Ryan Adams AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES Peter Blackstock and David Menconi, Editors Ryan Adams LOSERING, A STORY OF WHISKEYTOWN David Menconi UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN Copyright © 2012 by David Menconi All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2012 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html Design by Lindsay Starr LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Menconi, David Lawrence, author. Ryan Adams : Losering, a story of Whiskeytown / by David Menconi. — First edition. p. cm — (American music series) Includes discography. ISBN 978-0-292-72584-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-292-74459-2 (e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-74576- 6 (individual e-book) 1. Adams, Ryan. 2. Alternative country musicians—Biography. 3. Whiskeytown (Musical group). 4. Cardinals (Musical group : Ryan Adams). I. Title. II. Series : American music series (Austin, Tex.). ML420.A257M46 2012 782.42166092—dc23 [B] 2012020600 Contents Preface Before PART ONE: Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three During PART TWO: Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve After PART THREE: Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Selected Discography Acknowledgments Preface August 3, 1995 One hot August night in 1995, I went to a downtown Raleigh nightspot called the Berkeley Café. I had a show to see, and an interview to conduct—a typical working night out, one of thousands I’ve spent over the years. There was no reason to suspect it would be anything out of the ordinary. But it turned out to be one of the most memorable nights of my career, and not just because it would be my first direct brush with the subject of this book. That night’s show was a regular monthly happening, the Songwriters Alliance Series, organized and hosted by a local musician named Jeff Hart. Under this format, five musicians would gather in an acoustic setting to play and talk about favorite songs. There was a hootenanny-among-friends vibe, with other musicians comprising most of the audience of several dozen. My interview subject was Ryan Adams, a last-minute addition to the bill when someone else had to cancel. At the time, Ryan was leader of a fast-rising country-rock band called Whiskeytown. I had seen one of his earlier groups, Patty Duke Syndrome, but I am embarrassed to confess that they hadn’t made much of an impression. But Ryan sure made one that night, especially when he broke out his old Patty Duke song “Sara Bell.” Even with the velocity and the volume turned down to a solo acoustic rendition, it was drop-dead amazing, the outro refrain of “your eyes” made all the more haunting by his hushed delivery. A couple of things were immediately apparent. First, even though he could have passed for a high-school freshman, Ryan was good—really good, easily one of the best singer-songwriters I’d ever seen. Second, he did not lack for brashness, because the titular subject of “Sara Bell” (a woman every indie-rock boy in town had a huge crush on) was sitting to his left onstage and turning a bright shade of crimson. And third, even though he was playing a borrowed guitar and reading the lyrics from a crumpled piece of paper balanced on the dirty denim knee of his jeans, Ryan had It, a presence that lit up the room. It was not unlike walking by a pickup basketball game and noticing Michael Jordan on the court. Between songs, Ryan did exude a modicum of uncertain shyness, which manifested itself as self-deprecation. He introduced one number as “a song I never do the same way twice because I don’t really know it,” drawing a decent laugh from the audience. But once he started to sing and play, Ryan’s obvious talent overwhelmed his modesty. Music seemed to just pour out of him, perfectly and beautifully formed, and he sang in a keening wail that cut straight to the heart. Ryan was a natural, and it was obvious he wasn’t going to stay Raleigh’s little secret for very long. I wasn’t the only person in the room that night who thought so, either. One was sitting in the audience not far from me—Dana Kletter, Sara Bell’s bandmate in a folk-rock band called Dish, who had just released a major-label album that summer on Interscope Records. Kletter had seen Ryan in both Whiskeytown and Patty Duke Syndrome, but it took seeing him solo to win her over. “That was the first time Ryan really stood out to me as a songwriter, that night at the Berkeley,” Kletter said in 2011. “It was the power of the songs by himself, and the fact that he had to sit in one place without much posturing. He played some amazingly beautiful songs that night, despite the fact that he infuriated Sara Bell. That song about her really was great, though. So was another song he did, about how he used to get drunk behind the furniture store but he don’t get drunk no more.” Speaking of alcohol consumption, out-of-control intoxication figured prominently into the memorably bad part of that night’s events, which began when a crazy drunk managed to talk his way onto the stage at the end of the show. Identifying himself as “Kenneth from Nashville,” he took the event hostage once he got behind a microphone, mumbling a surreal string of non sequiturs. Of course, he couldn’t play or sing at all, and it had been a mistake to let him try. But he seemed harmless enough. Jeff managed to usher the show to a close, and that appeared to be the end of it. Afterward, Ryan and I sat down to talk at a table by the bar. The interview was for a short Whiskeytown feature in No Depression, to run in the magazine’s Fall 1995 debut issue. Ryan was an eager interview subject, a totally open book. I could not have asked for a more accommodating conversationalist. And even though he still hadn’t done many interviews at that point, he already showed a flair for rock star dramatics in body language as well as quotes. “My life is my life,” he said in his barfly rasp, lighting another in an endless string of cigarettes, “and as bad as it is, that’s how bad the songs will be. If my life is bad, then the songs will be bad. If it’s good, they’ll be good.” Ryan was just getting started, but I wasn’t going to get much more out of him that night thanks to the man from Nashville. Kenneth (described in subsequent police reports as a forty-six-year-old white male) had been sitting nearby muttering to himself, which was easy enough to ignore. But then he startled everybody by picking up and slamming down a bar stool. It boomed like a gunshot, and the bartender told him to cool it. That was when he started making threats, about killing himself as well as others. The police were summoned, and they entered the room with flashlights. Kenneth retreated behind the bar, vowing to cut anyone who came near him. Then he said the magic words: Don’t make me shoot. Not wanting to trigger a shootout, the cops cleared the room and a standoff ensued. Hostage negotiators couldn’t budge the guy, and the stalemate stretched long into the night. Finally, the police department’s Selective Enforcement Unit donned helmets and riot gear to forcibly remove poor Kenneth—who, as it turned out, had no weapon except for a can opener. Casualties were limited to some broken bottles, a few scratched-up guitars, a broken video camera, and everyone’s night of sleep. After his arrest, Kenneth was committed to the local psychiatric hospital, Dorothea Dix, from which he had recently (and prematurely) been released. Unsure of what to do, Ryan and I went outside with everyone else. I considered trying to continue the interview on the sidewalk, but the mood for that was gone. So we stood around in the late-night heat, chatting about the oddity of the situation. The musicians were all stuck because their instruments were still inside, which made for some crankiness. But I remember Ryan expressing sympathy for Kenneth and his down-and-out demeanor. “Ryan,” Jeff said, “you need to start writing down some of these emotions.” Ryan just shrugged and lit another cigarette. “I’ve got a backlog,” he said through an exhaled cloud of smoke. “Unfortunately, I’m one of those people for whom introspection has never been a problem.” Sixteen years later, Ryan was singing a different tune. In a contentious LA Weekly interview that ran the same week his poignant Ashes & Fire album was released in October 2011, Ryan tried to downplay any connection between his life and his music: “I just think it would be a weird thing for somebody to make a judgment on me based on the records.” Ryan probably meant that when he said it, but anybody who has spent any time around him knows better. He’s always been a fascinating artist and personality, and those two aspects are inextricably intertwined—and often contradictory—precisely because he just can’t hold anything back, whether it’s emotions or torrents of songs. He’s one of the finest songwriters of his generation, and also one of the thinnest-skinned; complicated in some ways, simple in others; alternately humble and arrogant; your best friend and his own worst enemy. He’ll break your heart in song one minute, then have you shaking your head the next with antics that would seem immature for a twelve-year-old. His swagger would have overwhelmed his music long ago if that music wasn’t so damn good, and sometimes the music got overshadowed anyway. Long before he had a large and rabid audience hanging on his every word, those tendencies were already well established. When he hit my radar back in 1995, Ryan had been on the scene for a couple of years. He’d dropped out of high school in his hometown of Jacksonville and run away to the comparatively big city of Raleigh to become, in his words, a “rock personality.” He was already that, and also well on his way to becoming a star even if the rest of the world didn’t know it just yet. But Ryan sure did, and he lived and breathed the part. The earliest Ryan interview I’ve found was a February 1994 Durham Herald-Sun newspaper story. Ryan was still a teenager, and the story closed with the sort of rock star–Masterpiece Theatre quote it would take most lesser mortals a career to work up to: “Rich and famous or not, I’m still going to be buried with a guitar, under a big oak tree in Memphis, Tenn., six miles shy of Graceland.” You could say that Ryan was literally born to be a rock star. His birthday is November 5, a date he shares with the likes of Ike Turner (of Ike & Tina fame), Art Garfunkel (Simon & . . . ), Sam Shepard (a rock star among playwrights), Canadian pop star Bryan Adams (of “Summer of ’69” fame)—and most momentously, the late, great cosmic-cowboy icon Gram Parsons, who drank himself to death in 1973, the year before Ryan was born. So not only did Ryan play in a band that was a direct stylistic descendant of Parsons’s Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers canon, he even had the same birthday. It was all just too perfect, especially since Ryan looked at rock stardom as more calling than mere avocation. “If you’ve ever picked up a guitar in a bedroom and done a Pete Townshend windmill, you’re a rock star because you’ve made yourself feel good and identified yourself as a rocker,” he told me in a 2000 interview. “As stupid as that sounds, we need those secret fantasies to make life tolerable. Some do it with love, or drugs, working out, their car. Or by being stars in their own mind.” Ryan spent plenty of time executing Townshend-style guitar windmills in his bedroom while growing up in small-town North Carolina, daydreaming about escaping. He found a way out in music, and its cultural icons. Every record, book, and issue of Rolling Stone or Spin that came his way was a textbook, and he devoured and absorbed them all. “Ryan was a kid from this crappy little town who grew up reading that stuff and really believed in it,” said Angie Carlson, another local musician and