Nitty Gritty Dirt Band farewell tour makes Albuquerque stop

Do what you love and you will find the reward, says Nitty Gritty Dirt Band keyboardist Bob Carpenter.

“You have to love playing music, and you have to be willing to just take it at that without thinking about fame or fortune,” Carpenter says. “And if you really love playing music and you get to do it every day, then I think you’re very lucky that you’re able to do that, because you can always find somebody to play for.”

You can hear his love of music on Saturday, Aug. 9, at Kiva Auditorium on the band’s “All the Good Times: The Farewell Tour.”

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has found their “somebody” in generations of fans through decades of eight-track tapes, cassette tapes and CDs, Carpenter says.

“That’s what’s kept us alive all these years,” Carpenter says. “People have brought their kids and their kids have brought their kids.”

He says the band wanted to hit everywhere in the United States on their last tour.

“On this farewell tour, we’ve tried to go into every little section of the country and give people a chance to come and hear our music live,” Carpenter says.

The tour is the band’s goodbye to large-scale touring, but Carpenter says they will still be putting out songs.

Over the last six decades, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has seen their hits played on everything from pop radio to country stations, Carpenter says. Their hits include “Mr. Bojangles,” “Fishin’ in the Dark” and “Make a Little Magic.”

“We don’t try to pigeonhole ourselves,” Carpenter says. “We let other people decide what to call the music.”

Carpenter says that he has seen music evolve over the years and there’s no “getting around that.”

“Musicians today are putting out music that they’ve listened to for so many years, coming from other sources, and they digest it and reinvent it and record it and put it out there,” Carpenter says. “So it’s a natural process, and I think it keeps everything fresh.”

With music changing over the decades, Carpenter says he hopes that fans, no matter what they are doing, will remember when they first heard the band’s music.

“That’s really what this is all about. When people hear a song, they relate it to when they first heard it, or what they were doing at the time,” Carpenter says. “And I think that’s why people get nostalgic over music, because it isn’t just the song, it’s putting them back in the place that they were when they first heard it.”

Carpenter says audience members remember the band’s beginning all the way up to now.

“It’s great to stand up there and watch people with smiles on their faces,” Carpenter says. “(They) decided to take some time out of their life to come out and sort of leave their problems behind and just listen to our music.”