I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like by Todd Snider

Author:Todd Snider [Snider, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306822612
Publisher: Da Capo Press

After Garth Brooks’s multi-million-selling failure on the Chris Gaines album, a lot of people laughed at him. He even went on Saturday Night Live and made fun of himself, but that didn’t help. It was open season on Garth. Meanwhile, I was about eight months into my new life as a rambling, storytelling folk singer. Any story I could find that had an element of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” in it, I honed in on and worked on it just as hard as I would work on a song. With Garth taking a public flogging, I thought maybe there was some kind of story I could tell about him. I knew I could tell the story before or during the part of the show where I’d play “Alright Guy.”

And so I made up a story that started with the phone call from Garth. And most of the story is pretty true. But at some point, I realized it would be beneficial for me, in my attempt to get laughs at my show, to pretend I knew in real time what a disastrous idea this Chris Gaines thing was. In the story, I played along and told Garth that it was a great, smart idea, knowing that he was going to fall on his ass.

That was not in fact anywhere near true.

The truth was that I thought it was going to be successful, and thought it was cool, and had hopes that it was going to do well.

In fact, I still don’t think it was stupid. I think it was smart of Garth Brooks to make a creative choice that resulted in selling millions of albums. Sign me up for that kind of stupid.

No matter the truth, though, I decided to exploit the idea that not everybody likes Garth Brooks to my own end. And I told myself that Garth wouldn’t be hurt by something like that, because he was so successful.

That’s a crock.

It’s a crock that I think prevails in this country: we bully the people who entertain us. We get on the computer and bully them. We buy magazines with pictures of them where they look fat or drunk or imperfect. And we suppose that those people’s success excuses our meanness.

I say this as somebody that this is, for sure, not happening to; I’m not popular enough to get bullied in this way. I’m just unpopular enough to mostly get encouragement.

In my young life, Garth and Jimmy Buffett were the people I got to be around who were so powerful that other people didn’t treat them like people. They got treated like a television show, or like a football team or a wrestler. And I got caught up in that and wound up telling a story that took the piss out of a guy who had shown me kindness and graciousness, and who gave me—with no strings, no contracts, with an apology, even—ten thousand dollars.

That’s embarrassing. It’s a shame wisdom comes so slow. It’s what makes life hard to look back on.

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