{"id":1317505,"date":"2020-01-02T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-03T02:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/mceuen-makes-vaudeville-debut-thursday\/"},"modified":"2020-01-02T19:40:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T02:40:00","slug":"mceuen-makes-vaudeville-debut-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/mceuen-makes-vaudeville-debut-thursday\/","title":{"rendered":"McEuen makes Vaudeville debut Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band co-founder John McEuen hangs out at the Hotel Colorado.<\/strong>
Chelsea Self \/ Post Independent<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

John McEuen and his wife Marilyn sat closely on an antique loveseat in the lobby of the historic Hotel Colorado, surrounded by generations\u2019 worth of Christmas decorations. With a nod to the story in the famous (in these parts) Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song \u201cColorado Christmas,\u201d the couple had fled warmer climes for the \u201cColorado snow\u201d to celebrate their anniversary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe stayed here last year and it\u2019s wonderful,\u201d McEuen said, \u201cWe live in Florida and my wife wanted to see snow.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a musician with over 9,500 concert appearances on his resume, McEuen also decided to use the Colorado time to play a pair of shows, including one at Glenwood\u2019s Vaudeville Revue Theater next Thursday \u2014 a venue he\u2019s never played before.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like playing wherever people come to see me. It doesn\u2019t matter the size. It\u2019s what I\u2019ve wanted to do since I was 17 \u2014 go onstage anywhere and play,\u201d McEuen said.<\/p>\n

It will be the award-winning multi-instrumentalist\u2019s second show in Glenwood this year after his August date at the Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park, and he will once again bring the String Wizards with him, including former Dirt Band member Tom Cable, as well as David Starr and Tom Spehar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll go through a lot of my favorite Dirt Band songs, music from \u2018Will the Circle Be Unbroken\u2019 and songs from my album that came out a year and a half ago called \u2018Made in Brooklyn,\u2019\u201d McEuen said. \u201cI\u2019ll bring a guitar, mandolin, banjo and fiddle, and we\u2019re going to have a good time.\u201d<\/p>\n

McEuen is prominently featured in the recent Ken Burns documentary currently streaming on PBS called \u201cCountry Music,\u201d including an episode called \u201cWill the Circle Be Unbroken,\u201d which details the making of that classic 1972 album.<\/p>\n

\u201cColorado has a connection to that album because when Earl Scruggs was playing here in 1971 I got up the nerve to ask him if he\u2019d record with us, and he said \u2018I\u2019d be proud to,\u2019\u201d McEuen said. \u201cDoc Watson was playing the same club, Tulagis in Boulder, the next week. And I said \u2018Doc, we\u2019re making an album with Earl Scruggs,\u2019 which we weren\u2019t yet, but he said he\u2019d like to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n

McEuen\u2019s brother William, who was the Dirt Band\u2019s manager at the time, got Merle Travis to sign on to the project, and Scruggs brought along (Mother) Maybelle Carter and Jimmy Martin.<\/p>\n

\u201cEight weeks later we recorded 34 songs in six days \u2014 all two track, so once you were done with a song, you were done, you weren\u2019t going to do anything else to it,\u201d McEuen said. \u201cWe recorded directly to a the master.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the music seems to be timeless,\u201d McEuen continued. \u201cCarter family music is wonderful. It\u2019s acoustic and it reaches people in a real way. They\u2019re more focused on the songs and the lyric of the song, and the melody without a bunch of stuff around it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like songs that are good with just the guitar player and banjo player \u2014 you add a few things and you\u2019re done. There\u2019s no reason to get too complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

McEuen won a Grammy award in 2009 as the producer of childhood friend, actor\/comedian\/banjo player Steve Martin\u2019s album \u201cThe Crow \u2014 New Songs for the 5-String Banjo,\u201d which won the Grammy in 2010 for Best Bluegrass Album Of The Year.<\/p>\n

\u201cSteve Martin and I \u2014 the banjo came into our life the same day in the living room of my parents\u2019 house with a guy that was playing it with my brother,\u201d McEuen said. \u201cWe had just gotten our dream job, working at Disneyland in the magic shop at age 16, and in that time period, music came along.<\/p>\n

\u201cI ended up getting a banjo by the time I turned 18. I could learn faster than Steve, so I showed him stuff. He says I taught him how to play. And I say, OK, you can say that.\u201d<\/p>\n

McEuen also does a show called \u201cAcoustic Traveler\u201d on Sirius\/XM radio, and recently published his autobiography, \u201cThe Life I\u2019ve Picked,\u201d in which he details his perspective from a music career that has spanned six decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very proud of this book, and people really seem to like it because it\u2019s not just my story; it\u2019s their story,\u201d McEuen said. \u201cIt\u2019s about a bunch of people, and the music they made that passed in front of all of us, only I was on the bus \u2014 I was where I knew a lot of people wanted to be, to be able to say, \u2018this is what happened when that went down,\u2019 or \u2018I knew he shouldn\u2019t have been doing that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

jbear@postindependent.com<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band co-founder John McEuen hangs out at the Hotel Colorado.Chelsea Self \/ Post Independent John McEuen and his wife Marilyn sat closely on an antique loveseat in the lobby of the historic Hotel Colorado, surrounded by generations\u2019 worth of Christmas decorations. With a nod to the story in the famous (in these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1317505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 06:30:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1317505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1317505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1317505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1317505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}