If Rusted Root's visit a little over a year ago proved anything, it's that Anchorage remembers the band fondly. The Pittsburgh-based group was booked for a Thursday night -- Bear Tooth's January 2010 First Tap concert -- but tickets sold so swiftly that the promoters decided to add a Wednesday show.

That one sold out too. Rusted Root packed one of the bigger venues in town on two school nights in the dead of winter.

That's no mean feat for a band that enjoyed its only Billboard singles chart success nearly 16 years ago. But even after all those years, "Send Me on My Way" -- wielding the band's trademark percussive chops and world music affinities -- still pops up sporadically on radio dials and is still the song for which the band is most famous.

At the height of the song's popularity, the band was part of a scene of earnest peaceniks that ushered in a mid-'90s era of neo-hippie jam bands. Bands like Blues Traveler, Phish, Widespread Panic and Spin Doctors offered an alternative to the so-called alternative rock of the time. While Smashing Pumpkins declared on "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" that the world is a vampire, Rusted Root just wanted to give the world a hug.

For listeners who maybe weren't so keen on the often aloof and sometimes cynical outlook espoused by some of the Pumpkins' peers, the new age of jam bands coalesced around the yearly H.O.R.D.E. Festival (Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere). Rusted Root provided familiar faces on that tour, which sold out amphitheaters throughout the country until the festival organizers pulled the plug in 1998.

During that surge in popularity, Rusted Root was booked for a show at the Egan Center. The 1997 gig was canceled due to slow ticket sales. The band's two-night stand at the Bear Tooth last year doubled the number of tickets sold 13 years earlier.

It's tough to say what happened to spike ticket sales the second time around. The band released a number of albums that flew under a lot of people's radars. Its next three albums landed in the Billboard album charts, but none of them yielded a radio hit. In 2002 the band released "Welcome to My Party," which ditched much of its freewheeling drum circle vibe for a more concentrated pop effort.

From the sexually charged funk of opening track "Union 7" to the sweeping balladry of the title track, the record marked a distinct sea change for Rusted Root. The bluegrass flourishes that used to earn the band Grateful Dead comparisons were gone, and so too was the percussion-laden quirkiness that elicited Talking Heads ones. The band toured heavily in support of "Welcome to My Party," which yielded a live record, but the band didn't put out another studio album for seven years.

Personnel shifts had already become a common thread within the group's large ensemble, but solo and side projects seemed to take up the attention of the band's three-person core: singer and guitarist Michael Glabicki, backing vocalist and percussionist Liz Berlin and bassist Patrick Norman. Rusted Root eventually resurfaced in 2009 with the album "Stereo Rodeo," which opens with a Latin-tinged take on Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" and wastes no time in putting the hand drums back in the front of the mix.

Maybe Anchorage was hip to "Stereo Rodeo," or maybe the ticket sales last year were fueled by nostalgia that hadn't yet set in back in '97. Either way, the reception was strong enough that the band and promoters wasted little time in attempting a repeat.