After almost four years in Austin, Snider got a call from his dad in Memphis. The elder Snider had run into a bartender who was Keith Sykes’ sister-in-law, so Todd loaded up the car and headed out.
“I drove there and found out where he lived,” Snider recalled, “and then I drove over to his house. I wanted to learn how to play boogie guitar. I just knocked on the door and told him what I wanted, and he let me come in. He showed me some things on the guitar and, eventually, about a million other things.
“From him, I got into Booker T. & The MG’s, Otis Redding, all that Stax stuff. I mean, he was more of a folkie, but he was livin’ in Memphis, so he got me way into that kind of thing. He was the person who called the record company so I could get a contract.”
Snider’s brash, outspoken take on life at the end of the century on his debut album had many people tagging him as something of a Gen-X spokesman. But the band inevitably fell out of the label’s good graces when sales figures took a downturn with the next two records. Snider also admits his bizarre behavior at an L.A. showcase for Viva Satellite may have had more than a little to do with the ending of his tenure with MCA.
“We were supposed to do this big showcase,” he recalled, “and I don’t know why, but after the second song, I just left. I went off the front of the stage and walked out the front door and down the street to a Chinese bar. I had a couple of beers and walked back to the hotel. When my manager caught up with me, he said, ‘Well, that was…interesting.’
“I can’t even hardly remember it. I never made any excuses. I regretted it for a while, but I can’t worry about it; it’s kind of funny now to look back on.”
Snider bears no apparent ill will toward his former label, an attitude that comes less from a Pollyanna approach than from a sincere appreciation of the positive opportunities MCA provided, along with a deep-seated philosophy about not wasting time with what’s in the rearview mirror. Even after three records over six years, he still has that “pinch me — am I dreaming?” love of the road musician’s life.
“I know this sounds like a cliche, but it was like a dream come true, for the most part,” he said. “I got to go around the world and make those records. Even now that I’m not with them, I can honestly say that those people [at MCA] were so good to me. They really tried and worked hard for us and let us make whatever music we felt like making. Even in the end, when it wasn’t working out financially for them, they could have been real shitty about it, but they were really helpful to get me with Oh Boy. I met a lot of good friends there that I consider my friends still.”
Snider had been touring for years with the Nervous Wrecks, but with the demise of the MCA deal, he found himself drifting back to that early inspiration Jerry Jeff had provided. “When the band first started to tour,” Snider says, “I had been playing solo for six years, playing with a band maybe ten nights a year. Then, that switched. Toward the end of the Viva Satellite tour, I was starting to get back into folk music. Plus, my ears began to hurt.
“So I started to listen to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie and all my old favorites. I’d never stopped listening to them, but they really got hold of me again. I started to get more into the words, spending a lot more time with the words where, with the band, if you found a groove, that was great; you just hurry up and make it rhyme.
“When MCA and the band was done, I decided I wanted to go back in the folk direction. I’d always wanted to combine my Texas folk influences with my Memphis influences, and I thought acoustic guitars with horns would be cool.”
He also wanted to take a different approach in selecting material for his next record. “My first three albums all had topics,” said Snider. “The first was ‘my generation,’ the second was ‘show biz’ and the third was ‘Memphis.’ I’d have a bunch of songs and then I’d trim them down to fit. There was nobody to say ‘no,’ and I’m glad of that; I think those records are fine. But I didn’t feel like I wanted to do that again. Not because I thought it was wrong, but because I had done it before.”
Oh Boy principals Prine, Al Bunetta and Dan Einstein turned out to be valuable assets toward that end. “I asked those three guys to be my sounding board. If all three of them didn’t like a song, I didn’t do it. They helped me with the topic, which was that all the songs would be autobiographical. I didn’t think I was ready to do that, but John convinced me that I could sing about myself and people would think it was about them, so it wouldn’t seem like this big self-indulgent thing. John just said that maybe it was about time I let people get to know me.”
