Todd Snider is dead That’s all we know for sure.
Perhaps the laid-back, self-deprecating, world-bemused singer-songwriter was the victim of a mugging which he claimed happened a few weeks ago outside of a club in Salt Lake City, where he had just performed. Or, stoned and drunk, perhaps he had fallen down in his tour bus.
At the hospital, where stitches closed the wounds in his head, Snider’s his erratic behavior led to him being booked on charges of disorderly conduct, threat of violence, and criminal trespassing.
Every day, the story evolves a little more. The cops are now discounting Snider’s claim that he was the victim of a mugging, and going with the stoned, drunk and falling-down scenario.
Further weakened from pneumonia and sepsis, this week the 59-year-old Snider died. That part of the story is not in dispute.
Snider was a favorite of mine. Because I enjoy that laid-back, self-deprecating, world-bemused singer-songwriter scene. I interviewed him a couple of times while working at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Here’s one of those stories previewing his show, from about 10 years ago, at Flower City Station.
The warning signs were there.
Singer-songwriter Todd Snider, bearer of bad news
By Jeff Spevak
This is an odd interview. Perhaps my oddest of all time. When I call Todd Snider, I find he’s fled the hip songwriter scene of East Nashville to live with a couple of guys in a house on a lake outside of Nashville. “I haven’t been here very long,” Snider says. “I just got divorced. The place doesn’t even have any furniture.”
But there was a boat. A little sailboat sold to Snider real cheap. As a long-wandering social minstrel and societal jester, he’s not too experienced with boats. The guys woke up one morning and discovered the boat was gone. Stolen, they assumed.
He’s a fine songwriter, but it’s his between-song stories that are legendary. Incredibly funny tales about getting beat up in high school in Oregon, running off to Texas to meet icons like Jerry Jeff Walker, playing dive bars, jail. And drugs, Snider has plenty of stories about drugs. He makes no secret of the fact that he loves drugs, despite several trips to rehab.
It’s not acid that fuels this interview, Snider assures me. Then perhaps painkillers are at work the morning I call? He has spent the last year propped up by a doctor-approved cocktail of prescription drugs for his bad back.
There are many themes to Snider, but looming largest is anti-authoritarianism. “I’m part vandalism and part rock,” he says. “I’d much rather spray-paint ‘Metallica’ on the wall than go to anybody’s church. And I don’t like Metallica. But you spray-paint that on the side of a school and it is profound and beautiful.
“I don’t think getting good grades makes you a good kid. I think dropping out of school does. Sorry.”
Maybe this anger shouldn’t be unexpected from a guy whose first album included a stop-you-in-your tracks song about child abuse.
“I used to be just as animated about country music,” he says. “I just don’t care anymore. There was a time when I was studying what John Prine was doing today, what Jerry Jeff Walker had for breakfast today.”
Snider’s a cheerful, goofy, barefoot stoner onstage, but he’s bearing bad news. “I think human beings are awful — we turn into a tornado and ruin everything,” he says. “I don’t care for democracy, I don’t care for the American system. This lie that everybody has a chance to win. The truth is, there is zero motivation for somebody to succeed in this country. America is not designed for everyone to succeed. It’s designed from its core to be full of losers.
“This has never been a free country, it has never been a positive place, it’s never been a non-war driven country at any time.”
He narrows the target a bit with his song, “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White American Male.” That’s actually the same crowd that Prine lampoons, although he’s more gentle about it. “The American Christian is a fraternity nobody really studies,” Snider says. “They only use it to band together against people.
“As my life work, I want to be the hassle to people like that.”
He’s doing it under different guises — aliases like Blind Lemon Pledge. He’s the singer and writes the lyrics for a band called Hard Working Americans, but insists he’s a secondary piece.
“Music really, really helps people, and the lyric part is the least impactful,” he says. “Drums are really profound. Words? I don’t think the alphabet has any value to it whatsoever. I don’t think people have ever used numbers to any good effect.
“The world is taking place in one pineal gland, projecting out on everyone. I just read this morning that your brain makes 400 billion decisions every minute. I’ve been reading a lot of quantum logic. I’ve even been in a mental home.”
Where is all of this leading?
“Hopefully, I’ll be dead,” Snider says. “Today would be good. I’m just convinced it wouldn’t be a problem for me.”
I tell Snider he’s really scaring me. Isn’t he afraid he’ll miss something when he’s gone?
“I’ve been here 48 years, and I do not feel there is anything on this planet that is worth hanging around for,” he says. “A couple of Dylan records, close.”
Or, maybe not close enough. A few moments later, seemingly suggesting that nothing anyone does will make a difference, Snider says, “I would so much rather fart than write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”
For the sake of the room’s atmosphere next Tuesday, I’m hoping he doesn’t feel that way about his own classically subversive songs, like “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” and “Beer Run.” I tell Snider that, when I interviewed him two years ago, he sounded like a completely different guy.
“Today’s a different day,” he says.
And tomorrow may be different as well. The wind shifts, and maybe you come back to where you were before. Like Snider’s missing sailboat. The wind changed, or perhaps a new current caught it. But almost weirdly, like it was being guided by an unseen hand, that boat drifted right back to the house. And Snider realized, he’d probably never tied it to the dock.
The song is a beautiful piece of 1960s pop. Melancholy, yet upbeat. Confronting an issue – loneliness – and offering hope:
There is quite a distance between a cry for help and the statement made on Christmas Day by a strange loner who rigged his RV with explosives, drove to downtown Nashville and staged his own death to the soundtrack of Petula Clark singing “Downtown.” The fact that no one was killed does not ameliorate the darkness of the act. He knew better. The people around him who knew he was building bombs knew better.
As much as I’d like it to be true, the arts and science are not generally accepted as reflective of truth. We don’t look that deep into ourselves. The internet justification for fact-free beliefs is “owning the libs.” Downtown may be where, “The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares,” but the internet is not such a place. It is a room of darkness and separation, it nurtures troubles in the same way that a box of manure in the basement feeds a crop of mushrooms.
My Friends Rick and Monica have a 1950s-era bomb shelter in their basement. Rick turned it into a rec room, and put the pool table right in the middle of it.