Hail, Hail Rock 'n Roll (Or: Todd Snider Rules)

Hi. I’m Ryan. I’ve written books about Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett. I was a sportswriter for a long time. Now I’m writing this. It’s a newsletter about the things we enjoy and that make us feel alive. It’s called Portfolio of Enthusiasms. It’s free, but we’d love it if you subscribed and/or shared with your friends.

Let’s start with an email, because Todd Snider sent a lot of lyric-shaped emails. We’ll end with an email, too, but that one’s newer. These first two are from a while back and a little background will help.

Street Roots is a newspaper you can pick up walking around Portland, Oregon. They ask for $1 but you should probably pay more if you can. It’s sold by people who are experiencing homelessness or poverty. People down on their luck. The kind of people Todd Snider so often empathized with and was sometimes mistaken for. His empathy rhymed and danced to simple melodies, and so he travelled millions of miles with it, ambling out onto thousands of stages where it underpinned a brilliant, beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, eclectic and adventurous catalog. He could turn a phrase and change how you saw the world.

“You seek adventure and you report back,” Snider said of his job. Todd Snider was an adventure. 

Anyway, those people — the down on their luck and in need of a hand — they buy copies of Street Roots for a quarter and sell them on the streets for a buck and keep the profit. It’s a good deal for the buyer. Street Roots does a lot of interesting work, including interviews with people like Todd Snider, who grew up nearby in Beaverton before setting out to California and Texas and eventually putting East Nashville, Tennessee on the map. In 2013, Todd did an interview with Street Roots ahead of a gig at the Oregon Zoo.

A little more than a month later, he popped into my inbox.

Ashley is Ashleigh Flynn. She’s great and had opened for Todd. By the time I suggested the Decemberists’ Chris Funk, Ashleigh had already reached out to him. But I was able to connect Todd with Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, the Minus 5, the Baseball Project and R.E.M. Scott loves songs and playing them as much as Todd did.

Recently laid off by The Oregonian newspaper, I was working on a book about Bruce Springsteen and was happy to do what little I could. It was fun getting pulled into Todd’s world.

We first met in 2006 when I profiled him ahead of the release of The Devil You Know. Our first interview, done next to a fire by Lake Michigan after a show, was mostly about stuff he loved: his East Nashville crew, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan’s New Morning, Chuck Berry riffs, John Prine and Kris Kristofferson songs. After that, we just sort of kept in touch. Off and on, here and there. For a while, he’d email on Saturday mornings to see how the Beaverton High School football team had done the night before.

Sometime in 2007, he asked if I could help him dig into an old Portland murder. That seems like a strange thing for an often-barefooted folk singer to wonder about but 1) murder ballads are plentiful, and 2) his father had known the victim, a guy Todd remembered as Willie Nelson.

“Battling Willie Nelson” (sometimes also “Willie Battling Nelson”) proved to be a tricky little mystery until I figured out the name Todd remembered was a boxing alias. In 1983, Harold Penland and his wife were murdered in their North Portland home. The case remains unsolved. "I don't know what my dad did with him,” Snider told me back then. “He might have been borrowing money from him ... My dad thought he was the neatest guy in the world.”

He was also something of an underworld figure. Phil Stanford, an Old Portland newspaper columnist, filled in a few more of Penland’s details. Todd turned the facts and faded memories (plus a few fictions) into a song about Slick Willie called “Unorganized Crime.” It’s on The Excitement Plan. Phil wanted to get Todd a copy of a book that included Penland’s story, and so I let Todd know. The next morning:

Israel Bayer was the executive director of Street Roots, and Todd did throw a kick ass show that helped raise some money and made a lot of people happy. Todd Snider did that better than anything. Every show felt like being given the antidote to cynicism. Because he meant it. Even when he was full of shit. Maybe especially then.

God he was funny. And incisive. “It ain’t the despair that gets you, it’s the hope,” he sang. That song’s called “The Big Finish.” He’d start shows with it.

Just listen to the people who know how hard it is to make poetry that sings.

“Todd’s catalog was vast and mythological,” Margo Price wrote. “His songwriting had an edge that was tough, tender, witty, dangerous, humorous, dark, self deprecating and self destructive.”

Kevin Kinney: “Poignant simple observations and street wise epiphanies.” 

Hayes Carll: “He inspired us to be artists, to be human, to be ourselves, to create, to laugh, to speak up, to turn  up, to take the piss, buck the system, point out the absurd, and to be the absurd. He was so brave and so sensitive, and so goddamn funny.”

So goddamn funny.

Todd Snider believed in songs and art and being yourself, and he believed defiantly in the face of a world working desperately to strip us of our beliefs and our humanity. All the money and the power the Musks and the Altmans can muster is trying like hell to drag us deep into the beige. Into a dull middle where there’s no good and no bad, only prompts and digital outputs.

To push back is to live big, love big and experience the big, wide, very real world and absorb all the wins and losses it hands out. Seek adventure and report back. Pick legit fights. Help others with theirs. “Stay low and wear bright colors,” Todd used to say.

I’m sure he could be a pain in the ass at times and a full-on problem at others. We all know he carried all kinds of pain. But he built communities. Of artists in East Nashville and beyond. Of fans, the Shitheads as they’re lovingly known. He was all the most interesting adjectives tucked under a hat with a flower in its band. 

Two years ago, he got in touch because he was thinking of writing another book and thought he might need a hand. We almost got started a couple of times. Once, I was just about on my way to the airport when the pause button got hit. Momentum stalled, other things happened. Time passed and I forgot all about it.

Until last month. On Oct. 17, he released High, Lonesome and then Some. It ends with “THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST”:

That rang a bell. A few days later, I checked my email and there was Todd.

Back when he was first thinking about that book (or at least when I learned that he was), he sent an initial list of chapter titles in ALL CAPS. He wanted to call the first, “MY FIRST BOOK WAS BETTER THAN THIS ONE WILL BE.” He wanted to close with, “THIS BOOK TURNED OUT BETTER THAN MY FIRST ONE.”

He’d endured a lot of loss in recent years. John Prine. Jerry Jeff Walker. Billy Joe Shaver. Neal Casal. Jeff Austin. Todd’s dog, Cowboy Jim. Jimmy Buffett. Probably more who didn’t make the headlines or into any interviews. All of them were on his mind. 

Chapter 2: “PEOPLE DIE A LOT, YOU GOTTA LIVE A LITTLE.”

And later, just before the the final chapter: “YOU GOTTA LIVE A LITTLE, PEOPLE DIE A LOT.”