The Lost Chord #5: Todd Snider and Others

I first heard of Todd Snider in 1998. He started a one-hour episode of Austin City Limits with Ryan Adams's then-band Whiskeytown, and it's a shame it's not available on DVD, because it was something to see. Snider was working with a band called The Nervous Wrecks then with Will Kimbrough playing lead guitar, and they were electric in every sense of the word. It was like being in the middle of a fireworks show. Snider was so intense, it was as if he saw this as his one shot at stardom, that he might never be allowed onstage again, and he was determined to make the most of it.

He certainly did that. He did a song called "Alright Guy" which was the funniest song I'd heard since the early days of John Prine. He did "Stuck All Night" which sounded like "Six Days on the Road" after some serious brain surgery. He did "Somebody's Coming." He did his greatest hit, "Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues," an account of a West Coast grunge band so alternative they refuse to do acoustical versions of the electrical songs they had refused to record in the first place.

All these skewed songs sounded so fresh and original it was like no one else but Todd Snider could have written and performed these songs. At the same time, his influences were apparent, and they were impeccable influences. He was obviously a fan of John Prine—he had the same easy, low-key rapport with an audience that had served Prine so well and the same ability to write songs that were funny and serious and insightful all at once. The Dylan influences were apparent, right down to the harmonica brace. His "Talkin' Seattle" sounded like Dylan's "Talkin' New York" which Dylan had, in his turn, swiped from Woody Guthrie's 1930 song "Talkin' Dust Bowl Blues." Who knew where Guthrie had swiped it.

I was a little put out that there was someone this good around that I didn't know about. This was before everything was instantly available on the Internet. So, the next day, I went to the library in Hohenwald, where they kept back issues of a now-defunct music magazine called Stereo Review, and began to search through music reviews for the past few years. And there he was. I found a review for an album called Songs for the Daily Planet, released on MCA Records. Stereo Review had been impressed enough to make it their "Record of the Month," for whatever month the album was released, a four-star review that hailed the second coming of the topical songwriter, and very few bad things for Snider.

There was no place to buy music in Hohenwald and the next day my son Chris drove to the nearest town that had a record shop to search for Todd Snider records. He returned not only with Daily Planet, but with an album called Step Right Up, also on MCA, which was his second album, and which blooms the field of promises his first album had made. They were the best records I had heard from a new artists since John Prine's debut album in 1971.

Some of the songs were amazing. "Enough" on Step Right Up was an intense, mysterious you-are-there meditation on how the breakdown of communication dooms a relationship. The nature of the relationship remained unstated when the pain and loss were all too real.

As my writing began to be published, I wrote occasional music pieces for The Oxford American, and when Happy to Be Here was released, I reviewed it for the magazine. By now, he had left MCA and was recording for John Prine's Oh Boy label and was doing his solo-barefoot-troubadour thing. I was hanging around Oxford a lot then and staying at the Ole Miss Motel (a motel with hearts painted on the doors) when Snider came to town and played a bar called Proud Larry's. After the show, he tracked me down in the middle of the night and turned up at my motel room with a sack of beer under his arm.

It turned out to be as interesting and insightful as his music was and we had a few beers and talked about songs and the nature of the music business and he told me about the awe he felt being in a room that contained, all at once, Steve Earle and Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. "I just sat over the in the corner and kept my mouth shut," he recalled.

Since then, Snider has changed labels a few times, but has never been less than a serious musician and his music has been a viable alternative to the platinum-selling instantly disposable superstar crap that occupies the charts and passes for country music these days.

Snider has another major-label deal with New Door, a subsidiary of Universal, and his tours have been going well, so maybe things are looking up. The newest thing I have by him is on his Aimless Records label, a live album entitled The Storyteller. The Storyteller is pretty much what it sounds like Snider, relaxed and expansive, telling stories that introduce his songs the way John Prine used to do—and is well worth checking out. Other good albums by Snider are The Excitement Plan and The Devil You Know. Snider deserves more space than this column permits, and I plan to do an interview and an in-depth profile later. The album The Devil You Know contains a song that is one of Snider's very best, "Thin Wild Mercury." That "thin wild mercury" sound was the way Bob Dylan described the music he was hearing in his head about the time he was recording Blonde on Blonde. Snider's "Thin Wild Mercury" is a recounting of Dylan putting Phil Ochs out of a limousine one winter night onto cold New York streets after a dispute about a song Dylan had recorded. It's a true story and a brilliant idea for a song, and Snider uses it as a meditation on the nature of chance and luck in the roll-of-the-dice world of music stardom: Either you become a superstar like Dylan or you fall through the cracks like Ochs. Of course, Dylan was a genius and Ochs wasn't, but it's a great song nonetheless. It could almost serve as a meditation on the ups and downs of Snider's own career. "Things will go either way," the song muses, "or they won't." Things seem to be going Todd Snider's way lately. Let's hope they continue to do so.

John Hiatt: Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns

(New West Records, 2011)

One of the most important things a recording artist needs to know is how to make records that sound good and John Hiatt certainly knows that. Either that, or he has good luck with producers. Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns, his most recent album on New West, and his previous release, are both great-sounding records. This record was produced by Kevin Shirley, and he's found just the right heavy-on-the-drums-and-acoustic rhythm guitar sound that best sets these songs off. It doesn't hurt that Hiatt has the sort of voice, on some of the songs like "I Love that Girl" and "All the Way Under," that evokes a sort of Barry White/Memphis soul sound. A curiously post-apocalyptic feel runs through the album and some of the songs seem to be about taking stock after things have settled down a little. "Down Around My Place" reminds one vaguely of Bob Dylan's song "Blind Willie McTell," from back in the '80s, and seems to be about Nashville's disastrous flood from last year and "When New York Had Her Heart Broke" concerns itself with the aftermath of 9/11.

Folks sometimes complain about today's music and the perils of being a singer/songwriter, but labels like New West should be appreciated for giving talented artists channels for getting their work out into the world. There's good music out there, especially in the Americana and No Depression field. You just have to look around a little for it.

Hear This! "I Love That Girl" by John Hiatt

Preachin' the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House

(Oxford University Press, 2011)

by Daniel Beaumont

When Son House was having a bad day—and along towards the end he had a lot of them—he could be hard to handle. He might not show up for concerts, or he might show up too drunk to perform, or without an instrument, having pawned his guitar that morning in order to get the money to buy whiskey. He might decide to sing a cappella hymns or preach a sermon instead of singing the blues. Son House was eternally caught between God and the Devil and he might try to drag you down to hell with the Devil's music or save your soul with a spiritual.

House was one of the old lost bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta, a sort of protégée of Charley Patton. House had been briefly recorded by the musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax, the man who had also gone onto the plantations and recorded Muddy Waters. These recordings sort of vanished into obscurity and House spent the ensuing years in timber camps and levee camps and playing from street corners, preaching from pulpits, chasing women who had the seemingly endless patience to put up with his infidelities. House's career was rejuvenated during the folk-blues boom by young enthusiasts like Dick Waterman, who had gone looking for House in the Delta but found him instead in Rochester, New York. House could be very confrontational (he even admitted to killing a couple of men and had done time for manslaughter) and never enjoyed the success achieved by more accessible bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt, but his passionate performances on songs like "Death Letter" ensured that he would not be forgotten. Blues lover Daniel Beaumont has written Preachin' the Blues, published by the Oxford University Press, an account of House's life and times and women that is, at once, scholarly and readable with almost the flow of a novel. Beaumont has researched census records and whatever documents House left behind and paints an indelible portrait of someone who was much more than a statistic. House was a deeply flawed but richly gifted human, who gave the world a few songs that will be around as long as the world is.