Reconstituting East Shore Trail

After the most incredible Christmas ever experienced, I was floundering around the iTunes site searching for things that would call me back to some of my days gone by, and I came across Railroad Earth. For anyone who is not familiar with the band, they are an eclectic mix of musicians, rooted firmly in the bluegrass tradition. Aside from my father forcing me to endure the annual Waterloo Village Bluegrass Festival when I was a child, I have no affinity for bluegrass. There is one element about this band that lured me in, however; the lead singer is a man named Todd Schaeffer. While I was growing up in northwestern New Jersey, Schaeffer became a local legend as the frontman for a band known as From Good Homes. Several of the musicians were based in and around a town called Sparta, New Jersey.

As it was, I happened to work at a bar in the town of Sparta called Krogh's. Before I worked there, the place had been one of the original starting points for the band as their began their rise from local act with potential to what would become a story I would boastfully tell to my friends in college. The band worked as most bands with talent do, pushing the club and bar scene on college campuses from Augusta, Maine to San Diego State. When their break arrived in the form of a deal with RCA, it happened to coincide with another group of diligent, talent-laden musicians from Charlottesville, Virginia who called themselves the Dave Matthews Band. As the story goes, or more aptly, the one I told and continue to tell (accuracy be damned), there was some trepidation among the execs at RCA as to who to promote on their label as the up and coming mainstream band in the mid 1990's. As the grunge scene was dying and the nation began to turn its attention to more traditional and marketable pop-music, RCA chose to endorse and promote DMB, while leaving FGH to fend for themselves. And, mightily, they did. For a few years, the band endured and pushed forward albums of considerable merit: critical darlings, but popular failures. Eventually the band went their separate ways, thus beginning the creation of my FGH eulogies to various college friends.

In recent years, not only Schaeffer, but other band members have continued to produce and flourish in New Jersey and nationally. However, it is Schaeffer that has transcended the death of FGH and become someone of nationwide merit. Finding Railroad Earth's first album, The Black Bear Sessions on iTunes this evening, I was brought back to evenings behind the bar at Krogh's with the resident bartendresses, as patrons discussed the national whereabouts of the boys who called themselves From Good Homes. Until that point, I had never lived vicariously through a musical group, but after feeling the pride that the patrons felt in being the origin, or at least the hometown of some of the band members, I got caught up in much the same emotion. I wanted them to break through, and was silently heartbroken when they didn't.