“Long-haired freaks playing country...”


“Barber shops were populated by old people and you didn’t wanna frequent them and nobody had any money, so why spend money getting your hair cut? I’ll just let it grow, and besides sometime you wanted to have long hair. I liked having long hair as it showed me a lot of people that I didn’t want to talk to, because if somebody disdained me because my hair was long, then why would I want to talk to them? It was as close as we could get to being black.


“There was nothing wrong with rednecks though. Rednecks worked hard in the sun. They were hard working people and they loved music, if you played music with banjo or harmonica, and sung two part harmonies they’re gonna like it… if it doesn’t suck.


“People in the South in the ’70s had a propensity or were easily prejudicial against something they didn’t understand. The number one country redneck Roy Acuff came into the Circle session and said ‘Boys, now what kind of music do you call that?’ And my brother said, ‘We think of it as Appalachian, bluegrass…’ he didn’t wanna say Hillbilly. And Roy said, ‘Why hell, that’s nothin’ but country music. Let’s go and make some more.’ The music bridged the gap.”


approach of the new breed of long-haired rock bands it only made sense to turn up the volume a wee bit. Uncle Charlie… is an unmitigated success for me, mainly because it doesn’t try too hard. Whereas some groups embraced the acid cowboy approach of the Dead and their offspring and set out to subvert the mores of country music in a post acid-rock era, the Dirt Band were enshrined in the old and the new. Crafted musicians open to new ideas and intent on making hit records.


McEuen follows my thread. “One of the things that The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band rarely gets any credit for is that many of the people that are heralded as the makers of early country-rock, people that had more of a rock ’n’ roll background came and went. Did they believe in what they were doing? Was Gram Parsons really dedicated to what he did?”


If a couple of years down the line the Dirt Band would immerse themselves in real country music, playing with the real stars of the genre, Uncle Charlie… is a stepping stone, a one-off record that bridged new singer- songwriters, straight ahead pop, rock ’n’ roll and purist blue grass music. The group had been building up to this over the course of their recording era, but with the novelty music pushed aside and a more pop/rock approach they seemed to have perfected the formula.


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“What we did with Uncle Charlie…” McEuen says, “was to control for the first time what we did in the studio, with my brother producing. We brought Kenny Loggins songs to the public… we made other people’s songs new. I remember that when Jeff and I went to see Michael Nesmith to get ‘Some Of Shelley’s Blues’ we were like, ‘Oh man, this is a cool song’ and then we found out Linda [Rondstadt] had recorded it, but we did it mainly because of having heard it on its own, not because of someone else’s version. I’d never listened to Buddy Holly, so our ‘Rave On’ came out different. ‘Mr Bojangles’ was very different too as it was too hard to play in 6/8 so Jimmy played it in 3/4 on drums… the music was folk/pop/country. When you sit down with one guy who knows the song in the Dirt Band everyone else would work out their part… and we changed things. Completely. They weren’t exactly intelligent arrangements… but they were natural. Uncle Charlie… was us being what we wanted to be. Like that fast bluegrass instrumental ‘Randy Lynn Rag’, I tried to record that three times and it sucked. Bill told me I played better live, then brought in 20 people and I played better than ever. And yes, ‘Mr Bojangles’ came out naturally. It was a good choice. It was luck. Who knows?’


In ’71 ‘Mr Bojangles’ climbed the chart and was the Dirt Band’s first significant hit. The tide was turning. “Well we recorded songs on Uncle Charlie… that had a nice melody and that we felt people would like,” chuckles McEuen. So no underground sentiments here


John McEuen on Clarence White


“The Kentucky Colonels were the real bluegrass of Southern California focused around Clarence White, who later went on to be in The Byrds. He came in as the legitimate influence on the people he played with. I didn’t pay much attention to what he did with The Byrds, but we played one show with them and I was proud to see that he was the best player on stage. It looked as if he had been poured into a Nudie suit. Not only did he like where he came from early on, he held his own and liked the way it was fun to look that way.”


then? Indeed, the young songwriter Kenny Loggins who had been in garage band Second Helping (see the Sundazed comp Ain’t It Hard!: Sunset Strip ’60s Sounds Garage & Psych From Viva! Records), the late stage incarnation of The Electric Prunes and Mercury signed act Gator Creek, was making inroads writing songs for Wingate Music. The excellent ‘Prodigal’s Return’, ‘Yukon Railrod’, ‘Santa Rosa’ and ‘House At Pooh Corner’ were all highlights of Uncle Charlie… with the latter becoming the album’s second hit single. Loggins, on the back of the exposure of these fine songs, was brought to the attention of Poco’s Jim Messina. Initially intending to produce the young singer’s debut album Messina soon formed a partnership with Loggins, becoming one of the soft-rock sensations of the ’70s. “We nearly recorded ‘Danny’s Song’ too,” laughs McEuen,


“and that could have been our second ‘Bojangles’. Instead it was huge for Loggins & Messina.”


So what did Uncle Charlie… do for country- rock? And why is it such a great country-rock album? Well, it wasn’t straight country like The Byrds attempted with Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and the Dirt Band bettered with Will The Circle Be Unbroken in ’72. “In the ’70s we played country-country, formative, derivative country in homage to the people we were inspired by,” McEuen explains. “I asked Earl Scruggs one night when I was driving him back to his hotel if we would record with my band. ‘I’d be proud to,’ he replied. I could see Jeff’s eyes lighting up. Two weeks later I asked Doc Watson, except I said, ‘We’re making an album with Earl Scruggs’ and he said, ‘Well, if Earl’s gonna be there, I’m fixed.’ Seven weeks later Will The Circle Be Unbroken was done, recorded in six days in August.”


And yes, this is a superb album – very enjoyable and real – and it’s fab to see hippies playing the mountain men’s music with such love and attention but as McEuen said, it was a country album. The follow-up to Uncle Charlie..., All The Good Times, had its moments but unsubtle blues and Cajun let it down. Uncle Charlie… saw the group fresh off the set of Paint Your Wagon prepared to reinvent themselves. A mixture of civil war soldier, cowboy, Edwardian dandy and Sunset Strip freak the group had been away from the pivotal changes in music that had occurred over the summer of ’68. In wanting to equal The Beatles and The Band, to play mass selling pop and to keep the credence of traditional blue grass, folk and country alive the Dirt Band may well have done what the Burritos sought… to create a new American music from the nation’s base elements and to make it popular.


The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s new LP Speed Of Life will be released this summer. John McEuen promises us that Uncle Charlie… fans will find something to savour.


Many thanks to John McEuen, Crystal Hogg and Aldo Torre.


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