This Friday, December 15th, Railroad Earth frontman Todd Sheaffer will reunite with From Good Homes at The Williams Center for a screening of Charlie Loves Our Band, The Story of From Good Homes. Directed by the band’s longtime friend and one-time tour manager Victor Guadagno, the film tells the story of how a few friends from rural Sussex County, New Jersey developed a close-knit community of fans but ultimately succumbed to the perils of an unforgiving music industry that failed to understand them.

The band’s story began when they were still in high school and Todd, who was already fronting a rock cover band, spotted an ad placed in the local paper by an anonymous drummer seeking a guitarist.

“I answered it, and we started chatting, and it went on for a while before I finally realized who it was,” Todd told Live For Live Music.

The anonymous drummer turned out to be his good friend from school, Patrick Fitzsimmons. “He was like, ‘Oh, Todd, you already have a band. Why are you answering?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to sing anymore.’ That was my answer. I just wanted to play guitar.”

The two friends merged their bands to form a new group, Old Crow (named after the whiskey long before the Medicine Show), with two drummers and, ironically, Todd on vocals.

“It wasn’t that I had a great voice,” Sheaffer explained. “My voice was very strange when I first started. But I was willing to do it and I could do it, and nobody else could do it or wanted to do it, so I became the singer. It took a certain amount of fearlessness.”

The band started performing a repertoire of classic rock songs—”The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones and that kind of stuff”—and quickly built a strong following among their classmates. Before long, they were hired to play every Sunday at a roadhouse called The Speakeasy.

“We were kind of the band that the community of friends rallied around and partied around. Our music spoke to those people. It made sense to them. We were the town band,” Todd reflected. “That’s kind of the real beauty of the band to this day, is that family of friends, that community of like-minded people who grew up together and shared all those experiences. There’s nothing like an old friend, and we have a lot of ’em. The music provided a center for people to come around. And the songs that we wrote over the years captured some of that energy and some of that feeling.”

[Image via Charlie Loves Our Band – Early performance by Old Crow]

As a scene began to form around them, the band regularly filled local clubs, threw keg parties, and hosted psychedelic-fueled “Freak Festivals” where they were totally free to explore new sounds and improvise, ultimately crafting a unique style one journalist dubbed “hick-pop.”

“It was the era of finding a place in the woods in the middle of nowhere and having a keg party with bonfires and music and kids growing up and exploring and adventuring. I think it was Jacqui Daniher [who] described it as we were ‘raised by wolves.’ There was a lot of freedom and a lot of openness to our lives and I think perhaps to life in general back then,” Todd remembered.

The band’s wild spirit reached its peak one fateful night when they were playing some songs at a local bar to prepare for a major label showcase in New York City the next day. As Sheaffer explained,

There were a few tunes that we wanted to play, just to kind of rehearse them. Well, what had happened was we had had our usual rowdy ruckus with the crowd going crazy and having a great time, having too much fun, and we didn’t ever want to stop. We just kept playing and playing.

The management of the venue eventually had enough of us and wanted us to stop so they could get everybody out, so at curfew time, they just pulled the plug. They literally turned off the power to get everybody out in time. So we had to leave without really having time to pack up our stuff, and we hadn’t had a chance to play a few of the songs that we really wanted to rehearse. 

Somebody had a little after-hours party after the bar closed, which we went to, and then we got the great idea that we should go back to the club and finish our set. There was a boarded up window in the kitchen in the back, which one of my bandmates knocked in. And then we all kind of turned on our equipment and played some more music.

There was no audience. It was just us. And then we went back out and back out the window and went to the diner to get a bite to eat. We’re sitting there eating our late night meal, and the police come in and I think what they said was, “Boys, you might want to get that to go. You’re coming with us.” We ended up getting in trouble for that. We didn’t do anything other than go in and play a little music, but it was breaking and entering.

Rather than charge the boys with a crime, the judge let them off with an unusual punishment. “They decided that since it wasn’t malicious intent—we were just there to practice or whatever—so the sentence was to play a concert for the youth of the town, a free benefit concert, and they said, ‘Since you’re all from good homes and we all know you are good members of our community, that’s your sentence.'” When asked whether he remembers anything special about the show they were sentenced to play, Todd laughed and said, “Well, we showed up with a new wise-ass name.”

After graduating from high school, Todd went on to study English literature and politics at Columbia University. “I wish I’d studied music. That’s one of my regrets, because since becoming a musician, I’ve never had time,” he observed.

Todd and his From Good Homes bandmates continued to work on new songs together during college, mailing cassette demos back and forth. Todd also formed a folk duo at Columbia with his friend Tom Duval and used the songwriting skills he had started to hone to compose what became the anthem of a powerful student protest movement against apartheid.

That was actually incredible. We really felt like we were making an impact and changing things. It started with the Black Coalition at Columbia. Some of my classmates went on a hunger strike, like stopped eating to get the attention of the administration. And then the rest of the student body, or a good portion anyway of my classmates, kind of rallied behind these students who were on the hunger strike, and this became sort of a campus-wide protest against the university’s investments in South Africa and the apartheid regime.

Tom and I wrote a song that was sort of the anthem of the protesters. It was called, “You Can’t Hide Me”, and it addressed the issues at hand. We would sing it at the rallies, and then it actually got coverage in some of the New York newspapers. I think the New York Post had a picture of us singing it in an article about it. And then somebody, I forget who it was, got some money together to have us record it.

[Image via Charlie Loves Our Band – Todd Sheaffer and Tom Duval perform “You Can’t Hide Me” at protest]

In addition to playing gigs with Todd around Columbia on the Upper West Side, Tom started getting sideman work in the vibrant downtown Greenwich Village folk scene. He ended up playing bass with folk songwriter Jack Hardy, and when Hardy was looking for a second guitarist/backup vocalist for a brief tour of Europe, Tom recommended Todd for the gig.

Hardy, who was known for his disciplined approach to songwriting, influenced Todd to get more serious about his craft and his sound. As Todd explained,

Jack was a very serious songwriter. In fact, he hosted a weekly songwriters gathering in his apartment in the Village, and a lot of prominent songwriters would come through and get together, and they would make some pasta, drink some wine, and share the songs they were writing. I only went to that once, but Jack was a big influence on me as far as taking songwriting a little more seriously, and the acoustic guitar.

When I auditioned for him, I showed up with a 12-string that I had at the time, and I played good enough to be in the band, and I sang good enough to be in his band, but he said, “Well, I really like you, but you’re not playing that guitar.” And he gave me his beautiful Martin D-18, which he had purchased from John Denver because Jack had grown up out in Aspen. It was a great, incredible Martin D-18 that was the best guitar I’ve ever played to this day. So that’s what I played my entire time playing with Jack. That thing just sang. It was a beauty and introduced me to Martin guitars, which is what I still played to this day. I wish I was playing that. And Jack played a Gibson, a beautiful J-45, so I started to learn about real guitars and real tone.

After touring with Jack Hardy, Todd returned to New Jersey to live with From Good Homes, and the band entered what he calls its “Big Pink era” in the documentary, referencing the collaborative creative phase when The Band wrote their debut studio album, Music from Big Pink, in a house called “Big Pink.” The group also started touring regionally.

“The first touring we started doing was in the Northeast,” Sheaffer explained. “I remember literally knocking on doors, just going into a place and saying, ‘Hey, we want to play. Can we come on Friday and play?’ I remember one place booked us, then a day or so before we were going to play, they called me up in a panic saying, ‘I heard from somebody that you play original music. We don’t have any original music in here.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, no, don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.’ So then during the show, I said, ‘Here’s another great John Cougar Mellencamp song that you’ve never heard before, and we played [From Good Homes original] ‘Radio On’. They were all worried and upset until the place was filled up with people, the most people they’d ever had in that bar, and they made more money because everybody had a great time and had some drinks. And they were like, ‘Oh, can you come back next week? I don’t care what you play.'”

[Image via Charlie Loves Our Band – From Good Homes]

The band’s sphere of influence continued to grow as they ventured further from home. “We sent demo tapes, cassette tapes. That’s what it was back then. We just sent cassette tapes everywhere that had music and said, ‘We want to play. We’re from New Jersey. We want to come up and play.’ Why? Nobody really knew. We just wanted to play,” Todd recalled.

Despite skepticism from venues, From Good Homes pushed westward and established a foothold in Colorado, blazing the trail for countless other touring bands.

“A lot of East Coast bands kind of watched us do that, and then were like, ‘Oh, let’s do that. That looks like fun.’ I think we were the second or third act to play at the Fox Theater in Boulder, which became kind of a big focal point for the jam band world. That started this whole trend of East Coast bands heading west and putting tours together, but we were just doing it ourselves and making it happen.”

They also started to play shows with bands like Blues Traveler, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Dave Matthews Band at New York’s Wetlands Preserve, a major hub of the burgeoning jam band scene, and used their regional sway to connect with acts from new markets and expand their reach.

[Wetlands] was a big home turf for us, and a lot of bands from all over the country wanted to play there, so what we ended up doing was we’d become friends with these bands and have them open up for us at the Wetlands where we were. It was a mutual help society there where, for instance, we’d have Dave Matthews Band open for us, and then they’d have us open for them down in Charlottesville and Richmond. For a while there we were playing every Tuesday and Wednesday opening for Dave at Tracks in Charlottesville and the Flood Zone in Richmond. And that was a long drive for us, but we were doing that, and we became good friends with those guys. Hootie and the Blowfish also opened for us at Wetlands, and we’d go down and open for them in South Carolina. So we had a lot of bands that we became friends with that kind of facilitated us going down south.

Todd described how taken aback he and his FGH bandmates were when they first encountered DMB and saw that they had a strikingly similar instrumentation.

It was a little bit of a surprise for both bands when we met each other, because at the time, I was the only guy playing an acoustic guitar through an amp. Nobody did that, so I felt like this was a very unique sound. And then we had Jamie [Coan] playing the fiddle, Dan [Myers] playing the horn, and nobody had ever done that. It sounded very unique. And then when we ran into those guys, we were like, “Oh,” they had the fiddle and the horn too. We played a lot together and were very friendly.

The two bands were both signed to the same record label, RCA, by the same A&R rep at a time when getting a record deal was the ultimate imperative for anyone trying to make it in the music business. “You needed a record deal even to make a record back then because there were no home studios or anything like that,” Todd remembered. “And it was enormously expensive back then, at a minimum, $150,000. And a lot of records cost a whole lot more than that.”

After signing to RCA, From Good Homes took a trip to New Orleans to record their major label debut, Open Up The Sky. It was the band’s first time working in the studio with a producer, and the results were less than satisfying. “To make a long story short, I think it was that they didn’t understand who we were and what we did, and they tried to change it, and we just really weren’t a band that you could change,” Todd said. “We were trying to capture the energy and the vibe of what we did, but that’s not what the producer was going for, and it just was not a good fit.”

Even after finishing the album on the East Coast, FGH continued to struggle with a lack of label support. “Everything that came our way, we did it ourselves through hard work,” Todd reflected. “And then when we passed that hard work into the hands of people who supposedly could take that hard work and turn it into the next level of success … then that’s when everything went downhill.

“We ended up with people who really didn’t understand what we were, who we were, what we did,” he continued. “They didn’t understand the depth of that relationship between the band and its audience. These are people who just look at a single, they’re concerned with one thing, the single. They had no idea how to develop a band that has a long-term career and a deep bond with its fans and its audience. … It was very disappointing and confusing and disillusioning.”

[Image via Charlie Loves Our Band – Todd Sheaffer]

The band would take a different approach for its second record, opting to record at a local barn studio where they felt more at home. Without distribution support from their label, however, the album never achieved liftoff. “The second record never even really came out. We don’t know why,” Todd said. “It might’ve been like a tax thing, we don’t know. It was incredibly frustrating. They never released it, or they did release it, but you couldn’t get it anywhere. Something like that. They said they released it, but the record never left the warehouse. We don’t know. It was nothing but frustration, to be honest. It was tough times.”

“You could make a whole movie about our last record, about being dumped by our manager at the last second and the record company pulling the rug out,” bassist Brady Rymer notes in the documentary.

After keeping the band from touring and failing to market its second album, RCA eventually notified FGH that the label would not be funding a third record. This disappointment came as the members of the band were starting to mature, and there was disagreement about how to move forward, whether they should shop around for a new label and start over, or whether they should give up entirely.

“Our lives were changing. Everybody was going through big changes. We were growing up and our expectations were changing, and then all that was happening. When you’re young and having a blast driving around in a van with your buddies, playing music is great. When you’re raising a family and you’ve got commitments beyond sowing your wild oats, then things get a little more complicated.”

Some of the band members, including Patrick and Brady, were reluctant to start from scratch with a new label, and Todd was clear that continuing on without them was never an option. “That’s not what that band is,” he said.

“It was painful and it was stressful, but we were friends. … We just sat down and talked about it, and we decided it was time to move on. It was disappointing because we really had the potential,” he added.

“It’s kind of a shame that there was no festival scene like there is today, because that would’ve been a great venue for us. That hadn’t really started. The H.O.R.D.E. tour was the first one that I remember, and that was started by Blues Traveler with Phish and Widespread Panic and [others]. We played with all those bands that were on that, but we weren’t on it, which was very disappointing actually. We should have been, but we were kind of at the end of our run right around then.”

Asked if being on the H.O.R.D.E. tour could have hypothetically affected the band’s trajectory, Todd replied, “I would say so, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.”

In 1999, From Good Homes shocked fans with the announcement that their annual show at Waterloo Village would be their farewell concert.

Todd went on to form Railroad Earth and started a record label of his own, Black Bear Records, rather than relying on others,. The rest of the members of From Good Homes pursued their own fulfilling careers: Dan became a producer and continues to work with special needs kids alongside his wife, Brady makes music for kids and has earned three Grammy nominations, Jamie kept on picking down south, and Patrick has made several records as a solo musician.

In 2009, ten years after From Good Homes’ farewell show, Rich Schaefer cajoled the band into reuniting for the grand re-opening of the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, NJ. The concert was a huge success, leading to more gigs and a spot on Dave Matthews Band’s Caravan Festival. Since then, the band has continued to sell out annual reunion shows, and in 2019, they released a new album, Time and the River.

“It was great to get together and create a new record. Records are a lot of work, but we did it ourselves, and I’m really proud of that one and happy with how it came out. And we might do that again. We’ve discussed it. It’s not etched on the calendar right now, but we may do that.”

[Photo: David Tracer – From Good Homes, August 2023]

Looking back at the life, death, and rebirth of From Good Homes, Todd expressed an overwhelming sense of gratitude. “I feel incredibly blessed and grateful, to be honest, and very positive about the whole thing,” he said. “If there were difficult moments, I’ve blocked them all out. How many people can say that they can get together with their high school band a million years later and still play for all their friends, and the joy and the spirit of the music is still there, and the spirit of the friendship is still there? Even with all our misfortune, we’re incredibly blessed, and at the end of the day, it’s music, it’s a band, and we had something really special, and it’s still special.”

From Good Homes will perform one long live set this Friday at The Williams Center following the film screening and a Q+A with the band. To purchase tickets, click here. Charlie Loves Our Band is available to stream here. FGH also announced a show at The Newton Theater on December 16th, the night after the screening, but that show is now sold out.