Todd Snider – Don’t hurry, be happy
Another important link in the chain was producer Ray Kennedy, Steve Earle’s “Twangtrust” production partner. “He’s the kind of person who calls home sick from the studio. He’s there right now, I promise you,” Snider chuckles. “Makin’ records is fun, but I’m not generally somebody that you’d call a studio rat; I’m the kind of person who tries to sneak out for a beer every chance I get. But he made it comfortable for me to stay there, and he encouraged me to listen to more things. And he didn’t like to do anything if I wasn’t there, which was cool.
“He’s like a musical mad scientist. One morning, my wife and I got there early, and there’s this head boppin’ around in the dumpster, and we heard this banging sound coming outta this dumpster full of garbage. I looked and I said, ‘Honey, is that Ray in there?’ And it was.
“He was hittin’ this pipe against this piece of, I don’t know…some weird box. And he stuck his head up and saw us, and he looked a little embarrassed, but he kept on hittin’ ’em together and said, ‘Hey, don’t you think this sounds cool?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ So there they are now in the middle of ’45 Miles’ — these two pieces of garbage.”
As for Snider’s own studio efforts, “I went in and did the guitar and vocal parts live; I didn’t even use headphones,” he says. “Then, we put everything else on top of that. There are three songs that are completely live [“45 Miles”, “The Long Year” and “What’s Wrong With You”], but the rest we had our friends come in and play on afterward.”
Among the musicians in the credits are Kimbrough, Kennedy, Spampinato, Holsapple, fiddler Tammy Rogers, Johnny Neal, Rivers Rutherford, and well-traveled bassist Keith Christopher. And: “We were lookin’ for a tapdancer for ‘The Ballad Of The Devil’s Backbone Tavern,’ and Kim Richey started braggin,’ so we got her on there.”
For Snider, though, “probably the biggest deal to me was Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns. Before we made the record, I went to lunch with him and asked if we could make a folk record with horns. He said he thought we could. So he came in and wrote all the horn parts. That was really exciting for me. We’d jam at night, and all of my revolving guitar-player friends took turns coming down at night so they could say they jammed with Wayne Jackson. And he loved it. Boy, he’d stay there all night.”
Snider used to stay out all night himself on the road, but those days seem to be beyond him now. “The first few years, all of us wanted to see just how weird things could get,” he recalls, “and that was fun. But then, you know, it ends up not being that weird. Over time, you don’t get in every car that opens the door anymore; you don’t go to every house that throws a party.
“I don’t spend as much time at the place where I’m playing as I used to, and I usually go back to the room afterward. My wife and I like to explore new towns. We have a big 16-passenger van that we built a bed in the back of. When we get to places, we spend more time exploring the towns in the days than at nights. I’ve kinda seen them all at night. We have friends in a lot of the towns now.
“I still like touring,” he continues. “I love to drive; I love to look around. I’ve been touring solo now for the last year and a half. I’m going out solo again this year and then, maybe next year, depending on how I feel and how the money looks, I might get a band together again.”
In the meantime, there’s a new place to call home. “We live in east Nashville,” Snider says. “I like it. What I think a lot of people forget about Nashville is that Steve Earle and Tommy Womack and Dan Baird and Billy Joe Shaver and Steve Forbert and Bobby Bare, Jr. and Bob Delevante and Kevin Gordon and Kevin Welch and Tim Carroll and Greg Trooper and Nanci Griffith and just dozens and dozens of others are living here and making really great music.
“I’m really not here that much, but the Nashville of TNT, I hardly see that town at all. I mean, I’m on the road a lot, but it feels like there’s a big change comin’ on.”
Jim Musser is a gimpy-legged ex-meat cutter and record store rat who’s blindly surfing the backwash of this current economic tsunami in Iowa City, Iowa.