For the first time since its earliest hours as a Southern California jug band in the late 1960s, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band expanded to a sextet in 2018.
The lineup now features co-founders Jeff Hanna (acoustic guitar, electric guitar) and Jimmie Fadden (drums, harmonica), as well as longtime member Bob Carpenter (keyboards) and new additions Jim Photoglo (bass, acoustic guitar), Ross Holmes (fiddle, mandolin) and Jaime Hanna (electric and acoustic guitar).
Jeff Hanna explains the addition of the new members — Photoglo joined in 2017, Holmes and the younger Hanna followed in 2018 — has given the veteran act a new lease on life.
In a wide-ranging conversation, the vocalist discussed the outfit's current configuration as well as the likelihood that fans will ever see a fourth installment in the Will The Circle Be Unbroken series.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band performs at Salina's Stiefel Theatre on Thursday, March 21.
Interview Highlights
Jedd Beaudoin: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has a new lineup. Tell me about this transition.
Jeff Hanna: John McEuen left the band at the end of 2017. When we started the year last year, we were fortunate that our friend Ross Holmes, who's actually a neighbor of my son's, a great fiddle player, and who had been playing with Bruce Hornsby's band at that point, was on a break. Ross came out, played fiddle and mandolin with us for a couple of shows.
One thing led to another and my son, Jaime, who'd been playing with Gary Allan's band, for the last 12, 13 years [was available]. We saw this opportunity for him to come out and play with us. It was great because we'd been talking about playing music together for years and years if you can imagine.
The vacancy that John left in the band created this opportunity for us. It's worked out great. It's been really, really fun.
So there'd never been a time when you'd said to Jaime, "Come out and sit in with us"?
No, he'd sat in with us a bunch of times. Around 1999, 2000 we actually went out and did some shows together with me, Jimmie Fadden, Bob Carpenter and Jaime. We did about eight shows together. It was just for fun. We had some scheduling conflicts with one of the guys in the band and so we thought, "Let's go do this." It was great. That was a one-time thing. We thought.
In the meantime, Jaime had been playing with The Mavericks, then with Gary. He actually had a recording deal with DreamWorks Records. He had a duo with his cousin, Jonathan McEuen, who's John McEuen's son. It was called Hanna-McEuen and it was really, really good but that fell apart in a record company merger, unfortunately.
So what's changed since they've come in?
The musical energy has changed a lot. In terms of instrumentation, it's not that vastly different. Fiddle and mandolin have been part of what we do almost since day one, going back to the late '60s. Everybody's different. Every musician has a different voice on their instrument. Ross' fiddle playing is way different than John McEuen's was. His mandolin playing as well. He brings his personality through the way he plays.
Jaime is a great guitar player. He's way, way more advanced than I am! [Laughs.] His chops are ridiculous. I always laugh because the way that music has evolved, there's so much virtuosity out there now. I think more than there was when I was a kid. So seeing this wave of great musicians and their musical vocabularies, which are so advanced [is great]. Jaime's a great player; he's got a great tone on electric and is a really fine acoustic player as well. And he's a great singer. We scored big with Jaime. We're really glad to have him.
Ross is a really good singer as well as is Jim Photoglo, who's the third part of this puzzle. Jim's an old friend of ours. We've known him for 30-some-odd years. He's a really fine singer-songwriter in his own right. His connection to our band, the main connection, is that he co-wrote "Fishin' in the Dark," which is a huge deal for Dirt Band fans. He played bass with Vince Gill in the '80s and, later on, in Dan Fogelberg's band and recently with Carole King as well. We're really grateful to have Jim out there with us.
Does this open up the door for a different repertoire on the road?
I think it's easier to shift gears when you have that much horsepower, absolutely. Some of the jams are lengthier now, in a good way, which we love. We all love to play. It's inspiring, too. Jamie and Ross, in particular, bring a lot of new notes into the overall musical complexion of the band. That's been really fun for the rest of us.
Does that also potentially open the door to new material?
Yeah, of course. That's definitely on the docket. Right now, as usual, job one is going out there and playing/touring. A, it's our favorite thing to do and, B, it's the only way to really make a living in this business anymore, touring. The record business is dead. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.]
A friend of mine the other day said, "You used to go tour to promote an album, now you do an album to promote a tour." It's not that recording isn't fun because it's a blast, it's really great. But it's a totally different financial dynamic. We sell a lot of records off the truck; the biggest percentage of acts out there, their biggest numbers are coming at the merch table, at the venues. Radio's a tiny thing. Streaming is an entirely different game. Essentially, touring is how we make our living.
The funny thing is, that's always how we made our living. [Laughs.] It's not a huge shift for us, the difference being the return on making a record. It costs money to make albums. We're paying for them now, whereas back in the day, you'd get a big budget from a record company, sometimes six figures, to make an album. You'd go in there, take your time, fool around and, at the end of the day, you didn't have to take out a loan to pay for it. That doesn't change the idea of new music mattering. It always matters.
How was the idea for the first Will The Circle Be Unbroken received? A group of younger guys calling up veteran players and say, "Why don't you come down and do this album with us?"
The musicians themselves were amazing and generous and gracious: Mother Maybelle Carter and Earl Scruggs and Vassar Clements and Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Jimmy Martin. All of them were unbelievable. When we came to Nashville, a writer with one of the papers here in town — I live in Nashville now — said something like, "Why are these young hippies recording with these dinosaurs?" Which was a really rude thing to say, I thought. Disrespectful. Not to us but to them.
After we made the record, they kind of ate their words, which is just great. These were folks who … their ages ranged from their late 40s up into their 60s. But they were still all really vibrant musically. I think that was one of the revolutionary things about Will The Circle Be Unbroken, the first one, was this cross-generational thing, there was a generation gap and a cultural divide as well because it was the hippies and the "rednecks," getting in a room and making music together. Of course, I would never refer to any of those guys as rednecks myself.
It was a very interesting time. I'm really glad that we got to participate at that moment in history. And from a purely selfish standpoint, I got to play with Doc Watson and Maybelle Carter and Earl Scruggs! [Laughs.] It was hero worship with those folks. There were the people [who], when we were pimply-faced teenagers learning our first guitar licks, we were listening to.
Is there any inclination to do a fourth iteration of Will The Circle Be Unbroken? It would seem that with people such as Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson around, there would be an invigoration for something like that.
I think that the concept of collaborating with folks like Jason — I'm a huge fan of his, and Sturgill's as well, Chris Stapleton, Margo Price, there's a long list of female artists, including Brandi Carlile — [is a good one]. But I'm not sure about calling it Will The Circle Be Unbroken. That's where it loses me a little bit. We had to be convinced to do Will The Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two. There was a good reason to do Volume Three as well. Branding it that, I don't know. It doesn't seem appealing to me. That's how I feel today. Check back with me in six months! [Laughs.]
This is year 53 for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. You started this when you were a teenager. Did you ever imagine it would go longer than five years?
No. We took it a gig at a time back then. To be honest, we hit our first snag at the end of 1968. There was a lot of internal grumbling in our band, and we shut it down for several months. We came back out and retooled the musical direction. We went from being a jug band to a country-rock band, which was more natural than it sounds because all of that was in our DNA anyway.
But once we hit 1976, then '86, all those decades, the further down the road we got the more grateful we were to be able to do this. Now, it's like, as long as we stay healthy, why not? It's great. We're having a blast. Nobody's interested in retiring to the golf course.
Jedd Beaudoin is the host of Strange Currency. Follow him on Twitter @JeddBeaudoin. To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.
