A message popped up this week on a wall inside the westbound Vista Ridge Tunnel:
“TODD SNIDER RULES”
This would be a nice little tribute to Todd Snider, the singer-songwriter born in Portland and raised in Beaverton who died last week at age 59. Except, there’s much more to the story.
It turns out, that same message first appeared on the wall of the Vista Ridge Tunnel 40 years ago. Snider explains why on his 2011 live album “Live — The Storyteller” as he sings the song “Rose City.”
“Back in my hometown, there’s this tunnel called the Multnomah County Tunnel, where, when you’re a senior in high school, you’re supposed to go down there at night and get out of a car and write your name in the tunnel,” Snider says. “You don’t have to use paint to do it because it’s a tunnel, so all the exhaust fumes create all this dirt and you can just take a rag and clean your name into the side. It’s not really technically vandalism. But it’s dangerous. And it’s an exciting thing for teenagers to do. And when I was a teenager I did that.”
Back then, Snider wrote “Todd Snider Rules.” And also: “Class of ’85 Rules.”
About 20 years later, Snider explains on the album, the same message appeared in the tunnel. This time, it came after he played a hometown show and then sang karaoke with high school friends over pitchers of beer. Snider saw the message in the tunnel on his way out of town the next morning, with no memory of putting it up the night before.
“I’m almost 40,” Snider says on the song. “I shouldn’t be writing that I rule in tunnels.”
Snider goes on to say that a few months later, he connected with a hometown friend who had been out of town during his Portland show. She asked how it went and he said he thought it was pretty good.
“It must have gone pretty good,” Snider recalls her saying, “because one of your fans went down to the Multnomah County Tunnel and wrote that you rule!”
Fast forward 20 more years, and that same message is back again. A fitting tribute to a Portland favorite.
Read the original article on oregonlive.com.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
