Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  Songs from some of these records turned up on Gold, the initial pressing of which included a bonus disc of five extra songs. Still, Ryan’s backlog was large and growing larger. He talked of putting the whole mess out as a box set, but Lost Highway was having none of that. What finally came out was a single thirteen-track album called Demolition, released almost exactly one year after Gold with a picture of a snarled cassette tape on the cover. Thanks to Ryan’s higher profile, Demolition actually charted higher than Gold by debuting at No. 28 on the Billboard 200, although it faded fast and only reached 170,000 in sales.

  As an odds-and-sods compilation, Demolition is neither as ambitious as Gold or as loose as Heartbreaker. And yet it stands as better-realized and more coherent than Gold, in that it goes deeper, giving a sense of Ryan as a person and an artist rather than a collection of influences. For better or worse, Demolition presents the auteur at his most Ryan-like—the extravagantly talented, hyperprolific doomed romantic, pained by love and in love with the pain. ADHD be damned, he is by God gonna bear down, make that amazing record, and go to the Hall of Fame someday . . . but not today. Not quite yet, when there’s all this fun to be had. Meanwhile, here’s another song; thirteen more songs, actually, all of them quite good, and there’s plenty more where they came from.

  Maybe one reason Demolition feels like more than a hodgepodge of leftovers is that it plays like a Tour de Muse, starting with dedicatee Carrie Hamilton. Ryan wrote “Nuclear” (a song also known as “Shut Up and Go to Sleep”) about the night he and Hamilton met. It opens the album with a sweeping pedal steel riff from Bucky Baxter, which sounds like fireworks ascending and bursting into a bright galaxy of twinkling, expansive color. Space-cowboy rock, indeed.

  Where the lyrics of “Nuclear” begin by mentioning the end of summer, the album-closing “Jesus (Don’t Touch My Baby)” invokes a summer that never ends—or maybe it wishes for one, since “Jesus” is a song about death. A prayerful plea that Ryan wrote while Hamilton was in the throes of cancer, “Jesus” throbs with an ambient pulse that feels like falling into that bright-light void. Ryan sounds utterly bereft and shell-shocked, singing through a lump in the throat. “Jesus” is touching, sad, and deeply, deeply spooky, even more so than the similarly styled Pneumonia song “What the Devil Wanted.”

  Another Demolition song, “Tennessee Sucks,” is a joke-filled knockoff that Ryan banged out for Hamilton’s amusement. The performance is casual, but undercurrents of manic desperation lurk beneath the song’s surface (especially in some of Ryan’s off-kilter piano flourishes). And the song that Hamilton cowrote, “Tomorrow,” is a gorgeous meditation on love and the distance between, with spare and just-right contributions from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Ryan told Uncut magazine that the scene described in “Tomorrow” was the last time he ever saw Hamilton healthy.

  Alanis Morissette holds sway on the three Demolition songs drawn from 48 Hours (which in many ways feels like the proper Heartbreaker sequel that never was). “Hallelujah” is not the oft-covered Leonard Cohen standard; rather, it’s Ryan fretting about his screwup ways accompanied by a first-rate bar band arrangement, punctuated by excellent harmonica from Ryan himself. “Desire” is hushed and reverent, another ode to unrequited love with a jittery stop-start tempo that emphasizes the theme of missed connections. And the stoic “Chin Up, Cheer Up” glides along like a train, clickety-clack. It feels like fleeing the scene.

  As Candy Cane Killers, Ryan and Beth Orton recorded a cover of “Brown Sugar” for a Rolling Stones tribute record put together by Uncut magazine. Ryan is also all over Orton’s 2002 album Daybreaker, most notably with a lovely vocal contribution to “Concrete Sky”—a song that sure sounds like Orton wrote it about him. Ryan returns the favor on Demolition with “You Will Always Be the Same,” an openhearted exhortation to keep on keepin’ on (although it does suffer from the same overly affected vocal style that marred much of Gold).

  Winona Ryder is back in an inspirational capacity on a handful of Demolition songs, all of them fairly gentle. “Gimme a Sign” dates from right around the time that she and Ryan met. “Cry on Demand” and “She Wants to Play Hearts” both call out their subject for her actorly, dramatically manipulative ways—while admitting the singer’s part in it, too. As Ryan admits in the latter song, “I guess I wanted to play, too.”

  During the press cycle for Demolition, Ryan talked about all these songs in a revealing series of interviews. Of particular note was a long piece in Entertainment Weekly that started off with Ryan refusing to give up Ryder’s name. But the writer kept prodding, and Ryan was spilling by the end:

  I mean, everyone knows I dated Winona Ryder. . . . Big fucking deal. Who would not? I really like her. She’s actually a very nice person. She’s nothing like anybody thinks. She’s a normal girl with normal girl problems who talks about normal girl things, who needs a guy, needs her hand held, needs to walk across a fucking street. So what if she dates musicians. She likes music! Everybody knows I went out with Beth Orton. It’s not a lie. We were each other’s muse. So fucking be it. I’m an artist and so is she. It isn’t like Lisa fucking Marie Presley and Nicolas Cage. It’s artists being with artists. Why not? Fuck! I love women with great lips. It doesn’t make me a fucking jerk. If I were a general contractor for a fucking construction firm in Louisville, I might have nothing in common with Winona Ryder or Beth Orton. As it happens, I am Ryan Adams, who writes a lot of songs, who goes out way too late and gets fucked up, who obsesses about his life, who is a guilt-ridden individual, who would like to pretend to be an artist, who therefore might get along with a girl with full lips who is an actress.

  Want to go get some coffee?

  Still, Ryan’s best muse on Demolition remains his ever-reliable gold standard, Amy Lombardi, who turns up toward the end of the album as the inspiration for “Dear Chicago.” It falls unobtrusively in the running order, between the lounge-lizard goof “Tennessee Sucks” and the Ryder meet-up ode “Gimme a Sign.” Clocking in at a hushed two minutes, “Dear Chicago” is the shortest, quietest song on Demolition. And it’s stunning. If this were a big-screen romantic drama, “Dear Chicago” would accompany the third-reel fast-forward montage showing two sundered lovers trying to carry on separately, only to keep stopping and staring into the distance—as the setup for a scene where they unexpectedly encounter each other after a long time apart. Only there’s not a happy ending to this one.

  Ryan strums a dreamy acoustic riff as he describes thoughts of suicide and the growing chill in his heart in a deceptively easy croon, recalling his ex’s prediction he’d come to a sad, lonely end. There is the slightest catch to Ryan’s voice as he murmurs that New York City is “almost gone”—yes, this is the sequel to “New York, New York.” And Ryan tries to defy that song’s forever-love vow, declaring that he’s “fallen out of love.” He says that three times at the end, the pitch rising with each repetition as he tries to work up his nerve (or convince himself it’s really true). It’s not until the very last one that Ryan can bring himself to say the final two words, which he doesn’t sing so much as exhale in what sounds like a last breath:

  with you.

  It’s a beautiful moment. But you don’t believe him, not even for a second.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Actually, some of Ryan’s best on-record moments from this period didn’t appear on his own albums. There was Beth Orton’s Daybreaker, and also Counting Crows’ 2002 album Hard Candy. Ryan wrote and contributed background vocals to “Butterfly in Reverse,” a lushly cinematic, piano-pop song with a hook so irresistible that not even uber-whiney Crows frontman Adam Duritz could screw it up.

  Better still was Ryan’s star turn on While You Weren’t Looking, the 2002 solo album by Caitlin Cary. The initial pressing included a bonus mini-disc of four songs, highlighted by “The Battle,” a heart-stopping duet with what might be the best vocal harmonies those two ever put on tape. For anyone who loved Whiskeytown back in the day, hearing “The Battle” wa
s a fond, bittersweet reminder of how special their vocal blend was. And for a brief time in 2003, there was talk of Ryan, Caitlin, and Skillet Gilmore convening a Whiskeytown reunion. “I think it’s time Whiskeytown make an actual record we like,” Ryan posted on his website. Rolling Stone magazine picked up the story, and I interviewed Caitlin for the News & Observer.

  “I still feel really trepidatious about it,” she told me. “I knew this would happen sometime, but I wasn’t thinking about now. If handled correctly and done on the right terms, it could be great. It’s scary, though. I don’t think it could hurt either of us as long as it doesn’t turn into a fiasco—and it certainly has that potential. That’s probably what everybody is expecting. We always were the rubberneckers’ favorite band.”

  Shortly after that, a statement appeared on ryan-adams.com:

  Contrary to what you may have heard, Whiskeytown will not be getting back together at this time. Despite the rumors and gossip, Ryan is currently working on new music, not a Whiskeytown reunion.

  Never mind that Ryan himself had been the source of the “rumors and gossip,” but oh well.

  Seven years later, on her Facebook wall, an incredulous Caitlin Cary would recount a conversation she had one night with a customer she was waiting on at her restaurant job:

  Customer: You’re kind of famous.

  Caitlin: Yeah.

  Customer: How’s Whiskeytown doing these days?

  Caitlin: Well, we broke up in 1999, but we’re fine.

  Customer: You should really go on tour and play Whiskeytown songs. You could get a different lead singer.

  Another non-Ryan Ryan record was 2003’s The Fine Art of Self Destruction by Jesse Malin, a friend since the days when Malin’s old glam-punk band D Generation would come through Raleigh on tour. Ryan used his newfound clout to champion Malin, telling Rolling Stone magazine during a 2001 interview that he’d just accompanied Malin to the offices of Columbia Records “to demand $15,000 for him. That’s just the kind of guy I am.” Malin wound up on the independent label Artemis instead, but Ryan still produced and played guitar on Self Destruction, a very fine thirteen-track set that sounded like Paul Westerberg backed up by a punk version of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

  Malin and Ryan also played together in a punk band, The Finger, under pseudonyms for contractual reasons—“Warren Peace” for Ryan, “Irving Plaza” for Malin. Ryan had some fun with that in interviews, telling the British website NME.com:

  I’m not officially supposed to say this, but there may or may not be this band called The Finger that just released this record . . . and I heard that I played on it. Let’s leave it at that. I heard they’re good, though.

  The Finger’s record was 2003’s We Are Fuck You, featuring a cover as X-rated as the title. The album’s twenty hit-and-run songs/rants clock in at less than thirty-five minutes. Like most of Ryan’s forays into punk or metal, it’s fun. Stupid, not particularly memorable and not what he does best, but fun. Metal has always been a base element of Ryan’s musical outlook going back to his Jacksonville childhood. He cut his teeth on guitar with the introduction to Iron Maiden’s “Somewhere in Time” (“but a really, really bad one-note version of it,” he told Paste magazine in 2007). But when it comes to metal, he’s still a better enthusiast than practitioner. In 2010, Ryan self-released a metal album called Orion that was so unmemorable, I couldn’t remember a single one of its songs after a dozen listens.

  Ryan’s metal jones was, however, responsible for at least one great moment of onstage genius, from a 2011 solo show in Oslo, Norway. In a flash of free-associative inspiration, Ryan launched into what he called a “black metal” version of Whiskeytown’s “16 Days.” Ratcheting the volume way down, he played a quivering single-string strum on his acoustic guitar while singing in a shredding, Cookie Monster yowl—but in a voice just about a whisper, including shrieks, with a perfectly off-kilter harmonica solo. He broke vocal character just once, pausing to note in his own speaking voice that the song’s reference to a Bible, rosary, and owed apology was “not a very black metal verse,” to riotous laughter and applause.

  If he ever does a comedy album, I’m there.

  There must be something about Oslo that agrees with Ryan. Firsthand witness accounts of a 2001 show there reported that he brought out a stack of vintage vinyl albums—Black and Blue by the Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye Live!, among others—to hand out to the crowd. Later in the show, when someone in the audience yelled out that he wanted his money back, Ryan reportedly went out into the seats, found the guy, pulled out some money, and handed it over.

  There have, alas, been other shows where interactions with the audience didn’t go so well, most infamously an October 2002 concert at Nashville’s fabled Ryman Auditorium. Ryan was playing solo that night, and there was some heckling going on. At one point, a sarcastic call rang out for “Summer of ’69,” the cheesy mid-1980s hit by Bryan Adams. A confrontation ensued, and there were reports that security kicked the heckler out after Ryan gave him his money back (the heckler was actually escorted to another seat farther from the stage).

  This wasn’t the first onstage dustup Ryan had over his name doppelgänger—there were reports of a similar incident in Australia earlier that same year—but Nashville had further ripples. Nashville Tennessean critic Peter Cooper recounted the scene in his concert review, which was seen all over the country after the wire services picked it up. The incident made enough of an impression to be the subject of a question on the public radio show Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me. Ryan left Peter Cooper an angry voicemail, which also went out far and wide over the Internet. Lots of people had lots of fun with that, most notably alternative-country singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, who offered to reimburse anyone who made Ryan mad enough to get thrown out of a show.

  Over the years, the Ryman “Summer of ’69” incident has come to be Ryan’s equivalent of Bob Dylan getting called “Judas” onstage in England in 1966 (or maybe the Rod Stewart pound-of-semen-in-the-stomach rumor from the 1970s). It’s the one thing that everybody seems to have heard about Ryan, even nonfans. Ryan himself has discussed it at length a number of times, including a lengthy explanation he declared to be “THE REAL STORY” on ryanadamsarchive.com in 2010. Asked if he’d do the same thing if he had it to do over again, Ryan claimed he didn’t kick the heckler out of the show, even though he wished that the hall’s “worthless and clueless” security had done something about him. He also said that the heckler never actually yelled out “Summer of ’69,” and that the Tennessean’s Peter Cooper made the whole thing up. And he lamented the fact that his prior reputation only made it worse:

  . . . most people have some awful shows and they get to live through them and move on. My bad show there had to be written about the next day and sold to the Associated Press by that fucktard so he could buy some more baked beans and Jimmy buffet c.d.s I hope he enjoys them tonight sleeping in his car somewhere. Asshole.

  It ruined my solo career and I have never really recovered. I mean, Ever since that bullshit article got sold to the Associated Press by that fucking loser now every other wasted college kid thinks I get mad when someone yells “Summer of 69”

  I don’t actually care either way about that.

  What I don’t care for is being yelled at. Especially by people who are so satisfied that their hope is it would actually take effect. It just reminds me how much actual malice and misdirected bullshit there is in the world. I always loved music because it was an escape from that kind of college-party intelligence. what a waste.

  Offstage, Ryan stayed busy throughout 2003. By the end of that year, he had put out twenty-nine songs on three different Lost Highway releases—a full-length album called Rock N Roll and two mini-albums, Love Is Hell Pt. 1 and Love Is Hell Pt. 2. Originally, Love Is Hell was to be a single full-length album (and its two halves eventually were combined into a single-disc release in 2004). But Lost Highway was less than thrilled with its dark, downcast tone. There wer
e concerns that Love Is Hell was not the album that could take Ryan to a commercial level beyond Gold. Ryan claimed that the label rejected the album as commercially unsound, but Lost Highway boss Luke Lewis later claimed he didn’t reject it so much as tell Ryan he could do better.

  Rock N Roll was what Ryan came back with, and Lost Highway released it in November 2003. Part one of Love Is Hell came out the same day with part two following a month later; but none of it set the charts on fire. The two Love Is Hell volumes barely dented the charts and collectively sold about the same amount as Demolition. Rock N Roll fared a bit better, debuting at a solid No. 33 on the Billboard 200. But it dropped off the chart a month later, eventually moving 215,000 copies as of 2012.

  Nevertheless, Rock N Roll is an intriguing record. After Gold’s tour of 1970s-vintage classic rock, Rock N Roll jumps ahead to the college-radio new wave of the 1980s, with hints of the Smiths, Replacements, and U2. “This Is It” opens the album with Ryan growling, “Let me sing a song for you that’s never been sung before”—a nervy declaration for someone who had long been accused of being little more than the sum of his influences. Besides which, the story the album tells is not new at all: Boy meets girl, they hook up then break up, boy finds someone else amid choice words for first girl. Rock N Roll has the sort of lyrics you might find scrawled on the wall of a college dormitory bathroom. It ranks as the angriest, crankiest-sounding record Ryan has ever made.