There’s No Fiddling With Devotion to Bluegrass : Pop music: Member Byron Berline says Ash Grove’s members are casual about success, not the music. They’ll perform in Huntington Beach.

It takes commitment in the music world for a band to make it to the top, a willingness to go full-tilt and do whatever is necessary to achieve fame. Then there is the new bluegrass group Ash Grove, which might be lacking in that particular brand of commitment.

“Well, let’s just say we’re not gonna buy a bus and get uniforms,” said fiddler Byron Berline with a laugh, when asked how much a go of it he and his fellow members were planning to make.

Ash Grove, rather, came together casually in the San Fernando Valley living rooms of its five members, players joined by the mutual sense of fun they have playing bluegrass music.

The group hasn’t played in public yet--that happens for the first time Saturday at Montana & Lace Vintage Musical Instruments in Huntington Beach--but there is little doubt there will be an understated yet evident sense of commitment along with that fun. Berline and his band-mates have a long-proven devotion to the music they’re assaying.

Joining Berline in the band are former Desert Rose Band members Herb Pedersen on banjo and Bill Bryson on bass, as well as onetime Kentucky Colonel Billy Ray Latham on guitar and Jethro Burns protege Kenny Blackwell on mandolin.

Berline, who turns 50 next week, made his first recording more than 30 years ago as the fiddlin’ part of the classic 1963 “Pickin’ and Fiddlin’ ” album by the Dillards (Pedersen and Latham also later passed through this outfit).

In 1967 he joined bluegrass progenitor Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. Then in 1969 he moved to Los Angeles and became a participant in the fermenting country-rock scene, recording with the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Rolling Stones and others.

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Ash Grove takes its name from the L.A. roots-music club of the same name, a focal point for the folk, blues and bluegrass scenes until an arsonist burned it down in the ‘70s.

“Most of us hung out there back in the early days,” Berline said. “Between the Ash Grove and the Troubadour it was really hopping back in those days. We’ll hopefully bring back a lot of memories with these guys in the band, because we’ve all lived through those times, and there’s a lot of history there. I guess you only have to get old enough, and people say, ‘Gosh, those guys go way back don’t they?’ ”

The songs certainly go way back, including a number of Bill Monroe, Osborne Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs tunes, along with some gospel and a cappella numbers.

Berline and the other band members are all neighbors who started playing the music at their homes for fun before they considered taking it public. Though most of them have played some huge venues and festivals, the places they’ll be playing, such as the 30-seat Huntington Beach show, won’t be much bigger than their living rooms.

“If you’re going to play bluegrass, you can’t get too particular,” Berline said, noting it’s not the most popular of music styles. The ideal isn’t audience size and prestige, but attracting the small but engaged listening audiences that go to places such as the Montana shop or Laguna Niguel’s Shade Tree Stringed Instruments.

“We’re happy just to find venues that we can play and enjoy, so it’s still fun just to get together and do this. If we really wanted to push this to a real big level, we’d probably go about things a little differently. But we’re not concerned with that at all,” he said.

Berline’s other band, California, is still very much a going concern, he said. (With Orange County guitarist Dan Crary and others, California is a continuation of a band they started in the ‘70s called Sundance).

Although that outfit is known to mix styles and influences a bit, Berline said, “Ash Grove is much more traditional sounding, really trying to capture the sound of the way the music was done years ago, although with our own styles. I like doing both. It’s fun doing traditional things in the old-time way, but, gosh, it’s fun to do other things, too.”

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As one might surmise of a guy who says “gosh” this much, Berline isn’t from these parts originally. He was born in Oklahoma, and got his first earful of fiddling from his father.

He later was influenced by the Texas fiddlers his father took him to hear, and he didn’t really get the bluegrass bug until he was in college, on a football scholarship at the University of Oklahoma.

It was there that he met the Dillards after a campus performance, and the group was so impressed with his playing they asked him to join. A couple of years later, his fiddling had a similarly immediate effect on Bill Monroe.

He hadn’t heard much rock when growing up. “My dad was a strict Grand Ole Opry guy, and that’s pretty much all we’d ever have on,” Berline said.

His introduction to the rock world was a fairly auspicious one. In 1969 he was still residing in Oklahoma when he got a phone call, and the next thing he knew he was on a jet to Los Angeles to record with the Rolling Stones. He’s featured on “Country Honk” on the “Let It Bleed” album, along with car horns and other traffic noise.

“I’d gone through the tune a few times when they got the bright idea to put me out on the street, on the sidewalk, and record me there. There was some construction going on, so Mick Jagger himself had to go out and stop this bulldozer from pushing dirt so we could record.”

Along with the Stones, the likes of the Doors and Leon Russell were also hanging around the studio, not that Berline was particularly impressed.

“To me it was just ‘Oh, well,’ because I wasn’t a big groupie-fan. I was just a country fiddler from Oklahoma, and the Rolling Stones weren’t part of my world. When they had called me up in Oklahoma to get me out there it was the middle of the night. They said, ‘Hey, man, this is so-and-so from the Stones.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know you’re stoned. Now who is this?’ ‘No, the Rolling Stones.’ ”

Berline had already planned to move to L.A. to work on a project with Doug Dillard, and he did make the move shortly after the Stones’ session.

“It was amazing here then. All the groups were out here trying to make a go of it, and there was a big country scene also. The record companies were signing people left and right, and everybody was experimenting. The Byrds and Burritos came around experimenting with country rock, and more people jumped on that. It was great timing for me to come out here then.”

Though he took readily to the musical experimentation, he was more cautious with his lifestyle.

“In ’69 it was pretty crazy, everybody experimenting with music, the drugs and so forth,” he said. “As you can imagine coming in from Oklahoma--even though I’d gone to the university there--boy, it was amazing out here, very exciting. Everybody was out here: the big stars and the movie industry, which I also got involved in.

“It was all so much more than I thought it would be. Luckily I stayed away from the drugs. I did my share of beer drinking but that’s about it, and I’ve given that up too.”

As an experienced fiddler young enough to be open to new ideas, Berline had the opportunity to record with the Byrds, the Burritos, Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, the Band, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, the late Henry Mancini and a host of others.

And like seemingly every sideman of the ‘70s, he also got the urge to “do his own thing” with his own band. He and other like-minded pickers formed Country Gazette and got signed to United Artists.

The acoustic group’s albums may have featured some solid tradition-rooted picking, but you’d scarcely know it by the covers. One, “Traitor in Our Midst,” had a fold-out cover with a comic strip-like photo story featuring the band in weird banditos-in-drag get-ups.

“That wasn’t our idea,” he insisted. “They spent more money on that cover than they did recording the whole album.”

The album cover also features Berline in a Tarzan outfit. It’s not his proudest moment, but it has provided him with some fun.

“I was hired to teach Arnold Schwarzenegger to look like he could play the fiddle in his first major movie, ‘Stay Hungry.’ ” Berline also wound up doing the score for the 1976 Bob Rafelson flick.

“He came over for me to give him a lesson, and I showed him this album cover and said, ‘Now here’s a real bodybuilder.’ He got a big kick out of that.”

Berline has always been able to support himself and his family with his music, but it’s required a fair amount of diversification. Along with his own musical projects, a solo CD and the two bands he now is part of, he is still a sideman on other performers’ recordings (he recently worked with Matthew Sweet on a song for a Carpenters’ tribute album), and he lends his talents to the demo tapes of aspiring artists.

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He does TV and movie dates, with recent credits including “Northern Exposure” and “Maverick.” He occasionally appears in films, though another of his jobs--conducting music clinics--recently precluded his appearance in an upcoming Jeff Bridges film about Wild Bill Hickock.

He’s written columns for music magazines, and has put out instructional tapes and videos. He takes a novel approach to the latter: Rather than have a single generalized instructional video, Berline records his tapes on request. Customers will ask for specific songs, “and I’ll just make a video here in the house and send it to them.

“Of course, I’ll keep a copy of each one, because I don’t want to have to do ‘Orange Blossom Special’ 100 times. I’ve been doing real well with this and am the only one doing it as far as I know.” (Fiddle fanatics can call (818) 986-3791 regarding Berline’s videos.)

Along with all the other hats he wears, Berline also is a cultural ambassador, a designation bestowed on him and the group California by the U.S. State Department. They have represented American culture on tours of Northern Africa and the South Pacific.

“As long as we got to play for the locals it was great,” he said, “not just the ambassadors and all their parties.”

It’s a sad state of affairs that he can get gigs in Tonga and Samoa, but not so many here at home.

“When I came out here people supported every kind of music, but the music scene has changed just so drastically. Now, as big as the Los Angeles area is, for bluegrass and acoustic music there are not too many places I’ve found that will support it anymore, just some of these little stores.

“But you know, it’s the same way all over,” he said. “I talk to people all over the United States, and they all say it’s the same.”

* Ash Grove and Eddie Montana play Saturday at Montana & Lace, 15182 Bolsa Chica Road, Huntington Beach. 7 and 9:30 p.m. $15. (714) 898-2453.