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. 

Trumpty Dumpty Dumps on Us All

Humpty Trumpty by Barbara Kelley

Apart from watching our country's comedians (when they are permitted to air), about the only solace I have in these dark authoritarian days is attending peaceful protests like the huge No Kings Marches that happened on Saturday all over the nation. The camaraderie, the clever signs, and the knowledge that the resistance is alive, bolstered my spirits for another day of living in the USA. 

But nothing quite prepared me for the uber-infantile, incredibly nasty and undemocratic AI video that Trumpty Dumpty posted on his social media after an estimated seven million Americans marched in protest of his administration's autocratic actions. 

In the video, he sports a crown and flies a plane named King Trump that dumps massive shit bombs on protesters, including young left-wing influencer Harry Sisson (just after giving Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom). As the Turkish proverb goes, "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus." 

It was bad enough that the day before the rallies, Trump freed from prison and released from paying restitution the convicted fraudster George Santos, perhaps pandering to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has surprisingly become a critic of the Trump administration and is ready to vote to release the Epstein files. 

RIP Diane Keaton, Who Played Charming Potheads on Film

UPDATE: CA Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statement, saying: “Diane Keaton was a true Californian. She was a self-described oddball, uniquely stylish, deeply creative, funny, and an acting legend who could steal the screen in comic and dramatic roles alike. She was in a class all her own, an icon."

Art: Alejandro Mogollo

The sad news hit today that Diane Keaton, who won an Oscar in 1977 for playing a charmingly ditzy pothead in Annie Hall (1977),  has died at age 79. 

Keaton, whose last name at birth was Hall, was doubtlessly an inspiration for her character in the film, which also picked up Oscars for Best Director (Woody Allen), Best Writing and Best Picture. 

The original title was Anhedonia, meaning the inability to experience pleasure. Allen's character suffers from the condition until he meets Annie, who with all of her fumbling and self-consciousness is a beautiful vessel of pleasure.

Alvy tells Annie that her whole body is an erogenous zone, and soon it is revealed that she insists on smoking pot before they make love. When Alvy objects, comparing it to a comic getting a laugh too easily, Annie tells him if he'd only smoke with her, he wouldn't have to see a therapist. Cinemablend ranked her at #6 as only woman on their list of top 10 movie potheads on the strength of her performance.  

Kamala Harris Address Cannabis, and Joe Rogan, in Her Book "107 Days"

Kamala Harris's new book "107 Days" about her presidential campaign says of her time as District Attorney of San Francisco:

"I was one of the first elected progressive district attorneys, looking for ways to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail rather than put them in it. I didn’t seek jail time for simple marijuana offenses. My Back on Track initiative, connecting offenders with services and jobs, and also taking care of their mental health by doing things like hooking them up with counseling and gym memberships, worked so well it became a model for other jurisdictions. It is true that prosecution rates for violent crime increased on my watch. If you rape a woman, molest a child, or take a life, consequences should be serious and swift. I don’t apologize for that."

Cannabis comes up only one other time in her book, discussing negotiations to be interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast. "I wanted to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25. He chose Trump instead," she recounts.

"I wasn’t in the weeds on any of it. I left that up to my staff," Harris writes. "They’d suggested topics that might interest Rogan’s audience, such as cannabis, social media censorship, and crypto. Rogan’s team said they just wanted to discuss the economy, immigration, and abortion. Again, I was fine with that."

Trump and the UK's Cannabis Connections: Shakespeare, Kipling and Orwell, plus King Charles and Princess Kate

In what must have reminded the Brits of Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of the US President in "Love, Actually," Donald Trump made his second state visit to the UK, where he embarrassingly read a speech that praised British authors Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Lewis, Orwell, and Kipling. "Incredible people," he ad-libbed after reading the list. 

At least three of those authors have possible cannabis connections, as do King Charles and Princess Kate. 

Clay pipe fragments excavated from Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon home were found in 2001 to contain small amounts of cocaine and myristic acid - a hallucinogenic derived from plants, including nutmeg. In Sonnet #76, he wrote that a "noted weed" inspired his creativity. His father dealt in contraband sheep's wool. 

Rudyard Kipling was given "a stiff dose of chlorodyne" to treat a bout of dysentary in 1884 at the age of 18. This mixture of opium, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform "hit him with the force of a revelation. In modern parlance, it 'blew his mind,'" writes a biographer. A character in Kipling's novel Kim, says, "News is not meant to be thrown about like dung-cakes, but used sparingly - like bhang." 

High-lights of the Smithsonian "Entertainment Nation" Exhibit and Report from DC and Mt. Vernon

The “Entertainment Nation” exhibit at the Smithsonian American History Museum in Washington, DC, highlights several Tokin' Women and men, and other sheroes and heroes. It opens with a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," and the guide told us the exhibit was years in the making. (Garland was 13 years old when she sang "La Cucaracha" in a film short.)

The first Tokin' Woman I caught was Bessie Smith, with copy that said, "Pioneering African American blues women such as Bessie Smith sang about the virtues of economic and sexual independence from men...in 'Any Woman's Blues' she laments her affections for a man who continues to let her down." Smith also sang about reefer in "Gimme a Pigfoot" (1933). 

Included in the exhibit are Billie Holiday's 1939 recording of "Strange Fruit" and the Aretha Franklin album cover, "Young Gifted and Black" (a Nina Simone song), in front of the dress worn by Billie Jean King when she defeated Bobby Riggs in the 1973 "Battle of the Sexes."