Todd Snider recalls his Santa Rosa days

Todd Snider, who headlines this year’s EarleFest, a benefit concert for Santa Rosa’s Earle Baum Center of the Blind, is best known for his serpentine songs that segue into stories, in the tradition of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Woody Guthrie.

You may have heard his songs: “Alright Guy” and “Beer Run” are among his best known.

But I bet you didn’t know that the lanky, heavy-lidded singer spent about a year in Santa Rosa, where he learned to play harmonica and had a brief stint as SRJC’s third-string quarterback.

It was autumn of 1985: Snider enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College, and due to paternal pressure joined the football team when the legendary Marv Mays was head coach.

“I came from Oregon (Beaverton) where my whole life was jock-y, Republican-y,” Snider said in a phone interview from his home in Nashville, Tenn.

But Snider’s parents “made the mistake of sending me to Santa Rosa, which is the capital of ‘Dude, we’re not gonna keep score.’ ... Deep down, I knew in my heart that I didn’t care” about sports.

Which was evident on the practice field, where Snider lethargically went through the motions. Despite his nonchalance, after injuries to SRJC’s top two quarterbacks, Snider became the third-string QB.

But his football career ended abruptly.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “An assistant coach asked me if I was stoned. He was being facetious, but I said, ‘yeah,’ because a lot of people got high before practice. I answered before I thought it through.”

Snider had no future in athletics, but the time he spent in Santa Rosa learning to play the harmonica has paid off for the quirky troubadour.

His fans, similar to those of Greg Brown and John Prine, like his stories as much as his songs, and often it’s hard to tell where the stories end and the songs begin.

Snider’s light-bulb moment came in the late 1980s when he saw Jerry Jeff Walker’s show.

“I was disappointed that he wasn’t going to have a band, but when he got up there and started playing it was mesmerizing,” Snider said.

“It was just one guitar and him singing. ... All of a sudden it stopped looking like Eric Clapton, and started looking like a trade.”

By the early 1990s, Snider’s songs were getting some radio airplay, and he was opening for Prine and Jimmy Buffett. He wasn’t making much money, but that was OK.

“The whole gypsy song-man routine got me,” Snider said. “If you can sing a song, you almost don’t need money because you can get yourself anywhere you want.

“If you want a boat ride, you can whip out a few Jim Croce songs and whoever has a boat they will want you on the boat, too. If you got a guitar and you can sing a few songs, you can get a sandwich, you can get a chick really, you don’t have to be in that great of a band to get a girlfriend. It changed the playing field for me.”

Though Snider is seen as a happy-go-lucky stoner dude, his songs can venture into political territory.

“New York Banker,” a scathing indictment of Wall Street’s greed and its effect on small-town Americans, distills the venality and cruelty of selling bonds that “had been set up to fail all along.”

In another song from his 2012 album, “Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables,” he cuts to the heart of human emotion with a single searing sentence: “It ain’t the despair that gets you, it’s the hope.”

Appearing with Snider at the seventh annual EarleFest benefit is the local alt-folk band Brothers Comatose. Another highlight: The Blues Broads with Angela Strehli, Annie Sampson, Tracy Nelson and Dorothy Morrison.

The Great Idea Band, which takes the stage early in the day, is made up of musicians who have performed at previous EarleFests. Among the luminaries: David Luning, Frankie Boots and Corinne West.

“We thought wouldn’t it be fun to ask them to put a band together for this event and see what happens,” said Allan Brenner, CEO of the Earle Baum Center. “It’s exciting to see a bunch of really talented musicians who never played together get together. That’s a big part of the old Americana music culture.”

The festival, now in its seventh year, began as a way for people to get acquainted with the center, which annually serves about 600 people who are dealing with sight loss.

But today, with government funding declining, the festival has become a key source of revenue for the center, Brenner said. “This is really important for us.”

The show, in an inviting outdoor venue at the center, attracts about 1,200 people. And with local vendors such as Lagunitas Brewing Co. on hand, EarleFest remains a lot of fun.

Calling it a “pretty unpretentious event,” Brenner said, “We want people to know that the center is a really good place to be.”

Michael Shapiro, author of “A Sense of Place,” writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. Contact him through his site: www.michaelshapiro.net.