As I read the windup chapter of John McEuen’s memoir, “Full Circle: I Didn’t Know I Would Get Here From There,” I kept hearing the closing voiceover from Naked City: “There are eight million stories in the naked city, this has been one of them.” I wouldn’t want to have to count how many interesting stories small, medium and extra large that appear in John’s long life in music, but they sure make for one fine book.

McEuen hits the ground running in Chapter One, “You Can’t Get Here From There,” with tales of trying to fit in school, his early creative entrepreneurial activities, and a high school job at Disneyland’s Main Street Magic shop. At Disneyland, with his lifelong friend Steve Martin (who worked appropriately at Merlin’s, the second magic shop around the corner, in Fantasyland), the boys would spend their lunch breaks playing chess in Tomorrow Land. With a pair of Back To The Future destinies, perhaps an errant arrow from Frontier Land pointed out Steve Martin’s path, but “as sure as you’re living,” (as Doc Watson would say), it was watching the Dillards perform (especially Doug Dilliard, the banjoist) that focused McEuen on what would lead him to the start of something—as Ed Sullivan would say—really, really, big. Along with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a group he would co-found, they performed on Midnight Special, Dinah!, Carson, SNL, Laugh In, Smothers Brothers, Glenn Campbell and a hundred other shows…and the beat went on.

So you ask, how big did McEuen’s garden of stories grow ? Here’s a very small sample of the diverse list: Mother Maybelle Carter, Linda Rondstadt, Dolly Parton, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, The Eagles, Tom Hanks, Tommy Lee Jones, George Jones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Jack Nicholson, Jimmy Buffet, Jose Feliciano, Garth Brooks, Levon Helm, Phish, Paul Simon and the only two guys that McEuen truly hoped to play music with (and of course did), Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs.

Of all the stories he tells quite candidly and honestly, there is an anchor story with a frayed and broken rope throughout the book. That is his up and down, on-again-off-again, very difficult relationship with the other founders of NGDB. For a while, during the early days of McEuen’s solo career, his name was always accompanied with the title “Formerly Of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band” as it was when I booked him 36 years ago in my Florida music hall, when my Mom was ready to throw him and his banjo out the stage door. It happened during his soundcheck, when while in the box office, she heard him screaming at soundman, moi. To her chagrin, it was only his hilarious “Dueling Banjos” bit with his boom box. Remember, this guy is a lifelong friend of that other “wild and crazy guy” banjo picker.

NGDB was the first American band to tour Russia (though Blood, Sweat & Tears toured Eastern Bloc countries under Nixon’s threat of deportation), and McEuen devotes an entire chapter—as he should—to their tour of Russia, a truly hair raising experience complete with KGB horrors.

John had six children, and the family’s stories are equally fascinating and as full of ups and downs as his own musical career. Like the story of the $100,000 1927 Gibson Florentine Banjo he forgot in a taxi (retrieved from a police station by the Lovin’ Spoonful’s  John Sebastian), his tales ring true and clear as a bell (especially a paranormal jaw-dropper that occurs in the wee hours of the morning at the Vietnam War Memorial). On his best day, Rod Serling couldn’t make this stuff up. Fortunately he didn’t have to, because John McEuen lived it.

—Ken Spooner