Just walked home — from Crescent Lake to Placido Bayou in St. Pete — to the tune of, oh, about five or six miles. Here's why: 

I was driving north on 16th Street, having left a Rays game, when my Prius started riding like a Peterbilt tractor trailer. I’m a little slow on the uptake with car stuff, so it took me a few hundred yards to realize I had a flat rear right tire. I pulled over into the parking lot of a mom-and-pop convenient store, opened the hatch and started looking for the spare.

The lighting was bad, and on a good day it would probably take me ‘til dawn to figure out how to change the tire — if I could even find it. Plus, I wasn’t really digging the vibe in the place. So I figured I’d drive up a little ways, real slow, find a brighter spot, and assess my situation. Blinkers on. 12 mph. I made a right on 9th Ave. No., a left on MLK.

Then I saw the lights of a cop car behind me.

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...