Feature Article - Fall 1995
JOHN McEUEN:
From Dirt Band to Movie Scores
by Robyn Flans
John McEuen was having a lousy, but fateful, day. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was in the midst of recording "Home Again in My Heart" and while McEuen was playing rhythm guitar on the track, the band brought in an outside studio musician to play the banjo intro.
"I said, `Look, I'll do the banjo and he can play the guitar.' They said, `We like the way he plays that nice straight-ahead thing -- you can replace it later.' `Later' was two weeks and I had four minutes to try to replace the part. `We'll give you a couple of passes at it and if you don't get it, we'll just keep what we've got.' I didn't spend 18 years of my life in that band to be second banjo," McEuen laughs. "But that made me realize I should be doing something else."
McEuen has quite possibly put the 5-string banjo in front of as many people as anyone else over the past couple of decades. Frailing banjo was the lead instrument in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's 1970s hit "Some of Shelly's Blues." He also supplied the banjo in Michael Murphy's pop hit "Carolina In The Pines," and he played banjo, dobro, and mandolin on Rolling Stone Bill Wyman's solo album, Monkey Grip. Most recently he has familiarized an even larger audience with the banjo through his film scoring, for such projects as the TNN Tommy Lee Jones directed The Good Old Boys and Braving Alaska. The latter even earned an Emmy nomination for best score, perhaps the first such nomination for the banjo, and definitely the first for National Geographic. His solo albums have attracted critical acclaim, as well as a Grammy nomination for String Wizards II.
McEuen is grateful for the teeth he cut with the Dirt Band. He hadn't been playing all that long as the band was forming in 1966. Inspired by Doug Dillard, John taught himself to play. "With no exaggeration, I spent three nights a week listening to Dillard live for about two years," McEuen recalls. "I learned from The Dillards' albums and performances -- all without their knowing it. Even little things, like they always laughed at something funny. They wouldn't stand there like musicians usually do when they hear the same joke -- it was always like they were hearing it for the first time. They were always working an audience. Doug would take off on banjo and play the audience instead of the banjo. I'd watch him, go home and listen to the record. If I heard a note I hadn't heard before, I'd go see him and watch how he did it, then go home and listen to the record again." (John recently produced A Night In The Ozarks, a 90-minute video of The Dillards, which John proudly admits "contains lots of close-ups of the banjo playing." See ad, page 8.).
By the time he began performing concerts with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, he had already created the foundation for a style that the band helped to further develop. "Being in the band definitely gave me a broader vocabulary," McEuen explains. "It helped develop recording technique. I'm usually thought of as real good in the studio -- not necessarily as a player, but as someone who uses the studio as a tool where I can go in and overdub. If I'm working on crafting a part, if someone has to roll back and I have to punch in or any of that, I'm pretty quick. The studio doesn't intimidate me. I play better with the red light on."
One of John's strong points is his ability to arrange songs. "I think that came from listening to different styles of music and recording in the pop music format." John thinks of the banjo as a percussion instrument, much the same as the piano. "It is a plucked percussive instrument that is difficult to play while a drummer is riding the cymbals and using a lot of hi-hat. When you hit the banjo string, there's going to be a note there and also a pick noise. The sound of the string is such a hot metallic sounding level that when I use percussion, I go towards congas, shakers, and maracas -- softer percussion sounds than the bell of the cymbal or sticks on the hi-hat."
John feels that the drum parts in the Dirt band accommodated the banjo well. He goes on to explain the banjo's role in several of the group's songs: "When we did something like 'In For The Night,' (from The Dirt Band, 1978), I liked having the banjo be a part of the song. On 'Some of Shelly's Blues,' it was right in your face. On 'Carolina in the Pines,' it was the part of the song that jumped out in the lead. It was supportive and kinda took over. On 'Long Hard Road' and 'Dance Little Jean,' I used little banjo sounds, trying to make a sound that was similar to what a woodblock player might have done. There are little layers in there that you can't quite identify. One thing the banjo is wonderful for is when you mute the strings, a la Earl Scruggs, where you wrap your hands around the string and don't play any notes. That is a great percussive sound that is not found on any other instrument. And if you include a few harmonic notes along with that, you can create a texture that can be very effective in many styles. My dream is that when you go to mix a record like that, they say, 'What's missing?' 'Turn up the banjo track.' 'Are you nuts? The banjo?' 'Well, it doesn't sound like a banjo; it's doing something else.' 'Oh yeah, that was what was holding it together.'"
One of John's prouder Dirt Band moments was "Long Hard Road" where he held the song together musically, playing guitar, mandolin, and banjo. On the album by the same name, he played a lot of acoustic guitar and realized he could take some of the finger style of banjo playing and apply it to the guitar, thus leading him to develop different sounds on some of the other instruments. "Banjo playing usually involves open tuning," he continues. "When you pick with your fingers, you're doing various kinds of rolls -- arpeggios. You can use a guitar in other tunings like a banjo, but even in standard tuning, you can use the approach of melodic banjo playing."
John feels an important aspect that sets the 5-string banjo apart from other instruments is the many tunings attributed to it. "For instance, the key I do 'Mountain Whippoorwill' in uses a C minor tuning, which is the same as 'Miner's Night Out.' The key I do 'Dismal Swamp' in uses a G minor tuning, which is the same as 'Pretty Polly' that The Dillards did. The key I do 'Opus 36' in is called closed C tuning. All of those tunings are very common, in addition to another dozen or so I've used in the past. D, D minor, D modal, D major, and D6. D6 tuning, starting with the 5th string is: A, B, F#, A, D. Also, a D tuning that is a sitar tuning, starting with the 5th string usually is A, D, A, A, D. In the middle, the 3rd string is tuned a little bit flat from the 2nd to make it resonate like a sitar and you fret both the 2nd and 3rd string on the same fret at the same time."
There's a tuning on John's new album (Acoustic Traveller on Vanguard) that he didn't know what to call. On a song called 'Old Country,' the strings are tuned: G, B, G, B, D. The low B on the 4th string gives him a lower bass note than found in other tunings. "I've never heard anyone play in that tuning. I tried to emulate a classical sound -- a European type of melody."
The new album has less banjo as a lead on it than other McEuen albums. He chose to place the banjo in a supporting role and feature the guitar more. "I also use all the other stringed instruments I play, like mandolin and dulcimer. I only played fiddle on one piece and I used a real fiddle player on some of the other songs -- I don't hire myself as a fiddle player unless the music is old-timey. But I used guitar in different tunings and, in fact, there's one lightning-fast 'Fisher's Hornpipe' I played on the guitar in D tuning -- that I don't think guitar players will be able to figure out. When a banjo player hears it, though, he's going to find a guitar and retune it and go, 'Ha, I can do that!' Banjo players should know they can get a lot of great music out of guitar just by tuning it to, say, open D tuning. They can play things that guitar players will have to work two or three years to figure out. It's a lot of fun and it's quieter. And your significant co-person won't try to make you less significant," he laughs.
"You can tune the banjo and get unusual tones out of it sometimes just by tuning it for a particular song," McEuen continues. "Many Appalachian banjo players would tune the instrument to their voice, rather than learn to play in Eb or D minor. They would tune to the sound they could sing to and then learn just enough notes to accommodate the chord changes. A lot of these people were farmers or miners and didn't have time to sit and play, but they created a world of tones and sounds around the instrument."
For the score of the Tommy Lee Jones film The Good Old Boys, John used a lot of guitar in open D tuning, which is the same as banjo open D tuning, but with two additional lower notes. "What I needed was sustain. I didn't need staccato, punctuated 8th notes. I needed to be able to play some high 8th notes, but avoid having violins or synthesizer or some kind of nowadays sustaining instrument. I needed an instrument that rings."
According to John, his approach is possible on even bigger scores, but he feels it's hard to convince the film community that some guy playing a few stringed instruments can cover a bunch of sounds when normally they're familiar with orchestral music and synthesizers.
John began dabbling in film scoring while still with the Dirt Band. He scored some motorcycle movies for Peter Starr, then a couple of Steve Martin specials ("Wild and Crazy Guy" and "Comedy's Not Pretty"), as well as The Man Outside. "I really liked doing that. First of all, with scoring in general, you can change tempo, time signatures, instrumentation, and keys all within two minutes. You can go from a dulcimer and a banjo to a full orchestra, to a vocal with just violin. It can go from country to jazz and you can play licks that are 13 l/2 measures long and they can make sense. When you work with songs, you basically have eight seconds in the beginning and the end and maybe six to ten in the middle for the turnaround. For me, recording records got to be 'Play the intro and then back up the singers.'"
By the time of that critical Dirt Band "Home Again in My Heart" session, McEuen's direction was obvious. And new challenges came with the change. "When I was working on Braving Alaska, the guy whose position it was to approve all the music cues was in the studio listening. After a few of them went by, his comments were, `I really like the opening and the one when the guy's on the airplane, but when that airplane comes over the hill, who died??? It needs more of a washing sound, a big woooooshhhh!' I thought, 'Well, let me get some music paper and I'll write that out.' One of the toughest jobs with doing a music score is trying to read minds and to keep the client happy."
John recorded 10 hours of music for the PBS miniseries The Wild West which was recorded in 12 cities using a total of 88 different people. He recalls a tough moment trying to find the key for Crystal Gayle in Nashville while recording the track in Wichita. Add to this, the fact that three of the five musicians had never been in the studio before. "One had never worn headphones. The hammer dulcimer player was trying to find out from Crystal if 'Barbara Allen' was going to be in Bb or A," "We went back and forth for 20 minutes when she finally decided that Bb would be better. I watched the musician's face sink. Bb on a hammer dulcimer is like telling a piano player to only use the black keys. But she learned it and lived up to her name which was Princess."
The big lesson on The Good Old Boys was don't ever lose touch with the director. "He's in charge and has final approval on everything," McEuen explains: "When you try to talk to the director through subordinates, they will try to translate what they think he wants and you'll be one step further away from what he actually wants. When Tommy Lee Jones began Batman Forever, I lost contact with him. I'd send what I was told he wanted and I'd get word back from him like, 'That's kinda the wrong direction for that.'"
"Sometimes you can find a piece of music that is already recorded that will fit perfectly behind the picture. I was proud that I was able to use 'Carolina Traveler' (which includes Earl Scruggs on banjo) off the original String Wizards album for the windmill raising scene in The Good Ol Boys."
A book about scoring that John recommends is called the Knudsen Book. You write a chart out that, say, is one minute 58 seconds. So the book tells you that will be this many beats. Then you write your measures down and look at the movie again and time it out. You go, 'Okay, at 11 seconds the car door slams. At 25 seconds, somebody sneezes, at 35 seconds a baby cries, at 75 seconds there are a bunch of gun shots, and at 90 seconds there's 18 seconds of dialogue. You go back to your book, look up all these times and it tells you what beat those will fall on in your chart. You go to your chart and put in the space for dialogue and however long the sound effects last, which you write into your chart as rest spots. Then you go back and watch it again to see that the car takes off right after the door slams, so right on top of that car door slamming, we have to pick up the music about a half of a second into it."
"In The Good Old Boys, during the rodeo scene, when the guy would throw his arms up in the air, the fiddle would punctuate it. Then the guy would go out and the music would take off. There was a pretty girl, so it did something else for about four seconds. When I wrote the chart out, it was just Byron Berline and I, and he's a great chart reader. We were going through the chart and he was saying, `John, it's got a lot of changes in it.' But we did it, and when we put it up to the picture, it even surprised me. Everything was there."
In addition to film scoring, McEuen's other creative outlet has been his solo records -- String Wizards I and II, as well as his new Acoustic Traveller project. "In the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, I could never play my music the way I wanted to. There were no other lead players that could handle that style of music. On String Wizards I, I was showing how music can be arranged around the banjo and how the 5-string can blend in with a few different instruments. I got to record with some of the best players in the world and 80% of the tunes were first takes."
The second album was more of an example of banjo-style guitar and the use of the studio as more of a production tool. More sound effects and editing were incorporated into String Wizards II.
McEuen's new album uses banjo in more of a supportive role--as part of an ensemble on most of the tunes. "There are 10 original songs and a few old chestnuts. It's an example of what those instruments might play had country music not been around. It's an interesting question--did the feel of country music become the feel because of the instrumentation? Did bluegrass happen because there was a mandolin, fiddle, and banjo? Or did somebody go, 'Let me put those instruments together and see what comes out?'"
One day John hopes to be able to perform at symphony halls, playing with hot bluegrass pickers for the first half of the show, then with an orchestra for the second half. "'Return to Dismal Swamp' is a wonderful orchestra piece, as is 'Miner's Night Out.' There are a couple of quartet classical pieces with acoustic guitar and I have charts for about a half hour's worth of material, not counting the new stuff." He hopes to make more albums, "accomplish a few major film scores, and . . ." he pauses for comedic effect, "get some new tires for my truck."
—5-SQ—Robyn Flans
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