Rob Miller already knew all about the fuss, but he was at the Split Rail anyway. Miller co-owned a Chicago-based independent label called Bloodshot Records, which started up in 1994 and had been happily putting out records by bands that were under the major-label radar—Old 97’s among them. That spring, however, the mainstream was suddenly interested in his label’s wares. Most people in the music industry would find that encouraging, but Miller was unnerved.
“We’d started this stupid little label to do this goofball music, and the next thing we know there’s a line down the block and people are telling us we’re the next Sub Pop Records,” Miller said in 2011. “I was scared to death. And that night at South By Southwest, between nerves and tequila, I was in various stages of sickness in the bathroom. Rhett Miller from the 97’s comes in and says, ‘Hey, you should meet this guy.’ And it was Ryan, who was also in various stages of being sick in the stall next to me. So that’s how we met.”
Ryan was stricken with nauseated stage fright that night for several reasons, one being all the record-label types eager to buy him drinks. But there was something else, too. As Nicholas Petti recounted between gales of laughter, a girl had shown up backstage wearing a Whiskeytown T-shirt she made herself. And she approached Ryan to let him know that her fandom knew no bounds.
“This girl comes up to Ryan and says, ‘Your voice makes me wet,’” Petti said, then promptly doubled over with laughter again.
Ryan disappeared back into the band’s van alone, and there was some doubt as to whether or not he would come out in time for that night’s performance—or ever again. And so the band called in a few familiar faces from back home, including “Grog” (Greg Mosorjak), who booked Raleigh’s Brewery nightclub and was in Austin for the conference.
“That girl just freaked Ryan out so much he would not go onstage,” Grog said in 2011. “Skillet told me, ‘Ryan’s not even gonna get out of the van.’ He was rolled up into a ball in the back. So I went into the van to talk to Ryan. It took everybody to talk him out and onto the stage.”
Ultimately, Ryan did come out and the show went on, although he was visibly terrified. Once onstage, however, he delivered. Whiskeytown’s ten-song set began with “Drank Like a River” and ended with “If He Can’t Have You,” pounded out as a loud, jaggedy stomp. Ryan had problems keeping his guitar strap on, and at one point his microphone came loose from the stand and was just hanging there. So he kind of crouched and leaned over as he sang and played, determined not to stop. Somehow, he didn’t miss a beat.
Though sloppy, Whiskeytown’s set got the job done: Every label representative in the room wanted to sign the band. Ryan retreated back out to the van afterward, as label recruiters swarmed around pressing business cards onto the windshield. I tried to get a word with Ryan later in the evening, after the crush subsided and he reemerged, only to discover him deep in conversation with a gaggle of wide-eyed young female admirers. I couldn’t swear to it, but I think the girl with the homemade T-shirt was one of them.
Ryan and I exchanged waves, and I left him to it.
A number of labels came courting Whiskeytown that spring, but two primary suitors quickly emerged. There was the aforementioned A&M Records, one of the most respected boutique labels in the business—recording home of everyone from Seattle grunge band Soundgarden to the iconic ’60s-vintage “Ameriachi” trumpeter Herb Alpert (the “A” in the label’s name). Debbie Southwood-Smith was A&M’s representative on the case, and she had a big credibility chip sure to impress Ryan: She had signed Uncle Tupelo to Rockville Records some years before. Southwood-Smith also had an assistant at A&M, Amy Lombardi, who would soon figure very prominently into Ryan’s story.
The other major contender was Outpost Records, a label I’d never heard of until a Saturday afternoon not long after South By Southwest. My phone rang and it was Mark Williams, one of Outpost’s owner-founders. He had missed Whiskeytown in Austin, but after hearing the buzz and the record he flew into Raleigh to see the band. Whiskeytown were playing that day at an outdoor festival out in the country somewhere, and Mark called to ask for directions. The festival was a hippie-rock kind of event and not Ryan’s scene at all; I remember telling Mark that this would not be optimal conditions for his first Whiskeytown experience. But he didn’t care.
“It was a mess, but that didn’t matter,” Williams said in 2010. “I’d already heard Faithless Street so I knew they could write, and Ryan and Caitlin had something. So they could’ve played in front of a disco ball and it wouldn’t have mattered. I saw them do worse shows later, but they stumbled through it.”
Outpost was a joint venture among Williams, Andy Gershon, and Scott Litt, who collectively had label, management, and production experience with acts ranging from R.E.M. to Camper Van Beethoven, Smashing Pumpkins, and Nirvana. Williams’s initial tip about Whiskeytown came from Chris Stamey, whose old North Carolina band the dB’s Litt had produced in the early 1980s. And once Williams heard Faithless Street, the hook was set. Outpost had backing from Geffen Records, then awash in cash from Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses, so the label could offer as much promotion, distribution, and money as any in the industry.
Good thing, too, because Whiskeytown and Mood Food were well and truly over each other by then. Frustrated at being signed to a label too small to take advantage of his band’s buzz, Ryan began referring to Mood Food as “Doom Doof” and repeatedly bad-mouthing Kurt Underhill. Kurt had just as many not-so-nice things to say about Ryan, too. Despite the growing antagonism, however, Whiskeytown were still under contract, and whoever took the band on was going to have to write Underhill a sizable check.
As labels started circling around, there was some talk of Ryan signing as a solo act, without the band. Several labels, including A&M, were interested in going that direction. As much as I loved Whiskeytown’s barely controlled chaos, there were times when I thought that Ryan going solo might not be such a bad idea—especially after an afternoon I spent at Ryan’s rather squalid “Faithless Street” quarters on Chamberlain Street.
He’d invited me over to hear some of his new songs, and it was an eye-opening couple of hours. He played a few on acoustic guitar, but most of them were on cassette tapes. As they played, he filled in all the other parts by mimicking the sounds of drums, electric guitars, even Caitlin’s fiddle. Bobby McFerrin had nothing on Ryan in the vocal-sound-effects department. I remember telling a friend that the experience was what it must have been like to go over to Paul Westerberg’s house in the spring of 1984 to hear the songs that later became the Replacements’ Let It Be.
As great as those songs Ryan played that day were, I don’t remember any of them turning up on records afterward, except for one. Ryan played a full-band version of “I Hope It Rains at My Funeral” that Whiskeytown had just recorded, which would surface two years later on the Tom T. Hall tribute album Real. It was quite good; and yet it still wasn’t nearly as good as what Ryan had been doing all by himself that day. And I remember thinking:
“What does he need a band for?”
In the music industry’s good old days, when labels had stupid amounts of money to throw around, bidding wars could go on for long stretches of time. Whiskeytown’s courtship lasted through the summer of 1996, and it involved much wining, dining, and whining across the country. Stephen Judge was managing Athenaeum by then, and he was in New York City when he bumped into Ryan—who told him about getting up and walking out of a meeting with one label as a sort of punk-rock gesture. And Nan Warshaw, Rob Miller’s Bloodshot Records co-owner, tells a story about something similar happening when she tagged along for dinner with a label executive in Chicago.
“We went to this Thai place and I remember Caitlin was trying to have a sensible conversation,” Warshaw said in 2011. “But Ryan was rolling his eyes and not paying attention. This woman had just flown in from L.A., very bubbly and enthusiastic, and she said, ‘We want to make you the next Offspring.’ And Ryan got up and walked out. So I got a free meal out of i
t, but I’m not sure it was worth the company.”
Things were finally coming together that September at the annual College Music Journal convention in New York, where the band members were entertaining offers. They’d just about decided on Outpost, when word came of trouble back home: A hurricane had hit Raleigh. Most hurricanes aren’t much more than rainstorms by the time they get a hundred miles inland to the Triangle. But Hurricane Fran reached Raleigh with hurricane-force winds, tearing up wide swaths of the city. Skillet, Caitlin, and Steve headed back immediately. But Ryan and Phil stayed in New York and couch-surfed, staying at the apartments of label employees who were trying to sign them.
After about a week of this, Whiskeytown’s lawyer Josh Grier told Ryan and Phil that they had to get out of town and go home. They were broke, of course, so Grier gave them money for train fare—which they promptly went out and spent on a bender. It was just as well that their hangovers kept them asleep past the departure time, since they had no money left for train tickets anyway.
They were, Wandscher later said, “living the life of rock ’n’ roll retards.” But the rest of the band weren’t, a schism that became apparent after Ryan and Phil finally made their way back home to Raleigh. Three-fifths of Whiskeytown—Skillet, Caitlin, and Steve—abruptly quit the band on the eve of signing a record deal, throwing the band into chaos. Then, at about the same time, Ryan’s girlfriend Melanie Bryan (cocredited for photography and design on the Faithless Street album package) broke up with him. It was all too much for Ryan, who promptly fled town.
“Ryan freaked out, disappeared back to Jacksonville, and nobody knew how to get in touch with him,” Wandscher said in 2011. “I had to go down there, find him, and talk some sense into him. Debbie Southwood-Smith from A&M was visiting him down there, whispering in his ear and trying to sign him as a solo act. So I went down there and told him, ‘We started this thing and we’re so close to it coming to fruition. Stick with the band, because you need it. We’re in this together. Let’s try to do what we started off to do.’”
Ultimately, Ryan came back to Raleigh and they signed with Outpost. The deal involved Outpost paying Kurt Underhill a hefty sum—$200,000, according to Mark Williams—plus conceding rights to release a collection of Whiskeytown tracks from the vaults. Meanwhile, a new Whiskeytown lineup began to come together. But the process took a while, and there were a nebulous couple of months after the band disappeared.
“There have, um, been some lineup changes,” comanager Chris Roldan understated in an interview we had that November. “As far as we know, Whiskeytown still exists unless they’ve changed the name—which might actually be an issue, but I can’t go into that right now. So, I don’t know. It changes every day and every time I say something, it turns out different. I can say that Whiskeytown does still exist. Maybe not in the same form as before, but it does. I just tell people, ‘Call me tomorrow and I’ll tell you’—and the next day, I tell them the same thing. Yes, we like the spontaneity of Whiskeytown.”
Eventually, the reconstituted Whiskeytown included Caitlin back in the group alongside Ryan and Phil. But the rhythm section was different, with the addition of drummer Steve Terry and bassist Jeff Rice. Terry had been playing in another band in Raleigh, The Lie, and tending bar at the Comet Lounge, while Jeff Rice was the younger brother of Backsliders guitarist Brad Rice. Together, they gave Whiskeytown more of a straight-ahead hard-rock whomp.
As for the departed, Steve Grothmann went on to play in the Tonebenders, Countdown Quartet, and 6 String Drag’s horn section, which took him all over. Skillet didn’t go far, though. He stayed within the Whiskeytown orbit as sometime road manager, and he would be in and out of the drummer’s chair for various tours during the rest of the band’s existence.
A couple of rehearsals later, the new lineup was set to go. As 1997 dawned, it was time for Whiskeytown to make The Big Record.
Chapter Seven
Most Whiskeytown shows involved wildly unpredictable swings between tight and train-wrecky; but every now and then, they’d play one that was Capital-T Tight all the way. My favorite of those happened May 18, 1997, at a restaurant in downtown Raleigh’s warehouse district called Humble Pie.
The show was hastily arranged to accommodate No Depression coeditor Peter Blackstock, in town to interview Whiskeytown for the band’s cover story in the magazine. And it was phenomenal, a long and well-behaved marathon that showed just how orderly a place Planet Whiskeytown could be when Ryan was in the mood for it. Former members Steve Grothmann and Skillet Gilmore were both there and sat in on various songs, and the band pretty much played every song in the repertoire. Of all the Whiskeytown shows I wish were recorded, this one tops the list.
“Man,” a friend remarked afterward, “that felt like seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club.”
Such a comparison didn’t even seem overblown in those heady days. The spring of 1997 was a tremendously optimistic time for the Triangle music community, because that was when those “next Seattle” predictions belatedly came true in some wonderful and weirdly unexpected ways. Corrosion of Conformity, the pioneering speed-metal band from Raleigh that had been plying the underground for fifteen years, somehow picked up a nomination for a Grammy Award, which seemed far-fetched. Chapel Hill’s Ben Folds Five had a slowly building breakthrough hit single (“Brick,” an autobiographical song about an abortion) that would explode by the end of the year and get the piano-pop trio the first Saturday Night Live slot in local-music history, which seemed improbable. And Squirrel Nut Zippers—a jazz band composed of slumming punk musicians from various Chapel Hill bands—were already gold going on platinum thanks to an MTV hit called “Hell,” which seemed completely insane.
There was even something like optimism afoot in the nation and culture at large in the mid-1990s, a time when the “morning in America” invoked by Ronald Reagan a decade earlier seemed like it might be coming true. Of course, another few years would bring on the dot.com crash, a wave of hideous teen pop, and eventually American Idol and Clay Aiken. But in 1997, the US economy was the healthiest it had been (or would be) for a generation, work was plentiful, and the mainstream still had room for the occasional Green Day, Beck, or Sheryl Crow to slip through.
It was easy to imagine Whiskeytown joining their ranks with Strangers Almanac, set to be released by Outpost in July. Not long before that Humble Pie show, an advance copy of the album arrived in the mail with a handwritten note from Jenni Sperandeo: “Babe: Hang on! Here we go!” Ryan and I sat down to do another interview around the time of that Humble Pie show, for a couple of Whiskeytown stories I was working on (one feature for the News & Observer and another for Billboard magazine). We met next door to the Brewery at the Comet Lounge, one of Ryan’s favorite bars in Raleigh and a place he namechecked in the Strangers Almanac song “Yesterday’s News.” But he wasn’t too thrilled with the Comet’s liquid offerings that night, based on how he signed my copy of the album:
This Long Island ice tea is probably a Los Angeles Ice Tea—Too much Coke not enough vodka—See you at the rock thing—David Ryan Adams
Even by his own lofty interview-ninja standards, Ryan was in rare form that night, as quotable and cocky as ever, and also of a mind to settle a few scores on the eve of his first major-label album’s release. Not even an unauthorized release—Rural Free Delivery, consisting of all eight tracks from the 1994 Greg Elkins sessions that had yielded the Angels mini-album, just out on Mood Food Records as the price of letting Whiskeytown go to Outpost—could put a dent in his mood. So I told the bartender to keep the drinks coming, wound Ryan up, and turned him loose. I just tried to keep up.
“At first, I was kind of upset that we made a ‘big’ record,” Ryan said. “But y’know, you’ve got to get big before you can be Keith Richards. So we just decided to get it out of the way, just deliver the goods. I think, because of my age, some people will think this record is a smart kid just making stuff up. But it’s not that at all. Some people will like this reco
rd and get it—at least I hope they will. It will talk to people, I think. It’s not a record where we segregated our audience or ourselves at all into corners.”
Here he paused to take a breath, and a drink.
“We, um, just went out back and took a leak with it,” he finally said, cracking a smile.
I knew another subject sure to get Ryan going, the silly and increasingly shrill debate about whether or not alternative country represented “real” country. For all the commercial potential that Whiskeytown represented, alternative country was still selling just a fraction of what mainstream country’s hat acts were doing. And Nashville was unimpressed with this new wave of bands, as evinced by a withering, pompous essay in the Journal of Country Music. “No Depression, Any Country?,” the piece asked, singling out Whiskeytown for particularly harsh criticism based on a couple of Faithless Street songs:
What’s troubling is the band’s annoying ironic distance from its material, a sense of play-acting that seems more condescending than good-humored. “I’m a fast-talking, hell-raising son of a bitch,” crows a Whiskeytowner in “Hard Luck Story,” swearing with about as much authority as a deacon tipsy on fruit punch. Now, if the singer sang these words over a crunching AC/DC metal riff, he knows he’d sound like some chestbeating dork. Instead, by drawling them over some twangy music in a sing-songy Buck Owens voice, he can poke fun at the character in the song while making sure no one thinks he’s singing about himself. Most importantly, he still gets to say, “I’m a fast-talking, hell-raising son of a bitch.”
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