I was sitting in the back row of the press box at Tropicana Field Friday night when an imposing figure sat down beside me. Dude was about 6-feet-2, thick, wearing a black brimmed hat. This is no garden-variety baseball beat writer, I thought.

I introduced myself.

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...