“What I like is change,” says banjo picker John McEuen whose biggest claim to success is the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a group that’s been playing the same fundamental bluegrass sound for more than six decades, an aggregation based on music founded by Bill Monroe almost 80 years ago.
The Newsman, John McEuen’s new album due out on April 12th, is an abrupt departure from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “I can’t help but change sometimes,” He says. “That’s one of the reasons I got out of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. It was a wonderful thing overall, the Dirt Band. I’m not disparaging something that I felt over the 50-year period, but there were occasional bumps in the road.”
He felt like he’d been plowing the same ground towards the end of his tenure as a founder of that band. “The last 11 years I was there, the music was the same.”
It’s unfair to say The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was completely stuck in a rut. “When I got someone to sit in with us, we would a (change up) a little bit. The Dirt Band was a wonderful thing overall, (but) what I wanted to get away from was repetition. I do a lot of the same songs (on my current tour). I do my favorite Dirt Band songs. “(Mr.) Bojangles” will always be a favorite.”
That said, The Newsman answers the question asked in the song “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” And the answer is a resounding yes. He calls the album a soundtrack for films not yet made.
Each number is a story. “I treated it like I was scoring a movie. If there were pictures with it, this is the music I’d put with it. It’s a complicated thing, trying to figure out how to describe a sound.”
The title “soundtrack” reflects back to 1967, four years after the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was formed. The title track is “about this guy riding a motorcycle all hunched over, kind of bent over with newspapers all over it. His name was Steve, the newspaper guy. He had respect from everybody he ran into, and they respected him, something they didn’t have for each other. The various rockers and the managers didn’t respect each other. Some of ’em did, but he had respect from everybody. And that was wonderful.
“That influenced me, that this guy would do his job selling newspapers starting at 5:30 in the morning and going to work. He didn’t have to do that, but he did. He took care of himself, a good example of America. “No matter what, you can make something. You can make some money. Find a way to do it.”
“Nui Ba Den” is written by a guy who was at Nui Ba Den in Vietnam when the battle was raging in 1967. “He wrote this story to his brother who sent it to me 11 years ago, and a few years ago I decided ok, I’ll put music to this. It’s really depressing, but I think it’s good.”
“We were just boys on that flight to the fight expected to act like men,” McEuen sings. “Do the best to stay alive, but you’re not expected to win.” More than half a century later, this veteran reflects, “Though it’s been years I can’t shake the fears, the nightmares.”
Walter Brennan had a hit with “Old Rivers” in 1962 that went top 5 in the hot 100, Easy Listening and country charts. “When I heard that in 1963, man, I thought that’s cool,” explains John. The music didn’t get me, but the idea of the story did.” He quotes the lyrics: “One of these days I’m gonna climb that mountain and walk up there among the clouds /when the corn is high and the cotton is growing/ And there aren’t no fields to plow. No, there ain’t no fields.
“I get that. There are no fields to plow. Seems like that old feller was always around, spent his whole life doing hard work, always walking this plowed ground. I’ve known some people like that.
“What I like is change. I can’t help but change sometimes. That’s one of the reasons I got out of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The music was the same for the last 11 years. It was a wonderful thing overall, the Dirt Band. I’m not disparaging something that I felt over the 50-year period, but there were occasional bumps in the road.
“What I wanted to get away from was repetition. I do a lot of the same songs. I do my favorite Dirt Band songs. ‘Bojangles’ will always be a favorite, but I get into some of the other songs that come from Will The Circle Be Unbroken album more than ever before.”
“Fly Trouble” is a Hank Williams Sr. song written under the name Luke The Drifter. “I love Hank Williams Sr. He had so many talking blues things to do, he did it under a different name – Luke the Drifter, which you probably know. “It’s one of those songs Wesley Rose’s buddy wrote for Hank to do. I think it’s just one of those strange songs that’s really fun,” John chuckles.
“Jules Verne” is the one instrumental in there that I wrote. It’s the way I write instrumental music. It refers to Jules Verne when he was in the French graveyard talking to a friend about his recently deceased young wife, and I used that as a setup for this piece of music, and I think it works.
“I used ‘Moonlight Dancing,’ one of the recordings I wrote about my wife as she was sleeping, and she was so beautiful. She was still alive, but she was asleep. But anyway. She’s Latino, and I wrote hopefully a Latino type song. I like to set up a piece of music with some type of – I wonder if this was happening, what would you play behind it? And that seems to inspire me rather than just the notes inspire me.”
“Miner’s Night Out” is one of John’s favorite cuts on the album. “I wrote it when we left Kansas City in the back of the bus, and I tuned my banjo to the engines. It’s like a drone. So, I figure it might have been played on the balcony in 1880 when the miners were finishing their day. And it was fun.”
John is currently on tour with The Circle Band. “I’ve got a guy named Danny Knicely and he plays guitar and mandolin and is absolutely great. (I’ve got) Les Thompson, the guy who called me when he was 17, said, ‘Hey, do you want to come join this group? We’re calling it the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.’ I said sure.”
