Today we look back to the February/March 2006 issue of Relix for this feature on Railroad Earth_

It’s well past two in the morning, and New York State Troopers are stepping over scores of black and yellow Railroad Earth stickers, which in the chilly night have become one with this icy black patch of Interstate 87. Shards of jewel cases, the crushed remains of dozens of copies of The Black Bear Sessions and Bird in a House, are trickling out of the band’s equipment trailer, inside of which a custom kick-drum and an upright bass have been reduced to firewood. Milling about are the six members of Railroad Earth, each having emerged unharmed but rattled from their totaled touring van, which is stuck in a nearby ditch on the side of the road.

Just a few moments ago, the band, spent from the night’s set at Higher Ground, was settling into the long drive from Vermont to their homes in and around Jersey when – crunch-boom! – their van was spinning off the freeway, leaving the band members to step out one by one, wondering what in the hell just happened. Towering above them on the edge of the highway is a seething beast of an 18-wheeler that miraculously failed to devour its prey – although still managing to completely sever trailer from van, hitch and all.

Two years later, multi-instrumentalist John Skehan is thinking back to that November night in 2003, recalling his surprise upon stepping out of the van: “I remember looking up and thinking, ‘ That’s what hit us? Are you kidding ?’ We already thought we should be dead, but then we saw an 18-wheeler and we were like, ‘Wait a minute!’”

From nearly the minute they formed, some two years earlier, the band had hit the road hard, and in recent months, the road, it seemed, was starting to hit back. Just a few months before the accident on I-87, the vintage tour bus the guys had slaved to buy caught on fire, before croaking to its death a week before the Higher Ground show. Unfazed, they revved up their old Ford van and pressed on with another gig relatively close to home. Because the bus breakdowns had temporarily hemorrhaged cash from band reserves, they were driving all night home to save 150 bucks in hotel rooms.

Standing in the ditch peering up at the jackknifed semi, it sure seemed like a message was being sent, says Skehan. “It really felt like somebody was saying, ‘Alright, you guys need to chill the hell out.’ It was like, ‘Okay, they’ve thrown everything at us that I think they can,’ from this to waking up to a bus on fire. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Well, I hope we’ve earned the necessary rock and roll merit badges.’”

In their first four years, the band has done that and more. Since casual jam sessions morphed into a full-time gig with boundless creative opportunities for its six members, Railroad Earth has become a band of virtual eagle scouts of the hippie highway, musical adventurers who criss-cross the country bending and blending folk and bluegrass with rock and pop, fanning the fire of Monroe-meets-Garcia folk-rock with building success. If they pushed themselves a wee far in their infant years, well, it wasn’t without reason – they were onto something.

Today, some two years removed from the black-ice incident in upstate New York, the band’s laughing – well, half-laughing – about its fate that night. Assembled around a massive stone fireplace – the whip-crack of sparking logs soundtracking their memories – Skehan and company are gathered at the cozy but quaint 18th century home of frontman Todd Sheaffer, unfurling the Railroad Earth story, and chatting about their new double live disc, Elko.

This stretch of the Stillwater, New Jersey, countryside plays a lead role in that story. It was here that Sheaffer, Skehan and fellow multi-instrumentalists Tim Carbone and Andy Goessling’s back-porch pickin’ sessions gave rise to Railroad Earth. And it was a friend’s barn around the corner that the band cut its most recent studio disc, The Good Life.

Perched on a small hilltop at the end of the rock-riddled, half-mile path leading from the paved road to his front door, Sheaffer’s colonial home is unimpressive upon first glace. Inside, its exposed-beam ceilings, the 11-by-6-foot fireplace, and a grand piano introduce a scene ripped from the pages of Country Living. Bought from a friend not long before his previous band, From Good Homes, split, the house’s deed measures the property in links and chains, making note of a big cherry tree.

If you trust state wildlife officials, it’s an area overrun by the black bear – so much so that annual hunts are scheduled during which the mighty mammals are killed by sportsmen under the guise of increased safety. Sheaffer and longtime girlfriend Erin Mills see black bears often; they regularly wake to the sight of deer chomping on fallen apples, and witness flocks of wild turkeys and the occasional fox whisking by. Here, some 60 miles from Manhattan, the nighttime sky glows with starlight. When it snows, the U-shaped driveway becomes an impassable icy slope.

In his seven years here, this wooded patch of central Jersey has proven a songwriter’s paradise for Sheaffer. He wrote “Storms,” the leadoff track on The Good Life, after watching shower after shower pummel the countryside outside his windows. “Mourning Flies” remembers an ill possum that inched out of the woods one day, and was later pecked apart by circling birds who hawkeyed its slow expiration. One day, a black bear literally ambled by as he and Skehan were – no lie – right in the middle of the future Railroad Earth song “Black Bear.”

Back in the summer of 1999, after a decade together, the childhood friends comprising the band From Good Homes decided to move on. Part of the early ‘90s New York/Jersey scene that birthed breakthroughs for Blues Traveler and Joan Osborne – one-time openers for the band – FGH had booked a farewell show in Jersey for September, after three albums for RCA and countless headlining and supporting tours with everyone from Dave Matthews to RatDog, for whom they opened on the night Garcia died.

At the time, Sheaffer interest in bluegrass was growing. He bumped into Skehan at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, and together they caught Tim O’Brien’s set. He was so impressed with O’Brien’s “Sing for Me” that he brought the song to FGH and the band closed out its career with it, encoring with the track at its farewell concert. In retrospective, it’s proven a wild hint at what was to come.

Over the next few years, as he penned his first solo record, Sheaffer began jamming at pickin’ sessions hosted by Skehan’s then-band, The Lost Ramblers, and later at Sunday afternoon song swaps at Goessling’s house. With Carbone, a sometime FGH collaborator and band mate of Goessling’s in the Blue Sparks From Hell, they started almost unintentionally at first working up the band’s earliest material. Eventually, it came time to find a drummer, and Carbone knew just the guy – a sympathetic player from Brooklyn named Carey Harmon, who, busy with other, local jobs, was merely up for an occasional gig or session. “I remember telling Tim, ‘Is this a band? This better not be a band, because I’m really happy with my life right now. I’ll do the recording, but this better not be a band.’”

“The French used to go to Ireland and conscript the young Irish in the bar – whack them over the head, and the next thing they know they’re on the battlefield,” chuckles Carbone. “That’s kind of what we did to Cary. The next thing you know we’re halfway across Kansas, and he’s like, ‘Where the hell am I?’”

Yet, with three-fifths of the group in their 40s, the older half of Railroad Earth has been playing long enough to know that great jam sessions, and even great recording sessions, don’t necessarily translate to a bona fide band. So it was with skepticism that they pressed forward: “Nobody thought when it was going to turn into a full-fledged, full-blown, buy-lots-of-equipment-and-leave-for-years-on-end band,” says Goessling. “It really just seemed like, ‘This will be cool for a while, maybe we’ll get some cool gigs, and fit our other stuff in, and write some songs.’”

If the group wasn’t exactly a band then, it was quickly becoming one, especially after the inclusion of bassist Dave Von Dollen. And if Harmon was feeling hijacked then, the entire group would relate a few months later, as things began snowballing. In May 2001, some 200 people turned out for Railroad Earth’s first official (kind of) gig at the Fountain House in nearby Newton, a few tapers among them.

From the start, the sound of Sheaffer’s sometimes introspective, sometimes whimsical stories strewn across a bedrock of Appalachia and American Beauty clicked. “For me,” says Skehan, “between the acoustic instruments, and the people playing them, it sounded like what I wanted to listen to if I went home and pushed play on the stereo.”

Based on universally positive reaction to a few demos and word of mouth, the group made its first official tour stop at the crucial Telluride Bluegrass Festival, gigging in front of some 3,000 people, and triggering a cavalcade of interest. ‘Grass freaks and Deadheads raved on the Web, thus hyping the band’s ensuing dates. “We got a standing ovation in Telluride, and then we jump in a club, and there were already 200 people there,” says Goessling. “In the old days, that would have taken years.”

By hitting the road at a breakneck pace, the six players turned into a band, says Skehan. “By just getting out there and playing, playing and playing, it became that.” Save breaks here and there, the group has averaged more than 120 shows per year since, blanketing the states and the bluegrass festival circuit. “For a while there, I felt like we were the local band in every town in America,” laughs Sheaffer.

“I know every single square foot of Interstate 80, and I missed the first two years,” cracks bassist Johnny Grubb, who was washing dishes and rolling burritos before he replaced Von Dollen in 2003, who left to finish a music degree. “I’ve been to California and back at least ten or 12 times.”

It was the band’s many trips out of California that inspired the road tale from which Elko takes its name. One of the group’s preferred stops on its way home from High Sierra – Elko, California – is a funky little slice of Americana, a Nevada-California bordertown that’s home to the annual cowboy poetry convention and a vaquero-themed casino where a weary Railroad Earth can score hotel rooms for 25 bucks and drink and gamble all night. “Poor boys and gamblers/Road dogs and ramblers/Shutting it down for the night,” Sheaffer sings on his tribute to the town.

It’s an appropriately cinematic title for the road-tested band’s fourth release, a rousing, warm collection of songs recorded in California, Jersey and Albuquerque and shot through with dramatic, electric jams and smart, smile-spreading pickin’.

“It’s a document of where the band is,” says Sheaffer, noting that fans have been requesting a proper live album for some time. “We’ve developed a body of material that warrants being documented, and we’ve developed into a live act that goes well beyond what we’ve done on our studio releases. A lot of these songs have changed arrangements, and we’ve sort of gotten comfortable taking them into new directions.”

For the band, and especially Carbone and Skehan, the freedom to embark on such explorations has been the never-ending reward of logging all these miles, playing all these sets. “If I was an artist,” Carbone says, “I would say I have a full case of oil paints here, and that I’m not missing any colors. And that’s what I find attractive about the band.”

Without question, it’s also what attracted the likes of bluegrass great Vassar Clements, String Cheese and Phil Lesh to the group: All the above have welcomed Railroad Earth onstage in recent years (see sidebar), while the band itself has brought out pickin’ pillars Sam Bush and Peter Rowan themselves.

When you consider that Sheaffer, Carbone and Goessling are all in their 40s, the triumphant Elko, in its dramatic climaxes and smooth, seamless transitions, sounds a lot like a second chance at something a bit bigger. Indeed, from a player’s perspective, the proverbial good life Sheaffer sings of each night seems to be in hand, attained both on the road and in the Jersey woods. Nevertheless, the road continues…

“Every night is an opportunity to try something new,” says Skehan. “It’s always an exploration, every night. Regardless of what’s happening, it’s a chance for us to say, ‘Hey, let’s try and find a different side of something.’”