RIP Todd Snider, the "Alright Guy" who left us "High, Lonesome and Thensome"

Sadly, singer songwriter Todd Snider has died at age 59 following an incident in Utah where he was assaulted and then arrested for a creating a disturbance when the hospital where he was being treated insisted on releasing him. 

Snider titled his last album and tour "High, Lonesome and Thensome." In the video for the title track (my new favorite song), he enjoys a sesh before the session. The tour was cancelled on November 3 following his attack. 

Snider was known to fans of John "Illegal Smile" Prine, for whom he often opened. The two had similar song-writing styles: simple and straight to the point, yet beautifully poetic and universal. And always amusing, if not downright hilarious. NPR reports he modeled himself on — and at times met and was mentored by — artists like Prine, Kris Kristofferson and Guy Clark. Jimmy Buffett was a fan who produced his first two albums. 

Looking online for Snider's hit "Alright Guy," I could only find a video version with the word "dope" censored from the line, "Now maybe that I'm dirty, and maybe I smoke a little dope / It ain't like I'm going on TV and tearing up pictures of the pope" [a reference to Sinead O'Connor calling out the Catholic church's child-abusive ways long before anyone else did]. 

In his popular singalong song "Beer Run" he sings;

A couple of frat guys from Abilene 

Drove out all night to see Robert Earl Keen ...

They wanted cigarettes, so to save a little money 

They got one from this hippie that smelled kinda funny 

And the next thing they knew they were both really hungry 

And pretty thirsty too

According to CelebStoner, in 2014 Snider formed the supergroup Hard Working Americans with Dave Schools, Neal Casal, Chad Staehly and Duane Trucks; in the video for "Blackland Farmer" from their self-titled album, a struggling farmer switches to marijuana. 

UPDATE: Billy Strings played a beautiful "Play a Train Song" in Newark, NJ on the night Todd died: 

I got this old black leather jacket, I got the pack of Marlboro Reds
I got this stash here in my pocket, I got these thoughts in my own head...

Then he told a story about playing at a festival circa 2017 in Gatlinburg, TN for which he wore a jacket with a vintage "Panama Red" patch on it that he left behind backstage. The Hardworking Americans played at the same venue the following night, and a day or two later, "I looked online and I saw a picture of Todd Snider wearing that fuckin' coat.....He was bad ass."

At Farm Aid in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2014, Snider played his song "Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White, American Male" (with a great intro/disclaimer about being a folk singer and sharing his opinions with the audience).  

Conservative Christian, right-wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay-bashin', black-fearin', poor-fightin', tree-killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg-tappin', shirt-tuckin', back-slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree-huggin', peace-lovin', pot-smokin', porn-watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me

Introducing the song on his live album The Storyteller with a story he told about his first experience on psychedelic mushrooms while a member of his high school football team; or as he put it, "the touching story of how psychedelic drugs turned me from the scoreboard-watching jock that my dad was hoping for, into the peaceful, pot-smoking, porn-watching, lazy-ass hippie that stands before you this afternoon at Bonaroo." 

With the Hard Working Americans (notice no hyphen), Snider sings of farming in the Pogonip region of Santa Cruz, CA in "Wrecking Ball""

I was just a little Deadhead...

Then I was a farmer in the pogonip 

Where the weed that I recall 

Was like a wrecking ball.

When writing songs with Snider in 2022, Loretta Lynn told him, "Smoke one of your doobies and go thru those [notes she'd made]. See if anything jumps out at you." In the trailer to the documentary "Todd Snider's First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder", Snider tells the band, "You can smoke dope on the job; clearly you're smoking at home." He then demonstrates. 

In "Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern" he sings about meeting a little old lady called Miss Vergie at a bar in Texas: 

She said,"Life's too short to worry

Life's too long to wait

Well, it's too short not to love everybody 

And life is too long to hate."

I meet a lot of men who haggle, finagle all the time 

Just tryin' to save a nickel and make a dime 

"Not me," she said, "No sir-ee 

You know I ain't a-got the time."

Words to live by, like so many of Snider's lyrics. 

The Acid Queen: Rosemary Leary

A new biography titled The Acid Queen sheds light on Rosemary Woodruff Leary, who was arrested with her husband Timothy Leary for carrying marijuana over the Mexican border, and during the infamous G. Gordon Liddy Millbrook raid, both in 1966.

The book's author Susannah Cahalan became interested in "mind opening" and psychedelics after her brain disorder autoimmune encephalitis was misdiagnosed as mental illness, spawning her bestselling book, Brain on Fire. 

Cahalan appeared by Zoom at a recent event in Berkeley, CA sponsored by the Women's Visionary Congress, a group that highlights psychedelic women who "often disappeared behind there more famous and florid male partners." She drew on Rosemary’s autobiography Psychedelic Refugee and her archives at the New York public library (where there are 400 boxes in Timothy's archives and only 25 for Rosemary, largely redacted FBI files).

Rosemary Woodruff, Cahalan writes, had her first mystical experience in 1943, the summer after her eighth birthday. Walking alone near her home, "she felt a tingling sensation rise up from her spine. The trees crackled with energy. She had plugged herself into the electrical grid, and the whole world flickered in confirmation of her sudden second sight: everyone and everything were connected. It happened for a second, a nanosecond, but that shining moment of divine union would stay with her....Other realms called. She longed to return to that blissful state."

The statuesque beauty worked as a model and a stewardess, professions in which "uppers" were regularly handed out to young women to keep them slim and active. In 1959, she had a small role in the film "Operation Petticoat" starring Tony Curtis and Cary Grant. During publicity for for the film, Grant went public for the first time about his use of LSD, telling a reporter that it saved his marriage to Betsy Drake (who lead him to try it). 

Living a Bohemian life in New York City, Rosemary dated jazz musicians and downed diet pills by day and marijuana at night. She "learned to find pleasure in the sensation of her heart beating in her ears when she smoked cannabis in jazz clubs. And how to portion out correct dosing of the hash fudge she baked from Alice B. Toklas’s famous 1954 cookbook. Like a growing number of Americans, Rosemary was joining an emerging drug subculture, not for medical or spiritual use, but for pleasure, identification, and belonging," Cahalan writes. A peyote experience made he realize she needed to leave her junkie boyfriend, packing her bags and leaving him the next day.