Country’s Todd Snider: The Man of Still : Pop: The genre has changed over the years, but the artist remains true to traditional styles, as his ‘Songs for the Daily Planet’ shows.

People who want to make it in the music business usually are advised to find a manager, a lawyer, a publisher, an agent, a producer, or all of the above, if they want to get ahead.

Todd Snider’s story points to the advantages of finding a good record store.

Taking tips from the keepers of a mom-and-pop shop in the sleepy college town of San Marcos, Tex., Snider, then a rugby-playing student at Southwest Texas State University, became acquainted with the tradition of singer-songwriters who mix country, folk and rock ‘n’ roll.

One of the little-known heroes he found in the bins of that record shop eventually played a crucial role in putting Snider where he is now: on the road, and in record bins himself with “Songs for the Daily Planet,” an album that positions the unpretentious, 28-year-old singer and songsmith as an upholder of the country-folk-rock tradition he largely discovered back at the Sundance Records shop in San Marcos.

“I’d just go in and tell this guy [at the store] how much money I had and say, ‘Set me up,’ ” Snider, who plays tonight at the Coach House, said recently over the phone from a hotel in San Francisco. “He knew what I was into.”

Snider’s trusted record retailer set him up with two obscure early-’70s albums by Keith Sykes, best known as writer of the Jimmy Buffett song “Volcano.” Through a roundabout chain of events, Snider eventually learned that Sykes was in Memphis, running a music-publishing company. Soon, Snider, who had grown up in Portland, Ore., was in Memphis too.

“I’d written songs that he liked, and he just thought he’d get a hold of somebody who could get him someplace,” Sykes recalled in a separate interview from his Memphis office. “Todd just sort of picks people out and doesn’t go away.”

Sykes didn’t sign Snider immediately, but he quickly saw the hold the youngster could exert over a barroom with just his songs and a guitar. Eventually, Sykes began promoting Snider to labels.

The Nashville-based Margaritaville Records, owned by Sykes’ old buddy Buffett, came through with a deal, and Snider’s album emerged last fall. The title refers to Snider’s regular, weekly gig at a Memphis bar called the Daily Planet.

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Since the album’s release, Snider and his three-man band have toured without letup, winning some exposure on the Adult Album Alternative radio format. Although he made the album in Nashville and considers himself a country singer, Snider’s crusty baritone and irreverent outlook aren’t part of the smooth, neat package that the marketers of mainstream country music are selling nowadays.

Self-styled country singer though he may be, Snider calls to mind a variety of influences. Several tracks, including the widely played “Alright Guy,” have a heartland-rock kick, picking up on John Cougar Mellencamp’s Stones-meet-bluegrass approach.

“My Generation (Part Two)” may take its title from the old Who anthem, but Snider sounds more like one of his early favorites, Country Joe McDonald, as he spouts breezy rhymes full of tongue-in-cheek foolery about today’s Young America:

We’ll buy anything from Diet Sprite

To a thousand points of light

I’ll admit we’re not that bright

But I’m proud anyway

On the unlisted concluding track, “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” Snider copies the humorous talking-blues style that cropped up on Bob Dylan’s earliest albums (although Snider says he wasn’t much influenced by Dylan and first came across the talking-blues on an album by one of his chief heroes, Texas singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker).

This absurdist little ditty, more for-the-fun-of-it than satirically pointed, speculates that the next big thing in alternative rock will be, literally, the sounds of silence: Bands will be hyped not according to what they can play, but on their steadfast refusal to play anything.

Snider was about to answer a question about “Talkin’ Seattle” when he got sidetracked by a strange coincidence.

“That’s so funny. You know who just walked by my window? The drummer guy from Nirvana [Dave Grohl, now leader of the band Foo Fighters]. We’re at the same swank rock hotel in San Francisco.”

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Listening to Snider’s novelty notions and humorously slanted songs, it’s easy to imagine him basing an entire career on his ability to provoke chuckles and grins.

But he opted, on “Songs for the Daily Planet,” to strike a balance. Hence numbers such as “I Spoke as a Child,” a sentimental, Tom Waits-like ballad of wistful reminiscence, “That Was Me,” a fervent recollection of Snider’s scuffling days, and the tense, bluesy rocker, “Turn It Up.”

In “You Think You Know Somebody,” Snider registers a dead-serious American-gothic tale about the disastrous ripple effects of child abuse.

“That song is true, but I hope the people in it, if they were in the room, wouldn’t know” it was about them, Snider said, noting that his slice-of-life numbers usually have fictional twists to add a bit of distance.

Snider’s mixture of the witty with the woebegone is another outgrowth of his solid background in the singer-songwriter tradition.

“When I started getting into records, I listened to John Prine or Billy Joe Shaver or Jerry Jeff,” singers with a way of oscillating between the comic and the pathetic. “I always thought that was the way you were supposed to do it. You were supposed to have a bunch of different emotions on records.”

* Todd Snider, Local Heroes and LAOC Band play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $15.50. (714) 496-8930.