Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  Hey, excuse me—could I get another cup of coffee? When you’ve got a minute? Yeah, sure, the check, too. I’ll take it to go.

  Between the pancakes and the bacon and the coffee and whatever else is still down there, you’re a little queasy again. Time to turn around and get moving. “Turn Around,” track number 7, is the sound of reacquiring bearings and continuing onward, moving for the sake of moving. Feels good to walk it off, throw your head back, and gaze up at the stars while striding on down the strip.

  Sadlack’s beckons in the distance, a few blocks away, and it’s still open. You have equilibrium again, but no telling for how long, so you keep moving. And there’s that person-place-thing again, creeping back into your mind. You brush it off. Or try to. Decide to pass Sadlack’s by this time—you feel weird about that place ever since you saw the graffiti in the bathroom noting that your name is an anagram for “YR A SAD MAN,” though not weird enough to quit going there altogether—and continue on to the Five-O Club farther up Hillsborough, because they’ll have a deejay and you feel like dancing. Maybe there will be someone there you know. Or someone who knows you.

  “Dancing with the Women at the Bar,” track 8, invokes both tonight’s full (fool?) moon and the Hillsborough Street strip you’re traversing. Equilibrium is holding steady, you feel pretty good, and yeah, there are women here to dance with and a deejay spinning new-wave oldies; The Cure, The Smiths, New Order. Your dad used to do this, too, dance with strange women in bars. Sometimes you like to think about doing the same things as him. Funny thing, for a song about dancing, this one takes forever for the drums to kick in. For about the first minute, “Dancing” is just pedal steel ambience, acoustic strumming, and Ryan singing in a hushed croon that sounds as if he’s seen a ghost. Perhaps his own, even.

  After dancing with the women at the bar for a bit, you spot someone you know over in a corner. Not a friend so much as an acquaintance, maybe even a friendly enemy. You’ve got a lot of those in this town, and they’re hard to keep straight. But you walk over anyway, he asks how you are. Your guard is down because one of those women was kind of flirty, and you’re still watching her out of the corner of your eye. How am I? So you tell him and he laughs, and not in a nice way.

  “Waiting to Derail,” song number 9, is the sound of your guard going back up as you storm out of the Five-O rather than get into your second fight of the night. Once outside, you break into a run, speeding up until you’re at a dead sprint even though nobody’s chasing you and you’ve got nowhere to go except home, eventually. If you can find the car. Where is it? You can’t remember, which might be a problem since you kinda sorta didn’t exactly really quite tell Van you were borrowing his car . . .

  Panting, you come to a stop within sight of a pay phone as “Waiting to Derail” wheezes to a close.

  I’m not gonna drunk-dial.

  I’m not gonna drunk-dial.

  I’m not gonna drunk-dial . . .

  You’re gonna drunk-dial. Under the pretense of calling a cab, you pick up the phone. But you don’t call Yellow Cab. You dial the number of that person-place-thing instead. Heart racing, you listen to it ring. And ring. And ring. You hang up just before the voicemail picks up, looking around to regain your bearings. If this were New York, you could tell where you were by the avenues (which run one way) and streets (which run the same). But it’s not New York. It’s Raleigh, which is simple enough to navigate drunk or sober (and good thing).

  “Avenues” is that aborted late-night phone call, a yearning acoustic reverie along the lines of the Replacements’ “Skyway.” It’s also one of Ryan’s most enduring love songs. He was dating Amy Lombardi by then, and that’s whom he wrote “Avenues” for. “Everything I Do,” too. Three years later, Ryan would call a song on his first solo album “AMY,” refer to Lombardi as “my Anita Pallenberg, the coolest and most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,” and explain to me that “Avenues” was “about how it doesn’t matter where the fuck I go, I’m still going in her direction.” But she’s in New York, which is north; and tonight home lies to the east, in that Oakwood closet on Bloodworth. Which you’ve not lived in for a couple of years. Wait a minute . . .

  The hour is at hand when it’s no longer possible to suppress thoughts of how much you’re missing that person-place-thing. And you’re wondering what it might feel like to give in—step off the fence, out of limbo; choose to go or stay, fight or flight, pick a side. Either way, what would you have to give up? Would it be worth it, losing what you have to get what you want? Do you want it bad enough? What would you wind up “Losering”? That’s song number 11, and for reasons you cannot fathom you find yourself punching a brick wall to a stomp-along back-beat. Now you’ve got bloody knuckles to go with the bloody nose from earlier in the evening.

  Dang, when did it get past three a.m.? All the bars are closed and the night’s last stragglers are staggering home, you among them. Van’s car was a few blocks from where you thought you’d left it, but no matter. You get in and start to drive, carefully, whistling past the graveyard (where we’ll lie) and humming “Somebody Remembers the Rose,” song number 12. Underscored by doomy minor-key piano chords, “Rose” weighs the risks of love and revealing yourself while lamenting the singer’s own damaged heart. This is also the only song on the album with the word “stranger” in the lyrics. Rhymes with “danger.”

  By now, the streets are deserted, not even any cops out, and you make it on home even though it’s “Not Home Anymore,” track number 13. Just an empty house. So you go around turning on lights to pretend you’re not alone, and you’re really not because you’ve got ghosts for company. They’re talking overtime tonight. You don’t want to hear them but you do, even when you put the pillow over your head in a vain attempt to drown them out.

  As “Not Home Anymore” fades out, the last sound on Strangers Almanac is a ringing alarm clock. It’s not like you slept at all. Why’d you even bother setting it? Good night, then. Good morning. Goodbye. Sorry . . .

  Chapter Nine

  Maybe I just drank the whiskey, but I really did think Strangers Almanac was going to be enormous. I actually got chills the first time I heard “16 Days,” imagining it as the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” of alternative country. The hook, Ryan’s lyrical wordplay, and the vocals were all killer, every element exquisitely balanced. Ryan’s yearning lead vocal was amazing, with letter-perfect harmonies from Caitlin and Phil. So I had “16 Days” pegged as the breakout hit, with “Excuse Me” as the follow-up single to close the deal.

  Around that same time, a review of Strangers Almanac appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. “If there’s to be a Nirvana among the bands that are imprecisely dubbed alternative country,” the review began, “look to Whiskeytown.” Of course, that review was written by Grant Alden, Peter Blackstock’s coeditor of No Depression magazine, so perhaps he drank the whiskey, too. But at the time, that level of success didn’t seem far-fetched.

  The ride was going to be bumpy, though. Drama set in before the band hit the road that summer, when bassist Jeff Rice had to bow out of the lineup over health issues. For a replacement, Whiskeytown drafted one of Ryan’s old Freight Whaler bandmates. Chris Laney had just graduated from college and was working at a restaurant in Atlanta when he got the call, and he trucked on up to Raleigh to commence rehearsals.

  “Ryan basically told everybody, ‘Chris Laney’s coming in and he’s awesome, kick-ass, it’ll be great,’” Laney said in 2011. “I’d met Phil once before and was told, ‘That’s asshole Phil’—and they stuck me with him, living on his couch. We had one band practice with everyone there and it was an hour at the most. It felt like Ryan was there maybe twenty minutes. He sang through a bass amp and we might have played three or four songs when he told everybody, ‘See, I toldja he could do it.’ He left, and I didn’t play with him again until we were onstage.”

  Laney picked up where Jeff Rice left off, so Whiskeytown had a rhythm section that was decidedly more rock and less country
. When they were on, that version of Whiskeytown could rock with an intensity bordering on metallic. Jeff Hart was playing bass in John Howie’s Two Dollar Pistols by then, and he remembers opening a Whiskeytown show in Tennessee during that period.

  “That was the best version of Whiskeytown ever,” Hart said. “Ryan was great and Phil was at his very best, too. It was tight and powerful, not falling apart like it’d been a year and a half earlier. It was a quantum leap from anything I’d seen them do before.”

  Unfortunately, however, there were other nights when things were falling apart more than ever. Relations between Ryan and Phil remained beyond strained, and the entropy that Jim Scott managed to keep under control in the studio ran amok onstage. Thomas O’Keefe, the band’s long-suffering road manager, once summarized Whiskeytown’s batting average as follows: “Typically, one-third of their shows were superb; one-third sucked; and one-third were some memorable punk thing. When Ryan would smash things and lay on the floor making noise for twenty minutes, Caitlin had already walked off by then most of the time.”

  There were times when Ryan’s onstage actions were just as mystifying to the rest of Whiskeytown as to audiences. Caitlin Cary remembered O’Keefe getting furious enough to scream at Ryan, “Do you have any idea how lucky you are, that people come to hear these songs you wrote on a bar napkin?!” And Steve Terry recalled a Whiskeytown show where Ryan decided he’d had enough after three songs and just sat down, leaving the rest of the band to continue on with Caitlin singing lead while Ryan just looked on.

  More typically, however, Ryan’s misbehavior was more active than that.

  “I had this drum kit I loved that the label had bought for the record, and I toured with it,” Terry said. “But one night in Dallas, we were doing the typical end-of-show thing of making drunken noise. Ryan had that gleam in his eye and the next thing I knew, he’d done the full-on Kurt Cobain catapult over the kit and into my lap while I continued trying to play. Then he stood on the drums, flipped them over and I thought, ‘I guess it’s time for me to leave.’ It was fun to watch but also heartbreaking—five-grand down the drain.”

  The summer of 1997’s most infamous onstage disaster happened in June in East Lansing, Michigan, manager Jenni Sperandeo’s college town. She booked Whiskeytown into her old hangout bar for a show that was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. Instead, it turned into an evening Ryan later described as “the pinnacle of bad vibes.”

  Indeed, Ryan did not like the vibe of the club or the crowd. He especially didn’t like that some members of the audience seemed to be paying more attention to a televised sporting event than to the band. So he got agitated, and the show took a hard-left turn into confrontational performance art.

  “Things got bad real fast when I detuned my guitar in the middle of a song and started makin’ a racket,” Ryan told me in 1998. “I was rebelling against the [sports] people and they were going, ‘FUCK YOU!’ ‘BOO!,’ all this shit. So I finally said, ‘I hate sports bars, the guys who hang out at places like this were the ones who used to beat up me and my friends when we were riding skateboards. So, sorry, I’m not playing this place.’ Which was the exact wrong thing to say. The people who were there to see us went crazy, started screaming at us. This one guy stood up, screamed ‘WHAT?!’ and threw ice at me. ‘Hey, you stupid SOB, I’ll kick your ass,’ I said, and threw a guitar pick at him. People were screaming that we were ‘Replacements ripoffs’ or some such shit, so I said, ‘Fuck this’ and walked out. A college kid tried to start a fistfight with me on the way, but our vampiric sound guy stood in his way.”

  The confrontation continued outside after Ryan retreated to the top of the band’s van with Steve Terry, Chris Laney, and a twelve-pack of beer. Angry people exiting the bar started out by hurling insults. Soon that escalated to tomatoes, rocks, bottles, and cans. Ryan and friends returned fire.

  “Four or five different cars were driving by pelting us while yelling, ‘You guys suck!’” Ryan said. “Somebody in a Trans-Am threw a tomato and it half-hit the van and half-hit me. I threw a full can of Old Milwaukee in their window and it just exploded. Knocking up a Trans-Am with a can of beer, I felt pretty good about that. The side of the van was covered in dents, beer, tomatoes. One car kept pulling up, wanting to fight, and Phil was going, ‘Come ON, motherfucker!’ He threw a half-full Pepsi at the guy and kinda messed him up. But then the cops came and they split, and then Tom finished loading everything and we sped off and left our manager to deal with this riot.”

  As for Sperandeo, she was able to joke about it: “I’m proud of my people for having tomatoes and being prepared to fight back.” Still, she also described it as “the most humiliating night of my life.”

  “It’s like he wanted to be mean and hurt my feelings as much and make me look as bad as possible, and he chose that place to do it,” she said in 2011. “Like he figured that was the best way to be as big a dick as possible. He threw many shows, but I’m sure that one was especially satisfying. Somewhere I have pictures from before the show. It was one of those excessive-eyeliner nights for Ryan, who was completely wasted. Yeah, it was mean.”

  Hostilities continued online for several days afterward, as people weighed in with overwhelmingly negative feedback about Whiskeytown on the Postcard mailing list. One of the thread’s most memorable posts came from someone who had been at the East Lansing show and was unimpressed with Whiskeytown’s halfhearted cover of “Sweet Home Alabama.” So he posted a rewrite of the lyrics, with “Apologies to Lynyrd Skynyrd”:

  Sweet home Carolina

  Can’t contain that swollen head

  Sweet home Carolina

  What monstrous ego have you bred?

  East Lansing caused enough of a backlash that Ryan felt obliged to post a lengthy apology in which he admitted there was “no excuse for that show.” He also tried to explain himself:

  Its hard not to feel backed into a corner being pojked with sticks at shows weather or not youre sitting their smiling rooting us on. And as far as the problem being with me and not the band, I never professed at having any people skills, I newver professed at being a nice sober guy out to shake all your hands like the 97s or whoever the top of the nice guy list is this week. Im 22 and Im trying to keep my shit together like anybody else in this world. The diffrence is my wiorld Is your world now and Im having a lot of trouble dealing. Maybe next year Ill be the nice guy you all wanted me to be, or the showman of the year in Rolling Stone, but until tyhen Itoo am a human being tired of getting ripped off llke you and tired of being turned into things i am not. I have feelings like anybody elses, only youre spending a whole lot of time buying into mine. Makes me feel like wearing make up. Makes me feeli like a hooker. I am truley sorry you have to endure how i feel, just to get to the music I make. But after all, thats what you paid for isnt it.

  It was hard to know just how seriously to take Ryan’s antics, or to know whether they were impulsive or premeditated. Paul Cardillo played in another Triangle country-rock band called Red Star Belgrade, which opened a Whiskeytown show in Florida in 1997. Afterward, both bands wound up back at the motor lodge and frolicked in the pool. There was some drinking going on, Cardillo said, but it wasn’t out of control. Everything was very fun and lighthearted—until a record company guy drove up in a stretch limo with a couple of women in the back.

  “As soon as that guy showed up, it was like a switch flipped and Ryan went into Keith Richards mode,” Cardillo said in 2011. “He started prancing around the pool, doing shots of Jack Daniel’s out of the bottle. And he took a chaise longue chair and threw it into the pool. The record guy was there maybe an hour, and after he left, Ryan dropped his guard immediately. He went back into the pool to get the chair, put it back where it had been, and went to sleep. It seemed like just such an innocent thing.”

  Chapter Ten

  Strangers Almanac was a critical favorite that year, landing at No. 23 in the Village Voice’s critics poll for 1997 (and inspiring Voice critic Ro
bert Christgau to call Ryan “a dulcet young hook merchant with ‘left to pursue a solo career’ embroidered on the seat of his jeans”). But it was nowhere near a commercial hit, never cracking the Billboard 200 album sales chart even though it continued to sell steadily over the years. By the time it was reissued in an expanded “Deluxe Edition” in 2008, Strangers had moved 141,000 copies—respectable, but nowhere near what I expected. It just never caught on at enough commercial radio stations to break through, leaving Whiskeytown stuck in the college/public-radio ghetto. A few years after the fact, Ryan was able to be philosophical about how he’d used his own foot for target practice.

  “Everybody in Whiskeytown, no matter how fucked up we were, had a good work ethic about playing and writing songs,” he told me in 2000. “I don’t know how we managed to do it, but we retained a profile as a band worth listening to. After ‘16 Days,’ we could’ve turned into an alt-country Trixter—there’s your slice, now move on. But we did everything we could to fuck up that whole thing.”

  Indeed they did, and Whiskeytown continued to get as much attention for the extracurricular activities as for the music—especially the ongoing mutual loathing society between Ryan and Phil. Things between them were as tense and nasty as ever by the time Whiskeytown rolled into Kansas City for a show on September 25, 1997. Over lunch that afternoon, Phil told Steve Terry that he thought the end was near.

  “‘Dude,’ I said, ‘I’m just about done. I can’t take this anymore,’” Phil said in 2011. “Steve was freaked. ‘Fuck,’ he said, ‘what am I gonna do now?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do, either.’ But it was fuckin’ uncanny, as if Ryan had been sitting at the next table listening. That night, boom, he beat me to the punch.”