Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Lord, it was nearly sixty years ago.

Long Beach, California. Jeff Hanna was in high school, a holding zone where hormones and anxiety are left to fester until they explode like Langston Hughes’s dream deferred.

Suddenly, a sound burst through the middling morass at laser speed, deflating the balls of confusion that teenaged Jeff was holding. That sound came from the iron ore town of Hibbing, Minnesota, by way of Greenwich Village. It was Bob Dylan, a young man who at first recharged old folk and blues songs, but who became known for his own wild-eyed compositions.

Hanna didn’t know what was going on. But, at the same time, he knew Dylan was the man who would lead him to know most everything that was going on.

After school, he’d go home, lock himself in his bedroom, and haltingly play the picking pattern to Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” until the halting gave way to the feeling that he’d mastered a magic trick.

And when Dylan came to play at the Wilson High School auditorium, Hanna paid $4 to sit in the balcony with his girlfriend and a group of pals that included Bruce Kunkel, with whom he would soon start the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a fluid combo that would make a beautiful and necessary mark on American music. Another key member of that band was a boy named Jimmie Fadden, who would sit and play Dylan songs with Hanna, transfixed by the way Dylan’s music blended seemingly every roots music strain.

Fadden would become Hanna’s lifelong partner in the groundbreaking, hit-making, Grammy winning, long-lived (since 1966), Dirt Band. Hanna considers Jimmie’s harp to be another lead vocal.

What’s all this about Dylan, then? Well, the Dirt Band’s new album, Dirt Does Dylan, is a romp through some of the gems in Dylan’s catalog, as played by Hanna, Fadden, keyboardist/songwriter/vocalist Bob Carpenter (who joined in 1980), and three new members: fiddle specialist Ross Holmes; singer-songwriter and bass player Jim Photoglo (who wrote one of the Dirt Band’s biggest hits, “Fishin’ in the Dark”); and Hanna’s son, the absurdly talented singer and guitarist Jaime Hanna.

They’ve won three Grammys and placed an album and a single in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and scored country hits including “Voila (An American Dream),” “Modern Day Romance,” “Stand a Little Rain” and many more. They’ve undergone numerous lineup changes, the latest of which has just recorded its first studio album together.

Dirt Does Dylan provides a damn good listening experience and a new perspective on the greatest songwriter of the 20th century (and his 21st century works are as mighty fine as The Mighty Quinn).
Don’t think twice, it’s more than alright. It is, as Dirt Band collaborator Kris Kristofferson would (and did) say, “A table-thumpin’ smash.”