Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  “I’ll get you there,” Ryan responded, with a touch of testiness. “You get three hours, I can have two seconds to be a narcissistic bastard. . . . Hey, I’m three frets away from working at a gas station here.”

  A friend likened it to watching Dennis Hopper coming unhinged in Apocalypse Now. Maybe he was just nervous about being back in Raleigh, but Ryan did appear to be on the verge of going to pieces—although everything seemed okay as long as he was playing and singing. It was an emotional night, especially the encore. That’s when Caitlin Cary came out to do five songs with Ryan as an acoustic duo, just like old times. They started with “My Heart Is Broken” as it should be done, a mournful dirge that underscored the lameness of the Jacksonville City Nights remake. They also sang “16 Days,” “Houses on the Hill,” “Faithless Street,” and “The Battle.”

  I’ve wanted things that you ain’t never thought of . . .

  It was truly wonderful despite their obvious lack of rehearsal, and I was suddenly misting up in spite of myself, reminded of why we’d all cared about Whiskeytown in the first place—not because of the antics, but those two voices locked together. The rough edges seemed fitting and right, too, as did the fact that they needed a lyrics prompt from someone in the audience to get through the last verse of “The Battle.”

  Afterward, the cheers were deafening. But it was still possible to hear one voice in the crowd, ringing out above the rest:

  “Same as it ever was!”

  That wasn’t me, in case you were wondering.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Technically, Ryan didn’t release an album in 2006. And yet he put plenty of music out there, starting with Willie Nelson’s Songbird. Ryan produced the album with backup from the Cardinals, and his stamp shows mostly in the song selection—the Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue,” Gram Parsons’s “$1,000 Wedding,” and the Ryan-penned “Blue Hotel.” Willie himself probably selected the likes of “Amazing Grace” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” giving each his idiosyncratic vocal stamp. While Ryan and the Cardinals play well enough on Songbird, it still could have been anybody backing up the star.

  But that year saw something else that was pure Ryan, the “Cardinal Jukebox.” An apparent manifestation of his musical ADHD, “Cardinal Jukebox” appeared on Ryan’s website late in 2006, and it was where he began posting hundreds of songs in a flurry that lasted into 2007.

  “Cardinal Jukebox” is probably another artifact where the word “songs” should be in quotes, given how many of them were stupid jokes—“When Pants Become Toilets,” “Drunk and in Jail for Arson,” “Awww Shit, Look Who Got a Web Site,” “Dead People Unite and Take Over,” “Passed Out in AA—Fuck,” “Unicorns (Prob. Don’t Exist),” and so forth, with lots of metal and hip-hop. They were grouped into “albums” with titles including Hillbilly Joel, Slef Portrait, Christmas Apocalypse, and The Meat Won’t Listen, variously credited to WereWolph, The Shit, and DJ Reggie. A few actual songs lurked amid the jokes, although it wasn’t clear if Ryan himself knew which was which. Noted a column in Spin magazine:

  These days, it takes almost as much effort to be a Ryan Adams fan as it does to be Ryan Adams. . . . Every time you hear a new Ryan Adams song, an angel updates his blog.

  Ryan has always had a love-hate relationship with the Internet, going back to his early days as a regular on the old No Depression board, where he declared in 1999 that his “spirit name” was “Alternative Count Dracula.” He’ll have long stretches of virtual inactivity, punctuated by outbursts when he’s as manic about communicating online as he is about cranking out songs, books (he published two volumes of poems and short stories in 2009, Infinity Blues and Hello Sunshine), and short films (Shopping Is Genius, I’m Insane, Transitions, and many others). But it always seems to end the same way, with Ryan swearing off blogging, posting, and everything else about the online world in general, even though he can’t stay away. He was, is, and always will be an all-or-nothing personality, about everything. Wrote Ryan on his Facebook fan page in the spring of 2011, not long before disabling his account:

  There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So Never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.

  Something else that happened in 2006 was that Ryan finally sobered up, which made for some pretty grabby headlines. There was a New York Times feature titled “Ryan Adams Didn’t Die,” in which he spoke quite openly about the depths to which he’d sunk:

  Without exaggerating, it is a miracle I did not die. I snorted heroin a lot—with coke. I did speedballs every day for years. And took pills. And then drank. And I don’t mean a little bit. I always outdid everybody. . . . My behavior was getting extreme. I was running the risk of becoming one of those people who talks to himself all the time.

  Actually, as that 2005 show in Raleigh demonstrated, he was already there. But talk of Ryan’s newfound sobriety dominated the press cycle for 2007’s Easy Tiger album, which was something of a return to form. Clocking in at less than thirty-nine minutes, Easy Tiger was the shortest album he’d ever made, and a good half-dozen of its thirteen songs were memorable enough to be hummed afterward. Not that it was completely free of indulgences. “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.” is as annoyingly half-baked and underwritten as the title suggests, and “Halloweenhead” is genuinely stupid (especially when Ryan yells out in a stoned-sounding voice, “Guitar solo!”).

  But on the whole, Easy Tiger sounded like Ryan regaining his bearings, at least a little. The Cold Roses–styled “Goodnight Rose” made for a fine opening track, and both “Everybody Knows” and “Off Broadway” showed he retained his flair for understated pop. Easy Tiger debuted at No. 7, Ryan’s first album to reach the top 10, and it sold around 250,000 copies (good for third on his list of top-sellers, behind only Gold and Heartbreaker).

  Easy Tiger did have something that stopped me cold, however. That was the penultimate song, “These Girls,” which was my old 1999 favorite “Hey There, Mrs. Lovely”—sped up and rewritten from the original damaged love song to a groupie lament about the sort of late-night ladies a critically acclaimed rock star might encounter. And in contrast to the original song’s heartrending emotion, Ryan sang “These Girls” in a weary, seen-it-all, just-short-of-lazy croon. The chorus is even lazier, concluding, “I get hypnotized and I wanna go to bed.”

  Oh, Ryan . . .

  That summer, Ryan played a concert at Red Rocks, the fabled outdoor amphitheater in the mountains west of Denver—an event Phil Wandscher later called “the ghosts of Ryan’s closet show.” Sponsored by Starbucks under the title “Carved in Stone,” the show also featured Wandscher’s post-Whiskeytown band, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter; Lucinda Williams, with whom Ryan had been romantically linked in the gossip columns; and his longtime nemesis, the Old 97’s. It was a strange night that the Denver Post’s concert review described as “a glorious disaster,” calling Ryan’s headline set “long, boring and rambling.” But the strangeness had started long before that evening.

  Several weeks earlier, Rhett Miller tried to contact Ryan to head off any awkwardness. But he could never connect. Neither could Phil, whose preshow e-mail (sent to Ryan via their shared booking agent) went unanswered. On the night of the concert, Miller found that Ryan’s part of the backstage area was roped off so that none of the other performers could get anywhere near him. Phil approached Cardinals guitarist Neal Casal to ask about getting a word with Ryan.

  “I asked Neal, ‘He’s not gonna talk to me, is he?’” Wandscher recounted in 2011. “‘I don’t think so,’ Neal said. Okay, whatever. So I watched his performance, and it was amazing. Then a few days later, a friend sent some photos of us that he’d taken during our set. Ryan was in all of them—peeking around a corner to watch us, at the bottom of the stairs, over by the monitor board. It was weird. He was there to check us out. But he wouldn’t hang out with us.”

  As unapproachable as Ryan became to many of his peers, he was still as m
uch of a rock celebrity as ever, in part for his string of fellow celebrity paramours (including actress Lindsay Lohan). But at a certain point, one woman emerged to make an honest man of him: singer/actress Mandy Moore, who had started out as a teenage pop star.

  Their initial connection came through a “crazy convoluted” series of events via an unlikely source, Whiskeytown’s old road manager Thomas O’Keefe. In the summer of 1999, O’Keefe needed to work while Whiskeytown was making Pneumonia. So he signed on as tour manager for Moore, who was performing in shopping malls.

  “She was fifteen years old,” O’Keefe told me in 2009. “It was me, her, one of her parents, and four gay dancer guys. Strange group. But it was fine, we hung out. She was sweet as could be. I’d help her with homework, or even do it for her. When I got married that October, Ryan was in my wedding and Mandy sent a wedding present. So I was who they first heard about each other from, and how they met.”

  Ryan and Mandy eventually wed in 2009.

  Ryan had a pretty good run with the Cardinals, although his public insistence that they were a band of equals always seemed pretty forced. “I’m the singer in the Cardinals, no matter what it says on the marquee,” he said in a lengthy 2007 Paste magazine feature that called the Cardinals “his musical soulmates” (and also talked about yet another five-disc box set of Ryan’s that would never see the light of day).

  But it seemed like this constant harping on Ryan “finally” finding his perfect band was beside the point. The more salient point was that any band with Ryan was going to be extraordinary. And despite all the egalitarian talk about the Cardinals being Ryan’s for-real forever band, he came to the end of the line with them in the spring of 2009, in part because he was suffering from an inner-ear disorder called Ménière’s disease. He explained it in a lengthy post on his blog, not long before he shut that down, too:

  i am . . . ready for quieter times as i think it is very evident i am struggling with some balance and hearing issues.

  also, no drama or anything but i am okay to step back from all of this right now and i think i did enough manic blogging when i felt alone and isolated during the last few years of travel.

  The final records from Ryan’s Cardinals era, 2008’s Cardinology and the 2010 outtakes set III/IV, didn’t make their split seem like much of a loss. They weren’t bad so much as uninvolving—unmemorable records highlighted by the requisite handful of stellar songs that left you puzzled as to why the rest of it wasn’t better. Cardinology debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200, did another fast fade, and sold less than half of what Easy Tiger had moved.

  “Somehow, I’ve wound up with a copy of every one of his albums,” Phil Wandscher said in 2011. “And they all have a couple of songs that are just amazing, but a lot more I wouldn’t have let him get away with. He seems lost. The reason those records up to Heartbreaker really meant something was that he had a story to tell—an identity, a home, familiar surroundings. Then he started to get off-track, and so many of his songs have become these meandering stories of nothing.”

  While that’s harsher than I’d put it, I wouldn’t really disagree with the sentiment—although I’ll admit it’s entirely possible that I just like the old stuff better because it came from the place I lived, too. But Ryan probably wouldn’t even recognize his former hometown anymore, given how many of his old Raleigh haunts have vanished. The Rathskeller, where Ryan worked in the kitchen with Tom Cushman and Brian Walsby, closed in December 2001, undone by health code violations. The Brewery, site of so many grand Whiskeytown shows, went under the wrecking ball in August 2011 to make way for a chain drug store (the News & Observer ran an online video of the building’s demolition, set to a recording of Ryan and Caitlin singing “My Heart Is Broken” at that 1999 Brewery show where I heckled Ryan over “Free Bird”). And at the time of this writing, a similar fate awaits the block occupied by Sadlack’s.

  That said, I still think Ryan’s music from Whiskeytown is what holds up best of all. And I think even Ryan agrees, based on the reference points he dropped in a June 2010 post at ryanadamsarchive.com:

  Making the album of my life. This feels like the career statement . . . just raw and real and me telling these stories. there is some NOLA vibe here but if i could say what the tunes are most reminding me of I would say the InnTown, WT vibe, the HRTBRKR SCarolina vibe and TOTALLY JCN vibe . . . It feels good to be back in the flow.

  In the summer of 2011, Ryan emerged from several years of public inactivity to do a run of solo shows in Europe, a trek he dubbed the “DRA Gets His Groove Back 2011 Tour.” Based on the bootleg recordings, it sounded like that troubadour from a dozen years earlier was back and on his game, better than ever.

  That created high hopes for Ryan’s next album—which he matched, and then some. Ashes & Fire is the album I’d spent a decade wishing he’d make, and the best thing about it is what isn’t there: no trace of that mannered, lost-sounding falsetto yelp that seemed to get away from him on his later-period records. Instead, Ryan sounds back in control on Ashes & Fire.

  Produced with understated elegance by Ethan Johns’s legendary father, Glyn Johns, Ashes & Fire is stark, spare, and dry as a desert campfire. Ryan’s voice and acoustic guitar are right out front on all eleven songs, tastefully supported by keyboards (mostly played by Norah Jones and Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench) and strings. The deathly quiet volume only underscores the rich emotion of Ryan’s voice. It’s his best vocal performance since the Whiskeytown days.

  Ashes & Fire’s lyrics bear some similarity to those of Cold Roses, with repeated references to natural elements—sun, wind, rain, rocks, light, streams, oceans, and clouds to go with ashes and fire. Human elements are present, too, especially hearts and tears. Where Cold Roses mostly evoked the homesickness of a prodigal wanderer unsure where to go, Ashes & Fire is preoccupied with aging and the passage of time. It finds Ryan gently pleading his case in a way he never has, maybe in a way he never could: Forgive me. Be kind. Save me.

  The album opens on a pensive note with an acoustic guitar figure as in Strangers Almanac’s “Inn Town.” This time it introduces the quietly apocalyptic “Dirty Rain,” in which Ryan comes back to an unnamed place (Raleigh?) where he finds everything in ruins. “I’m just here looking through the rubble, trying to find out who we were,” he murmurs over a distant backdrop of church bells and sirens as the stars overhead “exploded with gunfire.” Tench’s churchy keyboard gives it the feel of a requiem.

  The stately, surreal title-track waltz describes a tragic couple’s mutually damaged hearts—his “gnawed alive” from his “hunger to leave,” hers reduced to “ashes and fire” by crying. The act of crying comes up a number of times throughout the album, but mostly in the past-tense sense of tears no longer being necessary. “Nobody has to cry, to make it seem real,” Ryan coos on “Come Home.” Answering with the song’s title phrase is a group of vocalists including Ryan’s wife, Mandy Moore, with Strangers Almanac veteran Greg Leisz back to circle overhead with drowsy pedal steel ambience.

  Ryan brings this theme of putting pain in the past all the way home with the album’s penultimate track and first single, “Lucky Now,” which feels of a piece with his old Amy Lombardi farewell “New York, New York” (it’s also the closest to up-tempo that this very subdued album gets). On “Lucky Now,” Ryan questions everything—light, dark, love, loneliness, even the most basic essence of identity.

  “Am I really who I was?” Ryan asks in a raw, naked voice, sounding as if he’s trying to grasp fragments of a half-remembered dream. I imagine him in the company of one of Charles Dickens’s ghostly Christmas Eve guides, time-traveling back to watch that desperate Strangers Almanac–era kid stumbling down the dark end of the Hillsborough Street strip. Once upon a time, Ryan would have chosen to go further into the darkness that breaks hearts, all the way to Faithless Street. But here, he turns toward the light instead:

  And love can mend your heart,

  but only if you’re lucky now. />
  Ashes & Fire wasn’t a commercial breakthrough, but it did match Ryan’s US chart peak by debuting at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 when it was released in October 2011. And it sounded thoughtful and mature enough to make a longtime listener think that maybe, just maybe, the kid was growing up at long last.

  Well . . . Maybe, maybe not. A few weeks before Ashes & Fire’s release, Ryan played in England at a taping for the BBC show Songwriters’ Circle. The bill included Neil Finn, from 1980s-vintage hitmakers Crowded House and the ’70s new-wave band Split Enz, and Janis Ian, the dusky-voiced singer-songwriter who had been around long enough to be the musical guest on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975 (also the year of her biggest hit, “At Seventeen”). The show’s format called for the artists to perform on each other’s songs, hootenanny-style, and that turned out to be a problem. There was a confrontation during the encore in which Finn stopped mid-song to call out Ryan for not singing along on “Fall at Your Feet.”

  According to witness accounts, Ryan responded by packing his guitar away before Finn and Ian were done playing, earning looks “like daggers” from Ian. Afterward, a long discussion broke out on ryanadamsarchive.com, with most observers blaming Ryan for the bad vibes. Ryan himself joined the debate to defend himself, brushing off reports of any misbehavior on his part as “fan fiction.”

  In the midst of this, Janis Ian weighed in on the forum page of janisian.com to describe her perspective on what happened. She professed admiration for Ryan’s talent but also took issue with his arrogance, offstage as well as on, saying she’d never seen anything like this in her forty-five years as a music professional. And she closed by pronouncing a curse of sorts, describing a moment from her own past when she realized just how difficult it was going to be for her to make it as an artist: