Recap Todd Snider at Shank Hall

Under normal circumstances, there would have been reason to doubt Todd Snider when he announced late in the night Saturday at Shank Hall that this show was special. Performers say that sort of thing all the time. (Snider even once sardonically titled an album Happy To Be Here.) But Snider’s sold-out, two-hour concert really did feel like a special occasion. The cult singer-songwriter was back at Shank, his regular Milwaukee stomping grounds, after a weird detour with Pat MacDonald at South Milwaukee High School earlier this year. (High school auditoriums don’t suit an outsider iconoclast like Snider, and not only because you can’t drink there.) And instead of playing his standard solo acoustic gig, he was backed by Colorado jam band Great American Taxi, which provided an appropriately relaxed (though increasingly rollicking as the night wore on) country-rock accompaniment for Snider’s stoned drawls of witty insightfulness.

Early in his set Snider dispensed with his usual disclaimer about the opinionated nature of some of his material, assuring the audience that “I didn’t come down here to change anybody’s fucking mind about anything, I’m just trying to ease my mind about everything.” But for the most part Snider dodged politics, leaving out thorny songs like the brilliant George W. Bush takedown “You Got Away With It (A Tale Of Two Fraternity Brothers)” and the self-explanatory “Conservative Christian Right-Wing Republican Straight White American Males.” Instead he favored good-time tunes like “Play A Train Song” and “Greencastle Blues,” a true story about Snider’s arrest last year for pot possession that provides a classic example of his funny/sad songwriting aesthetic, juxtaposing lines about “shaking around like some crazy old hooker on meth” with a heartbreaking chorus that wonders, “How do you know when it’s too late to learn?”

Avoiding politics was probably a smart strategy considering the patchwork nature of Snider’s audience, which consists of an incongruous amalgam of hippies, frat boys, middle-aged Parrotheads (who discovered Snider after his four-year stint on Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Records), singer-songwriter fanatics, and guys with really long rat-tails. (Or at least one guy with a really long rat-tail.) Snider wears his bleeding-heart liberalness on his sleeve, but his fans are surprisingly golf course-friendly. When Snider made a mildly controversial point about the drug war during the in-concert standard “Tension,” singing that “It’s funded by tobacco and alcohol companies, it’s not what drugs you’re strung out on they care about as much as whose,” one woman in the back loudly yelled, “I disagree!” What was this, a town hall meeting?

But for the most part this ragtag team of Snider supporters was united in song. While Snider didn’t indulge in as much between-song storytelling this time around, he was clearly jazzed to be playing with his friends. And Great American Taxi proved to be a welcome addition, particularly keyboardist Chad Staehly, whose boogie-woogie licks added significant swagger to a great rendition of “Just Like Old Times.” By the time the band got to a set-closing medley of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For The Devil,” everybody—musicians included—seemed pretty spent. But by then there really was no doubt: This night was one to remember.