New Riders of the Purple Sage

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #135 (April/May 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Free-Range Music

by Michael Parrish

The early 1970s were the heyday of West Coast country rock, and no group embodied it more colorfully than the New Riders of the Purple Sage. This venerable quintet toured tirelessly for over 20 years before calling it quits in the 1990s, in the process introducing thousands to such interesting characters as Henry the hard-driving drug smuggler, the Gypsy Cowboy, and, of course (with a nod to author Peter Rowan), the irascible Panama Red. After an extended hiatus, the New Riders regrouped recently with a new lineup and is now touring to sellout crowds, many of whom were not born when the original group came together in the late 1960s.

The group's story starts long before there was a New Riders, back in the early 1960s when guitarist David Nelson and singer/songwriter John Dawson were part of the same south Bay Area folk-bluegrass circuit that included Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Nelson often played guitar in bluegrass groups like the Black Mountain Boys, which featured Garcia on banjo, and both he and Dawson drifted in and out of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, the group that eventually morphed into the Grateful Dead.

[cover #135]