On a breezy, anything-can-happen Tuesday night in Hollywood, the members of LA’s rootsiest band, Dawes, is taking full advantage of the swank backstage at Jimmy Kimmel Live, where they’ll play a song on-air in just about an hour. The band’s bassist, Wylie Gelber, is engrossed in a riotous game of NFL Blitz against his buddy Jonathan Chu of the also-rising band The Morning Benders, with whom he’s had a faux-football rivalry since high school. Ultra-young, Sideshow Bob-haired drummer Griffin Goldsmith and his frontman brother Taylor are grubbing with their manager, who’s obsessed with the cream cheese-stuffed churros. “I must have eaten five of these,” he says to Taylor. “You gotta try one.”

It’s ironic, because health food-obsessed chef Jamie Oliver is babbling on the preview screens about getting kids to eat vegetables. “He’s been following us around,” Taylor says, explaining that Oliver was also a guest with them a couple weeks ago on the Late Show with David Letterman. Then, he wanders over to one of the band’s newest – and most vocal – fans, who’s having a chat with Taylor’s dad, Lenny, an animated, stout man who looks like Anthony Hopkins.

This fan is not some young kid who’s just discovered the band – though there have been plenty of those in the last few years, thanks to audience-building appearances at festivals like Outside Lands and tours with artists like Band of Horses. Like many of Dawes’ other champions, this supporter is old enough to be one of the members’ fathers himself. Where the kids love Dawes’ easygoing onstage aesthetic, the 50-and-ups seem to be drawn into the classic, four part harmonies of songs like “When My Time Comes,” the breakthrough track from its debut North Hills, which – like many of its best songs – is both classically structured and alarmingly beautiful.

That wistfulness – plus a lovely sense of guitar histrionics – is also alive and well on its just-released follow up, Nothing Is Wrong. Like its debut, it was recorded on an analog machine, imbuing with a sense of vitality and vintageness as the Goldsmiths willow away about a certain type of girl on “Time Spent in Los Angeles,” a classic band-on-the-run song; and a totally other certain type of girl (that’d be the one who got away), on the lovelorn, smartly-cynical “Million Dollar Bill” .

The elder fan is none other than former Band leader Robbie Robertson who Dawes is backing tonight as part of a short promotional tour for Robertson’s new record. “He knows what it’s like to play with a band and he wanted that,” says Taylor, who sang backup vocals on the record after Robertson heard Dawes via his producer. Taylor was adeptly starstruck when he got the gig. Despite his age – he’s just 25 – he’s a veritable encyclopedia of music knowledge, and in a few hours, he winds his way in conversation between the Grateful Dead, Weezer, Tom Petty and The Foo Fighters.

Taylor may have once been starstruck by him, but now Robertson seems equally impressed with his young charges. “I appreciate a young band with a broad horizon,” he says. “Dawes is that in spades.” During its Kimmel performance, he gives the members room to breathe, with 20-year-old Griffin contorting his face as he gently smashes a cymbal, Gelber’s vintage bass bouncing through stridefully, keys player Tay Strathairn hammering away – and Taylor, looking supremely confident as he croons above some riffs with the elder statesman.

After the show, the members of Dawes forgo any sort of afterparty routine and, instead, happily head to a Hollywood gastropub – humorously enough, this is the same spot where Taylor and his father had lunch earlier in the day. The frontman recommends a gourmet burger topped with gruyere and rosemary bacon. Everyone has a round of microbrews and talks about their love for Wilco, which becomes a conversation about maintaining a career rather than having a single hit song, which segues into whether it’s actually pop star Ke$ha in an X-rated photo shared via iPhone at the table.

In other words, it’s a conversation as breezily engaging as the night itself – and also a fitting description for the band that disappears, knowingly, into it.