Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  As for “To Be Evil,” it felt more like an interesting idea than a finished song. It seemed like an in-the-studio goof as Ryan chanted, “L-O-V-E’s gonna be the death of me” accompanied by pinging steel drums. “I’m not evil,” went the outro, “I’m just scared”—repeated as a mantra, over and over in a low murmur.

  Pneumonia did earn Whiskeytown its first and last ink on the Billboard 200 album sales chart, where it spent a single week at No. 158. By summer, however, Pneumonia was little more than a footnote to the megabuzz surrounding Ryan’s upcoming solo album Gold. The second half of 2001 was Ryan’s moment. He was everywhere in the months leading up to Gold’s September 25 release, proclaimed far and wide as The Next Big Thing.

  The New York Times weighed in with a glowing prerelease profile headlined “A Future So Bright, He’s Already Seen It.” Gentlemen’s Quarterly ran a spread on “Brave New Country” stars, featuring Hank Williams III, Neko Case, Waco Brothers, Robbie Fulks—and Ryan in a $1,150 wool gabardine seersucker one-button peak-lapel suit by Fendi (a surreal sight for those of us who’d never seen him in anything fancier than jeans and T-shirts). Ryan was also one of four performers in a Vanity Fair package on “The Troubadours,” photographed by no less than the legendary celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

  Entertainment Weekly took that even further, picturing Ryan solo and dubbing him “The It Troubadour” in the magazine’s annual “It” issue. The black-and-white photo showed Ryan in his customary plaid and denim, slumped on a park bench with shades, cigarette, and, tucked into his belt, a plastic toy sword. The accompanying text noted his “early influences” as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Plath, Hubert Selby Jr., and Albert Camus. You could scarcely concoct a better parody of a self-conscious singer-songwriter. It was also a perfect setup for Gold, which included a song titled “SYLVIA PLATH.” Ryan’s relationship with Amy Lombardi had ended by then, but she was still providing inspiration for songs. Gold’s first single was “New York, New York,” a driving raveup that sounded like the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” as played by Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. The lyrics described Ryan and Lombardi’s life in the city, and their eventual split as a fond farewell. Vowed the chorus, “I’ll always love you, though, New York.”

  When it came time to make a video, Ryan was filmed across the Hudson River from Manhattan, strumming a guitar and lip-synching “New York, New York” in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was September 7, 2001, and the World Trade Center’s twin towers were clearly visible in the New York skyline behind him.

  Four days later, the world as we know it ended, and those towers fell down after terrorists flew hijacked planes into them. There was talk of scrapping the “New York, New York” video, but it was released with a written postscript:

  Dedicated to those

  who lost their lives

  September 11, 2001

  and those who worked to save them.

  Suddenly, “New York, New York” wasn’t just a single but an unofficial theme song for a city and a nation struggling to recover from an unthinkable attack on their psyche. As if to underscore the distress signal, the cover of Gold pictured Ryan in front of an upside-down American flag. Wrote critic David Browne in Entertainment Weekly:

  Heard in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center, “New York, New York” now feels cathartic and healing in ways it never did before. The same is true of the rest of Gold. In light of this recent horror, the album’s sprawling tour through American music, from coast to beer-stained coast, is like a diner full of comfort food. . . . And Adams, for all the hand-me-down nature of his music and his degenerate-rebel image, sounds like a healer.

  Finally, it seemed the planets were in perfect alignment for Ryan to explode to huge stardom. Gold was getting the best reviews of his career, including four stars in Rolling Stone (where Strangers Almanac had only rated three), under the headline “Country Rock’s King of Hurt.” But that was nothing compared to the reception overseas. The British magazine Uncut’s five-star review pronounced Gold “sheer blinding genius,” and also declared it the best album of 2001 in its year-end issue a few months later. Time Out Britain concurred: “Shade your eyes, his star is born.” The adulation would continue into early 2002, including a No. 6 finish for Gold in the Village Voice critics poll and Grammy nominations for rock album and male rock vocal (plus a third nomination for Ryan in the category of male country vocal, for his song on a Hank Williams tribute album).

  After a lifetime of dreaming about this moment, Ryan seized it with gusto, putting on one virtuoso interview performance after another. The press was happy to play along. One particularly remarkable piece in College Music Journal magazine read as if Ryan and the writer were both auditioning for a sequel to Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, opening thus:

  Ryan Adams is a charmer. “Coffee. A little bit of cream, no sugar because I’m already too sweet,” he says to the angular waitress tracking the hotel bar like a stylus. His smile is quick and sincere. He knows it’s a horseshit line and if he’s at all self-conscious about it, it doesn’t show.

  A lengthy Rolling Stone profile showed a bespectacled Ryan at a typewriter, and in various places around New York (including leaning on a railing in front of the Chelsea Hotel marquee, puffing on a cigarette). Headlined “Ryan Adams Just Wrote Another Song,” the piece recounted author and subject going into a bathroom to toke up—and a live-in-the-studio tantrum:

  All of Adams’ rants are delivered with tongue firmly in cheek. He makes it clear that he’s tweaking his own image as the It Boy, the Moody Artiste. But at the same time, however much he tries to downplay it, everyone in the room is an extra in the Ryan Adams Show. And however mock-rant his rants are, they have the same effect as a real rant: He gets his way.

  “I didn’t want to be a star,” he insists. “I still don’t.”

  Ryan made the television rounds, too, playing on David Letterman and Jay Leno’s late-night talk shows. And he made it onto Saturday Night Live, the November 10, 2001, show hosted by actress Gwyneth Paltrow. That was a first for Raleigh, and folks back in the old hometown tuned in. Caitlin Cary felt like she was watching her little brother.

  “I was looking for signs of nervousness, and he did look really young and scared,” she said. “When he was on the couch afterward with Letterman, pulling on his ear, I’ve seen that before. I was thinking after Saturday Night Live, though, that they should’ve put him in a skit. Talk about a waste of comic ability.”

  Given this level of attention, it seemed a sure thing that Gold was going to blow right past the 500,000-copy gold mark and shoot on up to million-plus platinum at the very least. Oddly enough, that didn’t happen. Despite an avalanche of hype, Gold never climbed any higher on the Billboard 200 than where it debuted, at No. 59. “New York, New York” got a lot of attention and television play, including as bumper music for the VH1 network’s telecast of The Concert for New York City (Paul McCartney’s benefit show for victims of the terrorist attacks). But neither “New York” nor the follow-up single “Answering Bell” caught on. Not even Saturday Night Live gave the album a sales bounce. By the spring of 2002, Gold had yet to crack 200,000 in sales in America. Even after a decade, US sales for Gold were still well short of gold: around 420,000 copies.

  That’s a healthy sum, to be sure, but nowhere near the breakthrough everyone expected. Instead, the wave that seemed to be building up for Ryan as 2001’s alternative-country breakout would crest for another album on Lost Highway Records. That was the movie soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ quirky take on The Odyssey. The film starred George Clooney, but the soundtrack’s music was raw, earthy Southern folk, gospel, and bluegrass. Performers included Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley, John Hartford, and a couple of Ryan’s Heartbreaker coconspirators, Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris.

  O Brother locked down the top spot on the country album chart for close to a year, and it also crossed over to hit N
o. 1 on the main Billboard 200 in March 2002 after winning the Grammy Award for album of the year. Eventually, its US sales reached more than 7 million copies.

  Gold did yield one hit, “When the Stars Go Blue,” but not for Ryan. The Corrs, a highly photogenic folk-rock group of Irish siblings, covered it with a cameo from U2’s Bono on their 2002 album Live in Dublin, and it reached No. 18 on the US adult top 40. Country star Tim McGraw did even better, taking “Stars” to No. 4 on the country singles chart in 2006. When American Idol runner-up Blake Lewis covered it on the show in 2007, host Ryan Seacrest would introduce the song as “Tim McGraw’s ‘When the Stars Go Blue.’”

  “When that was identified as a Tim McGraw song on American Idol, I just had to laugh,” Ryan’s lawyer Josh Grier said a few years after the fact. “Lost Highway complained that Ryan didn’t give them any hits. Well . . .‘When the Stars Go Blue’ was a hit, and Tim McGraw’s version was not so different from Ryan’s.”

  Watching Ryan’s ascent from afar was peculiar, especially since I was quite frankly dumbfounded at the prevailing critical sentiment that Gold was Ryan’s best record. It did have a handful of very fine songs, especially the aforementioned “When the Stars Go Blue,” which was done up with a lovely falsetto on the chorus. But too much of Gold felt like Ryan at his most self-indulgent, with half-baked rips of Van Morrison (“Answering Bell,” which also copped from the Band’s “The Weight”) and the Rolling Stones by way of Lenny Kravitz (“Tina Toledo’s Street Walkin’ Blues”) among its more obvious genre exercises.

  Not that it was terrible. In fact, if Gold was the first you heard of Adams, you probably came away impressed. But if you’d been lucky enough to hear him open up a hole in the universe with just his guitar and his voice, it was hard not to feel let down.

  With great regret, I said as much in the review I wrote for the News & Observer. So did No Depression magazine’s Peter Blackstock, in a column likening Gold to pyrite. Ryan was never one to let an unfavorable review go unchallenged—even though the record company biography accompanying Gold quoted him saying he had two new rules, one of them being “not to read my own press.” Three days after Gold’s release, Ryan paid a cybervisit back home to Guitartown.org, a Triangle-based music discussion group where Adams’s name came up enough for him to be christened HWSNBN (an acronym for “He Who Shall Not Be Named”), to let everyone back home know just what he thought about No Depression’s take on his record. Wrote Ryan:

  you are a stupid asshole. fuck you for having the balls to fucking decide what MY fucking standards are. fucking No Depression magazine . . . whatever. do you fucking call emmelou harris, or maybe steve earle, or whoever when theyre in the studio to check in and make sure shes making an “acceptable record worthy of her talents”. i m sure she would kindly hang up the phone.SHOULD I FUCKING CALL YOU AT HOME PETER, AND ASK YOU IF ITS OKAY IF I WANNA TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT NEXT TIME???

  it will be interesting to see how glossy your magazine covers are when universal and lost highway stop giving you the money to buy the ink you use to be a self-righteous asshole with.

  fuck you and fuck your magazine.

  Predictably, a firestorm erupted, with lots of people weighing in to blast Ryan over the next several days. Before disappearing, Ryan made one last kiss-off post:

  . . . you just cant stand it because its not about your lousy fucking internet groups anymore, peter you are getting old and jaded but worst of all, you are Ross Grady, with a zine, or maybe like a David Menconi but just no balls

  Several days later, Ryan played Irving Plaza in New York City. Elton John turned up onstage for a cameo performance on two songs, including his own “Rocket Man.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Amy Lombardi was the subject of at least one other Gold song besides “New York, New York,” thanks to an incident that happened at the 2001 South By Southwest. During a confrontation with Lombardi and her new boyfriend (Carl Newman, leader of the Vancouver rock band New Pornographers), Ryan threw a drink on them. “I have had it,” Lombardi declared, and she put her hands around Ryan’s throat in a chokehold. After the police came, Lombardi was the one who wound up in handcuffs.

  “Harder Now That It’s Over” is the song Ryan wrote about it afterward. It’s as mournful as he’s ever sounded, beginning with “They slapped ’em on you/Where that bracelet used to be” and admitting he’d thrown the drink “just to piss you off.” The song’s conclusion: “I’m sorry.”

  Many of the songs on Gold were about a different paramour, however: actress Winona Ryder, siren to generations of young rock boys (not to mention the inspiration behind college-radio star Matthew Sweet’s touching-yet-stalkerish 1991 ballad “Winona”). Over the years, Ryder has been romantically linked to Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner, actors Johnny Depp (at one time her fiancé) and Matt Damon—and Ryan, who fell under her spell after moving from Nashville to Los Angeles in 2001. Early in the Gold publicity cycle, Ryan attempted some halfhearted circumspection in his interviews by focusing on “what” more than “who.” Said Ryan in Rock’s Backpages in September 2001:

  I knew I was sitting there involved with someone I shouldn’t be involved with and enjoying every last miserable-ass moment of it. Because everybody does it, not just artists. Everybody loves a little bit of pain, ’cause it makes them feel real for a minute.

  But Ryder’s name was prominently featured in the thank-yous of the Gold credits (“Winona Ryder . . . damn girl”). Before long, Ryan gave up trying to keep her identity a secret.

  “Gold was written about a lot of things, but it is also a very personal record and can be looked at as a letter to Winona [Ryder],” he told an interviewer with the University of Iowa’s student newspaper in December 2001. Of course, Ryan has said a lot of contradictory things over the years about the women in his life—especially Ryder, about whom he wrote in a 2008 blog post, “I never dated Winona Ryder, but she is my friend and I will always love her.” But two other women besides Ryder and Lombardi figured into Gold in various ways, and both of them were show-business scions.

  One was singer-songwriter Leona Naess, stepdaughter of Motown legend Diana Ross. She and Ryan had appeared together in a 2000 Mademoiselle magazine fashion spread titled “Blossoming . . . the new Hollywood crowd (some of them known stars, some about to be) mix it up in summer’s prettiest evening clothes.” Ryan and Naess dated for a stretch, and she accompanied him to the Grammy Awards in 2002. She also appeared in the video for the second Gold single, “Answering Bell,” alongside Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz and Ryan’s new fan club president Elton John (Ryan reportedly asked his quasi-namesake Bryan Adams to play the Tin Man in the video, after they met while staying in the same hotel, but Bryan declined Ryan’s invitation).

  The other was singer/actress Carrie Hamilton, daughter of the legendary comedic actress Carol Burnett. She and Ryan were involved long enough for several pictures of her to appear in the Gold compact-disc booklet, alongside a number of disturbingly casual photos of Ryan brandishing a handgun. Hamilton served as inspiration for a number of songs that turned up later, one of which she cowrote—a beautiful, dreamy ballad called “Tomorrow.” She was just thirty-eight years old when she died of cancer on January 20, 2002. Ryan called her “the absolute love of my life” in Entertainment Weekly magazine, and he included this dedication on his 2002 album Demolition:

  GOD BLESS YOU CARRIE HAMILTON WHEREVER YOU ARE.

  “He was very sweet,” Carol Burnett said of Ryan in 2011. “We only met once, the first time Carrie was admitted to the hospital, and he was with her. While they were doing some tests, Ryan and I went down to the hospital cafeteria, and we sat and talked a while. I love the fact that he wrote some songs about her.”

  Even if Gold wasn’t a big hit, it definitely succeeded in lodging Ryan firmly in the celebrity jet stream. The media blitz continued into 2002 with a TV commercial for The Gap that showed Ryan playing the old Hank Williams standard “Move It On Over” wi
th the iconic country legend Willie Nelson because, Ryan told CNN:

  Who says no to $30,000 an hour? I don’t. . . . But maybe the No. 1 main reason is because Willie was doing it and I was supposed to do it with him, and you don’t say no to Willie Nelson.

  Ryan also appeared in an MTV show down in Jamaica, Music in High Places, which showed him playing with his band and the iconic reggae star Toots Hibbert. He started turning up onstage at high-profile shows like Neil Young’s annual benefit concerts for The Bridge School, playing alongside Young, James Taylor, and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke in 2002. And for a stretch, he became as omnipresent as the likes of Sheryl Crow or Kid Rock in the press. It was hard to pick up a music publication of any sort without finding Ryan either holding forth in interviews or posing for pictures in the “People” columns with his new celebrity friends.

  Virtually every story at least mentioned Ryan’s maniacally productive ways and all the unreleased albums he had in the vaults. It wasn’t so different from when he’d lived on Daisy Street in Raleigh and was starting up several new bands a week with Tom Cushman. Except now he had the means to record everything properly—although the amount of unreleased music he had stacking up was just as much a point of frustration as ever.

  “I just work too fast for any label to be able to put records out as I’ve needed to do them,” he’d told me in 2000. “I was born twenty years too late. If I could do two records a year, I think everybody would be happier, especially me. But one every two or three years just doesn’t work for me. At the end of the day, it’s not about whether we’ve worked the road for two years pushing a record to get a hit and recoup.”

  Actually, two records a year wasn’t going to put much of a dent in the song stash Ryan had accumulated by 2002. Between Heartbreaker, Pneumonia, and Gold, fifty of Ryan’s songs were released in 2000–2001—and he still had multiples more songs than that. There was 48 Hours, a splendid little Heartbreaker-style set that Ryan dashed off in two days at a reported cost of $1,200 after seeing a particularly inspirational performance by Alanis Morissette (whom he saw fit to cite five times in the thank-yous to Gold). Its companion piece was Suicide Handbook, also known as Career Suicide, two discs of twenty-one “miserably sad” acoustic songs recorded in Nashville with Bob Dylan pedal steel sideman Bucky Baxter. Ryan also had a rock record with the Pink Hearts in the can, along with Destroyer and the earlier items (Fucker, SnoKobra, and the Four-Track Mind/Exile on Franklin Street oldies), and even a couple of “supergroup” projects. Ryan, James Iha, Hole bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur, and Lemonheads guitarist Evan Dando made up the Fucking Virgins, while the Candy Cane Killers were the duo of Ryan and British singer Beth Orton.