Rusted Root: “Send Me On My Way”
If you were really lucky at sixteen you managed to date somebody older who could drive, and all of a sudden your life after school kickflipped itself into a newer, more perfect shape. Almost like you’d Gamesharked your actual life, as soon as the clock hit three you suddenly had the power to go anywhere and do anything with somebody who would let you kiss on them. You didn’t have to wheedle your parents to lug you across town every time you wanted to make out for more than two minutes (and you knew they knew that’s what you were doing) and you could take weekend trips to go record shopping and bum around college towns. I don’t want to wax too reminiscent about this but the divide between being a high school shithead-about-town with and without a car is so massive if you grew up someplace tiny and boring that I actually don’t think I could overstate its importance. And you know how much I love overstatement.
On top of that — and here’s where I loop this back around to the topic at hand — this was the first chance some people had to really lash cars and music together. Don’t pretend you don’t know how important playing music in the car is when you’re colt-legged and fresh to the highway, because you do. Dating older people usually affords an opportunity to hear something new and exciting, and I’m sure there are people who have stories about their night-school-busboy dropout boyfriends cranking “Bastards of Young” or their second-year-senior girlfriends digging a Christian Death tape out from a pile of black jeans. Well, not me, friends; I got Rusted Root. Coming back up from Noho on Rt. 9 through Ware, Rusted Root was there. Driving blind and kissing on the back roads behind the high school, Rusted Root was also there. Parking behind the textile mill and trying to fit two bodies in one seat: Rusted Root held court over my shirtless, trembling form. Carfaxing the Volkswagen Fox in question probably brings up a line item like “CAR PASSES INSPECTION, BUT DRIVER MAY BECOME SUSCEPTIBLE TO BUYING TABLAS AND ANDEAN PONCHOS.”
A decade later, pawing through the wistful mists of time, here’s what I’ve decided: I don’t like this band, and I don’t like this song, but I love listening to this song. Which is to say: I dislike it in the abstract, and I dislike its consituent parts, but I love when it’s actually put in my ears. Watching these guys raindance around somebody’s backyard in Arizona and wiggle their little panflutes makes me want to headbutt them all, but I’m on listen number eleven of this song and I don’t want it to end. So this is a reminder to myself that songs and bands (and &c.) can play various roles in our lives — sometimes oppositely so; sometimes simultaneously so — and also a reminder to myself that the most unlikely things can become meaningful to us if we’re honest with ourselves and we keep our senses alert. It’s easy to get jaded and ornery and pretend like we’re the arbiters and keepers of our own taste, but it’s so much more useful and interesting to a step back and self-assess. Here: “The worst single of 1995 makes me feel young and excited and weirdly horny.” OK, now you go.
