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- Concert Watch: Rusted Root
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| Concert Watch: Rusted Root |
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WHAT: Rusted Root, with Paul Cebar Tomorrow Sound, Sly Joe & The Smooth Operators  Jane Spietz: How did Rusted Root get started?Michael Glabicki: I was in college and had just gotten back from Nicaragua. I guess it was 1987. I had done some traveling, heard some different music down there. I was very politically active and charged to go out and do something new. So when I came back and went to college, it just wasn’t fitting. I decided at that point I was going to pursue music. I went out and started auditioning musicians. By then I had already done some work with some African drummers, so I knew that I wanted musicians who knew world beat music or African drumming. It ended up that I knew Liz from high school. She was at Pitt and knew some people in an African drumming class there, so we started bringing in people one by one and it just fell together. We’re all from the Pittsburgh area. JS: My friend Wendy, who’s a huge fan of yours, says your music feeds her soul and is “incredibly powerful, organic, pure and refreshing.” Describe Rusted Root’s music in your own words. MG: I think it’s sort of a collage of all types of world music, based in rock ‘n’ roll and folk, but you can really find a lot of very strong danceable rhythms from around the world. I would say that it’s unique. It’s unique to the songwriter; it’s unique to Rusted Root. Whenever I would write music, especially early on, I would try to throw out any idea that I was excited about because it reminded me of something else or someone else. The process was always to find yourself in it and also find a connection to the Earth in it, so that when the song was written, you could almost feel it come up from the ground through you. As opposed to, here’s an idea in my brain that goes down through your body and out to your instrument. It was sort of a natural, Earth-based music. JS: How do you feel about Rusted Root’s music not being included on the mainstream radio playlists? MG: It’s interesting. I remember reading something Neil Young said, to paraphrase: “The industry comes to me. And if they do, that’s great. I’ll take it, but I’m not going to go to the industry to try to be successful.” Not to say that I haven’t ever tried to do that, but I’ve always failed miserably at it. I’m completely unable to say “Hey, this is what radio likes. I’m going to try and write something that fits and is palatable to that.” Music is a path for me. It’s the way that I learn most things in life. It’s sort of my big mirror that reflects me. The reality is – that’s what I do, that’s what I’m driven by. It’s great that we have success, but the success has had nothing to do with this process being great to me or not. It just keeps going. And I keep growing in this process. I’ve excelled probably much more without this success because of the distraction of it. So I’m completely happy, especially right now. I’m just having a great time writing music and opening up new doors for myself. JS: Do you feel that you have that much more creative freedom not being tied down by some major record label? MG: I am. It’s hard to say because my success was pretty early on with the record label-type format. I wasn’t able to keep grounded in it enough to maintain a focus in my work. If it happened now, I think I definitely could. I just have to say this is where I’m at right now and I’m completely happy in it. JS: You’ve said that you like playing the smaller, more intimate venues. MG: Our concerts are very ritualistic. There’s a lot of healing going on and a lot of energy flying around, with transmutation of that energy getting back and forth. I think that when you get into amphitheaters that process gets diffused. People talking in the back, groups of people on a blanket having a good time on their own. It just gets kind of spread out. It’s exciting in a hype kind of way, but it lacks that earthly ritual pounding, rhythm, dancing, sweating together kind of connection. We’ve always thrived in these small clubs because of that. JS: Who were some of your earlier musical influences? MG: Real early were the Beach Boys and Cat Stevens and after that it was the Beatles. Then I got into the real heavy stuff like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Van Halen. Then it was Peter Gabriel and U2. After that was when I started writing music. Actually, I think it all fits. We’re doing world music, but we’re doing it in our own way, just as rock ‘n’ roll and punk did their thing where it was loose but it had energy also. Even though we knew about African drumming or Latin rhythms or whatever, it wasn’t like we were proficient in it. JS: Share a wild experience of Rusted Root on the road. MG: One of the great things of our career thus far has been playing with some of the great bands and musicians. We got to tour a couple of tours with Carlos Santana. The first day we got there he invited us up on stage to play. We go up and wanna know the songs, but he’s like, “Oh no, we’ll play something easy.” So he plays probably three songs that even his band didn’t know! (Laughs) He’s calling out these keys and it was fine. Then, I think maybe on the fifth song, he points at me to take a guitar solo. He leaves the stage and lights a cigar on the side of the stage. (Laughs) This was in front of like 15,000 people. I was sweating terribly. I got through it. We actually ended up doing that every night. Later on I realized through talking to him that he had done some research on the band and kind of knew our music. He was a great teacher and a great observer because he could listen to you play and know what you could do and could not do. I think he was throwing stuff out there for us to try because he knew we could do it. He was just very, very smart in that way. It was just a great time and I learned more from him than anyone. JS: How do you plan to celebrate Rusted Root’s 20th anniversary? That’s a huge accomplishment. MG: We’re going to come to Oshkosh! (Laughs) We’re just out playing and having a good time. JS: What kinds of political activities has Rusted Root been involved in? MG: We’ve done all kinds of stuff. Even when we started out playing music, we didn’t start out by booking money-making shows – we did every benefit in Pittsburgh that you could possibly do. At that time, there was apartheid, No Nukes, Nicaragua and El Salvador. We were involved in everything. When I came out of high school, I had a group that we started here called Youth Cry. We networked 20-some schools together and just went off on our own to bring professors in and teach ourselves about the issues. It was really great. It inspired a lot of music, too. That connection and that liberation of actually teaching yourself. We’d actually get in trouble for passing out flyers in school because the school system didn’t even want us to do that. It was really good having gatherings of like 400 students. It was really a special time in Pittsburgh. It only lasted two years but it got really big and did its thing. JS: Is Rusted Root doing anything political right now? MG: We’re doing a lot with local organic farming. We’re trying to invite the farmers out to our shows and present them in such a way so that people know about them and can help out. JS: Like an organic Farm Aid! MG: Yeah. (Laughs) That’s a good idea! JS: Talk about your latest CD – Stereo Rodeo. MG: That was a huge body of work for us. It was a great experience. All of the arrangements were developed on the road. One of the songs was written during the soundcheck. I was really trying to fuse the live energy with the sound recording. We got to the studio and played it all live and sang most of it live. That was sort of the main focus of it. I got to produce it. We’re just real happy with it. A lot of our fans come up and say it’s our best record yet. I did the painting on the front cover. There’s a woman on a horse and a cowboy on a horse. They’re laughing but they’re both on the same circle of rope, so it just shows the struggle. There was a time when I went back out dating. Just so out of it. It was just so funny how disconnected I felt, how delusional I was, almost, how I felt being back out there. The song “Stereo Rodeo” is actually about a cowboy – a rodeo star – that goes to Japan to find a mail-order bride and how delusional his thoughts are when he sees her in the bar. That’s basically what that song’s about. (Laughs) JS: What’s next for Rusted Root? MG: I have a couple ideas for offshoot records for the band. Maybe a cover record. Other than that, I’m working right now writing the next Rusted Root record and also recording a solo record right now. I think probably the band will get back in the studio and start working on some studio projects. JS: What can Rusted Root fans expect when you come to Waterfest in Oshkosh on July 15? MG: I wouldn’t expect anything because we try to change things up in the moment. Just come with good, open energy and we’ll have a good time. |
