In praise of a Painted Wagon

Early Nitty Gritty Dirt Band including Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jackson Browne.

Odd, but in a good way

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Several things stand out in one of my odd favorite movies. First, is unsettling musical combinations and surreal coincidence of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in singing roles. Second, is several bizarre links to Colorado in a strange classic hit film of weirdness in which one of the characters steals the name of Colorado historic character Horace Tabor — and longtime Colorado-based Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has a cameo appearance. Additional evidence, I guess, of the Californification of Colorado. And I mean that in a good way.

Paint Your Wagon is a 1969 Western musical film starring Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg. The film was adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from the 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon by Lerner and Loewe. It is set in a mining camp in Gold Rush-era California, and directed by Joshua Logan.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was founded around 1966 in Long Beach, California, United States, by singer-guitarist Jeff Hanna and singer-songwriter-guitarist Bruce Kunkel, who had performed as the New Coast Two and later the Illegitimate Jug Band. Trying, in the words of the band's website, to "figure out how not to have to work for a living," Hanna and Kunkel joined informal jam sessions at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. There they met a few other musicians: guitarist-washtub bassist Ralph Barr, guitarist-clarinetist Les Thompson, harmonicist and jug player Jimmie Fadden, and guitarist-vocalist Jackson Browne. 

As Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the six men started as a jug band and adopted the burgeoning southern California folk rock musical style, playing in local clubs while wearing pinstripe suits and cowboy boots. Their first paying performance was at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, California.Browne was in the band for only a few months before he left to concentrate on a solo career as a singer-songwriter He was replaced by John McEuen on banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and steel guitar. McEuen's older brother, William, was the group's manager, and he helped the band get signed with Liberty Records, which released the group's debut album, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, during 1967. The band's first single, "Buy for Me the Rain,"was a Top 40 success, and the band gained exposure on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, as well as concerts with such disparate artists as Jack Benny and The Doors.

Mainly as a novelty act, the Band made an appearance in the 1968 film For Singles Only and a cameo appearance in the 1969 musical western film Paint Your Wagon, performing "Hand Me Down That Can o' Beans". The band also played Carnegie Hall as an opening act for Bill Cosby and played in a jam session with Dizzy Gillespie.

G. Brown, of Colorado Music Experience, tells the tale of Nitty Gritty Dirt Bands move to the Centennial State.

"In 1971, the band left Los Angeles to relocate in the Colorado mountains, the members settling into their respective wooded communities. The move was perhaps the singular most important element contributing to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s rise in stature, both commercially and creatively," wrote Brown.

Success arrived with the band’s fifth album, Uncle Charlie and his Dog Teddy. The thread of Hanna and Ibbotson’s acoustic guitars and brother-like harmonies, McEuen’s banjo, Thompson’s mandolin and Fadden’s utilitarian prowess gave them a unique sound. Hanna’s take of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” made the Top 10 pop charts, and the follow-up singles “Some of Shelley’s Blues” and “House at Pooh Corner” were also hits.

That eclectic album was listened to by the children of traditional country music icons Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Maybelle Carter and others, including Jimmy Martin from Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys. As new Colorado residents, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band went to see the Earl Scruggs Revue perform in Boulder in the spring of 1971 at Tulagi. It was Scruggs’ picking that had made banjo a lead instrument over two decades prior, giving bluegrass a distinctive style. McEuen apprehensively asked Scruggs if he would consider recording with the Dirt Band. Scruggs said he’d be proud to.

“He had come to see us at a concert we did at Vanderbilt University,” Hanna said. “Before he left the room, we said, ‘Would you think about playing banjo on one of our records?’ And then months later, he played Tulagi. And we had come up with this idea…

“The catalyst? Randy and Gary had been listening to our records—they were into this country-rock aspect. And having grown up in Nashville under the tutelage of the greats—their Sunday dinners with Merle Travis coming over—they saw the potential for something as well. And they nurtured this along with their father. Earl was our liaison,” reported Brown.

"The next week at Tulagi, Doc Watson also enthusiastically consented to take part. The collaboration led to Will The Circle Be Unbroken in 1972, under the aegis of McEuen’s brother and band manager William McEuen out of Aspen. Risking their chart success, the band outlined plans for recording a selection of traditional country numbers to be performed in conjunction with the original musicians who had greatly influenced them. Some of the old-time greats were at first skeptical at first of the Dirt Band members and their amplified instruments. The long-haired musicians had their own preconceptions. Common ground was found when the traditional musicians saw how respectful the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was toward them and their work, as well as how serious the young players were about their own music, writes Brown, of Colorado Music Experience.

The band allowed the spotlight to fall on the old masters, and the resulting album—an unprecedented, groundbreaking three-LP set, recorded two-track live, with no mixing or overdubs—elicited appreciation from both rock and country listeners, and received two Grammy nominations. It even sold well, producing a gold album, the first for Scruggs, Carter, Watson, Martin, Roy Acuff and others. Circle was inducted into the Library of Congress as “one of America’s most important recordings”; Rolling Stone called the American music anthology “The most important record to come out of Nashville.”

The geographic transition to Colorado had brought an immediate host of fresh, attentive new faces to the front of stages, the personification of all the things the band stood for conceptually, and locals claimed the group for their own. The band recorded a string of classic albums in Aspen and at Caribou Studios near Nederland, according to Brown of Colorado Music Experience.

“There was a general feeling of unity, of having a home base, working in Colorado,” McEuen told Brown. “It was hard to feel that way in Los Angeles, even though that’s where most of us came from. Colorado in the 1970s was where a lot of people were finding a new direction. That effect was felt in the song ‘Rippling Waters,’ which became a Dirt Band standard.”

In 1976, after Russian and U.S. State Department dignitaries were sent to see the band in Colorado, the Dirt Band became the first American group selected by the Soviet government to tour the USSR, spending a groundbreaking month in Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Latvia playing to live audiences and appearing before an audience on Moscow Television of an estimated 145 million people.

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band members came and went. Bob Carpenter, based in Aspen during the 1970s with the band Starwood, joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and became an invaluable addition on keyboards and vocals. The back-to-back hits “Make A Little Magic” with Nicolette Larson and “An American Dream” with Linda Ronstadt, both released under the name the Dirt Band, made the Top 20 pop charts.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was then recast as a hugely successful charting country band. Manager Chuck Morris, whose attention had been trained on concert promotion in Denver, steered the band onto country radio. The band eventually had 15 consecutive Top 10 country songs. Originally recorded in 1983, “Colorado Christmas” has remained a radio staple around the holidays.

“But in the 1980s, our focus was Nashville, in terms of making albums,” MeEuen said. “Things change. It was difficult to work flying in and out of Aspen.”

In 1986, the “20 Years of Dirt” anniversary concert in McNichols Arena in Denver was a sell-out, with guests such as Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou Harris, Doc Watson, John Prine and others. By the 1990s, Ibbotson was the only member who remained in Colorado, and he left the band after a tour in 2004. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band continued to record and tour, celebrating “50 Years of Dirt” in 2016.

Paint Your Wagon was shot near Baker City, Oregon, beginning May 1968 and ending that October. Other locations include Big Bear Lake, California and San Bernardino National Forest; the interiors were filmed at Paramount Studios, with Joshua Logan directing.

The film was released at a time when movie musicals were going out of fashion, especially with younger audiences. Its overblown budget and nearly three-hour length became notorious in the press. Eastwood was frustrated by the long delays in the making of the film, later saying that the experience strengthened his resolve to become a director. According to Robert Osborne, Marvin drank heavily during the filming, which may have enhanced his screen appearance, but led to delays and many retakes.

Marvin was known for his ability to play an authentic drunk, i.e, his Academy-winning performance in Cat Ballou.

Marvin was originally cast as Pike Bishop (later played by William Holden) in The Wild Bunch (1969), but fell out with director Sam Peckinpah and pulled out to star in the Western musical Paint Your Wagon (1969), in which he was top-billed over a singing Clint Eastwood. Despite his limited singing ability, he had a hit with the song "Wand'rin' Star." By this time, he was getting paid $1 million per film, $200,000 less than top star Paul Newman was making at the time, yet he was ambivalent about the movie business, even with its financial rewards.

From the promotional  trailer of Paint Your Wagon