Another essay on slate.com echoed this criticism, citing Whiskeytown as one of several bands that “use country as a shock device, a flash of bad taste, and seem to view the genre as an oppressive religion.” This was reminiscent of a story Roger McGuinn has told about visiting a country radio station after the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo was released, and seeing what someone had written on the album cover: “Do not play. This is not country music.” McGuinn was hurt by that. But Ryan seemed more pissed off about getting called out.
“We are not a country band and never said we were, not even when we had a full-time pedal steel player,” Ryan said with some heat. “We just play what sounds good to us, and we’re already from North Carolina. I lost my accent from growing up near a military school with ten different ethnic groups. So I could give a fuck about being a country band, I just want to be a good band. When people associate us with Uncle Tupelo or Gram Parsons, we never asked for any of that or ‘proclaimed’ it. We just play what sounds good to us and I could give a fuck about being a country band.”
Actually, Whiskeytown did proclaim that—on-record, no less. Ryan gave a dismissive wave at the mention of his song about this damn country band he started.
“My fascination with country music is my business,” he said. “When I write songs, I write what I’m feeling as opposed to following some curriculum, unlike some bands. Like those fuckin’ Old 97’s. I can’t stand frat boys, whether or not they’re from Texas.”
Ah, the Old 97’s, Ryan’s latest target for invective. Whiskeytown had spent that spring on the road with the Old 97’s as part of the No Depression tour—which kicked off at South By Southwest with a memorably sloppy show in which Ryan destroyed yet another guitar at the end of “Faithless Street.” Sponsored by the magazine, the No Depression tour also featured the Pickets and Hazeldine on fourteen dates across America. The Old 97’s, who also had their first major-label album coming out that summer, got the tour’s headline slot. And even though they’d been friendly with Whiskeytown before that, afterward Ryan went out of his way to talk smack about the Old 97’s every chance he got.
According to Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller, however, it was all just an act for the cameras.
“In Nashville at the end of the tour, Ryan got very drunk and came to me and said, ‘I think we should have a feud,’” Miller said in 2011. “‘You know, like the Beatles and the Stones. It’d be good for both our careers.’ I was kinda taken aback and said, ‘That sounds like no fun at all, I want no part of it—but I call the Beatles.’ Well, Ryan took that and ran with it. Over the next year, I kept reading and hearing from people at random shows how he’d been trashing me.”
This happened enough that Miller eventually felt compelled to post a response on his band’s Web page in February 1998:
We’re pretty tired of hearing what that little turd Ryan says about us, but you know what? He never has said anything to our face. As a matter of fact, last summer, when we fronted him out in Chapel Hill he weaseled out and lied that he hadn’t ever said anything bad about us. The whole “argument” is pretty ridiculous since it only consists of Ryan pathetically standing on stage saying naughty things about us. I really haven’t figured out what his agenda is. Sometimes I think it bums him out that we have a real band and we’re all real friends, and he’s just some drunk, lonely, Paul Westerburg [sic] wannabe. Whatever.
Some years later, Miller said, Ryan sought him out to apologize and ask if they could patch things up. Despite some skepticism, Miller said sure. Things were cordial enough between them for a while, until one night when Ryan visited Miller at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles to ask a favor. He wanted Miller to undertake a diplomatic mission to John Doe and Exene Cervenka of the band X.
“He asked me to go to John and Exene and ask them to be nice to him,” Miller said, laughing at the memory. “‘I have an X tattoo on my arm,’ he said, ‘and I want them to not hate me.’ He’d been mean to some girl they knew, something like that, I’m not sure exactly what. But I was supposed to go on this mission of apology for him to John and Exene, who are very strong-willed people and also kind of my heroes. I didn’t feel like I could tell them what to do, which is what I told Ryan. I guess that put out the flame of renewed friendship because it was the last time I ever talked to him.”
Back at the Comet in 1997, most of his career still ahead of him, Ryan was throwing down weak Los Angeles Iced Teas while contemplating the costs involved with feuds, friends, and getting ahead. The fight with Rhett Miller wasn’t the first Ryan picked on his way up, nor would it be the last. It was all part of Ryan’s mythological persona as the brash, theatrical punk unafraid to say anything to or about anybody, consequences be damned. But were the inevitable bruised feelings a cost of success, or an impediment to it? Were the antics worth the anguish? And could Ryan even help himself?
“I don’t have an antisuccess bug,” Ryan said. “But sometimes it’s hard to put up with everything you’re supposed to do. If I’m in a certain mood, it maybe translates too much. Maybe that’s because I’m young and prone to throw fits. I do feel bad when I’ve disappointed people. But it always seems like we make up for it somehow.”
Chapter Eight
Every member of Whiskeytown circa Strangers Almanac has done fine work in the years since then. But none of them, Ryan Adams included, has ever made a better start-to-finish album. It’s hard to imagine they ever will, either, because Strangers is a bolt of bottled lightning and those usually only come one per customer. It’s not the biggest-selling album in Ryan’s catalog, but Strangers remains his Exile on Main Street, the record of his that matters most. And even though the album plays like an organic, unified whole, it emerged from circumstances of utter chaos. Having a new rhythm section to break in wasn’t even the half of it.
“I’ve always been amused at reviews that refer to Strangers as ‘overproduced,’ ‘too rigid,’ or ‘all structure,’” Outpost’s Mark Williams said in 2010. “It’s a miracle it turned out like it did because the preparation was so all over the place.”
Credit a perfect alignment of talent, desire, maniacal sense of purpose—and the right person at the helm. At that time, the obvious producer choice seemed like Chris Stamey. He’d been the one to bring Whiskeytown to the attention of Outpost Records, and the band had done some preproduction recording with him in 1996. But Williams wanted Whiskeytown’s mainstream introduction to lean more toward the Americana country-rock side, and he had a specific template in mind: Wildflowers, the 1994 album by Tom Petty. Produced by Rick Rubin (who also oversaw Johnny Cash’s American Recordings comeback album that same year), Wildflowers was about the twangiest Petty had ever sounded; but it rocked, too, especially the driving “You Wreck Me.” The album’s primary engineer was Jim Scott. After talking to Scott, Williams said, “There was something about him that made me feel like he’d capture the realness of it.”
Scott got the nod and convened with Whiskeytown in Nashville in February 1997 to start recording. But things got off to a rocky start.
“I remember those first three days,” Caitlin Cary said in 2002. “We went into this fancy rehearsal studio to play the songs for Jim Scott. They were terrible and Ryan was being a real brat, throwing in lots of Stones licks. And I remember the look of terror on Jim Scott’s face. He told us this wasn’t gonna fly and actually left for a day: ‘Work this shit out, and I’ll come back when you’re playing better.’ It’s an amazing miracle that record came out the way it did.”
That set the tone for their working relationship, and it turned out to be the right approach. Scott was a demanding taskmaster who refused to settle for half-assed or even good when great was out there, and it was. “Quit jerkin’ me” was Scott’s mantra in the studio with all of them, but especially Ryan—who, as writer and lead voice on all thirteen songs, had the heaviest load to carry. In 1999, Ryan summarized the recording of Strangers Almanac: “We went in snotty, half-drugged, lubricated to the gills on alcohol and I wa
s totally heartsick.” Phil Wandscher described the recording sessions as “complicated but good,” noting that Scott “was the perfect dude for the mission.”
Eventually, the band tightened up enough for actual recording to begin. Mark Williams was in Los Angeles anxiously awaiting the results, and he called Jim Scott after the first day to ask how it was going. Not bad, Scott replied; they’d started a few things. Williams asked what they recorded first and was told a song called “Inn Town.” That was not a song he’d heard, or even heard of.
“I had a list of about twenty songs we’d agreed to do for the record, and I wasn’t finding one called ‘Inn Town’ anywhere on it,” Williams said. “Then Jim mentioned another that wasn’t on the list, and another. So I talk to Phil and find out that Ryan had written some songs on the way to Nashville, and those were the first things he wanted to do. Unbelievable! I was throwing my hands in the air, calling Ryan and yelling at him, ‘What are you doing?!’ But ‘Inn Town’ turned out to be one of my favorite songs of his ever. That’s why we opened the album with it.”
As Strangers Almanac was being made, its original working title was Sorry I Said Goodbye. Which is fitting because Strangers stands as Ryan’s farewell to Raleigh. It feels like a “Dear Jane” breakup letter you’d leave under a windshield wiper blade because you’re afraid to venture any closer than the curb. Picture that late-night-to-early-morning moment of clarity, somewhere between drunk and hungover, after everyone else is gone and it’s quiet and you’re finally alone with your thoughts, fears, dreams—but most of all an overwhelming obsession for that person-place-thing you’ve been trying not to think about while drinking in a vain attempt to forget. Strangers casts that moment in amber, turns it into a paperweight you can hold.
And maybe, just maybe . . . the album might be a literal narrative of a night on the town. Over the years, I’ve come to think of Strangers Almanac as a song cycle about Ryan’s last night in Raleigh. Maybe it’s even the night before he struck out for Nashville to begin recording. “Inn Town”—one of those new songs Ryan dashed off during the 543-mile drive west on Interstate 40, probably with a view out the windshield very much like the one shown on the album’s original back cover—sets the tone. In his introductory essay to Merge Records’ Our Noise book, Ryan wrote that the song’s title was a nod to Mac McCaughan’s old band Wwax, whose first single’s B-side was also called “Inn Town”:
When I finally made my first record as in my first real album for a real major label (a no no where I come from at least the scene I had come from) I named the first song after that song—the very song that made me want to make any music at all really.
At first listen, “Inn Town” seems like a strange track to open an album with. Subdued and downcast over its long, slow six minutes, it gets Strangers off to a dark and mysterious start. But even though it’s quiet, “Inn Town” is riveting, boiling an ocean’s worth of salty tears down to a bare-bones barfly vignette. In his 1997 No Depression interview with Peter Blackstock, Ryan said that “Inn Town” came out of feeling literally dead.
“I felt beaten alive with my own anxieties and paranoia and my own problems,” he said, “and the stress and the fact that we’d spent the last eight months being shopped around and sold and bought and tossed and wined and dined and limousined, and drugged, and fucked, and whatever else.”
“Inn Town” begins with a hesitant acoustic riff in Drop D (one of Ryan’s favorite regular tunings), played on a pawnshop guitar they bought in Nashville for a hundred dollars after driving off and leaving Ryan’s guitars in a parking lot back home. Other instruments gradually join in, Caitlin’s fiddle evoking the tone of a funereal Civil War dirge. Every part is well played, perfectly arrayed as the song draws you in. But what clinches the deal is Ryan’s raspy voice. “Singing as if his life depended on it” is one of those clichés that’s been tossed around enough to be meaningless, which is too bad because that’s exactly what Ryan sounds like here. Just a few months after turning twenty-two years old, Ryan stepped up and delivered the performance of a lifetime. As framed by Jim Scott’s arrangement, Ryan sounds exhausted from the battle between his head and his heart—and all the wearier because he’s too wound up to sleep.
What seems hardest of all for him to bear is the knowledge that there’s something better over the horizon, a whole wide world to get out and see, if only he can escape the trap his life has become. The way Ryan’s voice climbs on the chorus hints at monstrously intense yearnings to fill that hole inside him that was gonna be tough to ever fill. But for tonight, he’s back in town from his travels (to Rocky Mount, Goldsboro, Fuquay-Varina) and settling into the same bar stool alongside the same people complaining about the same ol’ shit and drinking the same ol’ beer. PBR, breakfast of champions. It’s your turn to buy. No, it’s your turn to buy. Fifty cents, or a dollar, three—I don’t owe you anything. You can picture the scene at the Comet or Sadlack’s; Ryan’s voice draws it out in vivid detail. And for all the cheap thrills, it still feels like death or at least Groundhog Day. Who wouldn’t want to run away?
Bravado takes over on song number 2, “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight,” which is when the pace of drinking picks up enough for things to get a little manic. “Excuse Me” has a split personality, in that the “While” of the title implies a foregone conclusion but the actual lyrics hedge that by saying “if.” Ryan’s narrator is on a fool’s errand he has convinced himself is an epic, noble quest: Tonight, he vows, I am gonna get so plowed I can’t even remember my name! And yet the tone gives his resignation a sense of triumph, which is naïve enough to break every heart within earshot. You take your comfort where you can, and if it’s empowerment from doing the deed yourself, well . . . that’s something.
“Excuse Me” commences with Ryan counting off, “One-two-three-four,” but he should be counting down because session man Greg Leisz’s pedal steel sounds as if it just launched off toward another galaxy. Ryan is credited with banjo, which plunks along in Leisz’s wake like rocket stages falling to earth. “Excuse Me” employs an unusual structure, opening with a chorus, and it has a bridge that’s really another verse. And that bridge is also curious because it’s a cameo performance by Alejandro Escovedo, who sails in from out of nowhere to sing seven lines and then vanish. What’s odd is that the bridge/verse describes locking eyes with someone who for a brief moment seems like a kindred spirit with possible comfort to offer. I used to wonder why Caitlin didn’t sing this part, because it would make sense to personify it as a woman seen across a crowded room. And yet it feels perfect this way, with Escovedo—onetime leader of the band True Believers and a shaman-like figure to a younger generation of country-punks—in the role of wise-elder Greek chorus, conveying blessings. It’s a great moment.
Track 3, “Yesterday’s News,” sounds like what might happen when you’ve had enough to drink to think that picking a fight in a bar seems like a good idea. Maybe you’re at the Comet Lounge, since the lyrics make the invitation “See you at the Comet.” The up-tempo arrangement feels like a cross between Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band—dramatic piano flourishes copped from Roy Bittan, and a guitar solo that sounds as if it were derived from something Lindsey Buckingham played on Rumours.
The fight, however, does not go well. Track 4, “16 Days,” finds you sitting on the curb outside the Comet nursing a bloody nose, thoughts inevitably straying toward that person-place-thing . . .
No no no!
You don’t want that. But you plead your case anyway, “16 Days” building line by line toward an apology, even though nobody is there to hear it except your own shadow falling across Hillsborough Street from the streetlight buzzing overhead. You repeat that apology to yourself over and over, as if it were a mantra you’re rehearsing just in case you get the chance to present it for real. But you don’t. That person-place-thing is nowhere in sight, sixteen days and fifteen nights later. It’s just you out here on the street, alone with yourself and
your demons, and it’s a toss-up which is scarier. Which can only mean that it’s time for another drink or three . . . four . . . five . . .
By track 5, “Everything I Do,” you’ve drank so much that you’re not forgetting anymore, you’re remembering, not to mention repeating yourself; it’s just the same two verses, repeated over and over and over. “Everything I Do” might have Ryan’s best vocal performance on Strangers, urgent and pleading and desperate, so immediate. But it’s a song that belongs just as much to Phil Wandscher, whose jagged stabs of swampy guitar say as much as any words ever could. At the end of one verse, Ryan hits a note just a little flat and teeters on the brink of going horribly wrong. Wandscher’s guitar saves the day by scooping that note up and carrying it home, sloppy and glorious. Whatever Ryan and Phil’s personal differences, they’re a perfect match here. The horns kick in, giving “Everything I Do” the feel of Muscle Shoals soul.
As Wandscher’s final solo begins bursting in air, you stumble into a bathroom to throw up, something that’s been a long time coming. It’s awful, but you feel better after purging. Hungry, even. So you wipe off your mouth and head east down Hillsborough; past the Rathskeller, Schoolkids, Faithless Street, Sadlack’s, and the Velvet Cloak, but before Saint Mary’s and that blowjob painting, to the IHOP. You slide into a booth and order up a short stack. Something catches your ear, the way someone at another table laughs, and it reminds you of your grandmother and the way she’d talk about the grandfather who went off to the Great War and never came back. And you remember that box of ancient perfume-scented letters you found in the attic of your mom’s house last Christmas while looking for another string of lights for the tree. That’s “Houses on the Hill,” a beautifully drawn short story of a song, pensive and precisely detailed in both sound and lyrics. Banjo, piano, and lilting fiddle all lock in, giving the arrangement a steady rolling feel. Like striding downhill, through a graveyard, toward a gently falling stream . . .
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