Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  Raleigh is the largest city in the so-called “Triangle,” which is actually more crescent-shaped and includes Chapel Hill to the west and Durham to the north. With the region’s universities, high-tech industry in Research Triangle Park, and the state capital in Raleigh, the Triangle is very much like a smaller version of Austin, Texas. But it’s not that much smaller. Add up the Triangle’s total population and it comes to around a million people, many of them students at Raleigh’s NC State, Chapel Hill’s University of North Carolina, and Durham’s Duke University. That makes the Triangle fertile ground for new bands, with the added bonus of supportive local radio. Local music has always been a major programming element on State’s WKNC, UNC’s WXYC, and Duke’s WXDU, in part because so many local musicians work at all three stations.

  In the early 1990s, the major-label music business was more receptive to noisy bands from places like the Triangle than ever before. Thanks to the Seattle grunge band Nirvana, 1991 was The Year Punk Broke, as the title of a Sonic Youth documentary film put it with a touch of mockery. Nirvana’s landmark Nevermind album yielded an MTV hit in “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—the comet that killed off the 1980s-vintage hair-metal dinosaurs and knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts for good measure. Underground music had suddenly, unexpectedly escaped its college-radio ghetto.

  Music consumers had spent the previous decade replacing their old vinyl albums with expensive CDs, a windfall that fattened label coffers and put record companies at the peak of their power and influence. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and the rest of the grunge wave pushed commercial radio in a harder-edged direction, and labels were willing to take a chance on the sort of scruffy bands they wouldn’t have bothered with a few years earlier. The search was on for “The Next Nirvana,” as well as “The Next Seattle.”

  At the time Ryan was first making his way into the Triangle music scene, it looked like that next-Seattle boomtown might be Chapel Hill—“Chapel Hill” being the stand-in dateline for the entire region whenever out-of-town media showed up to look around. In actuality, there’s always been something of a divide between working-class Raleigh and artier Chapel Hill. In the Raleigh quadrant where Ryan lived and played, Motorolla were the best and brightest in the early ’90s. A power trio led by singer/guitarist Bo Taylor (who also played with Dana Kletter and Sara Bell in Dish), Motorolla added classic-rock firepower to the alternative-rock blueprint, with enough over-the-top instrumental theatrics to make it funny. Bill Mooney, one of the local club scene denizens, described them as “The greatest band in the world and a parody of the greatest band in the world, at the same time.”

  On a good night, it was easy to imagine Motorolla blowing up to Nirvana-sized proportions, and a fierce bidding war broke out among multiple major labels. But it would all come to naught. The one album the trio put out—1994’s Stay Loaded, released on Interscope Records under the name Motocaster—was a pale shadow of the band’s live show, and it didn’t sell. A follow-up album was recorded but never released, and the band broke up after getting dropped by Interscope. A few years later, when Ryan was in the first rush of interest from major labels, he told me he refused to even consider signing with Interscope “because of the way they fucked over Motorolla.”

  While it’s the smallest of the Triangle’s three hubs, Chapel Hill has always had the area’s highest music profile, especially after the uber-hip New York band Sonic Youth put out a song by that title in 1992. “Chapel Hill” namechecks Cat’s Cradle, the town’s flagship rock club and a key outpost on America’s underground-rock chitlin circuit. UNC’s WXYC has a similar stature as one of the country’s leading college stations (it was also the first radio station in the world to start broadcasting on the Internet, in November 1994). And Chapel Hill was home to Mammoth Records, an independent label that started in the late 1980s. Before Dish, Dana Kletter was on the Mammoth roster in the early 1990s with blackgirls, an interesting but commercially marginal chamber-rock trio. Mammoth would be selling millions of albums by the mid-’90s with Florida rock band Seven Mary Three and Chapel Hill’s own Squirrel Nut Zippers—a jazz combo composed of members of local alternative-rock bands.

  Another new label in Chapel Hill was Merge Records, imprint of Superchunk, a band whose fame went well beyond the Triangle. Young, collegiate, and cute, Superchunk’s revved-up, hooky punk made it one of the American rock underground’s leading lights. But when Superchunk had the chance to sign with a major label, the group opted instead to cast its lot with its own label, Merge. While that turned out to be exactly the right decision, it seemed self-limiting at the time. Merge’s first “office” was a corner of Superchunk bassist Laura Ballance’s bedroom, and the label’s early releases were seven-inch singles and cassettes by the band and its friends. By 2011, things had changed enough for Merge to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, earn gold records, and win the album-of-the-year Grammy Award with Montreal rock band Arcade Fire.

  Even in its embryonic stage, however, Merge had its loyal customers—including a Jacksonville teenager named Ryan Adams, who found the fact that Merge was just up the road from Jacksonville to be inspirational. In the 2009 label history Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small, Ryan contributed a rhapsodic introduction that described Merge’s records as beacons of light to someone growing up in the coastal backwater of Onslow County:

  Merge 7 inch singles came packaged like candy. They also looked a little like comics which was good because I liked both and I liked girls so much they scared me so it all seemed like the perfect distraction, at least to me, and surely to my grandmother who would patiently listen with me on our portable record player in the wood paneled kitchen while she baked this or that cake or whatever—she liked how much cymbal crashing was going on—somehow overlooking the melodic weirdness or angst, how forgiving and awesome those moments—in fact before i had money for records she would write the checks and mail them for each PO Boxed 7 inch I desired in exchange for how ever many times the lawn got mowed but I did that anyway so really she funded my habit embarrassingly and MY GOD at first they were so pretty I could do nothing less than just marvel at each one.

  After he moved up to Raleigh, Ryan had to buy his own records and pay his own rent. He cycled through a series of short-term day jobs, mostly in restaurant kitchens around town. One early job was at a takeout burger joint called Circus Family Restaurant, which he quit after a few months with a letter of resignation that still gets quoted in Raleigh: “This place is like a three-ring circus, and I’m tired of working for peanuts.”

  Another was at a downtown diner near the offices of the News & Observer. While Ryan was working there, the story goes, he developed a crush on a woman who worked at the newspaper, although I’ve never been able to ascertain who. So he applied for an “office boy” job at the N&O with a remarkable two-page typed document that has been widely circulated around Raleigh over the years. Less a résumé than a late-night manifesto composed from the depths of a liquor bottle, it lists work experience (“Resturant [sic] jobs, odd jobs, temporary services, furniture repair, restoration and painting”) and “Hobbies” (“Nightlife, writing songs and playing in random bands around the triangle area”) before launching into a stream-of-consciousness narrative about The World According To Ryan. The conclusion:

  There comes a time when old acquaintances must be forgotten, when the partys over, when the fat lady is just about let out those first few repulsive notes and it is finally obvious that action must be taken. Of course now what? What does the idealist persue in modern day society? More likely, what in the hell am I to persue in modern day society? Flat broke from the listless nights spent crooning life over a bottle of strong liquor, using my youth as a weapon against the world and myself. Taking advantage of life at all cost at any means and most definitly every waking hour. I imagine I shall persue the same direction as I always have, maybe this time with more self discipline. I have escaped every other fo
rm of discipline save the bad luck and hard knocks that one comes across alone and against the world once and for all. Even in failure I will still be at work. As restless as before. As willing to submit only to the deepest of my whims.

  It is important to become disallusioned with ones art so that one may feel it necessary to overcome oneself in their own right. In the name of their own vision of what is truth. A true artist cannot see the world except through his art. His life and his work are art. His soul awaiting translation.

  Ryan didn’t get a job at the N&O, but at least he managed to keep out of jail. Another soon-to-be-famous musician wasn’t quite so lucky during his sojourn in Raleigh—Christopher Wallace, better-known as Biggie Smalls, the late Brooklyn-born rapper Notorious B.I.G. In the early 1990s, Wallace had to get out of New York and wound up in Raleigh, where he spent enough time to get busted for possession of cocaine and marijuana with intent to sell. He copped a guilty plea and got off with probation and a suspended sentence before leaving town for fame, fortune, and his own murder in a 1997 drive-by shooting in Los Angeles.

  Like Adams, Wallace wasn’t shy about telling people he was going to be famous someday. But history does not record whether or not Ryan and Biggie ever crossed paths in Raleigh during their prefame days.

  Chapter Three

  At some point, Ryan found employment at the Rathskeller, a dark, narrow, and dungeonlike labyrinth of tables and booths just across the Hillsborough Street main drag from the NC State campus. The Rathskeller’s kitchen was an epicenter of the local music community, with numerous musicians and scenesters among its employees. That’s where Ryan became tight with future bandmates Brian Walsby and Tom Cushman.

  An underground cartoonist of semilegendary stature, Walsby had moved to Raleigh in the mid-1980s because it was the hometown of pioneering thrash band Corrosion of Conformity. At the time he and Ryan became coworkers, Walsby was the drummer in Shiny Beast, a group that played “math rock” (a combination of punk and progressive rock, so-called because of its elaborate shifting time signatures). Before that, Walsby had played in the band Wwax with Mac McCaughan, Super-chunk’s guitarist and cofounder of Merge Records. That got him on Ryan’s radar—Wwax’s “Pumpkin”/“Inn Town” was one of those seven-inch Merge singles Ryan had bought by mail.

  One night, Walsby and McCaughan were hanging out during a show at Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill. Ryan approached to pay his respects, telling them that the Wwax single had “changed my life.” A cynical sort, Walsby wasn’t impressed by that—or by Ryan turning up at Shiny Beast shows to plead with him to form a band. It took a while before Walsby eventually gave in.

  In the meantime, Ryan had another Rathskeller kitchen coworker to play with, Tom Cushman, who had moved to Raleigh from South Carolina in 1991 with a rock band called the Lubricators. The Lubricators took up residence a mile or so west of the Rathskeller, in a house on Daisy Street just off Hillsborough. Ryan and Tom became fast friends.

  “I’m a freak and an idiot, and so is Ryan,” Cushman said. “We liked the same kind of stuff, this really weird music. I’m at least ten years older than him, and he made me feel like a goofy little kid.”

  After the Lubricators broke up and scattered, Cushman stayed in the house on Daisy. Ryan moved in and the party started, with bands soon to follow. One night, Ryan walked up to Cushman in a bar with an announcement: “Tom! We’re in a band! You play bass, I play guitar and sing, John Reigh plays drums, we’re called Ass and we have a show next weekend!”

  Cushman didn’t actually play bass, of course, but he didn’t let that stop him. He did own a bass guitar, and he could fake it well enough for punk rock. Ass lasted all of two shows, the first of which consisted of three songs (one of which Ryan made up on the spot) at a house party. Cushman thought the evening a rousing success.

  “But by the second show, Ryan had gotten into alternate tunings,” Cushman said. “He’d have to come over and tune my bass after every song. That show was attended by a bunch of frat boys who all hated us, and it was pretty terrible. But I had a great time, even though somebody said we sounded like U2. That made me wanna quit playing music. We were so bad, we were almost good.”

  Ass were the first of many bands Ryan and Tom formed at Daisy Street, although “bands” should probably be in quotation marks because most of them weren’t much more than wee-hours jam sessions fueled by alcohol, pot, and/or speed. Late one night, Cushman came home from a show by the Minneapolis band Soul Asylum bearing a warm six-pack of Busch Light he’d been given, to find Ryan still up. So they started playing over beers. Ryan got behind the drums, instructed Cushman to play guitar and sing (“sing”), and American Rock Highway were born.

  “Godawful,” Cushman said with a chuckle. “Just the worst shit ever, although the drumming was good. Ryan’s a really good drummer, better than you’d think. We were listening to a lot of Royal Trux at the time, maybe that’s where it came from. I was singing, yelling something, but you couldn’t hear it. Walsby once described American Rock Highway as sounding like the worst SST band ever.”

  At Daisy Street and elsewhere, there were also the Skylarks, Knife, Spawn, and other assemblages too short-lived for them to get around to naming. But at least one band from that period had some potential: Lazy Stars, which formed after Ryan had moved out. Cushman still has a framed poster from the one and only show that Lazy Stars ever played: October 21, 1993, at the Fallout Shelter, a literally subterranean nightspot in an underground space beneath West Street in downtown Raleigh. Even though Ryan insisted on changing drummers at the last minute, the show went well. But they had an ugly altercation the next day, bad enough to break up the band, and that was that.

  “Lazy Stars could’ve been a spectacular band,” Cushman said. “Unlike most of the bands we had, we practiced a lot, months and months. It was like Crazy Horse with the Wipers, with some Byrds and Galaxie 500. Ryan described us once as ‘ghostly pop.’ It was late-night, sitting-by-yourself-drunk music.”

  Fortuitously, some of the music from this period actually survives on tape. Ryan was already in the habit of recording everything, even the seemingly aimless jams, and Cushman inherited a cache of cassette tapes left behind after he moved out. It’s just a fraction of everything that was recorded, and most of the tapes aren’t labeled. But despite the crude audio quality, they offer a fascinating sonic snapshot of what Ryan was playing back then. A lot of the tapes have experiments with drones, feedback, and backward tape, or snippets of riffs and grooves (or oddities such as Ryan playing credible funk guitar with a wah-wah pedal).

  American Rock Highway pretty much live down to Cushman’s assessment, with Ryan flailing away on drums as Cushman’s guitar makes what sounds like the noise you’d get from taking a chainsaw to a washing machine. If it sounds like they were making this up as they went along, that’s because they were. But one notable American Rock Highway artifact is “Restaurant,” a tribute of sorts to their place of employment. “Restaurant” sounds like the damaged, inbred cousin of Super-chunk’s hated-day-job anthem “Slack Motherfucker,” exuding the frustration of minimum-wage slave labor. “Whattaya want from us?” Ryan screams at one point, and the outro is just the word “restaurant” repeated over and over.

  Lazy Stars’ “Blue Door” laments playing in an empty room, although Cushman said that the group’s one show “was freakin’ packed.” Then there’s “Burning Bed,” which was in the repertoire of both Ass and Lazy Stars under various titles. It’s a song with a story behind it.

  “That one’s about the night I came home, and Ryan was about to get laid for the first time ever,” Cushman said. “That’s what he told me, anyway. Cute girl, too, she was a waitress at the Rathskeller. Anyway, I locked myself in my room and passed out in bed with a cigarette that lit the bed on fire. So Ryan’s finally about to enter the kingdom of heaven when the girl tells him, ‘Ryan, I smell smoke.’ He had to break into my room, drag me out of my burning bed, and pull the mattress out into the yard, where the f
ire department came and put it out. It stayed there for weeks. So yeah, Ryan saved my life.”

  The Lazy Stars recordings have been widely bootlegged under the title Exile on Daisy Street, with the songs credited to “Adam Ryan.” It’s the best-developed of Ryan’s Daisy Street bands, with glimmers of what was to come. Many of the songs creep along as sprawling, slow-tempo guitar jams that pick up where Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” left off. A few songs are faster than that (most notably “Hill,” with a tempo approaching breakneck), but most of the songs on Exile don’t seem in a hurry to get anywhere. And yet they do, eventually. Cushman is right—given time, Lazy Stars could have grown into something special.

  Music isn’t the only revealing thing to be heard, either. At one point on Exile, Ryan calls for a beer break. At another, right before “Burning Bed,” the drummer asks for suggestions. “Go straighter with us,” Ryan says. “Think about driving from here to Wilson on, uh . . . 61.” Wilson is a town about an hour due east of Raleigh, although the road there is actually Highway 64; perhaps Ryan had Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” on his mind.

  Best of all is a priceless exchange at the beginning of “Withering Heights” (not the same “Withering Heights” that would appear twelve years later as a song on Ryan’s Jacksonville City Nights album). Ryan asks Cushman if he can understand what he’s singing. “Not really,” Cushman answers. There’s a pause, and you can almost picture the earnest look on eighteen-year-old Ryan’s face as he asks his next question:

  “Do I sound like I mean it?”