Alright Guy: Todd Snider, Mark Twain of Lightning Strike Troubadours, Dies at 59
He had a cock-eyed smile, aquamarine eyes that could turn gray or amber and silky, dirty blond hair that just kinda hung there. Lanky, the nervous energy almost didn’t register in the limbs, but it made those eyes sparkle in a way even a master jewel-cutter couldn’t make a perfect stone glitter.
If you weren’t paying attention, Todd Snider was definitely the guy you wouldn’t see coming. Even with that Modigliani shaped early face, which would become more chiseled as he grew up, he was the one you’d miss in his baggy t-shirts, oversized button front shirts and pants barely making contact with his hip bones.
That was all the better for Todd, the observationist social commentarian who took on romantic dynamics, political issues and inequities with equally potent rapier-sharp insight and detail. He didn’t care if you saw him, because he was really busy watching… everything.
And it was all fodder, trust me.
When he showed up, he was equal parts Huck Finn, old school folkie troubadour, field hippie, activist, punk ass boy and punk rocker. Think Jeff Buckley with a slicing wit, a ZFG attitude and less heart throb baggage. Snider’d banged around a bit, classic story of the kid who was too smart for the room, talking back, talking smack and saying “F this” when it just wasn’t worth the effort.
Somehow, living just outside Austin, he absorbed all the great songwriter/singers from an era before his: Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, Guy Clark, the early story song era of Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joe Shaver, Kris Kristofferson. Heck, he stumbled into Jerry Jeff and his guitar, playing all of those songs at the legendary Gruene Hall, and turned into a burning bush of creative desire. With the help of Kent and Diana Finlay in San Marcos, he started learning the tides of holding a crowd, writing to lasso the listener and create a space that was his.
He rolled over to Memphis, got a gig at the Daily Planet, where journeyman writer, guitarist and session man Keith Sykes – a friend to all the legends noted above – stumbled onto Snider doing his weekly residence. Sykes witnessed to those friends, things started to happen.
After being so broke, he was more like one of Fagan’s kids in Oliver Twist, suddenly big things started popping. A label deal with a traditional label fell apart. Then Jimmy Buffett got his own label through MCA Records, the aptly titled Margaritaville, where long tall drawling femme rocker/writer Marshall Chapman recorded It’s About Time: Live from the Tennessee State Women’s Prison, Hunter S Thompson would deliver a record, as well as tasty Gulf roots bands the Iguanas and Evangeline. Perfect home for a kid who had a problem with authority.
Songs from the Daily Planet showed up as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and Green Day were dominating rock alongside regenerated Aerosmith, r.e.m. and yes, Hootie & the Blowfish. Kurt Cobain would die that April, leaving Snider looking a bit like a more robust cousin to the grunge poet.
If Snider wasn’t so sure about the corporate grind – he thought the perks and peccadillos were hilarious – the poohbahs weren’t so sure about a guy who’d tell anyone, anyone he thought was jive where to jump off. Thankfully Bob Mercer, who ran the label, Al Bunetta and Dan Einstein, who had a black belt in managing the quixotic songwriter/artist with John Prine and Steve Goodman, and of course, Buffett understood the temper and temperament of a true creative spirit.
Not only did Snider capture the lightning strike of the moment – the grunge rebellion, the commodification of rebellion in music, the over-styled and -hyped post-MTV world of pop culture – he chopped it up like the voice of the coming into their own generation he represented. The opening salvo – “My Generation (Pt. 2)” – offered the martini dry humor and detail anchor that made Planet a lethal weapon towards the bloat and marketing Boomers were grabbing with gusto.
Did you know there are people who put us down/Just because we get around
My generation, part two, verse three, chapter four, Jackson Five, Nikki Sixx…
and then into a “Subterrean Homesick Blues” list that skewered hair gel, health spas, fax machines, drum machines, credit cards, condom sense, paisley ties and watching “LA Law” or “Arsenio Hall.” But even more, he cites the malls, the living off the parents, 1000 points of light and not being so bright to let you know he knows there’s complicity to his generation’s sodden rebellion.
But it’s not all three chords and a middle finger. He brought industrial strength empathy with the awareness stoking “That Was Me,” an accordion-wheezing set of polaroids of less thans overlooked that invoked the Bible’s least of our brethren lesson without taking Jesus’ name into his work. He recognized believing you know people’s truths in the minor-keyed turn-of-a-moment reality that was the finger-picked revelation “You Think You Know Somebody,” with its unsettling denoument driven by unseen generational legacy and reverberations.
Sure, there was the jocularity of being caught with Madonna’s demi-scandalous SEX coffee table book in “Alright Guy,” the strolling overpowered-by-lust “Trouble” – “a woman like you walks into a place like this, you can almost hear the promises break” – and the pointed, hummmm-driven, electric guitar-lacerated “Turn It Up,” all swagger and coiled pounce of the cuckolded working class male blowing off steam. This was a record for raging, raving and rocking out with your friends, too.
That full-spectrum self-awareness came full circle with the surprise alternative radio hit “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” a wheezy harmonica-driven folkie treatise that opens invoking Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps Johnny Rotten homage “Hey Hey (My My),” lamenting his rock band’s dead end, before turning into the record business frenzy over grunge; not only do they do the full embrace, they actually refuse to play – one upping the shoe-gazing, flannel-wearing oeuvre. A bidding war, millions of dollars, girls, drugs, 5 star reviews and conquering MTV, then the Grammys refusing to play a note, it’s a marketing gold rush that pops when the next new thing explodes.
Hilarious, brutal, the commentary flew by many, who thought it was a major rave. Snider didn’t care. Take what you want and leave the rest. But to truly understand, listen to that final four lines, that culminate with packing up the van, shaving off the goatee and announcing, “We’re going back to Athens,” Georgia, no doubt.
That’s the deal. Listen, really listen and the gems keep erupting. Wanna know what he’s really thinking? It’s all there. All the unspeakable slights, the hand shakes that were really bites, the notion that with a big grin and a little forward lean, you’ll think it’s glory, not invective covered in laughter.
Those are the facts, and they hold up, the scenes of how Todd Snider popped – fully formed – into the universe.
But that’s the fun and joy that spilled over all kinds of places. Or the “He did what?” consternation that the grown-ups felt. One day, he just walked away from Jimmy Buffett’s tour, clearly over the whole industrial entertainment conveyor belt, and that was that. Or the time he did the MCA corporate event, spoke his mind and got his walking papers the next day.
Were there drugs involved? Probably. Crazy women? Absolutely. Lots of all kinds of late night, break it down conversation about injustice, inequity, lame ass garbage? Count on it. Bob Mercer would always work it out. Buffett and Prine cheered his “can’t be tamed” spirit. Bunetta, the manager, was a larger than life type, too; sometimes he’d be the voice of reason, alongside his partner Einstein, but other times, he’d laugh ‘cause he knew the legend was good for business.
It was also good for his creativity. By not folding the corners down, breaking his spirit or neutralizing the voice, Todd Snider emerged as the folkie-songwriter who could rock. Not quite a new Bob Dylan, he had too much brio for that, but certainly with his vulnerable kindness offered a precursor to Jeff Buckley, another street poet who’d straddle genres and marketing labels.
And that was what made Todd so exciting. If the record sales lagged a little, his touring life was robust. Sometimes with Will Kimbrough in his band. Sometimes Eddy Shaver. But when Todd was electric, it was incendiary – and so alive, it was the best way to get your truth delivered.
Todd, too, wasn’t afraid of the world. He’d show up in all kinds of places, cock-eyed grin grinning, or troubled about something going on; he’d walk up to you at Bongo Java and say, “Wanna talk?” and it would be the most whirlwind, breathtaking conversation you’d have all day. Sure, his concerns were real, but he probably already had the answer and was just checking the math – or he’d tell a story on himself, laughing until it was contagious.
You couldn’t call him guileless. He was too smart for that. But self-effacing, with a champion in local roots queen Lynsey McDonald and her eventual beau/husband/co-parent/ex and at the time activator at Margaritaville Sam Knight. They were like forward motion with a champagne fountain; new ideas, novel concepts and “how do we lift this artist and label up?”
Hard work and the agony of defeat was rarely so ebullient.
When MCA dried up, Prine’s Oh Boy stepped in. They were big on ferocious writers who loved to lick their finger and put it in the electrical socket. Happy To Be Here saw a sleeker Snider through a glaring yellow filter at a tiger-striped banquette; but the cultural pops, commentary and reality capturing remained strong. “Missing You” was as yearning and lovely as anything releases that year, while “The Ballad of DB Cooper” air punched the spirit of reckless adventure and tall tales with a vengeance.
Beyond his own social commentary with “Keep Off The Grass,” he dropped the taut miscegenation reckon “Betty Was Black (Willie Was White),” written by Kimbrough, Michael Grimes, Tommy Meyer and Tommy Womack, originally recorded for their album as the Bis*Quits. Sobering without preaching, percussive without numbing the brain, it was the embodiment of Snider’s gift.
Looking over a light board at the images for Happy, Snider emerged as a man who knew his gift was special; not quite settled into embracing his talent, but accepting there was a reason to be here, the slides were compelling in an iconic way. Not vanity, but look: this is the real.
The momentum didn’t come back, but Excitement Plan offered record biz commentary (“Vinyl Records”), jocularity (the much discussed did-they-steal-his-song “Beer Run”), reality ascending for the kids now 15 years into adulthood (“Class of 1985”) and always his romantic yearning. So many songs were tempered with the desire for love, the jagged shores it washes up on or destroys what you thought.
Even if the “Alright Guy” radio hit was never to return, this was the proof Snider was going to settle into the same kind of record/tour/citizen of creativity realm of his heroes. Lots of kids make a few “songwriter” records, but they can’t maintain the intellectual hoist; Snider was still delivering, still true to what he believed, saw, captured.
Only Snider – being a generational talent – was about to crystalize a massive shift in Music City. While Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, kd lang and Nanci Griffith represented a progressive turn in country, that would come to sweep up Kelly Willis, Joe Ely, the Mavericks and Iris DeMent, Snider dropped East Nashville Skyline. More than a play on Dylan’s seminal project, it planted a flag for the growing progressive music scene on the other side of the Cumberland River.
East Nashville Skyline was the culmination of all the touchstones that made Snider exceptional. Mike Tyson is celebrated in the almost sweet “Iron Mike’s Main Man’s Last Request,” while garage rock was given its kudos on “The Ballad of the Kingsmen.” Yes, commentary on the life (“Alcohol and Pills,” the poseurtastic call out “Play A Train Song” and the Jerry Lee Lewis-style boogie “Nashville”). Yes, embracing the simple truth in the pitfalls (“Sunshine”). But the Roman candle of the bunch is one of his most on-the-nose social takedowns, everything Nashville was already battling, but very few people saw (the sing-along lope of “Conservative, Christian, Right Wing Republican, Straight, White American Males”).
If a manual for us-and-them was ever written, this dozen songs more than delivered. Beyond a freak flag to fly, here was an album you could turn up. Here was a record that told people right where you stood. It created an unspoken signal, one that most of the “music biz” types didn’t really get, but also never really bothered to explore.
On a slow Thursday or lonely Saturday night, though, you’d find people at the Tower Records Listening Stations nodding their head in time. You could feel it from across the bins that held all the albums – or was it CDs? – that gusto of being alive even in the boredom or loneliness.
Of course, Todd lived these songs in a lot of ways. Rehabs, and more rehabs. Falling in love while falling out of addiction. Figuring out how to beat the system. Falling back into bad habits. Wives, loves, friends, music, music, always music. And collecting peers from the very best music people there were; because Snider was so versed in all the genres, he could hang with the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson as easy as roll around Texas with Robert Earl Keen or Jack Ingram.
Heck, the lovely Pamela Des Barres, known to the world as Miss Pamela from Frank Zappa’s notorious GTOs and author of I’m With The Band, was hired to write a bio for one of the MCA Records. She remained a staunch friend until the end. When Robert Plant flips his wig seeing you, when you were with Jagger in the room weighing the Altamont aftermath, you are a woman who understands the complexity of the rock & roll life, and quest to write truer, realer songs.
That peerage would let him lead a jam/alt supergroup called The Hard-Working Americans with Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools, Great American Taxi’s Chad Staehly, solo artist/songwriter/guitaristNeal Casal, Duane Trucks (Derek’s brother) and secret weapon multi-instrumentalist. If they came together for a Boulder benefit for Colorado Flood Relief, loved the vibe and kept touring, they ultimately landed at Bob Weir’s studio for an album of covers. It’s what musicos do.
Only that spark captured Snider’s – and everyone else’s – imagination. Reconvening, they wrote an album’s worth of material, including the raving anthem “Dope Is Dope” and a sobering cover of Guy Clark’s “The High Price of Inspiration.” This wasn’t a masterplan, a cash grab, a marketing move; it was communion over what happens when they got together – with or without a little peyote, acid or smoke thrown in for the imbibers.
That rock thing – Todd thin as a greyhound, built for speed and the heart to go the distance – was an explosion of wow. Watching audiences churn and roil before them, it was a time dissolve that perhaps harkened back to the Filmore and Filmore East, Joplin, Willie Nelson’s Dripping Springs Reunions. It was a superorganism of groove, feeling the moment.
Sitting on the bus after the show, completely wrung out, that banged up fedora with the artificial flower, Snider nodded. Talked about the insanity of what rock gives you, the freedom to jump off buildings and know you’ll fly on the energy coming back; he spoke of the eternal tug between conventional people and those willing to embrace the untamed piece inside; the joy that can be had when you stop and just feel the moments rushing past you.
When the American’s myriad schedules proved too impossible to converge, the East Side Bulldogs were born. With an even more complicated set of calendars, Elizabeth Cook, Bobby Bare, Jr, Tim Carroll, Jen Gunderman and more found themselves rocking for the sake of just blowing the carbsons out. A ferocious garage band of high school intensity with worldclass musicianship. Their rallying cry of “Chicks and cars and partying hard…,” which made the swerving taunt of “Hey Pretty Boy” so much joyous middle finger and who needs you?, was a siren’s call to anyone every judged by the golden, chosen kids. Suddenly, the ne’er-do-wells were everything – and kids who ruled the school went from hero to zero.
That musical dexterity made whatever Snider played seem somehow right on time.
Whether it was the more acoustic Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 with the “Talking Reality Television Blues,” the old style “Cowboy Jack Clement Waltz,” or the funky, side-of-the-mouth-delivery “A Timeless Response to Current Events,” the loose full band Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables with the working man duped by big business “New York Banker,” a rambling take on Buffett’s “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown,” the atonal Crazy Horse-suggesting “All Too Soon,” or the power pop of “Brenda” or the Jerry Jeff Walker homage Time As We Know It, featuring “Railroad Lady,” “Pissin’ in the Wind,” “Mr. Bojangles” and guests Amy LaVere, Kix Brooks and Elizabeth Cook, there was a freedom to the music that wrapped around you. Yes, you had to get and dig the street folkie/prophet reality, but all the different flavors Snider could pull out of that spectrum were intoxicating.
Over the years, the funky, jazzman fedora-ed writer would have deals, not have deals, not really care. He didn’t do it for the product, he did it because he lived for the songs, the people who lived in them and the places they’d go. Oh, and the chicks were good.
Todd loved women, which is why women loved Todd. His friendship with Elizabeth Cook is the stuff of legend; were-they-or-weren’t-they people wondered, so close was their bond, what man and woman could share that kind of kinetic intimacy without the hokey pokey?
Ye of little faith. It was the connection that mattered. Des Barres would stay with him when she was in Nashville doing writing seminars; photographer/film-maker/activist Stacie Huckeba has documented Snider’s career for decades, catching unguarded moments, formal portraits and everything in-between. The late Lynsey McDonald his best friend and ally, no matter what other career role or commitment she was forging – because Lynsey made people matter.
Even me. Between all the early morning back’n’forth emails to TMellyMoo@aol.com about whatever was going on, songs we liked, gossip no one else might care about, it was always a rush and a few smile- or thought-inducing volleys. Just because. Or going out to that low to the ground house on the lake with the incredible view of day’s end, trying to remember to take the time to go visit and watch the day die, not saying much, just taking it in.
Todd got it: taking in the moment, just being there, breathing it in, exhaling what didn’t work. Everything else aside, that was all that mattered. Make the space, take the slow roll to Hendersonville, just be… Just be… just… be.
On my better days, I trusted all that. When he and his good friend Richard Lewis decided to split the bill at LA’s seen-it-all Roxy, it was suggested I go. After all, two brilliant minds, both intent on skewering without bitching, what an incredible merging of comedy and song.
If on paper, it didn’t make sense, who's to say? The neurotic and the ultimate shake it off guy coming together, one with raps and the other with a guitar? What could go wrong? How could the very different audiences pick up what the other guy was serving up?
Funny thing about funny: it transcends. “Beer Run,” “Play A Train Song,” “Can’t Complain,” “Conservative Christian…” and “Alright Guy” hit the intellectual Lewis’ fans right in the middle of their furrowed brows. And Snider’s fans, well, they get the jokes.
When the room emptied, the lights came on and just a few stragglers remained, the storied Los Angeles venue looked like a desolation pitstop for people chasing dreams. Somewhere on the stairway, Snider’s voice was singing, that slightly nasal tone bouncing around for nothing other than probably entertaining his friends.
To be so alive, to share so freely. Since COVID, the loss of McDonald and Peter Cooper, the baseball fanatic-music critic/Country Music Hall of Fame writer/editor-erstwhile bandmate and the ravages of tornadoes on his home, he’d endured health issues that he chose to keep quiet. He’d made a commitment to do livestreams from Big Purple in East Nashville’s 5 Points, which in Taylor Swift-fashion became reinventions of his albums, that created a community out of the isolated times. Seeing his songs grown up was, indeed, a revelation.
Then came the weathered voice High, Lonesome and Then Some earlier this year. The recordings had a blues-lean, the occasional piano rumination; very handmade, very porous-sounding, it felt like a late night, lost hours confession. The ruminations on love, how it falls apart, how we want it offer a window to the conflicts we all struggle with.
It appeared if he wasn’t robustly chasing the fame, he was back in the game. Some tour dates were announced, and then… well… Salt Lake City happened. All the allegedly, the scrambling for answers, the no-doubt-rump-covering now falling into place.
What we do know is once Todd got back to Nashville, he really was sick. Walking pneumonia, which is a pernicious beast that makes you think you’re being lazy, that it’s all in your head. But also sepsis that was pretty far along.
Whatever else happened – an attack, being turned out of the hospital – this man was clearly ill.
And now, this man is gone. Fifty-nine years old isn’t old at all. Sure, he’d lived all nine lives, most likely; done all the drugs, had the big adventures, howled at the fullest moons, but surely it wasn’t time to die.
I got the text yesterday after from a musician friend at a session. “Can you give me a quick call?”
Texts like that, you respond to. He picked up, asked if I was somewhere safe, then told me the news. Time stops, even if you keep moving. You walk forward, ask for the table, sit down and try to make sense out of how someone so vexingly incandescent could be gone.
Then you cry. Then you think, “Who else might not know?,” knowing the news was being kept close – but also you don’t want someone you love crashing into an online headline or ham-fisted obit written with facts that miss the heart. Then you cry some more.
Funny thing about Todd, he lived his life like it wasn’t some precious thing to keep on a shelf. He was out there, living it, chasing it, wadding it up and shooting it at some unseen basket beyond the horizon. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, it was more he wanted to taste everything there was, and wasn’t afraid to go hammer it.
And now, well, he’s gone. Those last tour dates already cancelled, perhaps a harbinger of a superhuman life lived beyond limits maybe a little too far from the shore. The scuttlebutt is he shouldn’t have passed away. The reality is: he’s gone.
For those of us left behind, it’s a reminder to get out there and live. Just do it, as Nike says. Listening to all the songs, thinking about all the conversations, the music listened to, the stories written for so many publications over the years, the thing that keeps coming back is that cock-eyed grin, so pleased with whatever.
Sure, he had demons. Don’t we all. But he also knew how to take a big bite out of life.
High, Lonesome and Then Some opens with “The Temptation To Exist,” a pretty straightforward admonition that seems like the perfect parting gift to us all. The chorus alone, so lean, so direct, serves as a directive for those of us who can never quite get the work done or the day finished.
You’ve got to live a little
Might be all we got
You’ve got to live a little
People die a lot
They do, look it up…
www.hollygleason.com