Episode 13: Robbie Schaefer

Photo by Laura Goyer

This one's exciting for me.

When I was in college 20 some years ago, I was brought by a friend to a small, standing room only bar with a bunch of 20-somethings crowded in very tight numbers, waiting for this band to come out. I was promised I would love this band. So, when they came out and instantly put forth some of the tightest three and four-part harmony that I had ever heard, with an energy that should be illegal, my attention was forever theirs (and still is). All the 20 somethings started jumping up and down and screaming the lyrics to every song this band played. They were just awesome. This band was Eddie From Ohio, a four piece folk bank from ... Northern Virginia (that's another story for another day). Picture this: Center stage, belting out the highest notes, is Julie Murphy, who would soon become Julie Murphy Wells, much to the heartache of fawning male college student fans. The master percussionist in the back's name is Eddie Hartness (He's not from Ohio, stop asking). He focuses a lot on hand drumming in those earlier days, but will eventually add more and more percussion as the years go on. There are two guys up front, playing a couple of Takamine acoustic guitars (at least in those days), one of whom adds harmonica pretty often, and switches over to bass while wisecracking about rival universities -- that guy is at stage left is Michael Clem, and the guy on stage right, seeming like the most technical yet the most introverted one of the bunch, is Robbie Schaefer, with whom I will be speaking in roughly 24 years, on this crazy sci-fi platform called Facetime.

https://youtu.be/1v1w52ixw-M

Cellar Sessions: Eddie From Ohio November 2nd, 2017 City Winery New York Full Session

Robbie has been making music a long time. Starting as a 7-year-old asking his parents for a guitar, and later with his childhood buddy (and future EFO Bandmate) Michael Clem singing songs about girls and ... well ..., girls in their pre-formative and less-concerned-with-storyline years, he has since brought his meaningful and smart songwriting style Light Years ahead of his time. There's a reference there. You'll get it in a minute.

We chat about a lot of really neat stuff, how he started out with (and eventually gave up on) guitar lessons, the little, unexpected, non-consequential seemingly unrelated events that seemed to fall into place throughout his life, the development of an initiative to bring music to children in places torn apart by war and violence, to gathering a lifetime of experience with his own father and their complicated relationship to create a full scale musical, called (here it is), Light Years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz8wrsk-C6M

Robbie and Bobby Smith getting all father and son on each other.

So yeah. We talk about that, and a