October 14, 2022 - Great American Music Hall - San Francisco, CA

Setlist

The Get Together
Is This Thing Working?
[Open Mic / 15 Minutes Story]
Ascending Into Madness
[Loretta Lynn Story]
Everything It Takes [Lynn]
[Cash Cabin Story]
The Ghost of Johnny Cash
Easy Money
Moon Child [Walker]
[Talkin' Seattle / Cattle Call Story]
Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues
[Bob Mercer Story]
Beer Run
[Handsome John Intro] > Handsome John
Angel From Montgomery [Prine]
[Jeff Austin Story]
America's Favorite Pastime
Greencastle Blues
[Train Song Intro] > Play a Train Song
Can't Complain
Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern > [Hill Country Goodbye Story]

Encore:
San Francisco Bay Blues [Fuller]
[Where Will I Go] > Working on a Song > The Get Together

Audio

SOURCE: Matrix | QUALITY: A | COMPLETE: Yes | LENGTH: 88:47 | TAPER: Todd Snider Live
NOTES: Not available for sharing.

Notes

Variations

On Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues:

Transcript

AUDIENCE MEMBER
Happy birthday, Todd!

TODD SNIDER
Oh, yeah. It's my birthday a couple days ago. 

Alright. Let's start with a story.

[The Get Together]

Let me try this thing for a sec.

[Is This Thing Working?]

Oh, hell yeah. I came out and picked a couple of pretty challenging guitar ones to start with. 

If you're a guitar player and you're like, "Oh, what the fuck," I was just kinda making that up as I went along. I'll do it better later in the night, I guess. 

I don't know about that.

I've been doing this for as long as I can remember. Thirty years, I've been traveling around singing like this by myself. I've been playing here since the nineties. I remember my first show here.

[Applause]

Oh, thank you.

My main hero has been doing it since the fifties, and he's in here tonight. Ramblin' Jack Elliott's in here tonight.

When I first started singing and thinking about living this life, I had a guitar. I was already on the sofa circuit, as they say. I had learned a few chords and I made up three songs. And I took them down to this open mic where you had to play your own songs. And the guy before me got up and played a Willie Nelson song.

I didn't think of it as narc-ing at the time. I just thought of it as not wanting to follow some guy who got to play a Willie Nelson song. And this is the first time I ever played. 

I went up to the lady with the sheet that I signed in on. I said, "That's a Willie Nelson song."

And she said, "Well, Willie Nelson sings it, but he wrote it."

Oh, shit. Really, just a ton of light bulbs went off. I didn't know that you could make up a song that somebody else sung. I didn't know that you could be in music without everybody knowing who you were all the time. I just didn't know anything about music, especially about trying to make any more off of it than busking.

And so after I got done playing my songs, the microphone and everything, I went right up to that guy and I said, "I wanna do, what you do."

And he said, "Didn't you just go right after me?"

And I said, "Yeah. But I wanna make a living at it."

And he said, "Well, then you gotta get better."

And that's a true story.

I asked him. I said, "How do you do that?"

And he said he didn't have a specific theory, but he'd heard one on how you could get better at making up songs. He told me that if I kept my life ... he said, "If you keep your life in a situation where you can pack up everything you own inside of fifteen minutes and be moved out of wherever you are, and if you live in a situation where some shit like that might happen to you every once in a while and you'd be forced to execute that maneuver." He said "Your life may never really come together, but you'll always be getting better at making up songs."

I don't know if that's true, but I bought into it.

It takes me a lot of discipline to keep my life as fucked up as I keep it, I'll tell you that.

[Ascending Into Madness]

I've got this story I do wanna tell you that, I told it the other night.

When I was, I think I was in my forties or, I'm 55 now, so it's been about fifteen years ago. Maybe I just turned 40. And for a long time, my closest friend has been married to Loretta Lynn's daughter, Peggy.

So for years, in that house, when she is around music, when Loretta's around their music, they hear mine, you know, in and among all this other stuff. And that's really where she hears music. And so, somebody asked, her manager asked her to make a list of all the current musicians, and she wrote my name, as people that she wanted to write with.

She didn't know that was just my friend listening to me. She thought that I was really famous and rich and she died thinking that. She thought I was being humble.

She invited me out to her office and we made up a song called Don't Tempt Me, Baby. And we laughed and I felt like I had made a friend, you know. And then she called me a couple of times and just to check in.

And then I heard from her again. She wanted to try to make up another song and asked if I'd come out to the house. So I went out there and she had this songwriting shack, she called it, with a bunch of guitars. We were sitting out there, playing guitar, talking about what we could sing about, and she said, "Why don't you go see if there's anything in that refrigerator there, Todd?"

And I said, "Okay."

So I opened this refrigerator and a bunch of yellow legal note pads with her writing all start falling out like they're packed in there. Like, hundreds of them. It's got little bits of lyrics that she'd left or hadn't finished or anything like that.

And she said, "Why don't you smoke one of those doobies you're smoking? Go through some of that and see if something jumps out at you."

I saw on the paper, it said, "I love you more than..."

There was a bunch, but one jumped out at me: "I love you more than she ever will, but the only way she can get a man is steal. I don't know if I should tell you this or not, but she's got everything it takes to take everything you've got."

And she said, "Oh, yeah. I remember that little bitch."

And she said, "You wanna do that?"

She said, "Well, sing it."

And I'd only read it before, so I went back in and I picked up those words again.

[Everything It Takes [Lynn]]

You wanna hear another thing? You won't believe this and then the whole rest of the show, you'll be going, "Bullshit."

And I'll tell you this story and you can believe it or not. You can ask John Carter Cash if it's true or not. And then I'll play this. And then and then we'll just do whatever anybody wants. I've already played a bunch. I already acted like I was prepared, right?

So Loretta is gonna record that song and she said I could go with her. And she was gonna record it out at the cabin behind Johnny Cash's house where he passed away. I think Ramblin' Jack recorded a song there with him. So I got to go see this place and watch her record there with John Carter.

And then after, I had a dream that I was asleep on the floor there, and Johnny Cash kicked me and said, "You're missing it, man."

I still don't know what that meant, but I had been friends with John Carter and so we talked every once in a while. So the next time I saw him, I was out at the house again and I told him that story, and he said, "Do you think this place is haunted?"

And I said, "No."

And he said, "Loretta thinks it's haunted."

Now, ready? Okay.

He told me that she parks her bus there next to this studio when she's recording and that he can see her from his room. There's the big house and the little house and he can see the bus from his window in his room.

And one night, he heard loud country music at, like, three in the morning. And he looked out of his window to see that she was spinning around like a teenager dancing in this grass below his window.

Sounds unreal, but he said true.

And then, the next day he asked her what she was doing.

And she said, "I was dancing with your dad, John Carter."

I don't know if she meant that or was trying to be funny, but the next night, he said she did that again.

And then he said, "You wanna try to do a song about it?"

And I said, "Alright."

So I'll play this and then I'll...

[The Ghost of Johnny Cash]

Let's think of something I can do. Easy Money? Did I hear that? Moon Child is a good one. A weird one.

I'll do Easy Money though. I've been playing this one for so long. I love this one. It's been an old friend, I'll tell you that.

[Easy Money]

I say I play it a hundred times and then I fuck up the words to it. I was trying to hit a cool guitar lick, and I should've just left it alone.

[Easy Money]

[Request from audience]

I already promised this guy this one, but I'll do that next. I promise.

I'll do them all. I know all this shit.

But this one I don't know very good. 

Remember ... Moon Child. Jerry Jeff Walker.

I know I've told you that story a million times or many stories about Jerry Jeff. Ramblin' Jack was his hero. But he had this song, I got to, know him, and I knew all his songs. And one of my things that, I guess, I'm proudest of is that sometimes he would call me in my hotel from his hotel and ask me the words to one of his songs because he wanted to play it.

Yeah. And this one, he asked me to teach him. It's on a record that's out of print.

[Moon Child [Walker]]

I always love playing him, man. Oh, I promised that guy...

[Audience requests]

I already promised a guy. I'm gonna play my hit. See, you don't even remember that I had one.

Yeah. 1994. Made number 100, Top 100. I think we all remember where we were when we first heard this groundbreaking number.

But I tell you, before I play it, to make it make sense ...  maybe not. You know, if you're young, you just aren't gonna understand it. But in the nineties, before I had made an album, I was doing this thing. I had learned this thing. I was busking and then I started singing in clubs and I'd found this way of life that was working for me. And it was a way of getting away from everything.

And then I started getting offers to make records, which I thought sounded great because I'd go everywhere. Probably get some money. But then they all wanted me to be grunge because that's what was going on at the time. And I wanted to be too rock for country and too country for rock and all that.

And so at that time, they were having these, what they call, cattle calls. They may still do it now where a bunch of young people, they'll take about 20 or 30 of these young people that are about to get a record contract. All the record companies will come and watch these kids play under pressure for them. I woke up the morning of one of these things knowing that I was gonna go play, and then afterwards they were gonna ask me to be grunge.

And so I made up this talking blues song. A guy named Keith Sykes had showed me what it was.

[Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues]

After that, the guy, Bob Mercer, he said, "If you'll put that song on there I don't give a shit what you do with the other songs."

Nothing had to be grunge.

What else can we do?

AUDIENCE MEMBER
Beer Run!

TODD
Of course. Of course. That's my other main jam. 

[Beer Run]

Whenever I hear young people telling me about some new young singer, I'm always like, "Yeah. But what's his song spell, though?"

What's his song spell? Nothing, probably.

Speaking of making up songs, I've been doing it my whole life and one of the best friends I ever had at making it, was a guy named John Prine.

[Applause]

He came up with his own nickname for himself. He would say when he met people that he hadn't met before, this was later in his life, but if he met a stranger, he'd say, "I'm John Prine. Nice to meet you. You can call me Handsome John."

Anyway, I made this song for him.

[Handsome John]

Should I try one of his?

AUDIENCE MEMBER
Angel From Montgomery!

TODD
Alright. I'll try that. I'll try that. I'll do that.

[Angel From Montgomery [Prine]]

I haven't done Doc Ellis in a long time.

Jeff Austin, the late great Jeff Austin, inspired this song because ... we were getting ready to play at the Folks Festival in Lyons, Colorado, the Yonder Mountain String Band and myself. And he said to me, "Hey, me and the guys are gonna drop acid before our set. You wanna do it?"

I was playing by myself and I didn't think ... I was just starting to get into that crowd and, you know, tripping. They ruined me eventually. I've got, like, two brain cells left. But I couldn't believe they were gonna do it before the show.

Now I know that's nothing to these jam bands. I was in the jam band. We were on LSD the entire time. But it was new to me and I was like, "Can you believe we have this fucking job where you're gonna take LSD before work and it's probably gonna go great?! And everybody's gonna tell you you did fantastic."

And that is what happened.

But he said that wasn't the only case. He said a baseball player, one time, took a bunch of LSD the day before he was supposed to pitch. He didn't realize how far the day before had got into it. 

[America's Favorite Pastime]

What else? What else? Stump me. Stump me.

[Audience requests]

Greencastle Blues.

This one, I came up with ... you know, you get a phone call if you go to jail. That's real. You get one phone call.

I was married at the time and this was my phone call. I said, "Baby...

[Greencastle Blues]

AUDIENCE MEMBER
Play a train song!

TODD
Oh, yeah. That's a good idea.

AUDIENCE MEMBER
I know.

TODD
Alright, alright. It's not sports.

I appreciate y'all knowing these songs and I appreciate you singing them, too. I'm having a lot of fun. I hope y'all having a good time.

This might be my favorite one. I'll play you my two favorites in a row. Is that alright?

This one is my favorite because it's about, well, all my songs are real songs about shit that happened. I never could do, like, the "you got to know when the hold" ... like, the guy on the train who meets the guy who did cards. I always have to actually do it. 

So this guy, this is a true story, and I just know that he would like there being a song about him.

[Play a Train Song]

[Can't Complain]

Thank you for being so kind to an old man. Letting me sing my songs for you.

This is the oldest one that I play. It didn't come on the album til the fourth one, but I'd had it, I'd made it up when I was nineteen.

[Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern]

I was driving in my Buick LeSabre when I made this up. I was needing some reassurance. I had just been broken up with by my girlfriend. It was for the best, [since] she didn't believe in what I was doing. 

And she was always nagging at me. Just chipping at me all the time like, "Oh, you used my credit card. You don't have a job. You wrecked my car. You pushed my dad."

Just, bah bah bah...

I know, right? Some girls.

One day, I come home from a long day getting fucked up in the park with my friend. She's standing there in the doorway tapping her foot. I can tell she's mad at me. She looks at the guitar and she says, "Tomorrow we're gonna pawn that thing."

I thought, "What?! What?!"

I said, "Why are we gonna do that?"

She said, "We're gonna pawn it and spend the money on things we need and then you're gonna get a job and start acting like a grown fucking man."

I didn't know where all this crazy talk was coming from but I knew I had to think on my feet. And I was sitting there and then it hit me.

I said to myself, "Todd Snider, you can be out of here inside of fifteen minutes now."

I took that old guitar, got my Buick LeSabre, I started rolling down the road to anywhere, wondering where I was going.

I look up ahead on the road and there's these two cars. They're driving awful close to each other and then, bam, they hit each other. And they both roll off the highway into the, what do they call it, the median, I think. 

So next thing I know, I'm pulled over and I'm running toward these two cars. I can hear the sirens in the distance. I know somebody's already called the police and I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do over there at those car. But I thought it would just be okay to just tell them not to worry.

So I go over to that first car. I asked the lady if she's alright. She said she was alright. I could hear them sirens in the distance. I knew somebody had already called the police.

I said, "Don't worry about it. It's gonna be alright.

I ran over to that other car. I said to that woman, "You okay?"

She said, "Fuck, no, I'm not okay, man"

I didn't see a scratch on her.

I said, "What's the matter?"

She reached down under her seat and she pulled out a pillowcase-sized bag of marijuana. This was the eighties in Texas and I could hear that siren in the distance. I knew that somebody had already called the police, but it made me feel good to be able to say, "Ma'am, you don't gotta worry about it. Everything's gonna be okay."

I took that marijuana and I drove that car as far as I could from the scene of that incident. And I felt like it was the universe trying to tell me that everything was gonna be okay.

[Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern]

-- ENCORE --

Okay, I just a second ago learned the complexities of this. So give me a second. I'm gonna try something.

[San Francisco Blues [Fuller]]

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Ramblin' Jack, for teaching the world that song. Boy, what an honor to know Ramblin' Jack Elliott. He invented this job.

I'm gonna leave you with my favorite one.

No, you know, my favorite one isn't finished yet. But this song I made up about my favorite one.

It started, I shit you not, on that drive I was saying when I just got that marijuana and I'm driving. I ended up in Memphis. And after I drove off with that marijuana, I started making up a song called Where Will I Go Now That I'm Goin'.

And in that Buick LeSabre, I'll never forget. And by the time I got to Memphis, I thought I had the song, but when I got there it didn't feel right to me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER
Working on a Song!

TODD
And, yeah. That's what I was, yeah. That's this.

Because then I put it back in the shop and waited for another girl to dump me and took it back out and tried. And then, you know, I've just worked on it forever. And then finally, I made up this song about it.

[Working on a Song]

Y'all, thank you again for letting me come sing for you all these years. It's always such a privilege to come out here.

Thank you.