PEACE QUEER: THE BLURT BLOG

Mis Spellers Of The World Untie

I would like to take this gracious opportunity that the fine people of Blurt have given me to tell all of you about the night I was abducted by and later escaped from the International League of Peace Queers.

I remember East Nashville was in the middle of a two-week kind bud drought that had set our neighborhood into a small state of confusion, chaos and tension. I was recording a song called “Last Summer At Band Camp I Did It With This Chick” with my so-called friends Eric McConnell and Kevn Kinney, when a crash through the control room door brought with it two large and heavily armed men identifying themselves as members of an International League of Peace Queers They were looking for me. Not Kevn, not Eric, but me.

They asked if I had written "Conservative Christian Right Wing Republican Straight White American Males." I tried to deny it. The next thing I knew, I was blindfolded and stuffed into a small closet, where I was forced to listen to early Phil Ochs and Joan Baez material.

I was also brutalized beyond what I consider an acceptable level of sanity. I remember saying over and over that I was already for peace, but they claimed I wasn’t, quote, “for it enough.” They demanded I write songs for an album that they boasted would easily outsell Thriller.

Fortunately for me, I already had a batch of songs similar to what they were looking for, so I assumed things were going to work out splendidly... or at least easily.

I could not have been more wrong. Later that night, I was forced to sing “Beer Run” until I vomited, and yet sadistically, every time I played it, I was electrocuted by some sort of device they called The Peace Keeper.

Then I realized not only were there a lot of them, but I recognized many of the voices. I couldn’t put an exact name to the voices, but I knew the voices. They taunted, they mocked, they emasculated and they spat — many of them screaming that “Beer Run” had set back the movement at least a million years.

I was forced to smoke weak marijuana and pretend to care about the world. It upset me. I called them folk Nazis and was beaten heavily for it.

But I gotta tell you, as much as I love hockey fights, I did eventually grow sympathetic to the cause, and I recorded the album for them. After the album was completed, they took off my blindfold, and it was then I learned that my captors had been a loose assortment of Americana shit storm artists that I like to call my peers.

Last year I was nominated for Unsuccessful Country Artist Of The Year at the AMA awards, and I lost to none other than high-ranking I.L.P.Q. member Patty Griffin. It was Patty, in fact, who told me that on my next mission, I would be trusted on my own to walk to the Three Crow Bar for a short interview to promote 'Peace Queer,' the album.  She said this interview would be for "Peace Queer," the bio, so I set out for the Three Crow.

On my way, I spotted an old nemesis from the Nancy Kerrigan camp who dated back to my Oregon years. This all would have been fine had he not spotted me, too, but he did, and his attitude toward me was egregious. I thought it smart to run, which I did. But by the time I ditched the guy, I thought I might be late for my interview. Luckily, I wasn’t.

At the Three Crow, I was poured a glass of wine and introduced to a kindly old gentleman named Cokie Roberts. I found his questioning style a bit aggressive, but in the end, felt I charmed the pants off him. We said our goodbyes, and I was headed back to Camp Peace Queer when it occurred to me that I didn’t have to head back if I didn’t want to. It was my chance to escape the Peace Queers, and I took it.

Golly, you hear a lot of strange and unnatural things about people these days, and with that very thought in mind, I'm personally just happy to have my old life back.

And I must say that while I will never forget that glorious creative summer with Patty and Kevn and the other Peace Queers, I will never, for the life of me, understand the beatings.

(Todd Snider lives in East Nashville where he writes songs, whoops it up and pisses off self-righteous people every chance he gets. His new album, sensibly titled Peace Queer, is due Oct. 14 and will be available as a free download at ToddSnider.net from October 11th to October 31st. It’s the followup to 2006’s The Devil You Know and represents, as far as we are concerned, a big-ass MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Keep a rockin’, Todd. BLURT loves ya.)