Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Says Goodbye to the Road on Final Tour

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was formed as a jug band in the fall of 1965 in Long Beach, California. The group, which in its early days briefly included songwriter Jackson Browne, quickly pushed off on a storied ride that spans six decades of American-based music. Inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2015, the band is now on its farewell tour, which comes to the Paramount Theatre on Sunday, August 11.

As roots-sound trailblazers, the Dirt Band has influenced and played alongside an all-star array of country, folk and bluegrass artists since its inception and recorded hits such as "Mr. Bojangles" "American Girl," "Fishin' in the Dark,"  "Colorado Christmas" and a variety of acclaimed albums (the band counts six top-tens among its thirty releases), including its commercially successful and Grammy-winning Will the Circle Be Unbroken anthologies (the first of which came out in 1972, followed by two volumes in 1989 and 2002).

Ahead of the band's final Denver show, Westword spoke to keyboardist, accordion player and singer Bob Carpenter, who joined the celebrated outfit in 1979 while living in Aspen:

Westword: So this is the last tour for the band?

Bob Carpenter: We're letting people know that we're wrapping it up. We're happy that we've been able to do it as long as we have, but it's going to get harder, so we figured we'd take one final swing around and say goodbye to everybody and say thanks. We're in California right now, and then we're heading to Utah, Colorado and Arizona.

Might you still play one-offs or special shows?

There's still a couple places we want to get to next year. We'd like to go to Canada again; we have a great fan base there. This year we're going to do about sixty shows total. Those are all here in the U.S. In the ’80s and ’90s, we were playing about ninety-plus shows a year, and in more recent years we were at about seventy or so shows each year. Every year is different, though. We've been all over the place through the years — Moscow, Japan and all over Europe. We've been around.

Where do you consider your home base?

Nashville is our base. We'll be playing some shows at the Ryman Auditorium there later this year.

How did you join the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?

I first met them in Colorado around 1972 or 1973. I was in the Starwood Band in Aspen for many years in Colorado.
I played seven nights a week for many years with Starwood. We opened for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at Red Rocks in 1975. But I would hear the Nitty Gritty guys play at the Aspen Inn, and I got to know them and worked on some records with them. By 1980, we just agreed that I would focus exclusively on the [NGDB].

Are you from Colorado originally?

No, I started out in Philadelphia, moved to Los Angeles for nine months and then to Colorado for about a decade before returning to L.A. While I was in Colorado, I lived in Evergreen, Aspen and Idaho Springs. I also lived in Paonia for a while. I loved living there.

Did you ever find your way to Caribou Ranch Studio while you were in Colorado?

I recorded an album at Caribou Ranch with Starwood for CBS in 1976. We were there for a month, and I also recorded with NGDB at Caribou. I worked on the album An American Dream there [which was released in 1979]. Everybody recorded there in the ’70s.

NGDB has so much history, and its influence is really impressive. It seems like the group has played with everyone!

Well, you stick around for 58 years and you get to bump into everybody. The first Will the Circle Be Unbroken release was the first time that everyone got together on a concept album like that — where the genres crossed over and it was inter-generational among the musicians. It was groundbreaking, and the start of the whole collaborative-album thing.

You guys touch on all the great roots-oriented genres, from old-time to bluegrass and country. Does it all fall under Americana?

We definitely like a variety of stuff, including bluegrass. We've played all the big bluegrass festivals, and we count Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush and the guys from New Grass Revival as some of our best friends. We see them all the time and play with them. When we played our kind of music back in the day, we didn't really have a name for it. Country rock, roots music, Americana, jamgrass and those genres hadn't really been defined. That was stuff that other people thought up.

We just played our music. We had the easy part.

And you recently released an album full of Bob Dylan covers?

Yeah, we wanted to do an easy studio album [Dirt Does Dylan, 2022], and Dylan seemed like a great fit because there's such a wealth of great songwriting there and we could add our own style to it. It was supposed to take a couple weeks, but that album wound up taking a couple years because of the pandemic. We're doing songs such as "Girl From the North Country" as part of our set now. We're trying to fit a lot into about a two-hour performance. Everything from the first single back in the late ’60s to the Dylan stuff and the bluegrass and the country hit and the Circle records. We have a lot of ground to cover.

What else can people expect at the final show?

We're gonna play songs from the group's entire body of work. We'll try and touch on a bit of everything. We have a lot of friends in Colorado, and it's like home for us. We love it there. We spent a lot of time there as a band, and we always look forward to being back.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 7 p.m. Sunday, August 11, Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Place. Tickets are $66-$78.