You Asked, Todd Answered, Part 10

Todd Snider responds further to inquiring minds

(Image by starline on Freepik)

By Daryl Sanders

In the 10th installment of “You Asked, Todd Answered,” Todd Snider remembers William T.G. Morton, his worst crowds and venues, and tackles the life’s “only real question.”

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Ed Heath: I am visiting Italy, and they have weed here, so I am unsure about time and date, but maybe I am not too late. I agree that Kris Kristofferson is a genius, but don’t you feel “Watch what you say to someone with nothing / It’s almost like having it all” is the Todd Snider equivalent of “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”? Are they teaching a course on your songs yet? Because they should and will. Love you, brother.

Todd: I’ve never been able to think about it like that. I don’t think you can think of it like that if it’s something you do. I love songs. I want them all to be happy, and I wouldn’t want any of the other lines that I’ve been given to hear me thinking like that. Or also, you know, I’ve heard a guy say a hockey goalie was genius once, but with music in particular, once you've decided you want to make a living at it, you’re not a genius, and now you know for sure. 

I love Kris Kristofferson as a human being and a songwriter, and I think he's really smart. He has memorized a lot of information and is wise enough to not share it constantly. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” he thought that up and wrote it down. “Watch what you say to someone with nothing / It’s almost like having it all,” I made that up and wrote it down. And I have to admit that all the made guys in my crew let me know that it was a cool thing to say in a song. But there’s a guy named William T.G. Morton who figured out how to put people under so you could do surgery on them without them feeling it.

I think Jimmy Buffett might have been a genius. He created a completely unique type of music before he was 30, spoke many languages, an exceptional surfer, skier, pilot of both planes and sea planes, wrote novels, exceptional fisherman and fly fisherman, world class sailor, amazing photographer, brilliant business man, brilliant boss, insanely well-read, had a brain that wasn’t like any other songwriter’s I’ve met. Usually though, you can’t be a poet unless you’re an idiot.

Outlaw Gracie Wales: What's the worst crowd you ever played for and the worst venue you ever played at, and why were they the worst?

Todd: Before I refuse to stop answering this question, I have an opening statement. I am pretending to speak with authority for fun. But when I’m being very serious, I know better than to draw conclusions about anything. There's no cause for it. No percentage in it. I think I’ve been clear about that, but it’s no trouble to keep repeating.

The worst crowd I ever played for is tough — kind of a long explanation — but the addiction to singing in front of people is when I feel like I’m in here, but I’m not part of what’s going on. And I’m really aware of the separation between my brain and the universe it created for this personality it thinks it has and whoever is typing this to you. And that brain’s personality thinks its body is a singer, so it’s put in thousands of hours, and paved acres and acres of instinctual paths, to take in different circumstances and memorized hours and hours of songs. It’s over-prepared for what’s happening, and it figured out how to kick its witness out or whatever I really am, or whoever is answering this gets kicked out so it can run on autopilot, where I feel like the watcher, and if I said something, it’d be like a narrator, like The Wonder Years, and I could do it while the singer was still singing. 

(Side note: We have no evidence to prove that our “essence,” or say watcher that isn’t a brain, is a constant. It could just as easily be transient. If it’s in me, right? Am I in here like a knee cap or am I in here like water? You know what I mean? If the “I” is in here like water, and you can’t swim in the same river twice, there's a lot less than just no “I” in team.) 

But damn it, you just wanted to know what the worst crowd was, and I could have said real quickly that I don’t pay attention to it, but for some reason I’ve turned into the guy who has to say shit like this. Damn, I had potential.

Which brings me to my worst crowds. NFL. You hear all that hippie drivel I just barfed out? Those guys can smell people who spew pretentious hippie bullshit like I do, and they want to fight them, right away. They ask me what I’m looking at, but you can’t say “nothing,” cuz they say, “You calling me nothing?” Tough crowd. My point is, however, even when “I” say the crowd sucks during the show, whatever is witnessing from somewhere in here, isn’t picking up any dissonance from it or making a memory of it. I really miss it. It’s like running really far. 

Least favorite venue.. Hmm. If I wasn’t into it, I wouldn’t have played. Probably private parties that someone pays me to be at. If there is a singer you like, and you want to help him out, don’t offer him or her more money then they can turn down to come play for all of your friends that don’t know him or her because you think they will love it as much as you do when you see it where it’s supposed to be. But now it’s in your yard, and everybody is miserable and being polite for you.

Krispy: What the fuck?

Todd: For my money this is the only real question there is, and what I was trying to get at when I said life only begged one question. It’s not pronounced, “Is this serious?” “It’s pronounced “What the fuck?” And Bingo was his name O. No more calls. We have a winner. We literally have a word for everything, and if someone finds something no one’s ever seen before, the very first thing they’ll do is give that poor thing a name. Because then they’re gonna measure it and weigh it and dissect it and come up with names for every single little part of it and study every little aspect of its existence here with us just in case that little thing contains even the slightest clue to “What the fuck?” Because so far, nothing. 

I have thought about that question more than anything I’ve ever thought about. If I was a gambling man, and I am, I’d bet everything I own on the notion that the first oral communication between two human beings was something that they’d been asking each other with their faces for a long time. “What the fuck” faces are still a big part of our culture. We have billions, and they work just as good as the words but even still, one day those words fell out, and I have to think they were the first ones.

You know what I think it was? Before people began to wonder what they were doing, they must a just done it, you know? But the rub was the way that every once in a while someone would stop. People would shove ’em, push ’em, splash ’em, make sounds, but nothing would work. And the more it happened, the more they thought about it. Pretty soon they started making those “What the fuck?” faces, and then someone made that sound, “What the fuck?”

Can you image the explosion of joy or that feeling of “YES! ‘WHAT THE FUCK?’ INDEED! FINALLY! YES, I LOVE THIS GUY. WHO IS THIS GUY? WHAT WAS THAT? THAT WAS IT! DID Y’ALL HEAR THAT? ‘WHAT THE FUCK?’ EVERYBODY! ‘WHAT THE FUCK?’ INDEED. OF COURSE, IT’S JUST BEEN SITTING THERE. WHERE IS THAT GUY?  HIGH FIVE, MY CAVE MAN, WE GOTTA DO THIS FOR EVERYTHING, INCLUDING THIS BIG BATCH OF WORDS I JUST MADE IN ALL CAPS. EVERYTHING. ALL OF IT. WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

You gotta figure different versions of that sentiment were catcalling everywhere. Then they decided to figure out “What the fuck?” First, we need names. Next we gotta name everything else. Then we gotta check it for “What the fuck?” Everybody, fan out. 

Twenty years later, two teenagers are making out, and the girl asks the boy if he thinks we’ll ever know “What the fuck?” And he’ll say, “Well, you know, we have these words now, and we’re also pretty sure the stars know “What the fuck?” with the way the elders watch them every night and talk about it later. I’ll bet that pretty soon we’ll know “What the fuck?”

© 2024 Daryl Sanders