Back to the Nitty Gritty

Shortly after the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1986 with a blowout all-star concert in Denver, multi-instrumentalist John McEuen decided the time was right to leave the good-time country-rock band and go it alone.

Now, with the group on its 30th-anniversary tour, the time has come for McEuen to reunite with his old buddies. Maybe that circle can’t be broken after all.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what happens,” McEuen said in anticipation of playing this weekend in Cerritos, where he’ll perform his first shows in a decade with the Dirt Band. He and his five-piece band, featuring his 20-year-old son, Jonathan, on acoustic and electric guitars, will be the opening act. Then McEuen will join his former band mates for a mini-reunion during their set.

“I have a solo career now, but I’d love to go out with the group and play some more dates,” McEuen said.

“With the Dirt Band, there’s that magical combination of what only several people can do together,” said the Long Beach native and graduate of Garden Grove High School. “I could play with four other guys and do Dirt songs, but it’s just not the same.

“It could turn out sounding better or worse musically, but it wouldn’t be the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,” he said by phone from his home in Salt Lake City. “It’s like a painting, where if you take a person out of the band, it changes one of the colors and the picture is never the same. You know what I mean?”

For 20 years, McEuen supplied much of the color in the picture that was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. His mastery of banjo, mandolin, fiddle, dulcimer, Dobro and an assortment of guitars helped put his stamp on American roots music.

His instrumental prowess, vocal harmonies and songwriting (“Long Hard Road,” “Dance Little Jean”) were key components of the NGDB’s amalgam of pop, folk, bluegrass, country and rock. But he grew restless, and in 1986 left the Orange County/ Long Beach-bred band to develop a solo career and pursue work as a film scorer. The quest for independence seems to have paid off.

McEuen, 51, wrote scores in 1993 for the National Geographic Society’s Emmy-nominated documentary “Braving Alaska” and Warner Bros.’ “The Wild West,” a 10-hour miniseries recounting life in the American West. Last year, he scored “The Good Old Boys,” a Turner Pictures release starring Tommy Lee Jones, Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard. He even wrote a song for Spacek, “For the Love of a True Woman’s Heart.”

McEuen also has recorded three albums since turning solo, the latest being the guitar-centered “Acoustic Traveler,” released in January. Highlighting this collection of folk, new age, baroque and pop-country is a Brazilian-flavored bluegrass number titled “Moonlight Dancing” and an imaginative version of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” the 1970 Dirt Band hit that McEuen has rearranged as a three-part instrumental suite featuring fiddle, lap-steel and electric-guitar accents.

Despite the film and solo projects that keep him busy these days, McEuen said, all it took to bring about this weekend’s Dirt Band reunion was one phone call from a strategically placed fan.

“The guy at the Cerritos Center [executive director Victor Gotesman] had this cool vision about putting the two acts together and then having me join the Dirt Band for some songs later on,” said McEuen, whose initial musical inspiration came in 1964 while attending a concert in Orange by the pioneering country-rock band the Dillards. “He knows it’s the 30th anniversary of the group, and I can’t think of a better place to celebrate it.” (The band played its first show May 1966 at the Paradox club in Orange.)

“To me, this is about me and a band going back to our roots . . . to where we all started our musical careers in the ‘60s. I mean, we played the Golden Bear [in Huntington Beach], the Ice House [in Pasadena] and the Troubadour [in West Hollywood]. Cerritos is right in the middle of it all. I just hope Jeff [Hanna] decides to do ‘Buy for Me the Rain’ because that was our first bona-fide hit back in ’67.”

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Even if his brief collaboration with singer-guitarist Hanna, singer-bassist Jimmy Ibbotson, drummer Jimmie Fadden and keyboardist Bob Carpenter ends after the Cerritos shows, McEuen says he’ll have no regrets. “I feel lucky to be where I’m at,” he said. “I’ve met so many people on various film sets and on the road, from Dolly Parton and Tommy Lee Jones to Doc Watson, Bob Dylan and Eddie Van Halen. It’s been a rich, rewarding life for me.”

“I’ll tell you something . . . to write a song for Sissy Spacek, who’s someone I’ve always admired from afar, is amazing,” he said. “And to then sit down with my guitar and teach her how to play the tune on the piano . . . man, it gives you goose bumps.”

* John McEuen opens for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on Friday and Saturday nights at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. 8 p.m. $27-$40. (310) 916-8500.