“Steve Fishell has this academy, and he had asked me to play in front of his students so that they could learn how to record,” Todd Snider explains, while detailing the origins of his new album, Eastside Bulldog. “But that didn’t happen. We got them drunk and high and we made this album.”

The result was an all-night session that extended past dawn, during which Snider and some area players ad-libbed an entire album’s worth of material while adopting a new identity, creating songs on the fly that harkened back to the early days of rock.

Snider then sat on the results for a few years. “Every once in a while my manager would say, ‘You know, that came out good.’ In my mind, I was like, ‘How could it? I hardly remember it.’ I don’t think anyone who was there remembers it. So I wouldn’t want to listen to it. But at some point I did, and I thought that I was able to get to an honest place that I don’t get to when I try too hard.”

He clarifies, in his inimitable style: “My obsession with music started with the alphabet and all that I thought it could bring to music, so when I realized the alphabet was a hoax perpetuated by the Freemasons to trick me into thinking I could make sounds with my face that would improve my life, I was completely at odds with myself and my life’s work. All at once, it occurred to me that even Bob Dylan knows that, lyrically, he can’t touch “wop-bop-a-loobop” or “sh-boom sh-boom” or “shama-lama-ding-dong.” Those sounds actually indicate the exasperation of wanting to be loved or understood. I grew up around lyrics like that and, up to that point, had seen them as trite. I grew up around the music of The Kingsmen and Paul Revere & The Raiders. It’s sort of in my DNA. I have never been a great guitar player, but I have never stopped working at it either, and I have gotten to where I could play lead in one of those bands.

“So one night—in a fit of self-loathing, after having just finished an EP and an album of word songs, but knowing I thought words, in general, were useless as conveyors of emotions and ideas—it occurred to me how important the word ‘baby’ was in rockand-roll and that I only wanted to sing about fucking or fighting or y car or my town and my music. So I decided Todd Snider was dead to me and I would become a guy named Elmo Buzz.

“I wrote a whole backstory on him. He grew up in East Nashville and he formed a band based on his obsession with Bocephus [Hank Williams Jr.] and partying and rocking and just kicking ass in general. The band rehearsed for 12 years before they ever auditioned and, when they finally auditioned, they got the gig. Right when they get the gig, East Nashville is just becoming this Americana-y town, and this Todd Snider character comes into town. At Elmo’s fir t gig, he had this hat on with fl wers on it. He was kind of dressed the way I dress now. I saw this guy’s band, and I thought, ‘They’re just terrible. No one’s ever going to see these guys,’ so I stole his look, thinking, ‘Who the fuck would ever know?’ I got more popular around town and he eventually realized that I’d stolen his look and he got really angry about that.

“So now there’s this band Elmo Buzz & The Eastside Bulldogs who refuse to play anywhere other than East Nashville, and they sing songs about chicks and cars and partying hard. The guy hates me and you never see us in the same place because he told me if I ever saw him, I should run—so I do. He talks shit about me constantly and about how Todd Snider ruined East Nashville with all the fingerpicking and the folk bullshit and the beer song when it used to be a kick-ass, party-hardy rock town.

“Elmo’s answer to the question: ‘How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?’ is ‘Stop whining. I’m going to have a good time tonight if it fucking kills me. Are you with me or not? And Todd Snider still walks around acting like Dylan was being deep when he sang all that bullshit.’”

HEY PRETTY BOY

We went out, started playing and the fir t words that came out of my mouth were: “Nobody cares about the music business” because, to me, that’s East Nashville. In my mind, as East Nashville got hipper, the music business people would come over and hang out in the bar, and they would ask you how things were going at work and who your lawyer was, but nobody over there cares about any of that.

The guitar solo—that’s me. It’s the first solo I’ve ever taken. I play “take-off” guitar on the whole album and being that this is Relix, how should I say this? Neal, Derek, Trey [Casal, Trucks, Anastasio]—I hope they’re going to be OK. Especially on this one, my use of the one note really shows my lack of talent and dexterity as an expression of soul.

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So now, we had one song and it was time to make up the next one. I just yelled, “Hey, baby, let’s rock-and-roll!” You can’t say anything better than that. And then I just kept going with that thought, so I sang, “It’s alright if you lose control; everybody’s trying to get their kicks.” Then I yelled out our area code, and to make up a chorus, I just took all those lines and sang them backward.

Then, we just started rocking and Dennis Taylor, who has since passed away but was the sax guy for Delbert [McClinton], took a solo. And then I came in and I played my solo, which I’ve played for Neal and, when I did, I had to talk him off the top of the hotel for two hours. They asked me, “Please play lead for the band [Hard Working Americans]” but I told them that I couldn’t. I was too humble to do that.

To be very serious for a second, my leads are almost comical. They’re funnier than “Beer Run.” I don’t know why I like them, but I’m proud of them and I can’t believe I did them in front of people. It makes me want to play guitar.

The truth is that, for as bad as I am, I play all goddamn day. I don’t have the rhythm to play with my own band—I can do stuff, but I can’t do it with the drummer consistently. It really fucks up the live groove if somebody’s not locked in.

So then I thought, now that we’re here and we’re doing this, we have to have a dance. The very first song—it was kind of just a Chuck Berry song, and the second one is a slight variation of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Then we do “The Funky Tomato,” which is more in the vein of “Wooly Bully” or “She’s About a Mover.”

It sounds like a 19 year old playing the guitar, and there is something sweet about that kind of guitar playing. I’m glad I can do it. I learned to do it from guys like Dan Baird and [Jason] Isbell and Neal, although maybe not Neal as much. They just showed me those little lead scales. I’d never played lead before. I never left the fir t three frets until a few years ago.

Another part of this album that I’m genuinely proud of is the background stuff, the “whoa”-ing and all that. David [Schools] liked that, so it became something I got to bring back to the boss. Then, on the Hard Working Americans record, he was like, “Just go out there and ‘whoa whoa’ shit. Do the whole song.” He would keep tiny bits of it because he thought I made up some good “whoas” on my Elmo Eastside Bulldog record, which was originally called Shit Sandwich.

EASTSIDE BULLDOG

I didn’t do a solo on this because I thought, “Take it easy, don’t hurt ‘em, Hammer.” When it starts off, I’m just talking about this old car I used to have because I thought that you sing about your car if you’re in a kick-ass rock group that plays three-minute songs in the Great Northwest in 1963. I knew that the band was going to be called Eastside Bulldogs and, once I started yelling that over and over, I thought, “My God, this is really cool.” Then, the second verse, I just said real quickly about being a burned-out musician and being proud of it. I don’t know if I would’ve said that if I was thinking, but I’m glad I got that out and it feels good to yell it, and to have people yell it with me.

CHECK IT OUT

Once again, I made up the verse on the spot. I said, “This song is better than it sounds.” I was trying to project some hope into the idea that this was going to become a song in the next two-and-a-half minutes. And then it did.

It was that blues thing where you say a line and then you say it again, so you’ve given yourself 20 seconds to think of something else to say. When I said, “My reputation ain’t as bad as they say,” I didn’t even realize it was such a circular, logical, weird thing to say. And then I gave myself 20 seconds to think of something else to say. By that time, I understood what I’d said and thought it was funny. I thought my reputation would be great if you could just see me the way I see myself, so I said, “It would be better than good if you saw it my way.”

Then, there’s a sax solo, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing on the guitar. I was just hitting notes, flailing. I might not even have been on the right key. I was on the wrong part of the guitar, and the whole time I was thinking, “What am I going to say? What am I going to say?” Then, we came back around and I had done two word tricks in a row, so I was trying to think if there was another one like that, and the best I could come up with in the time I had was, “The way you see it ain’t as good as it looks,” and then once I started to say that, I was thinking, “There’s no way I’m going to think of something that rhymes with looks.” But then I opened my mouth and said, “You see me burned out in some library reading your matchbooks.” I still don’t know what the fuck that means or why that came out, but I thought, “That’ll work; it rhymes.” I wonder if maybe it does mean something, but not to me. Or maybe it will later as my life goes on.

BOCEPHUS

My thinking was that Bocephus is just something that’s fun to yell, especially if you’ve never heard of him. What a great thing to yell up at the sky or whatever. It just sounds good. So we were just jamming and, all of a sudden, we stopped and I yelled that. Then we did one overdub where everyone else went back in and yelled it when I yelled it, so the song is basically like “Tequila.”

I’ve never met Hank Jr., but I like his music and I try not to listen if they get him to talk about other things. I think his music’s funny and I think that my particular genre owes more to him than they give him credit for. When I say his music’s funny, I don’t mean I’m laughing at it. I think when he wants to be funny, he can be funny. Sometimes he’s funny with politics I don’t agree with, but I know that I’m doing that to some people, too. He would disagree with me about everything other than the way good country music sounds. I’m really hoping he’ll let me make a video with him in it. We don’t agree on politics, and it’s hard to trust someone when you don’t agree on politics, but I wouldn’t make him look foolish. I don’t need to agree with people to love them.

ARE YOU WITH ME

That’s the only cover. A band called the LeRoi Brothers wrote that. The guy’s name is Steve Doerr, and I fucked his song up horrifically. I saw it in a bar in Austin in like ‘88 and, in my mind, I never forgot it. So as we were doing this, I thought, “I’m going to do that one song I heard that one night.” I went in and I did it and loved it and thought we did great. Just recently, I found the actual song and I botched the lyrics all the way to fucking hell and left a bridge out, so I hope the guy doesn’t hate me.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

By now, I was thinking about the territory that I still needed to cover, and I realized I hadn’t gotten around to being in a fight. I can t fight; I learned to fight f om watching dogs swim. So I tried to think, “What was the closest I had been to being in a fight since I as a kid?” There was this singer that wanted to fight me once at this bar called the 3 Crow, which would’ve been the easiest thing he’d ever done. I thought, “Well, I could use feng shui on him.”

But if you’re in a kick-ass, party-hardy rock-and-roll band, you better sing about fucking and fighting and rocking out. So we sang what was going to be the Eastside Bulldog fight son.

I’m genuinely proud of the background singing. I talk about the record like I was dismissive of it and, to be honest, I was— but I’m becoming less dismissive of it as I listen to it all this time later. I think it’s honest. I wouldn’t put it against the [Hard Working Americans’] Rest in Chaos record, but it’s a different thing and I think it helped us with that one.

WAYS AND MEANS

By this time, I was out of ideas. So I turned to my buddy Peter Cooper and said, “What do I yell now?” He said, “Shout, ‘Hey, hey, hey!’” Bingo! So I shouted, “Hey, hey, hey, you’re going to be OK!” Then I thought, “Really? This is where we’re going?” Earlier in the day, I had been telling Peter what we were going to do, and I asked him if he had any phrases that would work and he said, “Ways and means.” So, 10 hours later, when I asked him, “What should I say?” and he said, “Hey, hey, hey,” I thought maybe I should go back to what he said earlier.

Peter had also told me how he’d been to the Alley Cat, which is the bar we used to go to, and he’d seen Warren Pash, who wrote “Private Eyes.” Later on, I was thinking about everything Peter had said to me, so I mentioned it. When we overdubbed the background vocals after I said, “I ran into Warren Pash,” Peter and I yelled, “He wrote ‘Private Eyes!’” You can barely hear it. The person in the song sounded like some guy hitting on a girl and telling her she was going to make it, which is very East Nashville—telling her she might have mass appeal and could end up on the cover of the Nashville Scene. By the time it was over, I thought, “Damn, that worked. We did it again.”

COME ON UP

There’s this thought that you don’t have to put a lid on a basket full of crabs because if one starts to climb out, the others will pull it down. A lot of towns are like that, but East Nashville is not. Everybody moves there with this grandiose idea that their songs are going to move some other person. So if you’re feeling stupid in your town ‘cause you want to sing your songs out loud, then come to East Nashville— that’s all we fucking do.

I remember I had this manager who told me one time that I had to know myself, to be myself and I thought, “Bullshit, I don’t want to do either of those things. Everything I know I learned from other people—stop trying to make me be myself. I’ll be whoever I want to be.” So I sang about that.

Then the last verse—I don’t drink anymore, not because I don’t want to but because I drank too much for too long and my body won’t take it anymore. (Although, every time someone says that in a magazine, the next time you see them, they’re drunk.) But not long ago, I used to wake up in the morning and walk to the bar. I used to be out of there by the time the people we called “amateur drinkers” got off ork and would come in. Sometimes around 4:20 would be the peak of the day in East Nashville, and that’s when all the guitars would come out. So I was saying if you come here and walk around the bars at about 4:00, I’m going to be in one of them. I’ll be fucked up singing to people who wish I would stop. Come see us. I thought that was a good note to end on. Make East Nashville weirder. Hurry up. We’ve been waiting for you.