Interview: John Skehan of Railroad Earth

John:  Warm weather, for one thing.  We’ve kind of been on the ongoing Jack London tour, man.  Every place we’ve been, until we got out to the West Coast and now down to the Southeast.  We’ve been up to our arses in snow and ice, but that’s just part of touring in the Winter.  It’s nice to kind of have an early Spring, and hopefully things will be turned around a bit when we get back home.  Weather and all of that aside, it’s just a great vibe down here, from New Orleans on and now Birmingham.  It’s just great to be back with old friends and a bunch of folks that we know.  

John:  Absolutely, absolutely.  Yeah, it’s funny.  The climate change, although we’ve been in warm weather from California on to Phoenix, and now we’re back in warm and humid weather, and everything’s just a little more laid back and chill.  It’s great.

John:  Oh, it’s beautiful.  It’s really well done.  Everybody’s been totally friendly, including the whole crew of loaders as soon as we walked in were all saying “Hi! Welcome!”  The food has been just great, and everyone has just been extremely accommodating.  It looks like a beautiful room.  Great stage and sound system.  We’ve always had a great time at Workplay as well.  There’s just kind of a crazy energy in there.  It’s a tight little room.  But yeah, this is an interesting change here.  

John:  Well, I’d say that Last of the Outlaws was kind of diametrically opposed to the approach on the previous record, which was much more of a studio production.  The songs were selected and kind of built from the ground up: bass, drums, and onward.  We worked with a producer on that for the first time since the record before that.  So we’ve almost gone in a bit of a pattern in terms of The Good Life was the first time we worked with a producer, and the record after that, Amen Corner, was when we holed up in Todd’s (Sheaffer) old farm house that he used to rent up in Stillwater and just did everything ourselves.  Then the self-titled album, Railroad Earth, we went into Brooklyn with a producer and kind of had someone calling all of the shots, and next with Last of the Outlaws, we just found a great little studio.  Well, I shouldn’t say little, actually a very, very large studio, in a house, out in Knowlton, New Jersey, not too far from all of us, where we pretty much at first treated it like taped rehearsals.  We were able to all play at the same time, record everything as we went, and just try out all kinds of different ideas.  And Todd has a really beautiful batch of songs that were really well tied together with things that were going on in the life of the band at that time.  We had a couple more experimental things, like the long piece that includes “Face With a Hole,” that we were just working on during sound check in there and changing up yet again.  We were really able to do whatever we wanted and be our own producer.  So there has been an opposite pattern over four records, I guess.  One produced, one that’s more, “The hell with it. Let’s do it ourselves and see what we get.”  Back to the producer.  Back to free wheeling.

John:  Yeah, yeah that was the great part about it.  With Last of the Outlaws, we were able to capture a lot of performances in the moment, things that we didn’t know we were gonna go for right then, like “Grandfather Mountain.”  We just decided, “Let’s open this up, and let’s play it and see where it goes.”  After a handful of takes, we would just decide which we liked best, and whether we felt we could beat it with another take.  We tried to beat it and said, “No, that’s the one.”  That third or fourth take, when we were just kind of trying it out, before we got to thinking about it too much.  And that’s the way I really enjoy recording, and it’s truer to what we do live.

John:  Exactly.  The trick is finding the studio where you can all be set up, but have isolation, and be able to get studio quality sounds, while all playing at the same time.  It just wouldn’t happen if we were all in the same room, you know?

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John:  Oh it’s great to be included, especially because we have had a great history with some of the surviving members of The Grateful Dead, and some of the side members like Bruce Hornsby.  And a lot of that, I don’t know how it happened, other than I think back in 2004, we were playing at The Independent in San Francisco, and one of the house people came back and said, “Can you guys move your truck?  Phil (Lesh) is coming down tonight.  We want to leave a parking space for him.”  And we all kind of paused for a moment and said, “What? Huh?”  Haha, you know I guess that started a relationship there, where we did some shows with him, playing Grateful Dead music and Railroad Earth music, with his band.  He learned some of the songs.  A couple of different collaborations here and there overtime with him coming out and sitting in with us in San Francisco, so that’s been really, really gratifying.  

As far as the influence of the music, for me, as for an awful lot of people, I think, hearing The Grateful Dead for the first time was an eye opener.  Seeing The Grateful Dead for the first time was an eye, ear, and mind opener, all around.  One of the things that drew me to it was there was a time where I just wasn’t listening to anything rock oriented.  I was interested in jazz and beginning to study it.  Just interested in improvisational music.  When I started to listening to The Grateful Dead, I realized that was the essence of what they were doing.  The feeling of jazz, of just free wheeling improvisation, and just taking something and going for it, but in a rock context.  And then I began to hear all of these other sounds in there that I couldn’t put my finger on.  They weren’t quite country, but uniquely and beautifully American.  As I later in life, many years later, started to explore bluegrass, I kind of had the aha moment of, “Ok this is where they were coming from.”   Bluegrass is so much of the great example of the true American musical melting pot of elements of blues, gospel, and country mixed in with the Celtic and ancient tones.  The Celtic fiddle tunes and all of that.  You can hear that so clearly in Jerry’s writing and his approach to playing the guitar, because he was running around studying the banjo years before The Grateful Dead, going to bluegrass festivals and taping music, you know?  With a little hand held tape recorder and then going home and learning it on banjo.  

So, getting to kind of go through that old journey and make that connection, eventually getting into more traditional bluegrass, as I was running around festivals and certainly very much thinking, “Oh thanks, Jerry, and thank you guys.  Y’all helped me find this music.”  I finally realized what it was that I could never put my finger on in The Grateful Dead’s music, aside from the truly tremendously experimental approaches to things.  The jazz concepts, all that.  Just this uniquely American thing, that’s like i said, ain’t country…you know, as we know commercial country, but it’s something deeper.  Something that spans more.  But, again, it’s so uniquely American.

John:  Yeah it is, because sometimes we end up playing for two hours at a festival.  Sometimes it’s 90 minutes, or as little as 75 or even 60 minutes, which is short for us, you know?  We usually end up playing for three hours a night, with a little break in the middle, at a club show.  And at a festival, depending on how many times you’ve been there and where it is, you’re hoping to really reach a wide range of people.  There might be people who are hearing you for the first time that aren’t really going to care if you are pulling out a song that you haven’t played in six months.  Whereas fans going to a club show might be a little tuned into that.  And with festivals, you’re back and forth across the country, in all different places, you kind of try to load the show a little bit more, you know, to try to reach everybody and to try to make moment.  

Honestly, it depends on what the vibe of the setting is. You know…are you playing at outdoors, at night, or if you're playing on a beautiful, sunny afternoon.  What do you want to do that fits the environment?  If you’re in a plain field, or if you’re at, let’s say Telluride, where there are beautiful mountains. What can you do that’s going to bounce off of that environment the best?  Whereas, in theatre shows or club shows, especially if you’re going kind of night after night in one region, we just keep trying to change it up and change it up for ourselves every single night, so you get much more of a mix.  And you can take some more chances sometimes, than you might if you only have 60 minutes to try and grab 5000 peoples’ attentions.