Splendor in the Bluegrass

Byline: Paul Cullum

I discovered old bluegrass stuff and fell in love with it,” says character actor and accomplished roots-rock guitarist Steve Zahn while wandering around Big Ed’S record store in Long Beach. “And then when I learned to play guitar, that and country-folk is the stuff I learned to play–The Stanley Brothers, the Clinch Mountain Boys, Doc and Merle Watson, even down to Smithsonian field recordings–Roscoe Holcomb, guys like that.”

That discovery came shortly after the Minnesota-born Zahn bought a farm in western New Jersey and subsequently moved to the bluegrass region of Kentucky. “I now live on a small horse farm east of Lexington,” says Zahn, unwinding as much as a borrowed burgundy Western shirt with white embroidery will allow him. “And there’s just something about that area that this music comes up out of.”

His first guitar came from Ben Stiller on the set of Universal’s “Reality Bites,” his first major film. He later picked up a banjo from Neil Diamond on Columbia’s “Saving Silverman,” where he played Wayne Lefessier, the leader of a Neil Diamond cover band. And it’s been largely on the sets of some 30 films to date that he has learned to play–from the three-month band camp that was “That Thing You Do” to Par’s “Sahara,” his big-budget buddy film with Matthew McConaughey, which was shot largely in Morocco.

“I spent so much time on those early movies, my trailer time, just strumming a guitar,” says Zahn, who’s equally conversant in newer acts like Bright Eyes and Iron and Wine. “On set, I was always too nervous–I had to do something, and I couldn’t just read. Thank God I only realized how great PlayStation is at the age of 37.”

Yet for all his modesty, Zahn does more-than-passable renditions of Steve Earle’s “Ben McCulloch” and John Prine’s “Paradise” in a high, lonesome tenor. The day before visiting Big Ed’s, he did a voiceover for Disney’s animated “Chicken Little,” where he sang a karaoke version of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” as a 400-pound pig.

“You know, it’s weird,” says Zahn, suddenly taking stock of his surroundings. “I was here (in Long Beach) 16 years ago when I was doing “Bye Bye Birdie,’ the national tour with Tommy Tune. And I was just this poor dude living in Hoboken and working at Maxwell’s. But we previewed here in Long Beach, so we were here for, like, five weeks. I stayed at the Howard Johnson’s right down the street from here. And that’s where I met my wife. She was a dancer on the show. We became an item at the Howard Johnson’s.”

Suddenly his eyes light up.

“And you know what first attracted me to her?” the inveterate goofball asks with a nod to the jump-blues masters lining the walls. “It was the little rockabilly hoop skirts.”

PLAYBOY “I spent so much time on those early movies, my trailer time, just strumming a guitar…. Thank God I only realized how great PlayStation was at the age of 37.”