
from Manuel's our buddy John Cable, who was a friend
of ours from Colorado. They were on board for I
don't know about a year and a half. Jackie and
John so we started this tour and we went to
Soviet Georgia, drank moonshine with the kind of this guy's

(01:48:14):
like kind of a godfather figure in and he was
the mayor of this time. What was the name of it,
shoot Deblisi, I think anyway, Uh, if I got that wrong, sorry, folks,
I'm not looking at my history book. So drank moonshine
with him, which was fun. We've got Yeah. So we

(01:48:35):
had a couple of days off, played in Georgia. That
was really great, just getting hot, by the way, hot
and muggy nowhere conditioning in the Soviet Union. So we're like, yeah,
we're torn in the south again. Here's Georgia. Here's Georgia.
Next thing we play in uh yet a van. I
believe it was in uh in Armenia soccer stadium. Five

(01:49:00):
thousand people inside, ten thousand people outside trying to get in.
There was a riot. I don't there was a riot.
I don't think anybody got hurt. But we're gone. And
by the way, we had heard from the jump that
these folks aren't gonna respond to your music if they
don't clap loudly. Understand, these people are rushing the stage,

(01:49:21):
standing on their seats, going nuts. Crazy bunch of folks
in our media. We were loving it because it felt
like rock and roll us. We're playing as loud as
that our little p a that we brought with us
it could stand. Uh. We played Latvia, which was great,
and that was the one place that was kind of

(01:49:41):
the least Soviet of the Soviet Union. I mean everywhere
so far Georgia and you're and Armenia is pretty shut down.
You know. The the authorities did not want us talking
to fans. They didn't want folks hearing about America, honestly know,
and they would detain them. They'd throw them in jail,

(01:50:03):
you know, if you know, for a couple of days.
If they were lucky. Some of them were beaten. We
find out later, which awful. We go to Latvia all
of a sudden, you know, people are dressing hipper, the
women are wearing makeup, and it was like it looked
like Europe to us. It didn't because the Soviet Union

(01:50:26):
was really great. That that country was in black and
white literally, um, and Armenia was kind of crazy, but
again still you know, feeling that kind of Eastern European
oppression at that point. But Latvia, we come to find out,
fought back hard. You know, they were like Ukraine during

(01:50:47):
World War two, is right now. And then they pull
us aside and we toast. We'd you know say, basically
screw bres Well. We drank a little laka. Uh. We
had a great time with them, they were wonderful. Then
we went to the Soviet Union and again you know,
our our our guides are emissaries who really sweet interpreters,

(01:51:08):
really really fine folks because you know, they were used
to dealing with with creatives, with artsy FARTSI people because
they had they were doing ballet and different you know,
different tours with a cultural exchange. There again pulling us aside.
They're not gonna really you know, they're not going to
be that excited. You know, don't be offended if they

(01:51:28):
do the golf clap, you know. So they're rushing the stage,
you know, they're coming up and throwing bouquets of flowers
on the stage, and we're smirking because we were used
to entertaining people and you know, kind of getting a
rise out of them. So we love that. So we
played in uh, I guess it was Leningrad went back

(01:51:53):
to my we closed it out of Moscow. We did it.
We did it. Uh a TV broadcast to hundreds of
millions of people, one station, one TV, one channel. So
that was pretty great. That was fun. Um. And then
we got back on a plane and went back home.
And this is after a month there. And I remember

(01:52:16):
we had a layover in in Belgium and Brussels and
just remember walking off that plane just like, oh my gosh,
everything's in technicolor. Again. I felt like latvia, you know,
it's like you want to coke with ice, Yeah, because
again we're sweating to the hits. It was a long tour.

(01:52:36):
We were all really homesick, and uh, it was. It
was pretty remarkable. It had a huge impact on us,
you know, as people. Okay, looking back at this amazing career,
how have you done financially? You know, we kinda I
mean honestly through the early years, ay, I should say

(01:52:57):
part of it, we didn't give a crap but make
and money. So if we had, if we had, if
we had enough dough to buy some groovy clothes, you know,
maybe a jacket from North Beach leather in l a
or a cool pair of cowboy boothe you know, everybody
got their favorite jeans and they didn't cost thirty bucks

(01:53:19):
back then much less. Um, keep us in some cool
shirts long as the families were fed, you know, and
and stuff didn't cost very much. I didn't. I didn't
buy my first new car until I was almost thirty.
I think, so we're poking along. As long as we
get to play, we're cool. We didn't start. I didn't

(01:53:41):
notice till Bob Carpenter and I and our friend Richard Hathaway,
who was playing in our band in nineteen eight as well.
We co wrote Make a Little Magic, and those checks
were big, and this is pop music, and I was like, man,
we all loved writing songs. But I didn't realize like

(01:54:01):
our friends, you know, from the Drubadour, who are seeing
some substantial coin from you know, Jackson's records and the
Eagles records. JD. Souther. Uh oh, yeah, that's kind of
kind of cool. So we got lucky and we wrote

(01:54:22):
this hit song and we got signed to Ask Gap
and they actually had signing bonuses unrecoupable, So yeah, it
was kind of kind of up. The Anny a little bit,
had a little money in the bank, has so much
money that I didn't know anything about you know, it's
ten ninety nine cash, so I didn't put anything aside
for taxes to pay my taxes. I'm like, what what taxes?

(01:54:45):
Got a huge bill. Actually had to take a loan
out with my folks at the end of that year.
That never happened again, God bless them. But I was like, yeah,
you make you can make money writing songs, because again,
we're making why don't we were? I think we're paying
ourselves a salary. I guess enough to enough to live on.
But it wasn't a huge amount of money. And uh,

(01:55:06):
you know when we got um, the records were all
cross collateralized, so we have a hit record that would
go into the next record that might be a stiff
So all the money kind of evened out, and like
the average was, you know, hey, here's a here's a
couple hundred, here's a couple of grand maybe. So we
did honestly, man, you know, we got paid for doing this.

(01:55:28):
That was our attitude. How lucky are we? But as
we got you know, as we started raising families, um,
we you know, and then started making some of this
right songwriting income, it became a little different game. We
did not live in palaces. Uh. I mean, I'd like
to say that the peaks and the valleys were less

(01:55:51):
extreme in our band, and I think I'm grateful for that,
because we didn't fall off of Everest, you know, and
land way down into f Valley. It was always it
was always a little hill and then the car cruises
down the backside. So I think we were you know,
we were pretty seasoned by the time we were in
our mid thirties and came to Nashville. And then again

(01:56:14):
we're right in half the hits, two thirds of the
hits it country your radio, so they're starting to pass
that mailbox money again. It's pretty cool, and we got
and we got this. The career made sense now. And
you know, Bob, you came up in a time where
nothing was genre specific, you know, and I those those

(01:56:36):
those FM stations. I love the bit that you wrote
about the Raspberries. The other day. Hearing your songs on
AM was like, that's pretty cool. FM was where the
fun was. Flatt and Scruggs. Literally I heard Earl Scruggs
and Lester Flat segueing into Foxy Lady by Jimmie Hendricks
on FM radio, especially college radios so cool. But now

(01:57:01):
country music sign FM and rock and roll and you
got the A O R charts and we found this
home and country music. They were so welcoming, and I
tell you they liked They liked us because twelve years
earlier we had done Will the Circle Be Unbroken? So
they thought these guys are legit. They don't have to
prove to us that they love country music, because we

(01:57:24):
know they did because they made a record with Roy
Acuff and Mother Maybell Carter and Roy I'm Sorry and
and Earl Scruggs. So uh, we had our foot in
the door. And they and again they had placed some
of the popists, you know, Magic and American Dream. So
we're lucky we got he had great producers. We always

(01:57:47):
had an ear towards outside material because as much as
we loved writing songs and we were all good at it,
I'm proud of the songwriters in our band. Um, if
we heard a song like stand a Little Rain that
was written by our buddies Don Schlitz and Donney Lowry,
we weren't going to not cut that great song. Rodney Krawll,

(01:58:07):
who had written American Dream, he comes with in with
a song called Long Hard Road the share Propper's dream,
great tune, and you could hear that song on Americana
Radio now very easily. Rodney's skills are profound. So that
was the first number one our band ever had. We

(01:58:27):
never had a number one record until we put out
A Long Hard Road Country Radio. But we had this
run and we got you know, like all of us,
we got a little spoiled with it. It's like we're
gonna put out a single, it's gonna go to number
one or top ten or top five. That started falling
off a little bit towards the end of the country career,
the radio career, i should say. But man, country music

(01:58:49):
fans are loyal. And when you combine the country music
fans from the eighties into the nineties with um our,
you know, the country rock fans and the bluegrass fans
from the seventies, that makes for a really, really great
fan fan base and a really loyal one. And we
love those folks. They've stuck with us. Okay, So you're

(01:59:13):
one of the few bands who sustained in excess of
fifty years and had hits and success in different genres
at different times. There are bands on the road that
you know, had huge hits at the end of the
sixties and seven. He's never had any other action and
they're touring on that. Whereas you've had these multi successes
in as I say, in different areas. Do you feel

(01:59:36):
that the Nati Guitty Dirt Band gets enough respect? Would
you like a victory lap to impress people on success
or you're just chugging along, little engine that could. As
long as you can play and the fans come, you're happy. Honestly,
We're so grateful to be the little engine that could
and keep making records and have fans that allow us

(01:59:58):
to do anything. And listen, man, we made some we've
recorded some tunes or tracks, and I'm not going to
mention that. I was just like, what were we thinking
back way back when? Some of them during the jug
band era, some of them during the yacht rock era.
But I'm really proud of everything, especially that we've done
since you know, the early eighties till now um and

(02:00:21):
the and the seventies records kind of leap frog and backwards.
I I you know, our fans allow us the latitude
to try anything, and I'm so grateful for that. Well, Jeff,
this has been amazing. You know, as I say, we
really could have gone on for a couple more hours,
going into detail about the second and third will the

(02:00:44):
Circle be unbroken, records, the yacht rock era, and of
course the temporary change of the name and the changing
cast of characters. But I think we've come to the
end of the feeling we've known for today. All right, man,
thank you, Thank you so much. I want to thank
you so much. And you really illuminated stuff, even for me.

(02:01:06):
You really made the southern California scene come alive. And
I wasn't here until the seventies, and I've read about
this stuff, but to talk to someone who was actually
there and go to the paradox, etcetera. You really, you
know these stories I've heard and haven't heard, you really illuminated.
So in any event, I want to thank you so much.
Thank you. Bob Gays talking about until next time. This

(02:01:29):
is Bob left Sins