"Ballad of The Kingsmen" Todd Snider

Todd Snider passed away from pneumonia on November 14, 2025.
This essay is from my 2020 book: The Last Playlist (A Sonic Epitaph)  

Todd Snider's 2004 release, East Nashville Skyline, is a modern classic in every sense of the word. It's a great and tumultuous ride into Hank Williams's Cadillac Coupe DeVille, Mike Tyson's entourage, and the head of a jumper on a ledge who receives some divine intervention from St. Peter. Although Snider's entire catalog is pretty great, this album is his London Calling or Exile on Main Street.

Originally from Oregon, Todd Snider is a modern-day troubadour wandering the country with a guitar slung over his back, a harmonica fixed to his neck, and a head full of hard-luck stories. His songs are a mixed bag of country, rock, and blues jumbled together with minimal instrumentation and production. He delivers his songs in an affable, shaky voice that sometimes borders on preachy but is utterly sincere. Lyrically, many are story songs, often focusing on characters living on the fringes of society with a penchant for ending up in handcuffs with no more than a prayer for bail. His songs make you laugh, cry, and think—the holy trinity of songwriting.

No better example of this can be found than “The Ballad of the Kingsmen,” which is perhaps one of the greatest rock songs I’ve ever experienced. And I do mean experienced because to say you engaged in the mere auditory process of listening to it diminishes its genius. This song makes you laugh, fills you with sadness, and then finishes you off by making the hair on the back of your neck stand at full, thought-provoking attention. To hit all those pressure points in just over five minutes is quite an accomplishment and the mark of a truly brilliant song.

You might recall that the Kingsmen, back in 1963, provided us with the classic version of the song "Louie Louie,” which was written by Richard Berry in 1955 as a breezy Jamaican romp. A rumor started to circulate among kids that some of the unintelligible lyrics in the Kingsmen’s version were obscene and sexually explicit. This prompted a concerned mother, probably from Indiana or Kansas, to file a complaint with the FBI.

Over acoustic picking, a punchy downbeat with some kindly harmonica, and electric guitar stitched up the gut, Snider alternates between spoken word and his singing voice while amusingly telling the story of the Kingsmen and the obscenity charges leveled against them. He also speculates about the social implications of the “unknown” as it relates to the lyrics of a rock song.

The compulsion to fear and denigrate that which is new and different dots human history through every age, from Jesus Christ to Galileo to Darwin to Elvis Presley. By the time the Kingsmen showed up with “Louie Louie” in 1963, America was past the shock of rock-n-roll, and all but the religious zealots had ceased burning records. The establishment didn't like it much, but as is always the case in America, if the market found rock-n-roll agreeable to the bottom line; rock-n-roll was good.

Throughout the history of rock music, we've become accustomed to artists working the "shock" angle to garner attention for their music and themselves. We need only to look as far as the mop-headed Beatles, the New York Dolls in dresses and women's makeup, the Sex Pistols with their spitting and safety pins, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing in a jockstrap, and the androgynous Marilyn Manson, whom Snider chooses to focus on as he speculates brilliantly on the ills of American society.

Snider paints a rather different caricature of Manson, whom we’ve come to know as a contrived, demonic, leather-clad goth figure who appears onstage wearing heavy eye makeup and tinted contact lenses (Beelzebub red and green) while donning prosthetic female breasts. First, he notes that Marilyn Manson is a made-up name and that he isn’t some monster from another world. Brian Warner is his real name, and he’s a skinny public-school kid from Florida. And, like every guy who ever started a band, music was just a way to get girls, or so Snider speculates.

If you strip away all of Manson's contrivances, what you really have is just another kid with no game and zero power. We all knew kids like this in high school, and they no doubt still litter the cafeterias, hallways, and classrooms of every school in America today. It should come as no surprise that Manson and others like him working the shock angle are often the vehicle by which these powerless kids tell their parents and the establishment, in a not-so-polite way—to fuck off. So much so that we've come to a point where it's common to casually write off the allure of Manson as everyday teenage rebellion or angst until, of course, things go bad. Then, as Snider points out in the next verse, the court of public opinion levies some pretty heavy charges against them and Marilyn Manson.

He outlines a scene at the mall where a group of people are looking at TVs after a school shooting, and two guys are talking about what went wrong. One guy asks if high school is so bad for some kids that they see this as an option, and the other guy flippantly responds that it isn’t. It’s the lyrics to a goddamn Marilyn Manson song that drives these disaffected kids to commit these heinous acts.

Written in the early 2000s, this is an obvious reference to the 1999 Columbine massacre where before committing suicide, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a rampage, killing twelve of their peers and one teacher while injuring twenty-four others.

Beyond the horrific tragedy of Columbine, the thing that is really sad and maddening is a lot of people will buy right into this theory that long hair, loud music, video games, or the words to a goddamn Marilyn Manson song prompted these boys to action. It’s easy to scapegoat Manson because of his outrageous appearance and his offensive language. Language that points an accusing finger at the hypocrisy of our institutions and society. It's a simple, uncomplicated answer and frees us from any responsibility. Marilyn Manson, in speech and appearance, is what we know evil to be, so he gets the blame.

In the following few verses, Snider offers a different theory—a theory that really shook me, one that I never heard before. After a little rap about war images presented high and wide on news television for all to see, he talks about how, all week long, we teach kids to be tough and resolute and that only the strong survive. Then, on Sundays, we dress in a suit and tie and tell these same kids there is a man in the sky who loves us and will take care of us, and the meek shall inherit the earth.

There it is, what might be the real seeds of our discontent, especially the discontent of teenagers, maybe even the discontent of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The foundation of our society is based on perfectly opposing philosophies. On the one hand, to be a success, you'll need to be tough and unyielding, while on the other, eternal glory is reserved for the humble and meek. Living with this immense contradiction is bound to mess anybody up, and it all comes to a head in the teenage years. That sweet spot between innocence and corruption.

I know it messed me up.

I’ve never been sure about all this eternal glory business, but I know that as far back as I can remember, I staked a claim with those humble revolutionaries who would see the meek inherit the earth. Though no ideology is perfect or always consistent, one of the central tenets of the left has always been to help the least among us, which is also one of the central teachings of our lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. From a very young age, this just made sense to me, and once I jumped on that bandwagon, I never looked back.

In the first grade, with the country being torn apart in 1968, I remember being solidly behind Hubert Humphrey because the ideology of the Democratic Party seemed to be aligned with what I was learning in church as opposed to the law and order doctrines of tough guy Richard Nixon. Again, in '72, I was for McGovern over Nixon. But beyond presidential politics, what really swayed me were friends who didn't have fathers and received Social Security benefits for one reason or another. These were barely-getting-by poor people, yet the Republicans always wanted to cut these benefits. Obviously, at ten years old, I wasn’t doing a deep dive into policy, but because of things like the Sermon on the Mount, cutting off people in need seemed wrong to me then, as it does now.

It wasn't just in politics where I was liberal. Going ahead a few years to when I was in the sixth grade in 1973, I let it be known among friends I had a crush on this sweet, blue-eyed Irish girl named Kathy. To my surprise, she liked me too and agreed to be my girlfriend. I was too shy to make out with her, and she quickly dumped me. Even though I saw it coming, since everyone was starting to make out and the best I could do was sit on her porch and maybe hold her hand, I was still crushed. In the aftermath, I walked around embarrassed by my lack of courage, and the song “Hello, It’s Me,” by Todd Rundgren was in constant rotation on AM radio at the time. Not only did I love the sound of the song, but as I torched on for my blue-eyed Irish beauty, I fully embraced the song’s concept the way you’d expect a dopey sixth grader to after getting dumped for the first time and thinking, like in the song, that I could come around once in a while when she needed to smile.

Of course, she didn’t need me to make her smile. A few weeks later, I saw her on a park bench at Mulroy Park with some douchebag eighth-grader, tongues-a-flailing. With this finality, I moved on with my wounded pride to other girls, who would eventually dump me. But I didn’t move on from Todd Rundgren. Our relationship was only just beginning.

A year or so later, probably the summer of ’75, while fully engaged in my KI$$ obsession, I was looking through some albums my sister’s boyfriend left in our funky semi-finished basement on Lockwood Avenue and came across the Todd Rundgren album Initiation. While checking it out, I saw not only was the album written, produced, arranged, and mixed by Todd Rundgren, but side two of the album was a thirty-six-minute instrumental called “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire” where Todd played all the instruments—everything: guitars, drums, bass, keyboards (actually, a “keyboard computer” is listed in the credits, which is a real curiosity given the year was 1975). I'd never heard of such a thing and was fascinated by the idea of a single guy producing all that music himself.

Despite my fascination, this dreamy synth trip into Eastern thought didn’t really speak to me and was several constellations removed from the plush top-forty pop of “Hello, It’s Me.” The other side of the album, the song side, had the same otherworldly synth sound along with some really great face-melting guitar, but it was still beyond me. I did find something in the lyrics, which were a tightly linked thematic expression of a man seeking release from the heavy burdens of the material world—physically, spiritually, and in Todd's case, musically—while exploring new spiritual-religious possibilities in the name of finding his higher, more perfect self. I would better understand this heady stuff as I got to more of Todd's stripped-down, traditional power-pop songs like "Love of the Common Man,” “Just One Victory,” and others containing spiritual-philosophical elements. The impact was such that by the middle of high school, Todd Rundgren would be my spiritual guru and remain so until this day.

Yes, an anorexic green-haired guitar player was to be the high priest of my soul—my sultan of swing. It makes perfect sense when you think about it, and it also explains why kids turn to Marilyn Manson or other rock artists. Gaining an understanding of my power, I questioned the authority of my parents and other establishment figures and rejected the orthodoxy of their institutions, including the church. Even if, on occasion, I did find myself in church, I couldn't follow along or understand the antiquated language of the readings or the meanings of the rituals. My attention always wandered to some female parishioner wearing a tight sweater.

Others like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joe Strummer, and Paul Westerberg, all of whom I would come to know deeply in the following years, along with all of the reading I would eventually do, helped to form my own unique morality and worldview, not constricted by any single philosophy or dogma but by a blend of many. At the core of this view is Todd Rundgren's music.

It may sound odd, but his songs are four-minute shots of hope and vision that remind us, above money, power, status, intellect, and female parishioners in tight sweaters—LOVE is the only thing that matters. A humanity forever enslaved by despair and oppression without respect for others will only find its salvation when it reaches beyond the self and spends a moment in another shoes. None of us will ever be free until all of us are free. Simple as that. On your block, across the country, beyond the ocean, past all borders. A giant, all-encompassing love of the common man—catch it while you can.

This brings us back to Todd Snider, the other Todd, and those lines from "The Ballad of the Kingsmen," and the notion that only the strong, unyielding types will survive. I got that message, too. It was everywhere in an overwhelming way.

Along with the loss of confidence after not making any headway in college, these two clashing philosophies ultimately may be why I could not finish anything and why I was so self-loathing in my twenties and part of my thirties. But when I turned forty, it occurred to me that more of life was behind me than ahead. Being on the downward side of the bell curve was good because it forced me to concentrate on who I was, rather than what I would become. And what I was and who I am, is a guy who likes to sit with a book, listen to tunes, and who looks forward to the day when the meek will inherit the earth.

Besides my support for a liberal political agenda, there were other signs of who I was from a very young age. For example, when I was nine or ten years old, I had a planned fight with this kid from down the street, Harvey Michaels. This came about after an argument with his older brother. The argument centered on my contention that I was the third toughest kid at our end of Lockwood Avenue, while Harvey's brother insisted Harvey could whup my ass any day of the week. So, without Harvey's input or consent, we set a date and time to fight. I worked up a fight plan in the space before our showdown. First, I would punch Harvey in the stomach, causing him to double over in pain. While he was doubled over, I would karate-chop the back of his neck, sending him to the ground in pain and defeat.

On the appointed day and time, flanked by his older brother, Harvey showed up in my driveway, and just as planned, I doubled him over with a punch to the stomach and then sent him to the pavement with a karate chop to the back of his neck. It was beautiful. Never had anything gone so well for me. With the perfect execution of my plan I had a momentary sense of exultation. Harvey’s brother would now have to shut up, and word of my triumph and the ease with which it was achieved would spread through the neighborhood, boosting my ass-kicking credentials.

But by the time Harvey's brother helped him up from the pavement, and they wordlessly started their slow, defeated walk home, I had this sinking, terrible feeling. I had no beef with Harvey. He was my friend, and I humiliated him for no good reason. I went back into my house, conflicted about why this triumph felt so hollow. The picture of the wordless, beaten way they walked away burned grimly in my head for years.

In high school, when I was still kind of handsome and had some game, I briefly dated this petite girl with small, tight features and beautiful dark skin. It was as if she had a year-round tan, which I found very attractive. I remember giving her the eye for a long time before we made out at some awful basement party. I was the stereotypical loud, obnoxious, illiterate jock, while she was smart and sensible with National Honor Society credentials. It was the recipe for every lousy teen movie ever made. With my elevated sense of self, I had little doubt that I was a major step up from the nerdy little boys who flitted around her. As it turned out, she didn't feel the same way.

One Friday night, I stopped where she was babysitting. It was maybe nine or ten o'clock at night, and the kids she watched were asleep. The house was dark save for soft, muted lights on the living room's perimeter. Wafting through the air out of this great stereo was the song "Babe” from the new Styx album—yeah, yeah, not all the girls I dated were into the Sex Pistols. Thrilled with the dreamy ambiance, we talked for a bit in the kitchen (probably about the greatness of Styx) and then started to kiss. She smelled so good, and her petite frame fit perfectly in my arms. Not one for pre-function or tact, I slipped my hand down on her ass. She stiffened a bit but didn't push it away. Before I could move on to other parts of her body, "Babe” had ended, and she wanted to hear it again. We untangled, and she skittered off all petite and cute to some back room to reset the turntable arm. When she returned, I sat in the living room in this floppy recliner. She climbed into my lap, and we kissed again. With her ass now safe from my hands, I had to adjust my assault on her dark little great-smelling body. I tried everything to get at her forbidden parts: up, down, over, under, in, out—everything. It was obnoxious to the point where she finally got my coat and told me to leave.

I put on a little charm offensive, and she gave me another chance, turning down the lights and climbing back into the recliner with me. Despite my limited experience with women, I immediately sensed a difference in her. Her kisses were cold and lacked passion. She was bored with my bravado and just wasn't there anymore. I knew then that not only was the night over, but this experiment with the sensible girl with the year-round tan was over, too. She wasn't going to take off her glasses and be the prom queen, and I wasn't going to be the jock who suddenly became smarter and more sensitive like in all those teen movies. When it was really time to go, all annoyed, she said, “Why’d you have to come on so strong?” And then, she slammed the door behind me.

In the twenty minutes it took me to walk home, I turned this over and over in my head to no avail—why did I come on so strong? I stopped at the pizza shop on the corner of my street where I used to work, and while downing a slice, I told the pimply kid working the counter, Lenny, what had happened. He responded, "Those chicks can’t do us like that!” I wanted to agree with Lenny, but as I climbed into bed that night, I knew he was wrong, and I was filled with regret.

Like the fight with Harvey Michaels, this has bothered me for years. Enter Todd Snider and "The Ballad of the Kingsmen.”

These two minor events might not have bumped around in my head like an uneven load of laundry if I hadn’t been socialized by these conflicting philosophies—the drive for more verses the notion that the meek shall inherit the earth. I was aggressive with Harvey and the sweet National Honor Society girl because I was obligated by this compulsion for more, bigger, better. I wanted to walk around the neighborhood with the reputation of a real ass-kicker, and I insisted on violating the body of this girl who was really too good for me so I could talk shit and be a big man with my friends at school. I was haunted by these events because I knew others deserved to be treated with dignity and respect rather than to be fodder for my id.

Had I not been so confused by what I was supposed to do in these situations, I wouldn’t have humiliated a friend, and I might have gotten with a nice girl whose smarts and straightness appealed to me way more than I was aware of at the time. Sorry, Harvey. Sorry, sweet, National Honor Society girl. It wasn't you, and it wasn't me. Well, it was me, but there were forces at work I couldn't comprehend or control.

While not being totally aware, I did better at understanding what the values of money and material wealth meant to me. When I was supposed to lay the foundations for material success in my twenties, I was floundering in a sea of uncertainty, conflicted about society's expectations of success.

I remember one of my older brothers being home for a summer weekend with a rented Volvo. He let me take it out and tool around for a night, and I failed to see the big deal, brand name notwithstanding. Simply put, the car was a piece of shit. It had no pickup, was not responsive to attempts at James Bond-like turns, and generally loped along like a Freightliner. Worst of all, the stereo was tinny and underpowered, wrecking a just-completed mixtape by those mod punks, The Jam. I just didn't get that feeling of elevation, of superiority it was supposed to provide. It was just another car. Another car with a shitty stereo.

Also, early on, I understood that I wouldn't succeed in managing people or climbing the corporate ladder. I had a friend who became the manager at a bar where I worked, and it turned him into a total asshole. One night after the bar closed, we all went to a co-worker’s lawn-chair-filled apartment for some after-hours partying. During the night, this manager dude was feeding drinks and cocaine to this girl who everybody could see was totally playing him. Desperate to get over on her, he started to work the power angle, referring to me and co-workers as “my people,” like we were his lapdogs: My people step up for me . . . My people understand the bottom line . . . When my people take care of me, I take care of them, and on and on. Imagine that—talking this shit while running a place that on its best day smelled like used condoms and two-day-old piss.

The bar business was destructive to me, and I would be out of it soon enough, but that haughty little "my people" episode left a big impression on me. It was fascinating how a microscopic bit of power turned an otherwise good guy into a flaming asshole. I get douche chills even now when I think about it. Though I knew I didn't ever have the type of ego or position to leverage sex, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had no desire whatsoever to be management. This lack of desire troubled me because we're more or less conditioned to pursue this next step. Yet when the time came to take this step in my life, something innate kept me from acting. This troubled me for years until one day, five or six years into my old delivery job, it all became clear.

A new manager was hired, and instead of coming from the ranks of drivers like me, which was the usual path, he was off the street and ex-military. To get to know the workgroup he started shadowing people while we made our deliveries. When my day came, after some preliminary small talk, he started to tell me his managerial philosophy. This was bad—very bad. He had a goddamn philosophy, plus all kinds of other ideas and suggestions for how to make us better, more complete truck drivers and delivery people. Lord have mercy.

Though I couldn’t help feeling I was getting a new dad, I did my best to show respect and really listen. But as he droned on, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t really give a shit about being a great truck driver or employee. I was proud and wanted to do a good job, but thinking about the word philosophy as it applied to driving a truck and delivering cell phones, I realized that no matter what I did for a living, it would never be that important to me or define me as a person. Not only that, but I was finally okay with the fact that I didn't care much about my so-called career, which was very liberating and helped stop me from beating the hell out of myself for not wanting to practice the art of more.

Not scratching and clawing for a spot on the elevator up results in people looking past you and not taking you seriously. They have no use for someone indifferent to the material things and titles they've accumulated. And they certainly aren't interested in any highbrow literature or music you might have read or heard because illumination doesn't buy a Beemer or a club membership.

Sometimes, this is a very lonely place, and it drags me down. But invariably, something will jolt me back into place, like an interaction I witnessed between this Asian neurologist with a significant language deficit and this gorgeous pharmaceutical rep.

Doing my deliveries, I was always fascinated to see the quaffed and perfect pharmaceutical reps sitting in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices, ready to make their pitches or deliver samples. More fascinating was when they’d bring coffee and bagels, and I would overhear their patently phony relationship-building conversations with the receptionists, who were also dealing with me and a million other things. I loathed these reps and felt sorry for them at the same time—having to peddle their wares, a box, a coffee, and a dozen bagels at a time.

Anyway, it was late on a Friday afternoon, and I had to go back to this neurologist's office to deliver a package I'd overlooked. I walked in, and the receptionist and everyone else was gone for the day except the young doctor with the language deficit, sitting in the waiting room's corner with a dark-haired woman across from him. A black bag was on the floor next to the woman, tipping me off that she was a pharmaceutical rep. I didn't want to bother them, but I had to get rid of the package, so I walked in their direction and said hello in a way that apologized for interrupting, and then made the universal gesture for the doctor to sign my handheld device and take the package. Only instead, as he sat there very relaxed with his tie undone, he started to bust my balls in his crude, broken English, asking if I was the pizza delivery guy. The dark-haired woman erupted with laughter—way too much laughter for a not-so-funny joke—and then she leaned forward and touched him playfully on the arm.

Surprised at the over-the-top laughter and the arm touching, I saw she was angled in the chair with the skirt of her black business suit revealingly above her knees, exposing the contours of her perfect legs. I got it then. She was trying to make a sale and the heavy artillery was out. Beyond her legs, the rest of her was perfect, and she should have been in the court of a king rather than sitting there using her sex to get this pudgy doctor with bad jokes to buy her drugs.

Despite being from half a world away, the doctor understood my annoyed disposition and signed for the package. On my way out, I heard the rep start to giggle again. As I climbed into my rig, I noticed the only cars left in the parking lot were two sparkling Lexus SUVs. I paused momentarily, looked at my dirty hands and fingernails, thought about the nine bucks in my pocket, and felt pretty good about myself and who I was.

It took me a long time to get to this place—years of disentangling what was probably in me all along. And now that I’ve come out the other side and maybe understand the game we’re playing, I can’t help but feel we’re all just riding along on this giant contradiction that traps us in this eternal malaise. In the race for more, we sneer at the meek and call them weak and shiftless. We are convicted in the belief that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up that school because they were evil or because of something in a goddamn Marilyn Manson song, and we never stop to think about the endless mixed messages and contradictions we all are subject to in an overwhelming way every day of our lives.

I don't know where the truth is or if it's even out there. But you won't find it in social media, on talk radio, in the pulpit, or from our gaslighting elected officials. My bet is the truth is with artists like Todd Snider, who write songs like "The Ballad of the Kingsmen” that honestly, thoughtfully, and lovingly hold a mirror up and show us who we are and what we are.