Favorite Pastime

All Todd Snider wants to do is play music, to sing for people and
write songs. All the time.

The headliner of this year’s Tucson Folk Festival has found that
it’s better for everyone if he focuses on that and not much else. His
managers and publicity people work to keep him in that bubble.

“I got a guitar because I was trying to beat depression,” Snider
explains. “I don’t, like, have to do business-y stuff, so I kinda
don’t. I mostly stick to art. The bills don’t come here. Only rarely do
I get involved in money. I had my money in a coffee can when I got my
first record contract. Jimmy Buffett was like, ‘You should give that
can to an accountant.'”

This makes what he’ll talk about during his Saturday workshop at the
festival, “Everything You Need to Know About the Music Business,” a
real source of curiosity.

“Every time I meet young people, and they want advice about the
music business, I’m like, ‘I don’t know anything about it, man,'”
Snider admits. “I write songs all day. I’m practicing; I’m making a set
list. I play guitar and piano and harmonica all day long.”

And perhaps that is the most important thing for would-be Idols to
know.

The 24th Annual Tucson Folk Festival is, as always, free, thanks to
the volunteer Tucson Kitchen Musicians Association. Many of Tucson’s
finest local acoustic musicians will perform across the festival’s four
stages. While Snider headlines on Saturday night, the festival will
also feature bluegrass musicians Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, Grammy
winners for their children’s album Bon Appétit! Musical Food
Fun, on Saturday evening. Folk icon Eric Andersen will perform
Sunday evening.

Todd Snider has a well-earned reputation as a crowd pleaser. He
follows the wry tradition of Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers, but with a
postmodern irony and no small dose of bar talk. His songs are hilarious
and insightful. That’s evidenced by the song from his 1994 debut,
Songs for the Daily Planet, that first got him national attention:
“Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues.” It’s also evidenced by a song from
his upcoming Yep Roc album, The Excitement Plan, produced by Don
Was and due in June: “America’s Favorite Pastime” is an account of how
Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Doc Ellis once threw a no-hitter on
acid.

Many of Snider’s performances (including the first time he played
“America’s Favorite Pastime” for Was) are available on YouTube. His
fans also maintain an extensive site, www.eighteenminutes.com, which
publishes set lists and photos from performances, lyrics and more.

Snider’s decision to become a singer/songwriter was precipitous,
coming out of a hopelessness that led to enlightenment.

“I was sitting on this roof in California. These guys had told me
that their parents said I couldn’t stay on their couch no more,” Snider
says ruefully. “I was sitting there drinking on this roof, and these
cops came, and I realized that they were surrounding me, you know?
Somebody thought I was going to jump off this roof. I saw them and I
thought, ‘Man, I can do anything I want. I can do anything.’

“In that moment,” he recalls, “I decided I want to make up songs and
be a singer: ‘I wanna be a singer.’ I felt like I got to make that
decision, because I didn’t have any goals or plans or money. I don’t
know why, but it was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna be a singer; what’s the plan?
There isn’t one!'”

Eric Andersen is one of the heavies of modern folk music. Coming out
of Greenwich Village in the early ’60s, his peers were Tom Paxton, Phil
Ochs, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and young Bob Dylan. Highly literate songs
like “Thirsty Boots,” “Close the Door Lightly When You Go” and “Violets
of Dawn” became standards.

“Most musicians went to New York for the folk revival,” he explains
by phone. “I went to San Francisco, because I was interested in the
Beat writers more than I was in Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Tom
Paxton found me in a coffeehouse where I was playing with Janis Joplin
and Dino Valente (Quicksilver Messenger Service founder and writer of
“Get Together”). He brought me back to New York for that beginning
songwriting scene. So I was informed from another set of
influences.”

While his early traditional work would have been enough to secure a
place in music history, it was his masterpiece 1972 pop album, Blue
River, featuring admirer Joni Mitchell on the title
cut, that cemented his reputation as one of the most articulate and
profound songwriters of the period.

His 1989 comeback, Ghosts Upon the Road, raised the bar
again. His voice had deepened, and his writing, still poignant and
sharply observant, had darkened, tinged by his years living in
Europe.

He’s followed that with a slow but steady stream of albums that have
included covers of tunes written by his fellow ’60s songwriters and
works Andersen co-wrote with the late Townes Van Zandt.

Andersen is currently working on a novel and has completed an essay
for the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
Later this summer, he will travel to Paris to headline the musical
portion of a tribute to the book that, along with Kerouac’s On the
Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, defined Beat literature.

Meanwhile, at the Tucson Folk Festival, Andersen will be reunited
for several songs with bassist Harvey Brooks, who played on Andersen’s
early Vanguard albums. Brooks now lives in Tucson.

Andersen will also conduct a Sunday workshop on songwriting, a craft
that he acknowledges is tough to teach.

“On the face of it, it’s a magical process,” he admits. “It’s very
difficult to explain anything like that. You have to be in it, and when
you’re there, you think you could explain it to anyone. Then, of
course, when the song is written, the bubble pops, and you’re
wondering, ‘What the hell did I just do?’ We’re going to try to recover
those memories.”

This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.