Nitty Gritty Digs In and Still Grows

The mod look was in and the psychedelic trip was just around the corner when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band first stepped on a stage, looking and sounding like an apparition out of the 1930s.

The date was May 13, 1966, the place a tiny coffeehouse in Orange called the Paradox.

“We wore pinstriped suits we found at the Salvation Army for about $5,” says the band’s co-founder, Jeff Hanna, recalling his first night on what turned out to be one of the steadiest jobs in pop music. “It was all authentic stuff, down to the shoes. We did a lot of shtick; we had sort of a theater vibe to it, a throwback to the ‘30s,” including a musical repertoire built around old-time jug-band music.

“It was fun. We actually got paid, and there were a lot of cute girls. That was a bonus from having Jackson in the band.”

That would be 17-year-old Jackson Browne, future epitome of the serious-minded singer-songwriter, but a kazoo and washtub bass specialist for his brief spell in the lighthearted original Dirt Band.

Hanna’s specialty back then was scratching out rhythms on a washboard. Jimmie Fadden shared washtub bass duties with Browne and embellished the rhythm by blowing into a jug. Les Thompson, Bruce Kunkel and Ralph Barr were the other original members.

Thirty years on--after several stylistic turns, more than a dozen personnel changes and a career as a consistent if never spectacular draw on the pop, rock and country circuits--Hanna and Fadden are still at it. Hanna’s washboard did turn up on some of the Dirt Band’s important recordings, but his main role in a lineup of multi-instrumentalists has been singing and playing guitar. Fadden put down the jug in favor of a sweet-sounding harmonica and doubles as a drummer.

Joining the two founding members are Jimmy Ibbotson, singer and jack-of-many-instruments who arrived in 1969, and keyboards player Bob Carpenter, on hand since 1978. The Dirt Band’s show Mondayat the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana will bring them back to near where it all began.

Bob Sheffer, former co-owner of the Paradox, recalls that, from that first night, the Dirt Band could be relied upon to pack the 150-seat house and to provide a good time.

“It was fun to watch. People commented about how happy it was. They liked listening to happy stuff,” Sheffer remembered recently from his home in Nevada City.

The original lineup had coalesced at McCabe’s, a Long Beach guitar shop that was then a sister operation to the McCabe’s in Santa Monica. “They let us hang around there all day,” Hanna said earlier this week from Aspen, Colo., where the band had gathered at Ibbotson’s home to work on its next album. “We jammed a lot; we were all guitar players. And eventually somebody goes, ‘Hey, let me try the mandolin’ or ‘I’ll play the harmonica.’ ”

Thus began the band’s tradition of versatility. Hanna, 18 at the time, said the early Dirt Band specialized in jug-band music “sort of as a reaction to pop music. We thought it would be kind of fun to be esoteric folkie guys.” Bluegrass and Appalachian folk music also figured in the mix. “I guess when a lot of guys were learning Beach Boys tunes, we were slowing the record down and trying to learn ‘Black Mountain Rag.’ ”

But the Dirt Band also was enamored of the work of such folk-rock contemporaries as Ian & Sylvia, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Lovin’ Spoonful. It was as a folk-rock band that the Dirt Band emerged on its first record in 1967--partly because its label, Liberty Records, made it clear that it did not want to try to sell jug-band music.

By the end of the Dirt Band’s first summer, Browne had gone off to make his way as a singer-songwriter, landing in New York City, where he found work playing guitar for Nico, the Teutonic chanteuse of Velvet Underground fame.

John McEuen, a virtuosic string player from Garden Grove, took Browne’s place in the Dirt Band. The happy-sounding group from the Paradox made its first national impression with “Buy for Me the Rain,” a somber folk-rock tune composed by Steve Noonan and Greg Copeland, who had been Browne’s songwriting mentors at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton. (And the Dirt Band ended up including Browne’s “Melissa” on its first album.)

The Dirt Band moved to Los Angeles and into such marquee clubs as the Troubadour and the Ash Grove. Still decked in ‘30s garb, the band toured as an opening act for the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane and shared a house in L.A. with Duane and GreggAllman, who were trying to launch Hour Glass, a precursor of the Allman Brothers Band. Among Hanna’s memories: spending a weekend hanging out in a marijuana haze, listening to Jimi Hendrix’s landmark debut, “Are You Experienced?”

“I remember Duane going, ‘I can do this.’ He picked up his Strat and started playing [Hendrix’s guitar parts] back to us.”

The Dirt Band’s first cycle ended with a brief breakup in 1968.

“We were doing OK, but we had growing pains; we felt we needed to change something in the mix, and the band kind of slid into a couple different factions,” Hanna said. He went off to back Linda Ronstadt, McEuen to play sessions and Fadden to sell clothes.

About 10 months later, they were back together to give it another try, along with founding bassist Les Thompson. They added the versatile Ibbotson, who could sing and play drums as well as guitars. They also added a crucial song to their repertoire: Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles.”

“I came into rehearsal,” Hanna recalled, “and said, ‘I heard this great song last night on the radio.’ Jimmy Ibbotson had the 45 in the corner of the trunk of his Dodge Dart, and we worked it up. We cut the song with no intention of it being a single--a waltz about this old guy and a dog--and lo and behold.”

Having scored a No. 9 pop hit with “Bojangles,” the Dirt Band soon moved onto another career high mark: the 1970 sessions in Nashville in which the longhaired rockers teamed with such veteran country and bluegrass musicians as Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff, Vassar Clements and Mother Maybelle Carter to create “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

Released in 1972, a time of deep fissures between America’s youth culture movement and its guardians of tradition, the 30-song, three-LP collection showed that musical tradition still had an honored place among at least some of the young.

The Dirt Band’s fortunes in the pop marketplace ebbed in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (Ibbotson left for several years during that period to try a solo career), but with “Circle” as an imposing credential, the band was able to embark on a third cycle, reinventing itself as a mainstream country group and scoring a string of 16 Top 10 country singles from 1983 to 1989 (McEuen left in 1986 for work as a film scorer and solo artist).

Since then, radio programmers have had ears only for “new country” acts (see accompanying story), and “new” is one thing the multifaceted Dirt Band isn’t. But the group continues to have an active career on the road, thanks to its reputation as a reliably enjoyable stage act.

Hanna says he feels no chagrin that the Dirt Band didn’t become a huge seller like such early associates as the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt.

“You could dwell on that stuff, but on the other side of it, there were bands that were more talented that weren’t as successful. I think [the band’s brief breakup in 1968] was a lesson of some sort” that has enabled it to ride out any subsequent rough patches. And Hanna says that the lack of giddy commercial heights along the Dirt Band’s steady, not spectacular way has been balanced by a lack of steep falls that can shatter a band.

Other relationships have proved less durable than the band: Hanna said all four current members have been through at least one divorce during their Dirt Band tenure. “I’m on my third marriage, hopefully the charm,” said the singer, whose wife, Matraca Berg, is a successful mainstream country songwriter.

For its 20th anniversary, the Dirt Band played a big arena show in Denver with a guest roster that included Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, Doc Watson and Rodney Crowell (the band moved its base of operations from L.A. to Colorado in 1971; only Ibbotson still lives there, with Hanna now in Nashville, Carpenter in Los Angeles and Fadden contemplating a move from Hawaii following a recent divorce). The members are still figuring out what to do to mark their 30th.

“We’ve been talking about it, but nothing has materialized,” Hanna said. “We have a year to think about it, since the first record came out in ’67. We’ll wait ‘till we have something significant and cool” to build a celebration around.

“Other than that,” he added, “it’s a lot of birthday candles.”

* The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band plays Monday at 7 and 10 p.m. at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. $28.50. (714) 549-1512.