When John McEuen left the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1986, he left a lot of folks in the music industry scratching their heads in bewilderment.
After all, the Dirt Band was reaching a peak of commercial success, and McEuen's masterful touch with string instruments had defined the Dirt Band sound for 20 years. In many respects he was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.Beyond the loss to the Dirt Band, could McEuen really make a living as a solo artist playing traditional acoustic string music?
"I've kept busy," McEuen laughs, a permanent grin peering out from his gray-white beard and trademark long hair. "I've done films and soundtracks. I play here and there, eight to 10 dates a month."
He picks up an acoustic guitar off the couch and plucks out a few notes. "And there were those 12- to 14-hour days writing music for the new album."
The new album, "String Wizards" (Vanguard Records) is near and dear to McEuen's heart. Though it's been five years since he left the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, it's his first solo recording since that time, a purely instrumental effort that flows effortlessly from bluegrass to country to purely experimental meanderings.
Adding to the stunning virtuosity of the recording are Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on dobro, Roy Huskey on bass, Sam Bush on mandolin and David Grier on guitar. (Four of the five were winners of the "Instrumentalist of the Year" at the 1990 IMBA awards.)The video of "Return to Dismal Swamp" was recently placed on heavy rotation on Country Music Television - an amazing accomplishment for an instrumental tune.
"Instrumental country has never really caught on," he said. "We're forging some new ground here."
Not bad for a guy who makes his home in Murray, Utah, a couple thousand miles outside the notoriously geocentric Nashville country music loop. McEuen, 45, moved back to Utah recently to be a " `hands-on' father " to his six children, who live here with their mother.
"I don't feel 45. I feel 72, especially when my daughter's kid comes over and calls me Grandpa Banjo."
His modest home, cluttered with photos and memorabilia of 25 years of performing, reflects his attitude toward music: traditional, spare and to the point. It certainly doesn't reflect the opulence that might be expected from someone whom many consider one of the world's finest string musicians.
McEuen, a former magician at Disneyland, grew up in Southern California in the mid-1960s, playing banjo in local folk groups, one of which was a bluegrass trio with his brother Bill. McEuen played with other struggling artists like Steve Martin and Michael Martin Murphey.
By 1966, a group of musicians began hanging out at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Long Beach with the intention of playing good-time music just for the fun of it. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was born.
Begun more as a folk band with long-haired hippie-types, the Dirt Band's music became progressively more commercial, eventually merging folk with rock and then country. Their fifth album in 1969 produced the hit "Mr. Bojangles," which spent 34 weeks on the charts and firmly established the band in folk-rock circles.
But it was 1971's landmark "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," recorded with the founding figures of country music (Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, etc.), that established the band in country music and established McEuen as one of the world's premier multi-instrumentalists.
More hits followed, as did a 28-show tour of the Soviet Union, the first American band to ever tour there. By 1986, the band had finished an immensely successful tour of Europe and then had returned to the studio to record "Home Again in My Heart."
For some time McEuen had felt the producers were meddling too much with the distinctive sound of the music. But when the producers wanted to use another banjo player for the recording, McEuen decided enough was enough.
"The main reason I left was I felt I had done everything we could do together," he told one interviewer. "If I'd stayed in the group I'd have been in on another couple of hit singles in a period of a year, and I'd done that before. I don't think it would have gotten me any further in what I was trying to do."
Leaving the band meant a return to acoustic music. He tours relentlessly, opening for more well-known artists (he opened for Nanci Griffith at Kingsbury Hall a couple years back) and occasionally headlining. A solo concert in Moscow, Idaho, recently drew 1,200 people.
But in the helter-skelter of performing, the solo album, the one he always wanted to record, eluded him.
Until this year when he sat himself down and recorded "String Wizards." Sifting through 30 titles, many of them original tunes, McEuen found himself revitalized by a belief that instrumental country music with banjos, fiddles and mandolins is as vital a music form as any other.
While instrumental music has found a respectable niche in rock, classical and jazz, country music has virtually ignored instrumentals.
"In country, it's looked on as the `old stuff.' I wanted to put it at the forefront, make an album that appeals to that void and would also appeal to people unfamiliar with that kind of music," McEuen said.
The result was an album dripping with musical flavors, from the squeaky back porch of a Tennessee mountain cabin to the steamy bayous of the Deep South to the heart-pounding thin air of a Rocky Mountain high.
Then again, the thing about instrumentals is that each listener gets a different image of what it's trying to say. "Ten different people might get 10 different images," he says. "The great thing about this music is it doesn't really need words."
And "String Wizards" speaks for itself.