“We didn’t know you didn’t have to play three or four hours,” Robert Randolph says, both proud and amused that he and his Family Band were so naïve when entering the secular music world more than a decade ago. “We were just like, ‘Whatever, man. People are here, so we’re gonna play.’ It was only later that people were like, ‘You really don’t have to play three or four hours.’”

Over brunch in Montclair, N.J., not far from where he grew up, the pedal steel virtuoso is in a somewhat nostalgic mood, remembering how he and the band began taking the music that they played in their local church to boozy audiences on the other side of the Hudson River at such now-defunct Downtown New York clubs as the Lakeside Lounge and Wetlands Preserve.

“What’s funny is that now you have all these fans out there that go, ‘Screw you man, I remember when you used to play three-and-a-half hours. What happened? Where’s the second set and the third set?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not playing three-and-a-half hours any more. Dude, go to the Phish show for that – or at least let me make some more records so I can make sure we got enough tunes.’”

Randolph’s now-finished, three-album tenure on the Warner Bros. label has left him pining for those halcyon days. Having felt creatively stifled while a Warner artist, Randolph is trying to regain the magic that he and The Family Band had in the early days when fiery, sweaty gigs got the ball rolling for the uncommon guitar hero – when it was “just us, and fans were gravitating to what we were doing.”

Randolph says his experiences on Warner led him to a spiritual crossroads. In recent years, he’s found himself over-touring and under-recording, forcing him to ultimately question what the hell he was doing with his life. His career was spiraling out of his control. Instead of making the music he wanted to make when he wanted to make it and with whom he wanted to make it – thus, he says, being able to move forward as a recording artist, and not just establishing himself as a road warrior – he found himself creatively standing still, or, worse, going backward.

“Warner Bros. was a good label,” he says, in between bites of a salmon omelet, "but it wasn’t the right record label because I found myself arguing with people over music: ‘What’s this? Why you wanna go record with Carlos Santana? Why would you want to go record with Soulive? Why do you want to record with Trey Anastasio? He seems like a hippie guy.’ It’s like, ‘Shut up!’
“I found myself being busy and not producing any results, running over here to play over here, and then going over there to play over there, just playing shows and not creating anything new. And the whole thing about music is the beauty of being in the studio creating, collaborating with other artists. It brings a whole new energy, a whole new excitement. It helps you learn and focus. That’s why I wanted to hit the reboot button with everything because between labels and wrong people around you – the wrong management team – you could be doing a whole lot of nothing.”

Part of that “rebooting” process was to sign a new deal, which he has done with Blue Note Records. It’s a label headed by musician/producer Don Was, someone who Randolph’s proud to point out is a “music person” and someone who “gets it.”

Now at brunch talking about his debut for the label, Lickety Split, Randolph finally feels as though he’s regained free rein and is able to just be himself again. Famed Jimi Hendrix/Led Zeppelin engineer Eddie Kramer, who worked on the album, likened Randolph in the studio post-Warner Bros. to Hendrix recording Electric Ladyland after producer Chas Chandler quit the album. In both situations, he says, creativity flowed like water from a faucet.

“Every time I started to get him set up in the studio,” Kramer says, “he would take off at a gallop and I would have to make sure I had tape or Pro Tools running so I could capture what he was throwing down because it was amazing.” Offering proof of Randolph’s love of the studio, and the difference that the right collaborator makes, Kramer laughs that when the two of them first started working closely together, with the pedal steel set up in the actual control room, the latter’s enthusiasm was immediate. “When I first started dialing in the sounds, his face lit up as soon as he heard what I was getting for him, and he just started rippin’, and the hair stood up on the back of my head. At which point, I said, ‘OK, this is special,’” he says.

Sitting across the table in a sand-colored blazer – tricked-out with rock and roll touches on the sleeves – and knocking back a handful of vitamins, Randolph bears little resemblance to the flashy performer we’re used to seeing shredding the pedal steel from under a doo-rag, his foot stomping, head bobbing, eyes and smile wide. At 32, he’s been married now for four years and has a four-year-old daughter, Rhia.

Despite running on just a couple hours of sleep, having arrived home this morning from a gig in North Carolina, he’s talking and thinking as fast as he plays. His iPhone next to his plate, he’s waiting for a call from the mayor of East Orange, N.J., regarding the other big undertaking in his life: opening a school.

What began more modestly as simply a music and arts program has mushroomed into a state-funded charter school that will be open to children living in Irvington, Newark and East Orange. The plan is to give those children, many of whom he considers to be at-risk, a safe place to learn about the arts. And it will be something of a refuge, too, eventually being open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“See, a lot of people don’t understand that, in these neighborhoods, you have a lot of single parents raising two or three kids,” he says. “And a lot of these kids have no hope whatsoever. All they know is the gangs. Ya know, ‘I’m gonna go out there and try to make five dollars on the corner selling drugs,’ or ‘Imma kill you over 20 bucks.’ You can’t talk to these kids about going to college. They’d be like, ‘Go to college? For what? My grandmother grew up in the hood, my mom grew up in the hood, I grew up in the hood.’ They don’t see anything else; there’s no other interaction with any other group.”

After attending numerous school board meetings, exchanging countless emails and (finally) successfully navigating the state approval process, Randolph is frustrated by the bureaucracy that he’s encountering. He needs the school board in Irvington to approve the sale and transfer of ownership of a former school house to the group he’s formed to spearhead the project. If this happens soon, then he’s hoping to open in time for this coming school year.

“What happens is when you mention to the local board of education that you’re coming to open a charter school – and this doesn’t happen in every town, but in some towns – they think, ‘We don’t want no charter school,’ because it takes away from their budget,” he says.

He feels that the Irvington school board has been “jerking him around” for nine months while kids continue to fail in school and, far worse, kill each other. In mid-May, Randolph met again with the board, prevailing upon them to sell him the building so the project can move forward. “‘The bottom line is you sell me the school, and my school will be open next year and it will impact at least 1,000 kids, immediately,’” he told them in no uncertain terms. In the meantime, he’s met with kids, parents and gang members to drum up support for the school. And, according to him, they’re all extremely excited for it.

“Music and arts help you focus because you’re giving these kids something exciting,” he says. “It’s not just gonna be bands and guitars. It’s gonna be chorus and video arts. I’m taking the curriculum from a school in Nashville. Eddie Kramer is helping with that. It’s the kind of thing where you get kids excited about music and arts and then you can have a conversation with them, and explain to them, ‘Hey, if you want to do this, the way this all works is you gotta get your grades up.’”

Randolph is hoping his many famous friends will help perform at one or two fundraisers, possibly one concert at the Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, and another in Manhattan. Both would fund a foundation set up for the school that would enable him to do things like pay expenses for artists to come to the school to talk to students.

“From this area right here, I can name you ten big stars who came from here: Lauryn Hill, Wyclef, Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah, athletes. You have all these people that come here and nobody’s done a damn thing. Here I am, the smallest guy on the totem pole, spending all this time trying to make this happen.”

Randolph and The Family Band performing at the first-ever NYC Freaks Ball, 1/20/01- photo by Dino Perrucci

If Randolph gets a bit passionate about the school, then it’s for good reason. As he sees it, he easily could have been one of these kids if not for the fact that he had the church and music. As a kid, Randolph attended church three times a week, and it was there, in his local House of God Church, where he learned the pedal steel, a popular instrument since the 1930s in Pentecostal churches, where it’s called “sacred steel.”

With a grin, Randolph points out that he was never a tame church boy, and doesn’t hold back on tour when it comes to having a good time, dancing on tables and getting loose.

“That’s what we do!” he says. “Growing up in church is where I got all my teachings really about love and how to accept people. Ya know, things like, ‘What’s the overall contributing factor of why you’re having a bad day? Why you having a shitty year?’ All these kinds of things because you gotta realize you treat somebody badly, you’re gonna reap what you sow. A lot of people I meet today, they’re just out here, and you see this guy and he’s addicted to heroin. That’ll never happen to me,” he says, rapping his knuckles on the wood tabletop.

His first big break came when he was included on a 1999 compilation called Sacred Steel – Live!, alongside his mentors Ted Beard and Calvin Cooke, performing “Without God.” The album, and Randolph’s track in particular, caught the ears of John Medeski and the North Mississippi Allstars, who were inspired to try and record something together they simply referred to as a “gospel record.”

As luck would have it, Randolph came knocking on the studio door of a mutual friend of Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson in the summer of 2000 looking to cut some demos – Eric “Roscoe” Ambel. Blown away by the then 20-year-old musician, Ambel dubbed copies of the sessions to pass around when he left to tour a few weeks later as Steve Earle’s guitar player. Dickinson got a copy as did the New Yorkbased promoter Bowery Presents, who decided to book Randolph and his band as the opener for the Allstars at the Bowery Ballroom that September.

That night catalyzed Medeski and the Allstars’ long-discussed record although now it came to include Randolph. Cut in Medeski Martin & Wood’s Brooklyn studio, The Word’s self-titled album was released in July 2001 and saw a few incendiary live shows in support of it.

Meanwhile, the four-piece Family Band – with his cousins Danyel Morgan on bass/vocals and Marcus Randolph on drums, as well as keyboardist John Ginty – had been honing their own chops to develop a much-talked about live set thanks to appearances at SXSW that year and a tour-opening gig for DJ Logic. Shortly before the closing of Wetlands in 2001, The Family Band recorded a live show there which became their debut CD the following year and an introduction to a bigger world.

Randolph and The Word – photo by Dino Perrucci

“Just by [The Family Band] playing music, it started to transcend onto all these other genres,” he says. “Look, I’m an urban, city guy that grew up in church, but it just worked. Rock and roll people loved it; jamband people loved it; blues people loved it. I won gospel awards. Eric Clapton tracked me down, and said, ‘I want to meet this guy.’”

Members of the old guard, like Clapton – with whom Randolph has since recorded and toured – were immediately impressed. Kramer remembers being introduced to Randolph via an early TV appearance: "I said, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ I couldn’t believe he rocked so hard and that he played the pedal steel like I’ve never heard it done before. In essence, he has taken over that role of the Jimi Hendrix of the pedal steel in no uncertain manner. His talent is unique; his take on the instrument is totally unique.

“He approaches it not as a pedal steel, but as a guitar,” Kramer elaborates. “He can do the pedal steel tones when he plays quietly, but for the most part, it’s fairly distorted. His approach, his attack, his sustain, his use of the wah pedal and distortion, just puts what he does outside of the box. He can get so many wacky sounds, and such cool sounds. And the fact that it comes from the heart is absolutely amazing.”

Randolph and The Family Band recorded three records for Warner Bros. – 2003’s Unclassified, 2006’s Colorblind and 2010’s We Walk This Road – and by the turn of the decade, the time in between sessions was starting to eat away at him. All the while, people were questioning him in interviews about when he was going to record the next album and he had to make up stories because he didn’t want to explain that he was fighting with the label. Beyond journalists, friends and even his own musical heroes were starting to wonder what was going on.

He elaborates: “I remember this one guy who runs a label came up to me at JazzFest and said, ‘Man, I remember going to [New York’s] Roseland Ballroom two nights in a row in 2004. The first night was The White Stripes and the place wasn’t even filled. Jack [White] put on an OK show, but the next night you guys played, the place was sold out and you kicked major fucking ass. You guys were on the path to playing arenas. What happened?’ And he knew what happened: We were on the wrong label.”

Carlos Santana, coincidentally, gave both Randolph and Derek Trucks a lecture around the same time. “He said, ‘I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told Derek a couple weeks ago – What are you guys doing? You guys are supposed to be the next us. You gotta get it together – we’re gonna be dead soon. Who’s gonna be here in the next 20 to 30 years doing this?’”

It all has him more focused then ever before on creating a true body of work. And not all of it has to be with The Family Band. “I want to take the Eric Clapton approach,” he says.

“I want to look back after 30 or 40 years and be able to have recorded 15 or 20 albums. I want to have my Cream period, and my Derek and The Dominos period, and be able to pull songs from each of those eras every night on tour.”

Already, Randolph has been talking about his next release with Don Was. If he has his way, then fans will see a new album from him every 13 months or so. He has more than 40 ideas in the can. “I got six with me and Dave Matthews, 10 with Santana. And most of them are fully recorded songs – there’s maybe a few lines missing here and there,” he says. He also did a session with Buddy Guy in Chicago.

Santana and Trombone Shorty both appear on Lickety Split. In fact, the song “Blacky Joe” was born out of a jam between Randolph and Santana. Elsewhere, he and the current Family Band – Morgan, Marcus, vocalist Lenesha Randolph and guitarist Brett Haas – pay tribute to the great musical heritage of New Orleans, and they even offer a cover of the Ohio Players’ “Love
Rollercoaster” “just to see if we could beat the Chili Peppers’ version,” Randolph says with a smile.

Curiously, the second song on the record, which he wrote about a friend finding love post-divorce, could just as easily have been the title track. Titled “Born Again,” it seems to sum up just how Randolph is feeling, musically, creatively and spiritually at the moment.

“This album,” he says, “is really just about re-attaching ourselves to the roots of where we came from, being able to recreate our own music, collaborating with guys like Carlos Santana and Trombone Shorty. It’s a whole new breath of fresh air. It’s kind of like, ‘Forget the past six years and let’s just start from here and move on.’”