Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  Who the Hell makes an interesting time capsule of the local scene at the moment of Whiskeytown’s birth, spinning a web of connections. Both of Ryan’s old Patty Duke Syndrome band-mates are on it in Refrigerator Heaven, a band that also featured Greg Elkins. Elkins’s other band, Vanilla Trainwreck, is also on Who the Hell, as is Matt Brown’s Ashley Stove. So are the bands June, Pine State, Joby’s Opinion, and other leading locals of the time. But even though Ryan would later proclaim Whiskeytown’s “Blank Generation” to be an embarrassment, it pretty much steals the album. Grady thought enough of it to do a radio edit with the word “fuckin’” bleeped out, included as an unlisted hidden track at the end of the compact disc.

  “Getting Whiskeytown onto Who the Hell was kind of a no-brainer,” Grady said in 2011. “I knew everybody in the band, so they were an obvious choice. Somebody else really wanted to do ‘Blank Generation’ and got really mad I gave it to Whiskeytown instead. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d verbally promised that to someone else before I knew Whiskeytown wanted to do it. At that moment, they could kinda do anything and it’d turn out really fuckin’ awesome. It was impossible for them to screw something up.”

  Like “Nervous Breakdown,” the Whiskeytown version of “Blank Generation” is less a cover than a deconstructive rewrite. Grothmann transcribed Richard Hell’s lyrics as best he could (this being long before you could look up any song on the Internet), but Ryan composed a completely different arrangement to go with them. It sounds as if it was recorded under water, commencing with an off-kilter guitar lead that stutters a bit before Caitlin’s woozy fiddle picks up the riff and runs with it. Then the rhythm section kicks in, accelerating the shambling free-jazz stumble of the Richard Hell and the Voidoids original to a crazed hoedown gallop. Ryan applies his best snot-nosed sneer to the opening line—“Weeeeell, I was sayin’ let me outta here before I was even booOOOOooorn!”—not harmonizing with Caitlin so much as hollering in unison on the double-time chorus: “’Cause I belong to the/Blank Generation/Take it or leave it/Any fuckin’ time!” Right before the outro, Ryan cackles and gives a whoop: “All right, let’s cut this biscuit! Hey!”

  As it happened, “Blank Generation” was the first Whiskeytown recording that I remember hearing. On the day that Who the Hell showed up in my mailbox, I probably played “Blank Generation” at least twenty times.

  Chapter Five

  Even though he made Whiskeytown’s first recordings and was a longtime friend of Ryan’s, Elkins was not exactly sold on his new alternative-country direction. Elkins much preferred Patty Duke Syndrome, noting that “all of his indie-punk-underground-rock friends were really disappointed that country music was being brought into the picture.” But that was nothing compared to what Ryan’s old Patty Duke band-mate Brian Walsby thought. The harshest part of that 2002 cartoon Walsby drew about Ryan recounted his reaction to Whiskeytown:

  I hated his involvement in it because I thought the only real reason he stumbled into country music was only the result of him burning all of his bridges with all of his relationships, & how he had to do a brand new thing. Pretty dopey, but that is how I felt. . . . I cringed at their “Nervous Breakdown” cover, & then I flipped off the stereo speakers when that song with the immortal lyric “punk rock’s too hard to sing” came on. I took it really personally!!

  The accompanying drawing shows an enraged Walsby in cartoon form, raising a middle finger and screaming in response. There were other rumblings around town about country music’s supposed uncoolness, too.

  “Because they were alt-country, it seemed like there was some grumbling and discontent about the emergence of that,” said Sarah Corbitt. “It didn’t fit. You know, Raleigh was punk, Chapel Hill was experimental and country was . . . kinda lame. So I remember people hearing about Whiskeytown and going, ‘Uh . . . really?’ In the punk community, it didn’t seem to be accepted in the beginning even though it was people like John Howie [drummer for Finger, then leader of the honky-tonk band Two Dollar Pistols], this rock drummer who’d grown up listening to George Jones and Johnny Cash. And Ryan was more of a rocker back then. So there was this perception of it being very uncool at the beginning. But that changed and it became very cool very quickly.”

  Cool or not, Whiskeytown moved early on to make themselves even more country by adding steel guitar to their instrumentation. The group would have a succession of steel guitarists over the next several years beginning with Chris Riser, who also played in the band Pine State. Riser had joined Whiskeytown by the time the band played a now-legendary gig with the Backsliders and 6 String Drag in late January 1995 at Raleigh’s Brewery nightclub.

  “That show was when I really thought something was going to happen with this band,” Riser said in 2011. “I was in at the very beginning, right when they started playing out. Ryan had seen Pine State and I was playing lap steel, and he said, ‘Hey, you should come play with my band.’ So I started driving over to Raleigh. I’d just started law school and practices were at Skillet’s house. They were really good for a band that hadn’t played out much, very fun to play with. But I also remember practices being a lot of playing a few songs, and a lot more getting high.”

  That went for the live act, too. Those early Whiskeytown shows were not unlike what aging hippies used to say about the Sixties: Anyone who claims to remember them probably wasn’t there, because a lot of liquor was going down. The audience would join right in, too, often turning their shows into communal spectacles. Typically, somebody in the crowd would yell out, “Why’d you do that?” during the pause when Ryan was explaining why he’d started this damn country band in the “Angels” chorus, as if we were at a live-music version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  That ritual aside, no two Whiskeytown shows were alike, and nobody ever knew what was in store—including Ryan’s bandmates—because he would often do on-the-fly arrangement changes onstage without cluing anybody in ahead of time, radically altering tempos, keys, lyrics, and whatever else took his fancy. The contrast between his smirk and the rest of the band’s dumbfounded bemusement was always funny to witness.

  Whiskeytown sets tended to careen wildly back and forth between tight and dialed-in, a gloriously ragged mess. Ryan would stand at the center-stage mike, tousled and unkempt in denim and flannel, eyes tightly closed as he sang with Caitlin swaying away as she played fiddle to his right. Phil played lead guitar in a hunkered-down glower to Ryan’s left while the bespectacled rhythm section of Steve and Skillet brought up the rear, valiantly attempting to maintain a semblance of order. I remember Skillet wearing a wristwatch, the better to try and keep the train running on time, but it was an unruly mob to manage. Their shows were chaotic, funny, often alarming, and occasionally even sad, but never dull. For someone with my fondness for rock mythology, Whiskeytown were the ultimate music encyclopedia entry come to life. Excessive alcohol consumption, check; blatant interpersonal hostilities there to see onstage, check; the sense that things could go flying out of control at any moment, check; and a preternaturally gifted frontman everyone else could barely keep up with, whose life was an open book—check, check, and check. Even the most shambolic Whiskeytown shows felt epic and larger than life, and the band’s legend quickly grew.

  Just about everybody of a certain age in Raleigh’s club-going population has at least one Whiskeytown gig story from back in the day, usually some variation of its being simultaneously the best and worst show they’d ever seen. One of my favorites involved the song “Matrimony,” which was written and sung solo by Caitlin. That left Ryan with nothing to do, so he’d usually pass it by retreating to the side of the stage to light up a cigarette. Eventually Caitlin came to refer to “Matrimony” as “The Ryan Break,” because there was no telling what he’d do when it came up in the set. Like the night at the Brewery when Ryan decided to take his break offstage and made a move to leave. Unfortunately, he missed the first step, took a spill, and just missed falling on top of a guy in a wheelchair. After standing up and du
sting himself off, Ryan continued on over to the Comet Lounge, a dank and black-walled bar next door to the Brewery.

  “I got a couple drinks, a cigarette, ran into somebody I knew, hung out a little,” he told me in 1999. “I thought I’d been gone maybe five minutes, but it was more like fifteen or twenty—and I forgot I was supposed to be onstage. Finally, I walked into the back door of the Brewery, and they’re fuckin’ playin’ an Elvis cover. I’d been gone so long, they played ‘Matrimony,’ one of Steve’s songs, one of Phil’s songs. They’d run out of songs, so they were doing ‘That’s All Right Mama.’ I got a beer and walked up to the stage and yelled, ‘You guys fuckin’ suck!’ Caitlin starts hollering, ‘Ryan! You get back up here!’ I said, ‘You can’t make me!,’ then I went back to the bar and got another beer. Then I went back up, stood there tuning for four or five minutes and finally started up.”

  “There’s nothing more fun than heckling your own band,” he concluded with a satisfied cackle.

  Another memorable train wreck happened in October 1995 back at the Berkeley Café. Whiskeytown took the stage well after midnight in a highly inebriated state and played a wild set for an audience split between the Sadlack’s hippie crowd and members of the local punk cognoscenti. Everybody got along fine except for Ryan and Phil, who concluded the show by taking their mutual antagonism out on Ryan’s guitar.

  Just before walking offstage at the end, Ryan flung his guitar into the crowd. It made a loud and sickening electrical noise when it hit the floor—but that was nothing compared to the sound when Phil jumped off the stage and landed feet-first on the guitar’s body. Jeff Hart was standing nearby and likened the stricken instrument’s dying shriek to “Eugene Chadbourne’s rake caught in a lawn mower” (Chadbourne being the legendarily eccentric outsider-art folk musician from nearby Greensboro). Ryan was out on the club’s patio by then, and Hart brought him the guitar’s remains, which he proceeded to smash on the back steps.

  “Being a guitar fiend, I asked if I could have it,” Hart said in 2011. “I figured I could use some of the parts. For years I had the neck, back of the body, and some of the strings in a bag. I finally threw the hardware away, and I’ve kept what’s left behind my refrigerator. It’s skinny like a boat paddle.”

  Ryan signed the guitar, too:

  You can’t always get what you want, but you can break what you need.

  I am a bastard, David Ryan Adams.

  The second time I interviewed Ryan was the fall of 1995, a few months after that abbreviated first encounter, for a magazine called Huh. In the interim, I’d also written a short piece about Whiskeytown for Billboard, the music-business trade magazine, which used to run paragraph-length blurbs about up-and-coming new acts under the heading “Continental Drift.” In print, I referred to Ryan as “the closest thing the area’s music scene has to a prodigy,” which prompted the editor to ask that I include his age. So I called Sadlack’s looking for Ryan, who wasn’t there that afternoon. But I talked to Skillet, who told me Ryan was twenty years old. Minutes after I’d hung up with Skillet, my phone rang and Ryan was on the line.

  “I know Skillet told you I’m twenty, but I’m really twenty-one,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Um . . . okay,” I said, a bit confused, and we stammered through a little awkward small talk before hanging up.

  So it was that Whiskeytown’s first national press in the summer of 1995 noted Ryan Adams’s age as an alcohol-legal twenty-one years old, even though he wouldn’t actually hit that milestone until November. I’d been clued in about that by the time Ryan and I sat down again, so I asked him why he’d lied about his age. He blushed, just a little.

  “Because,” Ryan said with a sheepish laugh, “I knew that a bunch of record company people would be coming around after that, and I wanted them to buy me drinks. So I needed to be legal in-print.”

  I supposed that made me an accessory to underage drinking.

  Since this second interview happened at Sadlack’s, Skillet was there, too. So was Caitlin, although she didn’t say much, because she was behind the counter working. I had just gotten a finished copy of Faithless Street, Whiskeytown’s first full-length album, and I had all three of them autograph it. Skillet matter-of-factly signed just his first name on the bottom of the front cover, just above the Street part of the album title. With a flourish, Caitlin signed her full name inside right next to the lyrics to “Matrimony.” And Ryan left his signature at the top of the front cover just below Whiskeytown’s name, adding an odd little message in the same childish printed scrawl I always saw him use:

  Signed this for David

  Yes I did

  Ryan Adams

  That wasn’t all he wrote, either. Possibly remembering the circumstances that cut our first interview short, Ryan brought along a few handwritten quotes he wanted to make sure he got on the record, just in case we were interrupted again. Written on a Rathskeller restaurant receipt (for a Guinness purchased the evening before) and titled “Interview—,” it was a spiel he’d clearly spent some time on, with scratch-outs in more than one place. And it was a charmingly earnest statement of purpose:

  I, and so far as I know, the rest of Whiskey town (excluding Caitlin) are not so much interested in country music as we are in writing songs that have themes blending typical American life with matters of the heart. It really is not in so much as an attempt at country or country rock as it is an attempt at recreating what something in our lives might have felt like, seemed like or looked like. I think this record was an attempt—a lesson if you will at doing this in a studio. It scratched the surface for what we will do later on.

  Unfortunately I think that we have had live shows that weren’t documented in any way that completely dissolved the barriers between us as musicians and us as artists. We don’t always win the ballgame but then again who does.

  This band actually does exactly what I was just discussing when we are all on the spot with each other. There’s something about the way we play when we are under confident that is essential to what we expect from ourselves. Otherwise I think as a band we just end up feeling cheated. You just can’t practice the mistakes that end up making a song timeless. Ask Ray Charles—for that, ask Black Flag.

  I was really glad he let me keep that receipt.

  Ryan was plenty chatty in person, too, and so was Skillet. Most of the conversation centered on the recording of Faithless Street. They had cut it in a whirlwind (and well-oiled) summer week at a studio out in the country near the town of Apex, west of Raleigh, working in a converted barn aptly named the Funny Farm. And for all the progress Whiskeytown had made in a few short months, they were still raw rookies when it came to recording in a studio.

  “We were nervous, not knowing what to do,” Skillet said. “We didn’t have any sort of plan going in, and the guy who recorded us was drunk half the time. Plus I had to fire Ryan halfway through.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, “I forgot to get some other people to cover my shift.”

  At that point, I remember Skillet reaching over to give Ryan a playful shove. Everyone laughed.

  This interview happened not long after Whiskeytown’s guitar-shredding show at the Berkeley (“I hated that guitar. That’s why I smashed it,” Ryan said by way of explanation), which only added to the band’s growing reputation for drunken on-stage entropy. And yet Faithless Street was strangely, unexpectedly quiet. Thanks to Ryan’s seething emotions and the subject matter—mostly the aftermath of doomed young romance, depicted with shattering intensity—the album wasn’t at all mellow. But the overall tone was surprisingly subdued, with rockers outnumbered by more measured, down-tempo songs.

  “I can’t explain how it came out that way,” Ryan said. “The songs that session just became what they wanted to, like they always do. Live, we just try to get the songs to the point where they ought to be and doors start to open, suck you in. Sometimes, they’re quiet one night and louder the next. I definitely think the next record will be real satisfying.
We just scratched the surface this time. Next time, we’ll really dive in. We understand the process better, and the sound is getting wider. The band is taking on more of an identity.

  “I want to do some writing on the road, too,” he added. “Maybe being in Kentucky broken down at a gas station would be good—actually getting to see stuff I’ve been writing about without seeing it. I haven’t been outside of North Carolina much. Never been to the Midwest, and the first time I was in New York City was when we played up there recently.”

  One of those outnumbered rockers on Faithless Street was a furious Stones-style raveup called “Revenge,” which Ryan called “a chance to dislike somebody on-record” and likened to his Patty Duke kiss-off “Bastards I Used to Know.” But “Revenge” felt separate from the rest of the album’s strum and twang, especially because it was a hidden bonus song tacked onto the end of track 12. Long on dirty-guitar snarl, “Revenge” was convincing enough to confuse people as to whether this was a rock band or a country band. Even though he was on-record calling Whiskeytown “this damn country band,” Ryan didn’t seem interested in the category. He was, however, happy to join in on the growing debate about the “authenticity” of alternative country.

  “Personally, I don’t consider Whiskeytown a country band,” he said. “More than country, we’re interested in American music. I do love to listen to country, but I can’t play straight country like a lot of the old heroes. My grandma would listen to the Grand Ole Opry on RNS. With me, it was Hee Haw, Dukes of Hazzard, and General Hospital.”

  We also talked about my favorite song on Faithless Street, the lead-off track “Midway Park”—named after that military housing development down in Jacksonville. With its mysterious lyrics about graves, feathers, beads, pillars, and darkness, it almost sounded like the product of a visionary fever dream. But “Midway Park” was less abstract and more straightforwardly autobiographical. Ryan said he’d written it about an old girlfriend who gave him a necklace that broke when he was running to answer a phone call from her, sending beads everywhere. So Ryan gathered up all the pieces, took them to a graveyard, hid them under a stone, and wrote a song about it. As a postscript, Ryan said, he’d woken up one recent morning to discover that girl in his room watching him sleep.