THE PITTSBURGH MOMENT, CONTINUED FROM PG. 29
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PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 03.20/03.27.2013
instrumental global fusion — which didn’t necessarily fit in with the straightforward rock that so many others were playing — took off almost immediately. Its first show was the Graffiti Rock Challenge, an annual battle of the bands named for the nowdefunct Baum Boulevard venue: Rusted Root came in fourth out of 152 entries. The band released an independent debut CD, Cruel Sun, in 1992 and, thanks in part to extensive touring, sold around 40,000 copies. Then things started to get a little crazy. In a 1993 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile, frontman Michael Glabicki described feeling sick from the smoke and heat of a typically overwhelming crowd, adding, “We’ll definitely have to start turning people away so that it remains enjoyable for all of us.” As P-G writer Tony Norman put it, “Increasingly uncomfortable with mass adulation, Rusted Root has begun demythologizing itself.” And that’s before they had a national hit. In 1994, the band signed with an enthusiastic Mercury Records, and released When I Woke, which — with the help of a song called “Send Me on My Way” — went platinum. Though Rusted Root was easily associated with popular bands like Blues Traveler and Dave Matthews Band (Spin made fun of all three in a 1995 piece called “Hippies al Dente”), Liz Berlin, a founding member of the band, attributes its success to what was missing from music, both locally and nationally. “There was a lot of amazing talent in Pittsburgh,” she says. “But I think we were a really new sound, and a really new musical phenomenon. The only people who were really doing anything like it at the time were Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon.” Mercury sent Rusted Root to record When I Woke in Pasadena — a typical move at the time. But in the wake of the industry’s more recent decline, local musicians have more opportunities to record close to home. Wiz Khalifa, Anti-Flag and Centipede Eest, among many others, have worked with folks from ID Labs, Mr. Small’s (which is owned by Berlin and her husband, Mike Speranzo) and Treelady Studios. And despite garnering national attention, Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa have both taken the relatively fresh route of signing with a small, locally based label, Rostrum Records.
ness of its aesthetic, and the fact that band members don’t really care what the haters say. In 2012, for example, “Send Me on My Way” was featured non-ironically in an Enterprise Rent-a-Car commercial, and somewhat ironically in an episode of Fox’s The New Girl. The band can also still draw a crowd, and recently finished a tour supporting its new record, The Movement. Things turned out a little differently for Deasy and The Gathering Field, who were
The Gathering Field circ
a the mid-’90s
lost in the shuffle at Atlantic, and eventually got out of their contract. “We did kind of fall victim to the belief in the old model where you sign a deal and your ticket’s written for you. We lost a little bit of our edge when we were kind of in that limbo period,” Deasy admits. “It was the end of the really traditional rock-star model of the record industry, where there was just a certain way you did things. We were right at the end of what we didn’t quite know was a dying beast.” That was hardly the end for Deasy, however. He’s enjoyed a long career as a singer-songwriter — Good Morning America used his song “Good Things are Happening” as their theme for four years — and he’ll release a new solo record, Start Again, in April. Ultimately, it’s hard to say how much national attention Rusted Root brought the region, or how much thought their fans across the country gave to where the band came from. But at the very least, Berlin argues, the band was responsible for an attitude shift. “Pittsburgh as a whole had a really big inferiority complex,” she says. “I think it has a lot to do with the potential consumers who just weren’t impressed by anything. And I feel like us breaking out helped to remedy that because we were so new and because we had such huge success.” “It doesn’t matter if you’re from Pittsburgh,” she adds. “In fact, being from Pittsburgh can be strength. It was strength for us.”
“SOMETHING JUST HAPPENED WITH MUSIC AND YOUNG PEOPLE IN PITTSBURGH.”
OVER THE YEARS, Rusted Root has managed to adjust to changing times as well, thanks to the sometimes divisive weird-
M W E L S H @ P G H C I T Y PA P E R. C OM