from this period) to McEuen’s superb bluegrass instrumental ‘Dismal Swamp’, the latter illustrating the road the Dirt Band were destined to follow.


When discussing the incredible vibrancy of the Sunset Strip era, McEuen reiterates the immense amount of music to see and hear. “Keep in mind this was an area where there were seven clubs that people would play. If you were playing The Troubadour you might run down to The Ash Grove, which was only six blocks away, in between sets to see Bill Monroe… or you might be playing in Pasedena at one of the two places called The Ice House. And a lot of music went through there. You might be playing in Hollywood for a week and then you’d play The Golden Bear at Huntingdon Beach, which was an hour and 10 mins away, and you’d go in there after Paul Butterfield and maybe see Hendrix or Joplin… and after that you were going to see The Dillards. We played a show at a High School football field after ‘Buy For Me The Rain’ was a hit and there were The Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, The Association, The Jefferson Airplane and The Doors. It was $6 to get in. All those groups had an audience. They didn’t have a history yet, but the audience wanted to hear something from each one of them. Some people would get disgusted by Jim Morrison, but they liked ‘Light My Fire’. Some people thought The Association got boring but they liked ‘Cherish’… that kinda scene was going on in Southern California.”


The second LP Ricochet was an even stronger set. Unfortunately it didn’t chart but other than the odd throwaway the music continued to develop, with choice contemporary covers (Jackson Browne’s ‘Shadow Dream Song’ and ‘It’s Raining Here in Long Beach’, and Brewer & Shipley’s ‘Truly Right’) to the fore. Reflect- ing their approach to material and how they played it, McEuen notes, “All of the different things in the mid-late ’60s exploding on the scene helped open the door so that what would be called ‘country-rock’ could exist. To me, the country part of it is a lyric that relates to something people could understand.”


“Ricochet is an example of a band in their formative years, without having a solid direction…” remembers McEuen. “Some of the music is kinda country-rock, some of it’s over-produced and some of it’s jug band. It was a mixture as we went in to record a 10- song album and only knew nine. We had one song on that album where the producers said, ‘Send it out to the string arranger and make it sound like ‘Buy For Me The Rain’.” As often was the case the label wanted to capitalise on prior hits, but the young band were soaking up all manner of sights and sounds, learning their craft and wanted something more deep rooted. “One of my favourite recordings that the band ever did was called ‘Collegiana’ it was a 1928 song that we must have spent more time working on than anything, and it just didn’t make it.” Although later included on Rare Junk this very song may have marked the end of the Dirt Band’s dalliances with old time jug band music.


In ’68 Chris Darrow, who had played in Kaleidoscope, replaced founding member Bruce Kunkel and brought to the Dirt Band’s live shows a new degree of musicianship. But after an unsuccessful album and no hit records to talk of Liberty stuck out the odds and ends album Rare Junk. It was an eclectic set to say the least, but the further use of Browne numbers like ‘These Days’ and a pedal steel dominated take of Tim Hardin’s ‘Reason To Believe’ showed strong country motifs. These were as much precursors to other bands of this ilk rather than direct lifts. Of this era McEuen firmly states, “We were so busy performing, writing and recording over that I did not listen to any of the LA canyon hippie bands. I didn’t really hear them until a few years later. My country influences were from


Grove and we were doing two shows a night for six nights and we made $100 a piece that week. We were opening for Merle Travis and that’s what set up that relationship. Man, that was a lot of money.”


For most of ’68 the Dirt Band were based in Oregon filming Paint Your Wagon with a number of stars including Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Providing wonderful bluegrass excursions (trimmed down to a minute or so in the final cut) dressed in tailored Western gear the group immersed themselves in the work load, feeling a kinship with the actors and not really paying any attention to the music biz at large.


“After Paint Your Wagon we took a six month hiatus, we felt it had been a great career: we’d made a few albums, been in a big movie and we didn’t have anything else to say. The movie took the group and parked it away from the music biz for four months. At that time Music From The Big Pink [The Band] and The Beatles’ White Album came out. Those were both so powerful we felt like we weren’t doing anything. So we quit. We were done.”


“Five months later,” McEuen picks up, “we were watching Poco [or Pogo as they were then called as they hadn’t yet cleared the name from the comic strip guy]. They impressed us so much that we said to each other, ‘Hey, we can do this again. Let’s go and find a singing drummer’ and we found Jimmy Ibbitson, got Les back in the mix and


then went and made the Uncle Charlie… album. What’s strange is when the album came out we had Poco open for us in LA at The Troubadour. It was like having The Beatles open for us.”


The Dirt Band in full flight (top); praying Lee Marvin doesn’t start singing in Paint Your Wagon (above).


the country players – The Dillards, Flat & Scruggs and other bluegrass player like Vassar Clements. What I wanted to do with the Dirt Band was put the mandolin, five string banjo and fiddle into music that you usually didn’t find it in – and sometimes it sounded like country music except for the accents of the singers.” It seemed he had a plan.


When asked about their communal pad, The Dirt House, and rumours of numerous wild parties in the Hollywood hills, McEuen turns my procrastinations around. “This was a house that we rented when we first decided to become a band. For about eight months. The Allman Brothers moved in for six weeks until they found their own place. And some people would come by, but we were working an awful lot. Keep in mind that at this point in time the band was new. One guy was a junior in High School, one was a senior… I was the old guy. I was 21. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were just going out and playing shows. We had a week at The Ash


Maybe it was rumination. Maybe the group had noticed how music had been divided (the comment on Alive about Blue Cheer being so loud that you could hear them round the block clearly marked the “us and them” split), but McEuen sensed that by blending older styles and playing in a more restrained manner with a pop ethic could be the answer. “Sometimes I think the country-rock style was chosen as it was easier to play, but it was more difficult in a sense to find the lyrics that made the songs survive. If you are bashing away on an electric guitar and screaming in the mic it’s more emotion driven. A force. You don’t have to hear the words as you can just feel the angst. If you’re playing licks on an acoustic guitar and there’s a fiddle or a banjo playing it seems like the harmonies are more important and the story of the song. The Band putting the instrumentation of mandolins and acoustic guitars in with the B3 Hammond organ and the driving drums of Levon Helm was a major influence.”


The reconvened Dirt Band released Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy in ’70, and the timing was perfect. The ’60s were over, hippie culture had become the mainstream, FM radio allowed a deeper focus on albums and Dylan and The Band had paved the way for roots in pop. And with the deafening


51


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