Plays of Our Lives: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - "Hold On" (1987)

Some thoughts on the country I come from.

Every so often, we’ll talk about an album that has played a particularly important role at some point in our lives. For the first of these, Charles offers some thoughts on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

I’d like to tell you about an album I love. And then I’d like to tell you about it again.

Released in 1987, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Hold On finds the band at their peak as country hitmakers. With three Top 10 country singles, including the enduring #1 “Fishin’ In The Dark,” the album symbolizes an astonishing run of success that found the veteran group – who started as hippie-folk throwbacks in California in the late 1960s – become staples of country radio playlists and TNN. The group had found success on the Hot 100 at either end of the previous decade, first with 1970’s rootsy “Mr. Bojangles” and then sleek, Adult Contemporary-flavored turn-of-the-‘80s tracks like “An American Dream” and the Nicolette Larson-assisted “Make A Little Magic.” And they released several well-received albums in the 1970s that mixed their facility with acoustic sounds with their occasional forays into cosmic-cowboy freakery. Most successful (and straightforward) was 1972’s acclaimed Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a joyous, generation-spanning collaboration with bluegrass and country elders that influenced subsequent generations of newgrassers and neo-traditionalists. But sustained success on the Country charts eluded them until 1983, when “Dance Little Jean” became the first of twelve straight Top 10 hits.

Their ‘80s peak vibrantly bridges their traditionalist and crossover strains. Coalesced around front men Jeff Hanna and Jim Ibbotson, ace multi-instrumentalist John McEuen, Jimmie Fadden on drums and harmonica, and keyboardist/vocalist Bob Carpenter, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – augmented by Nashville session players – released a set of records that blended their various phases-and-stages and suited the larger creative dynamic of the ‘80s-country mainstream. Albums like Plain Dirt Fashion and Partners, Brothers, & Friends – with their sparkling production and spiffed-up cover photos – succeeded artistically as well as commercially. Their best moments – like the Ibbotson-led version of Rodney Crowell’s gorgeous “Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream),” which they took to #1 in 1984 – are as good as country got in these years. By 1987, they’d locked into a successful groove but not come close to exhausting its possibilities.

Accordingly, Hold On hums with the confidence and good humor of seasoned pros who hadn’t forgotten to have fun. They open with “Fishin’ in the Dark,” a winking flirt that builds to a climax chorus worthy of the countless sing-a-longs it’s provoked over the years. They bend toward mainstream pop-rock with the pounding “Keepin’ The Road Hot” and jumping post-New Wave of “Baby’s Got A Hold On Me.” They nod back to their roots with the mandolin-driven two-step “Oh What A Love.” And they include two of the band’s best ballads, both sung with shaggy-dog sweetness by Bob Carpenter. “Oleanna” is misty-eyed MOR melancholy, while “Blue Ridge Mountain Girl” pairs an archetypal country narrative with a swelling melody that hits the high lonesome even while it smooths out the edges. From top to bottom, Hold On is a tight, deeply enjoyable collection of songs that never sags during its crisp 36 minutes.

I believe everything I just said, but it’s not the reason why Hold On has such a hold on me.

So, let me tell you about it again.

I love this record as much as I do because Hold On sounds like my time growing up in Central Wisconsin in the late 1980s. I don’t just mean that it reminds me of it, although it got played a lot in the house and car during these years, and the band’s appearance at the 1987 Wisconsin Valley Fair (a month after Hold On’s release) was my first big concert experience. And it’s not just that the album’s hits got played on local radio as much as they got played elsewhere. (“Fishin’ In The Dark” is still a favorite in my neck of the woods, as it is in many necks of many woods, especially among those who might like to neck in the woods.) And it’s not even how the group sometimes got figured into the larger “heartland” music phenomenon that bled across (white-identified) styles in the 1980s as a product of genre blends, commercial shifts and the socio-politics of the Reagan Era. All of that is part of it, maybe even a big part. But none of it is what I mean. What I mean is that this stuff is definitively central Wisconsin in a way that I have never been able to articulate.

Don’t get me wrong. Even in my most grandiose moments, I’m nowhere near arrogant enough to suggest that my experience is enough to offer such a declarative statement. (Although I guess I just did.) In a recent conversation on Facebook, though, several people I grew up with admitted (without prompting) that they not only also associate the band with our hometown, but that they thought the band was actually from Central Wisconsin. I never got that far, but I immediately got why they felt this way despite all factual basis to the contrary. Even at the peak of their popularity, and even though others elsewhere may have felt the same, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – this album in particular – feels like home to me.

I hear home in the swell of “Blue Ridge Mountain Girl” and “Oleanna,” both of which have the kind of windswept ache that western Wisconsin’s Justin Vernon would later identify in the music of Bruce Hornsby. (Hornsby collaborated with the band, and his rolling piano has always sounded to me like a snowstorm.) I hear home in the wintry loneliness of “Blue Ridge Mountain Girl,” too, when Carpenter reminds us that it’s “so cold here in Chicago” and the “wind can cut you like a knife.” Five hours north of the Windy City, I knew this feeling all too well. I hear home in the racetrack rock of “Baby’s Got A Hold On Me” and the accordion-driven swing of Bruce Springsteen cover “Angelyne,” which doesn’t sound much like a Midwestern polka but exists along the same squeeze-box continuum. I hear it in the working-week fantasy of “Joe Knows How To Live,” where the possibility of getting away on vacation is made no less poignant by the fact that it’s not even necessarily your own. (There are so many old-timers and not-so-old-timers back home who I can imagine saying “I’ve got to admit it, Joe knows how to live” in a clipped accent that outsiders would probably mistakenly call “talking like those people in Fargo.”) And, sure enough, I hear it in “Fishin’ In The Dark,” in its unapologetic but amused sexiness, its imagery of a night out on the water as something worth waiting for all week or all winter, and that simple riff that would sound just as appropriate on records by Bob Seger, Alabama, Jimmy Buffett, or Poison. On Hold On, I hear the dial flipping between country hits on WDEZ, Top 40 pop on WIFC, and oldies (including “Mr. Bojangles”) on WOFM. I hear the summer in the sunny expanses of the band’s harmonies. I hear the smell of wood-paneled basements or the feeling of the air when the seasons changed. For me, Hold On goes beyond nostalgia to a kind of sense-memory sub-consciousness that exists somewhere between what they intended and what I experienced. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to explain it, and maybe that’s why I shouldn’t try.

Hold On was a hit. They’d have one more big album with a couple more Top 10 singles, and a triumphant return to Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. II, a record I could write about all by itself and maybe will at some point. (Until then, check out this great retrospective piece by Bobby Moore.) They’d keep making good-to-great records, including a fine album of Dylan covers in 2022. They’d win Grammys, hold star-studded anniversary shows, and be officially lauded in country and bluegrass, along with the Americana world that they presaged and helped create. They’re still a steady and successful touring act, now occupying a different generational arc of the circle that they brought together as young men back in the day. They’ve played in my hometown, for example, numerous times since I saw them 36 years ago.

I join the larger chorus of praise and celebration for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which I think still deserves to be louder, and I place Hold On centrally within my own relationship to a group from whom I’ve derived great pleasure over almost all of my life. But I won’t suggest that Hold On deserves to be more broadly considered a masterwork. In fact, I can’t really even make a case that Hold On is better than the two Nitty Gritty Dirt Band albums that came out right before it. But, beyond my special and specific relationship, there are lots of treasures that anyone can find here. I love the jangling stomp of “Oh, What A Love,” and Hanna’s bouncing vocal on “Baby’s Got A Hold On Me,” and how desperately in love Carpenter sounds on both of his vocal showcases. And I’m one of those people who occasionally wants nothing more than to go home, open something cold, and crank “Fishin’ In The Dark” as loud as I can several times in a row.

So, you should go listen to Hold On. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Hold On is currently absent from streaming services, as are its two immediate predecessors. (Hold On does seem to be physically available in some places.) You can still find unofficial streams, of course, and I clicked my way through a YouTube playlist of Hold On several times over the last few days. It was deeply enjoyable, as always, and a little moving too, which I find happens more as I get older. I’ll make do with what I’ve got, which includes a CD somewhere. (And an LP back in Wisconsin.)

But if I really want the full experience, I know what I’ll do. I’ll find a way to dub the album onto one side of a blank cassette (with who knows what on the other). I’ll find a 1980s Pontiac or Cutlass, settle down in the passenger seat, pop in the tape, and press play. Then I’ll close my eyes and pretend that I’m back in my tender years. And I’ll spend awhile rolling through Central Wisconsin with my family, as the sun shines off the river or the snow glistens in the twilight.

You can’t go home again. But maybe I can. - CH

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