It’s also the closest thing to the full-on rock record that Ryan had been promising but failing to deliver for years, especially the stomp-along rockers “1974” and “Note to Self: Don’t Die.” “So Alive” recalls the Smiths and U2, with a soaring arrangement and falsetto, and “Luminol” sounds like the Replacements at their snarliest. Ironically, the quietest song on Rock N Roll is the title track, a solo piano ballad on which Ryan admits, “I don’t feel cool at all.”
One of Rock N Roll’s oddest postscripts involved its producer, Jim Barber, then-boyfriend of Courtney Love—leader of the band Hole, widow of Kurt Cobain, and one of the most volatile loose cannons in the music business. In 2008, Love wrote an infamous MySpace blog post accusing Ryan of ripping her off by running up $858,000 in charges on her American Express card while making the album. Sensibly, for once, Ryan did not make a direct public response.
But the most interesting angle on Rock N Roll requires a bit of backstory from Ryan’s real life. By then, his love interest was actress Parker Posey, listed as cowriter of “Note to Self: Don’t Die” (on which she also sang backup vocals) and credited as the album’s “Exe’cute’ive Producer.” In his wake was ex-girlfriend Leona Naess, who had a self-titled album—produced by Ryan’s sometime-producer Ethan Johns, no less—that had come out two months before Rock N Roll.
Naess was on the road that fall, and her tour T-shirts bore this declaration: “MY EX IS A WANKER.” Naess told Blender magazine that the shirt’s sentiment was “about all the ex-boyfriends in my life. It is not about any one person.” Be that as it may, I couldn’t resist playing Leona Naess and Rock N Roll back-to-back and indulging in a little armchair psychology. Where Rock N Roll sounds angry, Leona Naess sounds heartbroken. She pines for a departed lover described as “gone like a bullet from a gun,” while he describes putting a match to “pretty pictures in a magazine” (an interesting detail, given their joint appearance in that Mademoiselle fashion spread three years earlier).
Considered together, the passions of these two albums felt akin to Shoot Out the Lights, British folk-rock duo Richard and Linda Thompson’s legendary 1982 breakup opus. It was as if each album was half of an argument, with Ryan and Leona talking back and forth in song:
HER: Don’t use my broken heart to pick up other girls.
HIM: I used to be so sad, now I’m just bored with you.
HER: It’s only been pain loving you, you’re my dues to pay.
HIM: You’ve lied to yourself forever.
HER: Sweet melodies bring bitter memories, sing in my ear and drown out your heart.
HIM: Welcome home, Miss So Unknown/Bet you want it back . . . but you can’t have it.
HER: He is gone like meaning from a song, he is done like a vampire in the sun.
HIM: Note to self, don’t change for anyone, don’t change just lie.
HER: Where did you go, oh no did you tear it apart? Go back to the start, now there’s nothing left of my broken heart.
HIM: Why don’t you leave me, leave me alone?
Rock N Roll makes a better first impression, but Love Is Hell is the album that has aged better. Maybe that’s because grief is more lasting than anger, and Love Is Hell is downcast and monochromatic enough to make Suicide Handbook seem almost cheery by comparison. Between its unrelenting minor-key depressiveness and pain seeping through every crevice, Love Is Hell was never the most inviting album; it’s easy to see why Lost Highway’s brass balked at making it the official follow-up to Gold. The album’s checkered release history made it feel even stranger. In the credits, the album’s thank-you notes begin, “We appreciate and acknowledge anyone who stood beside this record in its long and strange journey into public forum . . .”
For all that, Love Is Hell boasts a handful of killer tunes, some with a hint of New Orleans soul (and it was indeed partly recorded in the Crescent City, with production credited to John Porter and Ryan). The opening “Political Scientist” is one of Ryan’s rare ventures into current events, pondering the environment and government drug conspiracies. But most of the album is closer and more personal than that.
It’s easy enough to play Spot the Muse on “City Rain, City Streets,” with its reference to a “genius in a hospital bed” and the anguished confession “I fucked you over a million times and you died” (Carrie Hamilton, rest in peace). “English Girls Approximately” seems like another song for Beth Orton, with a reference in the lyrics to “daybreaker” and a backup vocal from the legendary Marianne Faithfull. And Ryan sounds pretty much at the end of his rope throughout, whether copping to being “Afraid Not Scared,” fighting “World War 24,” or confessing “I See Monsters.”
Fittingly, Love Is Hell’s one thin ray of optimism comes from a song that Ryan didn’t write himself, a cover of the British pop band Oasis’s 1995 hit “Wonderwall” (which earned Ryan another Grammy nomination, for best solo rock vocal performance). “Wonderwall” is not an obvious cover choice, but Ryan completely owns it with an exhausted sigh of a vocal that gives the song’s chorus plea of “Maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves me” deep layers of grief, guilt, and doubt that the Oasis original never had. The man who wrote the song apparently agreed. New Music Express reported an onstage quote by Noel Gallagher at an Oasis performance in London:
I never got my head ’round this song until I went to [see] Ryan Adams play and he did an amazing cover of it. So now I’m going to cover one of my own songs in the style of Ryan Adams.
Toward the end of 2003, a poem called “Midnight in America” surfaced. Penned by a writer named Tim Peeler from the North Carolina town of Hickory, it was eventually published in his 2005 collection Blood River: Selected Poems (Rank Stranger Press).
Ryan Adams is faking self-destruction somewhere.
Nearly all the trashcans are full.
There are five more beers left in the tap
at the Side Pocket Bar and Grill.
Nationwide, there are too many sad cases to count;
only one man drinks for the right reason.
One hundred thousand taxi drivers fear their next fare.
Across the ugly river, Canada listens.
In one more hour, the sober Ryan Adams
will pour his last beer into the dressing room toilet.
Chapter Sixteen
Ryan had a long stretch of forced inactivity in 2004, after breaking his wrist onstage in England. It happened at the end of a show in Liverpool during “The Shadowlands,” a slow trance of a song from Love Is Hell. Guitarist Brad Rice watched the whole thing happen from close range.
“The stage had this big cutout in front of it, all marked with white tape, and an orchestra pit about six feet down,” Rice said in 2011. “It was the closing song and Ryan had his eyes closed, walking around lost in the moment, and he fell off the stage. I’d do a big guitar solo at the end and I’d just put my cigarette down to get feedback going. I turn around and all of a sudden see him fall and hear a crash from his microphone. That was the end of that tour. In fact, that was the last time I played with him.”
Undeterred, Ryan posted some grisly X-rays of the injury online. And midway through his convalescence, he posted a cryptic update on his website:
Ryan would like you to know he is currently eating bugs and tile samples. He is in Mexico City . . . seeing out the final stages of his treatment where he will become tiny and inaccurate. Truly, he is sorry about your neighbor and will not be sending any more spider cakes.
Despite his absence, Ryan was still turning up in the papers just as regularly as ever. The British magazine Q ranked him No. 97 on its list of “The music industry’s 100 most influential people” that year (alongside Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs, Madonna, Bono, Jack White, and Jack Black). And Greil Marcus, one of the grand old men of rock criticism, somehow found a way to compare Ryan to another Raleigh musical export in one of his “Real Life Top-10” columns on salon.com: “Underneath his clatter and angst, what [Ryan] has to offer is different mostly in style from w
hat Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard are selling.”
Even though he went more than a year between releases during this period, the Ryan-just-blinked-and-wrote-two-more-songs narrative continued to get play in the papers. A January 2005 feature in Entertainment Weekly about “the death of the album” included a list of albums that needed pruning, citing records by Moby, Beyoncé, Guns N’ Roses, and finally, “Just about every Ryan Adams album.”
As if to prove the point, around that same time came word that Ryan would release not one, not two, but three different albums in 2005. For once, Ryan was going to get his way where product flow was concerned. He put out a box set’s worth of music that year, with forty-one songs on three different releases (one of them a two-disc set), clocking in at nearly three hours total.
The first was Cold Roses, a two-disc set issued in May 2005 with packaging so reminiscent of the Grateful Dead that it’s a wonder it wasn’t patchouli-scented. The dark blue cardboard cover suggested hand-tooled leather, with ornate patterns and a rose in the center. Inside the double-gatefold cover was a strange cartoon illustration—two bears standing upright to present a child with a rose and a cup of tea as a rat looked on and an owl flew by, each figure in dark silhouette against a bright orange sunset (or sunrise).
The opening song “Magnolia Mountain” sounded like the missing link between the Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia” and “Box of Rain,” and it brought to mind something Ryan had declared he loved in the Gold liner notes: “the Grateful Dead and Black Flag at the same time.” Cold Roses was Ryan stripped completely clean of Black Flag leanings, and it was Dead-friendly enough for Ryan to wind up on the bill for a series of “Phil Lesh and Friends” concerts in Colorado in the summer of 2005. That surprised some people who’d known Ryan way back when.
“Oh, he always hated stuff like that,” said Brewery booker Greg Mosorjak in 2011. “‘Buncha fuckin’ hippies’—he’d snarl that about certain bands or certain people. So it was really humorous that he went on to play with Phil Lesh. And when I saw Bob Weir’s project in Charlotte last year, they did a song by Ryan Adams.”
Cold Roses heralded a new era of apparent democracy, billed as it was to “Ryan Adams & the Cardinals” (and with all five members of the ensemble sharing songwriting credits). It was the most successful of Ryan’s 2005 releases, even though it cried out for editing. All eighteen tracks would have fit onto a single disc, but they were split into two nine-song discs instead. And while some reviews criticized Cold Roses for mid-tempo uniformity, it actually shows a good bit of range beyond the obvious Grateful Dead references. “Let It Ride,” “If I Am a Stranger,” “Dance All Night,” and “When Will You Come Back Home” all stand as fine examples of Ryan’s classic country-rock style. “Beautiful Sorta” is a swaggering rocker that would have fit onto Gold. The syncopation and deep acoustic warmth of “Rosebud” recall Simon & Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock.” And the depressive tones of “Sweet Illusions” and “How Do You Keep Love Alive” are very much of a piece with Love Is Hell.
Lyrically, Cold Roses found Ryan getting in touch with his inner naturalist, dropping in repeated references to dawn, sunset, night, flowers, bodies of water, empty houses, and God Almighty. But what came through most of all was a sense of homesick loneliness—even though Ryan seemed unsure of where home even was anymore. “If I could find my way back home, where would I go?” Ryan asked plaintively on “When Will You Come Back Home” (a song that echoes another Tar Heel expatriate, James Taylor). Tellingly, Ryan name-dropped his native state in more than one song, including the first single, “Let It Ride”:
Tennessee’s a brother to my sister Carolina
Where they’re gonna bury me.
This theme of homesick weariness carried over to the second album of Ryan’s 2005 troika, September’s Jacksonville City Nights, also credited to Ryan Adams & the Cardinals and produced by Cold Roses producer Tom Schick. Since its honky-tonk leanings played to Ryan’s strengths, Jacksonville City Nights should have been great. But it’s an album that never quite clicks. Everything seems a little off and out of focus, even the cluttered cover illustration of a woman with her head in her hands viewed through a cracked window.
The album meanders along with no sense of flow, feeling awkward and uncertain despite a few fine individual songs—especially “Dear John,” a stark duet with Norah Jones, and the quietly fatalistic “September” and “Pa.” But too many Jacksonville songs have torrents of words tumbling forth, tentatively sung by Ryan in a quavering falsetto that never seems to mesh with the music. He resurrects Whiskeytown’s “My Heart Is Broken” (which originally appeared as a B-side on the “Theme for a Trucker” seven-inch single), but in an ill-advised up-tempo version that feels almost glib. And “The End,” an ode to Jacksonville’s oppressiveness, is just a mess despite the obvious emotion involved. Ryan sounds lost, almost frantic, in search of something. Maybe himself. He sounds like a parody of himself imitating Adam Duritz.
Album number three was 29, released in December 2005 and billed to just Ryan Adams. Ethan Johns returned as producer, and the Grateful Dead were back as an inspiration on the title track, a blatant rewrite of the Dead’s 1970 signature “Truckin’.” And that’s about as jumpy as this very dreary album gets. An ostensible song cycle about one’s twenties, with a song for each year, 29 is interminable, verbose, and impenetrable. It bottoms out with “The Sadness,” a whiney melodrama set to a flamenco arrangement that drags on for nearly seven minutes. But even at his lowest ebb, Ryan managed a few good songs on 29, especially the stately “Carolina Rain.”
Whatever commercial strategy was behind Ryan’s three-release plan for 2005, things went in the wrong direction as the year progressed. Cold Roses debuted at No. 26, a new chart peak for Ryan. But it sank quickly, with sales eventually topping out at just under 200,000 copies. Jacksonville City Nights made it to No. 33 and sold 120,000 copies. And 29 was still short of the 100,000 mark in 2012, after putting in a brief chart appearance at No. 144.
It seemed like there was a single great album here, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. What I came up with was an alternate-universe iPod-only album compiling seven Cold Roses songs (“Magnolia Mountain,” “When Will You Come Back Home,” “Beautiful Sorta,” “Mockingbird,” “Let It Ride,” “Rosebud,” and “Dance All Night”) with three each from Jacksonville City Nights (“Dear John,” “Pa,” “September”) and 29 (“Carolina Rain,” “Night Birds,” “Blue Sky Blues”).
When it came time to do my list of 2005’s top 10 albums for the News & Observer, I put 29 Cold Jacksonville Roses at No. 1.
A month or so after Cold Roses was released, Ryan came to Raleigh and played a show—his first performance in the old hometown since a one-off Whiskeytown show back in 2000. Local anticipation ran high, starting with a tongue-in-cheek survey that appeared on Guitartown.org to ask, “Who’s going to see Ryan Adams in Raleigh June 8th at the BTI Center?” A sampling of the responses:
I will be there wearing his concert T-shirt.
I would not go see that $%*^()&($(#(#(@# if my life, and yours, depended on it.
I may stumble in drunk.
I talk a lot of shit about him on a regular basis, but will probably be hangin’ backstage with him.
He still owes me 20.00.
By the time the lights went down in 1,600-seat Meymandi Concert Hall that night, Ryan was facing a sold-out house. Circus music played as the musicians took their places onstage. Between his thick-rimmed glasses, unkempt beard, and dazed demeanor, Ryan looked like a befuddled graduate student who hadn’t slept in at least a week (a picture of him in this guise would subsequently appear in Rolling Stone magazine as an example of the “homeless beard”). As Ryan and the Cardinals donned their instruments, there was plenty of noise from the crowd—including a woman’s voice shouting, “I love you!” Squinting out into the darkness, Ryan cocked his head and said, “Then I apologize in advance.”
Musically, however, Ryan had nothing to apol
ogize for that night. The show went on for twenty-six songs and nearly three hours, with Ryan and band taking some intriguing, rewarding liberties with the live arrangements. The Cold Roses selections especially benefited from this, rocked up a notch from Grateful Dead to Allman Brothers on the jam-band scale, and the Heartbreaker songs were even better. Ryan and J. P. Bowersock accelerated “Be My Winding Wheel” from a shuffle to a sprint, and they turned “To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high)” into a fantastic guitar duel.
Between songs was when things got very, very weird. Ryan paced around the stage, taking drags from a couple of smoldering cigarettes and gulps from multiple bottles and cups. He fussed endlessly with his guitar’s tuning, the height of his microphone, his glasses. He hovered around bassist Catherine Popper so much that she finally commanded him to stay out of her space. And he babbled endlessly, frequently off-mike, as his bandmates stood around waiting him out. He seemed to give voice, unedited, to every thought entering his head. Sometimes he’d talk about other musicians, either in imitation (Billy Corgan) or ridicule (Robbie Fulks). More than once, drummer Brad Pemberton cut Ryan off by starting another song. He didn’t seem to mind.
“Where’s that clown I ordered?” Ryan muttered at one point. “Wait a minute, I’m already here.”
When pedal steel guitarist Jon Graboff quipped at one point that he was “just makin’ shit up,” Ryan answered back, “That’s so ironic because it’s all I’ve been doing the last five years, and look where it’s gotten me.” Later, he cracked to Bowersock that they were playing for “an audience hologram” rather than actual people. The actual people in the audience stayed pretty well behaved, although they did start in with a lot of yelled-out song requests as the evening wore on.
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