Gothic Theatre

Railroad Earth chugging into Englewood

By Robyn Lydick

Staff Writer

Colorado Community Newspapers

John Skehan wants to break the snow curse when his band, Railroad Earth, comes to the Gothic Theatre Saturday.

It snows almost every time Railroad Earth comes to Colorado.

Last year, they opened for Honkytonk Homeslice on a “snow filled adventure” of a tour, Skehan said.

Tours are challenges for anyone. Air Supply arrived in Littleton 15 hours after a bus fire last August. Steve Vai lost his entire tour wardrobe when his bus caught fire between Tulsa and Oklahoma City in the late 90s.

Railroad Earth has also been on that road.
“We were opening for Sam Bush on a really long tour and we had a 1974 GMC bus, an old Greyhound style bus, that broke down in southwest Oregon. We missed the gig and sort of took over the town,” Skehan said. “We get the bus from a mechanic and take off. Everyone is sleeping and suddenly we feel the bus pull to the side of the road. You know, that usually means it’s time to eat or play. But we hear this calm but insistent voice: ‘everyone off, everyone off.’ The rear axle was on fire. We rented a U-Haul box truck and four of us rode in the back with the gear. It’s really dark in those trucks.”

Skehan is used to performing under adverse circumstances. He busked around Europe at 21, playing guitar, but that trip would introduce him to the mandolin.

“The French wouldn’t give us a dime,” he said. “Then this gruff English character explained that the Gypsies stake out territory and if they catch you, they’ll kill you.”

Still, in 15 minutes Skehan and his traveling companion could get $30 in the hat and spend the evening in bars or traveling from island to island in Greece, busking for the port tax and a bottle of wine.

Somewhere along the road, Skehan’s companion bought a mandolin.

“It was tuned all wrong,” Skehan remembers. “He left it in my hands.”

Skehan picked up a book a fiddle tunes. A mandolin and a violin are tuned identically but a mandolin has two strings for each note, like a 12-string guitar. He gave back the Hungarian cheapie, but upon returning to New Jersey trekked to Mandolin Brothers on Staten Island and bought a 1917 Gibson A.

“I tortured my girlfriend of the time,” Skehan said. “I spent five hours in there, playing everything they had.”

The A style mandolin has a breathier tone, and for bluegrass, or the fusion Railroad Earth plays, requires the seminal bluegrass mandolin: the Gibson F. The A is pear shaped and symmetrical. The F, is an explosion of swirls and curls.

“I’ve heard that the F, that little scroll, is the world’s most expensive strap button,” Skehan said, referring to most players’ use of the scroll to hold a loop of the strap. The two models are about $300 difference for similar condition.

Skehan is not limited by traditional instrumentation. Often his tonal place in the band is akin to the right hand of a piano player, fitting as piano was his instrument in college.

After years of playing in bands around New Jersey, Railroad Earth formed in May 2001, bringing Skehan together with violinist Tim Carbonne, guitarist and singer Todd Sheaffer, Andy Goessling on guitars, banjo, dobro, mandolin, flute, pennywhistle, saxophone and vocals, percussionist Carey Harmon and bassist Johnny Grubb.

They hit a pinnacle of the bluegrass world that summer, playing at Telluride Bluegrass festival. They play about 90 shows a year.

Sheaffer is the primary songwriter.
“He brings us songs pretty much fully formed and we create the arrangements or melodic lines,” Skehan said.

Some tunes grow and evolve on the road. A local favorite, “Colorado,” has undergone three or four rewrites of the middle since it was written. On the band’s live album “Elko,” the song has sections that are basically taken from the “Staten Island Hornpipe.”

“We broke the hornpipe into bits and put it back together within ‘Colorado,’” Skehan said. “We also deconstructed the fiddle part at the end. When we came back and heard the recordings, we couldn’t remember how we did it.”

Posted by Katy Bruns on 09/04 at 10:39 am