Saturday, July 21, 2007

UPDATED: Concert stalking review: Todd Snider

By Scott O. Miller

Updated 03:59 p.m., July 22, 2007

Don’t you just hate it when one person has to ruin it for everybody?

I’m sure it was nothing, probably just a fan who wanted to ask Todd Snider to play a favorite song. Or something.

But she definitely took the wrong approach Friday night at The Sons Of Hermann Hall.

As he was strapping on his guitar and getting ready to start his set, a lady got out of her front row seat and climbed up on the edge of the stage and said something to Todd , who looked kind of startled and stepped back So she tried to wave him over. He stepped back further and looked genuinely frightened and started to take off his guitar and harmonica when Dave Hixx, his stage manager, spotted the intruder and immediately grabbed her and pulled her off the stage.

Hixx then yelled “all the way out” as she was brusquely escorted out the door while her confused companion stood there looking like he wasn’t sure what to do.

It seemed like a fairly harsh over-reaction. I mean while the lady clearly wasn’t up on her live show etiquette, neither she didn’t look threatening in any way, merely intrusive.

But she may well have seemed threatening to Todd. After his first song he explained about his stalker who was just arrested in Nashville on Wednesday. She had trespassed onto his property and scared the hell out of his house-sitter. After leaving Todd’s house, she apparently broke through a Presidential motorcade roadblock and even led police on a 20 minute chase.

Ironically, Todd was on the road to Dallas during all this.

He said after all that when he saw the woman get on the stage all he could think was (paraphrasing) “I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

The Nashville stalker, Kristin Ashton, has evidently caused trouble for Todd and his fans before.

I’m sure the lady at the Sons Friday wasn’t quite as deranged as Ashton but whatever was so pressing she had to jump on the stage to tell Todd as he was just about to start sure seemed to knock him off kilter. I think his performance suffered as a result. He did a fairly short set without ever really seeming to engage even though the crowd was solidly with him. There were no 18 minute rants, no “Play A Train Song” and the banter he did attempt seemed kind of distracted. After he played an encore of “Conservative Christian…” he was off the stage and out the door.

In case anyone didn’t already know (OK, there was one person there who didn’t) Todd also told us that if you want to tell him that you met his brother in Houston in 1983 or whatever, it’s kind of an after-the-show thing.

I sure hope she remembers that next time.

Pegasus News content partner - Slacker Country

Ed Note: Story was updated to remove a link to a private message board, on request of its managers. We generally don't honor such requests, but when a potentially dangerous stalker is involved, it seems the right thing to do. -MO

Related stories

• Concert review: Robbie Fulks (Feb. 23, 2008)

See more stories in:

• Arts > Popular Music > Folk
• Arts > Popular Music > Singer / Songwriter

Comments

Mike Orren Staff

I'm glad Scott did the research and got the real scoop on the stalker. It was, indeed, the least satisfying concert of Todd's I've seen -- ableit understandably so. Of course, for me a bad Todd show is like a bad day of golf for serious duffers. Not so much for April, whom I've now dragged to five Snider gigs, three of which actually occurred. (He noted that in his 15 years of touring he's missed three shows due to weather and two were in Dallas.)

I was a little closer to the stage than Scott was, and I couldn't make out everything the woman said, but she wasn't making a request. I thought I caught something about it being important that Todd come with her and that she was here to help him.

It made one verse of his lead-off tune, "Side Show Blues," particularly chilling:

I try to tell my girlfriend she's the only one that I've got / This chick I hardly knows keeps on telling her she's not / She got a loaded pistol, she waves it all the time / Says some times you gotta kill a boy to keep his ass in line / Well that's the way she sees it, she says she saw it on the news / It's a circus out here mama, Your baby's got the sideshow blues

It's usually performed with vim and sass-- I caught something more troubled in the delivery.

It made me think about one of the dark sides of the Internet phenomenon of which we here are all of fond.

Sure, celebrities have dealt with stalkers for years. And while I wouldn't wish that on anyone, if you're a rich and famous megastar, that would seem to be some compensation for dealing with the crazies.

But with easy online communication and the ability to imbue oneself in long-tail niches, it sucks that someone like Todd gets the short end of both sticks...

I was disappointed that Todd was too distracted to finish his new baseball song that he's been performing of late: http://www.eighteenminutes.com/lyrics...

....

One thing that I found strange -- If Todd was so freaked out by stalkers, why did he plug the Belmont Hotel at the end of the gig? He rightly praised the place, its pool and the view, but only stopped short of giving us his room number...

Longtime PegNews reader and pal John Clarke was at the show too and his wingwoman gave some rude Dallas fans their comeuppance:

http://johnclarke.blogspot.com/2007/0...

2 years, 3 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )

Scott Miller Verified

I have to agree that the Belmont Hotel thing was strange, to say the least.

2 years, 3 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )