Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  Chief among them were the Backsliders, who were older if not necessarily wiser than most of their local peers. But frontman Chip Robinson had enough perspective to see alternative country, and the place of new bands like the Backsliders in it, as part of a continuum going back for decades.

  “We’ve seen all this before,” Robinson told me in a 1997 interview. “There’s been fringe country all along. Hell, Johnny Cash was fringe country. Those early Sun Records, Hank Williams, Buck [Owens] and Merle [Haggard] and Bakersfield. Way before anybody appreciated all these people for the American treasures they are, they started out on the fringes. It’s kinda cool that it’s come back, though. We had heard rumblings from various pockets, that this same kinda thing was happening in other cities for whatever reasons. I think people just got tired of doing something they didn’t want to in order to ‘make it’ in the business, and decided to go back to trying to write good songs and figuring out where their real roots are.”

  The Backsliders were a furiously intense band that didn’t combine country and rock so much as sic them on each other in a fight to the death. Unfortunately, Robinson and his co-leader Steve Howell couldn’t stand each other, which made for some unpleasant postshow van rides but amazing onstage fireworks. The Backsliders’ secret weapon was lead guitarist Brad Rice, a longtime veteran of numerous regional rock bands—most notably Finger, a band Ryan Adams actually auditioned for in the early 1990s when the group was between drummers.

  Also coming together were 6 String Drag, led by Kenny Roby from the punk band the Lubricators—transplanted South Carolinians, and cronies of Ryan’s old Daisy Street roommate Tom Cushman. Equal parts Elvis Costello punk and Doug Sahm country-soul man, Roby sang in a honeyed croon with an edge hinting at both his punk past and a somewhat frightening dark side. Roby’s vocal harmonies with bassist Rob Keller also echoed the Louvin Brothers, with elements of soul and even gospel. When they added a horn section later in the decade, 6 String Drag became one of the best live acts in the country.

  And of course, there was also Whiskeytown, the one Triangle act to be featured in that Fall 1995 debut issue of No Depression magazine—a piece recounting the Kenneth-from-Nashville blowup under the headline “A short interview’s journey into hell.”

  In the fall of 1994, shortly before his twentieth birthday, Ryan had settled into his latest restaurant job at Sadlack’s Heroes (although more than one of his coworkers from back then has said that he didn’t work there so much as hang out behind the counter). A semilegendary beer joint and sandwich shop in the shadow of the NC State Bell Tower on Hillsborough Street, Sadlack’s was a funky blue-collar establishment populated by a colorful cast of musicians, artists, blue-collar workers, students, and assorted miscreants. The late Peter Eichenberger vividly described the scene there in a 2004 essay written about a horrific drunk-driving accident involving a Sadlack’s regular:

  [Sadlack’s] was how things could be, gleefully messed up but generous, tolerant and occasionally hilarious—laborers, disaffected academics, loafers, fashionistas (when the weather’s nice) and the medicated. They come on foot, on bicycles and in cars. The island of misfit toys.

  When it’s good, there is nothing like it: bright sunshine on the deck, a kooky theater-with-plot-lines courtesy of the actors. Guitars, dogs and children chattering. A fine perch, lots to look at, fire trucks howling past the pretty young State kids. Some dude working on playing Jimi Hendrix on a ukulele while riding a bicycle backwards.

  When it is not so good, the early dark of a soggy, cold night in late November, the metal walls press in like the hull of a sinking submarine. The drinking is conducted with grim dedication while the greasy rain rattles on the roof. Same folks with the same problems—anesthetizing themselves with whatever it takes to hang on.

  Ryan’s kind of place, in other words. At that time, his boss at Sadlack’s was Eric “Skillet” Gilmore, who also played drums. Ryan and Skillet would get together to jam, and the first version of Whiskeytown began taking shape. The music was a jittery, up-tempo combination of country and punk—not unexpected, given Ryan’s Uncle Tupelo crush and former band Patty Duke Syndrome—to the point of being caffeinated. “Coffee country,” they called it. But Ryan didn’t think Whiskeytown was all that big a stretch from Patty Duke Syndrome.

  “When Patty Duke broke up, it left me really depressed and I started writing songs that were kinda country,” he told me in an early interview. “A lot of them were just terribly sad, like ‘Pawn Shop Ain’t No Place for a Wedding Ring.’ Me and Skillet started playing with this other guy, Rags, who played banjo. Then he left and we kept on. We just kind of let the band be its own thing without trying to control it too much. It just so happens it’s kinda country. I think if you stripped away the loud rhythm section from some Patty Duke songs, they could be country songs.”

  Rags didn’t last long before departing for parts unknown. But there was a large pool of like-minded musicians hanging around Sadlack’s, including two NC State English majors named Steve Grothmann and Caitlin Cary. A bassist from New Orleans, Grothmann had some jazz chops he later put to good use in a series of funk bands. Cary had grown up in Ohio learning classical violin by the Suzuki Method, eventually taking up country fiddle-playing in a just-for-fun band in Texas called the Garden Weasels. Both joined Whiskeytown as strictly instrumental members, but Cary’s role soon expanded.

  “I just started out playing fiddle those first few practices,” Caitlin told me in 2002. “Then I told Ryan, ‘You know, I can sing harmony if you want,’ and it went from there. But even from the very first practice, Whiskeytown was really exciting to me. I had no idea what I was getting into and I didn’t take it all that seriously. But right off, I knew it was really good.”

  Caitlin would sing lead on only one song in Whiskeytown’s recorded output, 1995’s “Matrimony.” But her vocal harmonies with Ryan soon emerged as a Whiskeytown signature, and the one consistent sonic element of the band’s three-album existence. Onstage, Caitlin also served as a beloved matriarch figure, soothing ruffled feathers whenever Whiskeytown’s antics got out of hand. Everybody loved Caitlin, Skillet Gilmore most of all. Despite the antimarriage sentiments of “Matrimony,” the two would wed in October of 2000.

  By the time she joined Whiskeytown, Caitlin was also a Sadlack’s employee alongside a lanky left-handed guitar player named Phil Wandscher. Phil knew who Ryan was before they met and, in a harbinger of their contentious future relationship, thought very little of him based on that first encounter. It happened at a local open mike night where Wandscher was a regular, performing as a duo with Greg Readling (a future member of Tift Merritt’s first band, The Carbines, as well as the bluegrass group Chatham County Line). Wandscher and Readling would also hang out to watch whoever else showed up, and sometimes things got comical.

  “One time this really skittish kid got up with a book of poems he was looking down at, reading them,” Phil said. “And then he got scared and ran offstage. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘that kid’s a fuckin’ freak.’ Come to find out that was Ryan. Might have been the first time I saw him. But I saw him everywhere after that.”

  Wandscher was still learning guitar himself, and he bounced around among a few other local bands. He was also part of the after-work crowd of Sadlack’s employees hanging around Skillet’s house, and he decided he wanted in on Whiskeytown. So one night, he made a bold declaration to Ryan: “I wanna play guitar in your band.” Phil signed on as Whiskeytown’s lead guitarist and occasional songwriter/lead vocalist. But his primary role would be Ryan’s instrumental foil, mirroring Caitlin’s vocal-foil role.

  In retrospect, it’s somewhat surprising that Ryan’s breakthrough group turned out to be a country band that sounded like Gram Parsons sitting in with the Rolling Stones at their most ragged. To that point, there had been little classic rock and even less country evident in the music Ryan played since he’d come to Raleigh. Indeed, college-radio indie rock like Sonic Youth or Superchunk seemed like more i
mportant reference points than the Stones or Parsons.

  “When Ryan and I lived together on Daisy Street, he’d come home and I’d be drunk and listening to old Rod Stewart or Rolling Stones records,” said his former roommate Tom Cushman. “He’d make fun of me for listening to that old-fart stuff because he was listening to Sonic Youth, Faust, Can—this really abrasive, inaccessible indie rock.”

  In Whiskeytown, however, Ryan’s punk-rock past seemed more evident in terms of attitude than musical style. While Whiskeytown may have been twangy, the main aesthetic was ragged-but-right and don’t sweat the tuning. And thanks to Ryan’s ample gifts for picking up styles quickly, he could convincingly sing and play country music as if he’d been doing nothing but that from the beginning. It also didn’t hurt that his plainspoken voice and phrasing resonated on the same wavelength as the aforementioned Gram Parsons.

  Beyond musical reference points, interpersonal relations were also a key element of the band’s chemistry. Like the Replacements, Whiskeytown were a volatile combination of personalities made even more so by voluminous alcohol consumption—that name was no accident. The fact that Ryan and Phil’s tempestuous relationship seemed to be steeped in mutual hatred gave Whiskeytown a very high baseline for tension, drama, and combustibility. Ryan once said that the worst heckling he ever got was from his own bandmate onstage.

  “In the middle of a song, Phil would sometimes look over and go, ‘Fuck you,’” Ryan told me in 1998. “I’d say ‘Fuck you!’ back, we’d stop the song and there’d be feedback while we tried to hit each other.”

  Tension between Ryan and Phil to the point of physical violence would be a Whiskeytown constant. Caitlin once had the misfortune of getting caught in the middle of a scuffle and got clocked for her trouble. Ryan felt bad enough about it to give her a mandolin as a peace offering, which he presented with a letter of apology:

  I am very sorry,

  I think I must be crazy.

  Forgive me if you can—

  If you can’t, play this

  Much love, and sorry, Ryan

  Despite the personality clashes, the Ryan/Caitlin/Phil triumvirate was pure musical gold, thanks to multiple dynamics. The most obvious was the vocal combination, Ryan’s Parsons to Caitlin’s Emmylou Harris, in harmonies that could be heart-stoppingly beautiful. When they were on, they sounded like they were born to sing together. Ryan’s voice was usually top-dead-center, with Caitlin’s dusky voice providing color, support, and sometimes counterpoint.

  But Phil’s role was just as important. Sometimes his guitar would take that counterpoint role to Ryan’s voice, and sometimes it was more a matter of their different instrumental sensibilities meshing.

  “I loved the way we’d play together, the guitar parts kind of intertwined,” Phil said. “He was more indie rock while I was more classic rock, which he always used to give me shit about. But he came around.”

  Ryan was never much for waiting around, so Whiskeytown got busy recording almost immediately. Just a few months after forming, they scraped together enough money to go into Sonic Wave Recording, a studio near the Raleigh Five Points district. This was a reversal of the customary order of things—bands would usually spend long months or even years woodshedding and playing live before recording. But recording before amassing much of a gig history was a conscious decision.

  “The whole goal was to write and record, then really start playing live, rather than falling into the trap of playing live all the time and you’ve got no time to go into the studio,” said Wandscher.

  At Sonic Wave, they worked with Greg Elkins, a friend of Ryan’s who lived near his old closet abode in Oakwood—right down Elm Street from Dana Kletter, and next door to members of the band Erectus Monotone. Elkins’s band Vanilla Trainwreck had just broken up in September 1994, and he was trying to get a studio career going. Whiskeytown were one of his first recording projects, and he was every bit as raw as the band when it came to studio techniques.

  “At that point, it would be generous to say that I barely knew what I was doing,” Elkins said in 2011. “There wasn’t a whole lot of time or money involved and everybody was bending everything as far as they could to make something happen. Rubbing two sticks together to make fire, basically. It was lean for everybody. Pretty much the perfect scenario. Quite frankly, those recordings are an embarrassment to me. That’s not a comment on the musical quality, only on my limited abilities back then. It’s been hard that one of the first things I ever worked on turned out to have the legs that it did.”

  The eight tracks Whiskeytown recorded with Elkins at Sonic Wave all eventually saw the light of day. Four of them comprised Whiskeytown’s first mini-album, which was released in early 1995 through a complicated chain of relationships involving Ryan’s old girlfriend Sarah Corbitt.

  Corbitt had graduated from Saint Mary’s and gone on to UNC in Chapel Hill, where she also worked part-time at an independent store called Monster Records. By then, she was dating Ross Grady, an NC State graduate student with Whiskeytown members Caitlin Cary and Steve Grothmann. Between his friendship with various band members and his local-music radio show on WKNC, Ross was around during Whiskeytown’s formation.

  In fact, if any critic can legitimately lay claim to being first on the scene with Whiskeytown, it’s Grady. He wrote the first story about the band in January 1995 in the Independent Weekly, a piece about alternative country focused on “Whiskey Town” and another local band called Pine State. It ran with an onstage picture of Whiskeytown (taken by Grady himself) in which Ryan appeared to be about twelve years old, and yet another virtuoso quote by the young maestro: “I don’t have time to be unclear—I’m going to die someday.”

  One of Sarah Corbitt’s Monster Records coworkers was Kurt Underhill, another young man with music business aspirations. He had recently formed a label called Mood Food Records (with the motto “SoundFood for your MusicMood”), and he was looking for bands. Knowing that she and Ross were in the local-band loop, Underhill asked Sarah whom he should sign.

  “I told him, ‘You should put out Whiskeytown,’” Sarah said. “‘They’re great and people love them.’ I got him and Ryan on the phone together during a shift, and they did the rest.”

  And so it came to pass that Whiskeytown signed a record deal not long after forming (although it was a deal they would soon regret) and had music for sale in Schoolkids, Monster, and other record stores in short order. Titled Angels and pressed on old-fashioned seven-inch vinyl, the new record was an EP of four songs from the Sonic Wave recordings: “Angels Are Messengers from God,” “Captain Smith,” “Tennessee Square,” and “Take Your Guns to Town.”

  “Take Your Guns to Town” puts a spin on the 1958 Johnny Cash classic “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” although the chorus plays both sides to give it a sense of push-pull tension: “Take your guns to town/Don’t take your guns to town.” The recording features Ryan singing solo and describing the feelings of someone on the road (or on the run), with the obligatory references to drinking. But the words are secondary to the exuberant arrangement, wonderfully balanced between snarling guitars and Caitlin Cary’s keening fiddle.

  “Captain Smith” features a rare Phil Wandscher lead vocal, which works well enough; but mostly it convinces you that Ryan was the one who belonged out front as the primary singer. It’s the most up-tempo of the EP’s four songs, blazing along at a rollicking runaway-train clip with call and response between the guitars and vocals, and the drums doing the pushing (a template also favored by the Old 97’s). By contrast, “Tennessee Square” is a stately waltz where acoustic guitar sets the tempo, with lyrics about being stuck in a nowhere town that sounds a lot like Jacksonville.

  As for the songs that wouldn’t be released until later, there was “Macon, Georgia County Line,” very similar in tempo and style to “Captain Smith” (with harmonica credited to Phil); “Oklahoma,” a snarling rocker on which Ryan’s vocals range from murmur to holler; the downcast ballad “Pawn Shop
Ain’t No Place for a Wedding Ring”; and “Nervous Breakdown,” a cover of the 1978 hardcore flip-out by Black Flag, done up in an amusingly straightforward countrypolitan arrangement prominently featuring harmonica.

  But the most attention-getting song of the bunch was the mini-album’s unofficial title track, “Angels Are Messengers from God,” a ballad that later came to be known as “Faithless Street.” And it does evoke the street (or the gutter) more than heavenly bodies, coursing with exhausted anger and resentment—even though it’s one of the quietest, most deliberate songs Whiskeytown ever committed to tape. The guitars are subdued and the tempo is a slow heartbeat, with Caitlin’s sadly crying fiddle carrying the tune. Ryan claimed to have written “Angels” after a night of heavy drinking, in a fifteen-minute spurt. But Caitlin’s fiddle part was important enough to the finished recording for her to rate a cowriting credit.

  In terms of subject matter, “Angels” could be the sequel to Ryan’s post–Patty Duke Syndrome revenge anthem “Bastards I Used to Know,” cursing loneliness and blue-collar poverty with similar vehemence. But “Angels” feels more like a forward-looking manifesto because of the end of the chorus, which Ryan sang solo in a tone of resigned weariness. It was an infamous declaration that would haunt Whiskeytown for the next five years in the form of a thousand pun-filled headlines, kickers, punch lines, and rants:

  So I started this damn country band

  ’Cause punk rock was too hard to sing.

  Another notable Whiskeytown recording from that period was a cover along the lines of “Nervous Breakdown,” punk godfather Richard Hell’s 1977 protopunk anthem “Blank Generation,” which they recorded with no production to speak of on a four-track cassette machine in the living room of Steve Grothmann’s rental house. It was for Who the Hell: A Tribute to Richard Hell, which Ross Grady put together and released on his label Cred Factory Records in the spring of 1995 as a benefit for area AIDS service groups.