I remember seeing the video for Rusted Root’s “Send Me On My Way” on MTV back in the early/mid 90s, around the time the album “When I Woke” was released. I would have been a freshman or sophomore in college, and I recall it being a very dichotomous initial experience. First, I was mildly repelled by the over-the-top song with all its high pitched yodels and flutes and bongos and the overt, well, hippiness of it , and not to mention that band of happy tree huggers joyfully dancing and singing in the MTV video, smiling-widely, in a seemingly peyote-induced jam session out in the South Dakota badlands. I was slightly repelled by it, indeed, and yet, strangely drawn to it as well. It was all so exuberant and celebratory and so unlike the other bands my friends and I were into at the time like Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, etc.
Those damn hippies just dancing around outside, and just being so… happy. It was weird, man.
I was a college student, but I did not go through a “Do bog rips in your dorm room and listen to Floyd and Widespread” phase. Instead I had immersed myself in the opposing spectrum of classic college party tropes: Keggers, drinking games, last calls, and whatever other standard intoxicated, oft naked, ridiculous buffoonery one can stumble into. I maintained a presence as far from the salt-of-the-earth granola lifestyle as I could get.
Not anymore, of course. 30 years later and I’m about as much of a Rusted Rooty-ass hippie as one gets at 50 yrs old. I’d like nothing more than to frolic barefoot outside to a killer flute solo. I wear a bunch of bracelets, linen pants and sandals, a shitty old man man-bun. I don’t even work. I only shower when it becomes an emergency, like after I go for a long jog and I try to peel my sweaty shirt off over my head but the shirt is too sticky and tight and my head gets stuck inside of it and I end up inadvertently hot boxing my own toxic armpit noxiousness. A smiley tree-hugging old son of a bitch is what I turned out to be.
Back in college, though, I looked not to John Lennon or Jerry for inspiration, but rather Bluto from Animal House or Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds. My hippie powers were deeply repressed, and it’s probably why I was so attracted to those happy dancing Rusted Rooters and why I also wanted to throw an empty Natty Lite can at them.
Unable to contain this war that raged within me, my inner flower child vs. my external Thumb Master, I finally relented and bought a copy of the “When I Woke” CD. And I liked it a lot. And I played “Send Me On My Way” relentlessly. It became a late night staple in our college apartment parties. We’d blast that song on repeat and dance around the coffee table covered in half-empty solo cups and cigarette ash, beer-soaked carpet sloshing beneath our feet, a stupid strobe light and traffic light from Spencer Gifts filling the room with annoying chaotic color, as the last standing party survivors slowly trickled out the door to go get a couple hours of sleep before doing it all over again tomorrow. In hindsight, it wasn’t all that unlike the way the band danced in their MTV video, only instead of bright blue skies and endless Dakota landscapes, it was a dirty cramped apartment slowly filling with post-party farts.
But damnit, we were dancing and we were smiling! As a group, a team, a family! And in doing so, we had accidentally, perhaps mystically, merged the Rusted Root hippie ideals with the barbaric keg stand culture, and it was a mash-up that worked! We could indeed rejoice, all of us together, different as we all may be, as part of one united celebratory dance (which happened to be next to a floating keg of Milwaukee’s Best)!
It really was a wonderful album made by earnest young musicians with a lot to say, and although “Send Me on My Way” is the one that continues to keep pace with popular culture so many years later, popping up in movie soundtracks and commercials, you’ll find a lot of catchy, fun and uplifting tunes on this album. A few real bangers that come to mind are “Ecstasy,” “Martyr,”, and “Back to the Earth,” and they’re top of mind because we were jamming out to the album just this past weekend. We had friends over for a party at the house on Saturday, and while it was not as raucous or debaucherous as our college parties 30 years ago, it certainly did try. That afternoon my friend Chops gifted me a fresh new vinyl record of “When I Woke” in honor of my recent 50th birthday. Chops, being a participant of those late night Rusted Root dance sessions so long ago, was keenly aligned with the significance of the album and its role in the transformative parts of our lives.
The night progressed, and I was leaning against the bar in the garage, talking to another buddy who is a few years younger and had no knowledge of my drunken Rusted Root dance troupe of lore, and he said out of the blue, “You know what song I’ve randomly gotten into recently? That ‘Send Me On My Way’ song by Rusted Root.”
30 years after the song was introduced, he brought it up to his nouveau-hippie pal whom he was unaware had such a long term connection to it, and who had been gifted the album only HOURS BEFORE! With that innocent statement, my friend thus completed the decade-spanning cosmic Rusted Root circle of destiny that the elders have only spoken of in whispers, and temporarily freed us from our shackles of middle age, corporate accountability, societal norm adherences, and sore knees, and allowed us to once again… dance.
And dance we did. We pulled everyone into the family room, threw that beautiful new record on the turntable, cranked the volume to a very unneighborly level, and our group of 40 and 50 year olds danced just like that group of smiling happy Rusted Root hippies did in the South Dakota badlands so long ago, or those ridiculous college kids did in their party-ravaged apartment, and we celebrated the awesomeness of joyful tunes that persevere through the decades and magically pop back into your life at just the right time.
TLDR – Timeless album. Worth a revisit. Go get wild.
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