Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  Reports vary as to the precise circumstances of that night’s events. Some say the blowup happened during “Jacksonville Skyline,” others during “Today”—two songs that had yet to be released. But by all accounts, the onstage tension was palpable as Ryan and Phil needled each other amid much dark muttering. Eventually, that turned into Ryan launching into a mid-song tirade, smashing his guitar and (according to Thomas O’Keefe) telling the stunned audience, “Get on the Internet and tell your friends you just saw the last fuckin’ Whiskeytown show.”

  It wasn’t, and yet it was. The next day, Phil Wandscher, Steve Terry, Chris Laney, and utility-player sideman Mike Daly were all sent back to Raleigh. Ryan and Caitlin finished out the tour’s final three dates as an acoustic duo. Onstage in Louisville the night after Kansas City, Ryan reportedly explained the rest of the band’s absence as due to “illness.” After the dust settled, Ryan and Caitlin would assemble new players and continue on, and it was still good—in some ways, better than ever. But from that point on, Whiskeytown were a band in name only. The lineup became a revolving door, each replacement more of a temporary employee than the one before. A year later, Whiskeytown’s former members would number a dozen, enough to inspire a legendary piece of graffiti in bathrooms around Raleigh: “I used to play in Whiskeytown and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” You could buy a T-shirt that said that, too.

  Even as Whiskeytown ceased to be a band of equals, however, Ryan insisted he did not want it to be that way.

  “I never in my whole fucking life for one second intended to be the frontman for Whiskeytown,” he told me in 2000. “That band was supposed to be shared songwriting and a shared spotlight between Phil and Caitlin and myself. I always wanted it to be more like the Eagles. Not musically, but this shared bigger band so the identity wasn’t just me. And it became me when Phil left. I did not fire ten band members. A lot left for superpersonal reasons that had nothing to do with me. Some I did fire, mostly because I was the only one with the balls to do it. I don’t know why, but I accepted the responsibility. Just like I accepted the responsibility for being the frontman of a band that didn’t need one.”

  Thomas O’Keefe, for one, believed none of that.

  “Ryan once said, ‘I drive this circus from the back of the bus,’” said O’Keefe, who after Whiskeytown would go on to a long run as road manager of the immensely successful and far-better-behaved San Francisco pop-rock band Train (of “Hey, Soul Sister” fame). “He’s always known exactly what he’s doing. He knows you get way more press by firing the band in Kansas City than you do from waiting until you get home three days later and just replacing everybody. He really did the drugs, got drunk, wrote all those songs. But there was all this calculation in building ‘Ryan Adams’ up to this image, and he’s had his hand in that. It’s no accident that he became the alt-country Keith Richards.”

  Back in Raleigh, the next model of Whiskeytown came together swiftly. Sideman Mike Daly was summoned back, as was drummer Skillet Gilmore (even though Ryan had said in the No Depression cover story, “If you quit, you’re gone, you don’t come back”). As for newcomers, Whiskeytown acquired impressive lead-guitar firepower in the person of Ed Crawford, better known in alternative-rock circles as “ed fROMOHIO.” Crawford had played in the Minutemen spin-off fIREHOSE, moving to Chapel Hill after fIREHOSE dissolved in 1994. When he got the call, Crawford and his girlfriend Jenni Snyder were playing in a local band called Grand National, which went on the back burner when she also joined Whiskeytown as their new bassist.

  Following a quick round of rehearsals, Whiskeytown were back on the road mere weeks after Kansas City. Over the next year, Mike Daly became a Whiskeytown mainstay, and Steve Terry would return to the drummer’s slot for a tour or two. But Phil Wandscher was definitively, permanently banished. Fourteen years later, he was still bitter about it.

  “What really bums me out is how self-serving so many people were,” Wandscher said. “Nobody knew how to handle it. Ryan would pretend he didn’t want the band to be his, but that was just his manipulative way of making people think something was theirs that really wasn’t. Toward the end, I felt more like a babysitter than a musician. Everybody was coming at me like I was supposed to have some kind of answer. Then when the shit hit the fan, fingers got pointed—all at me. ‘It doesn’t look like this is gonna happen anymore, because you’re the problem.’ ‘I’m the problem? Thanks a lot!’ What was funny was that everybody had been bitching about Ryan and how fucked up things were, wanting to quit. Then all of a sudden they were right there by his side and ready to figure things out. It’s just funny how hypocritical some people were.”

  In January 1998, Whiskeytown played the long-running public television show Austin City Limits, splitting the bill with their friends-turned-rivals the Old 97’s. It went fine in front of the cameras, although Ryan and Rhett Miller reportedly had a backstage scuffle over a bottle of liquor. But nobody got hurt, and Whiskeytown’s performance was terrific.

  If the 1997 model of Whiskeytown was more rock than country, this early 1998 version rocked harder still. Crawford brought a different feel that accelerated and toughened up songs like “Dancing with the Women at the Bar,” making them rock harder than ever. And Ryan was feeling good enough to be self-deprecating about the seriousness of the Strangers Almanac songs. Speaking of “Houses on the Hill” during the Austin City Limits telecast, he quipped, “I’d have written another line, but I’d killed both of the characters already.”

  “That was probably the weirdest high-water mark of my time with Whiskeytown, getting them onto Austin City Limits,” Jenni Sperandeo said. “It would’ve been perfect if Phil had still been in the band. But it was great and they nailed it, which was a huge accomplishment. They were a fairly new band to be on that show. I do remember a lot of conversations about the length of Ryan’s shirt cuffs hanging out like Keith Richards’.”

  Ryan concurred about that when I interviewed him shortly after the Austin City Limits taping, joking that he’d looked “like a gangrenous version of Keith Richards.” That didn’t stop him from being effusive about the show, and things in general.

  “It went incredible, probably the best Whiskeytown performance ever,” he said, calling from Seattle. “Ed outdressed me, that bastard, in a double-breasted jacket. But everybody played great, although Skillet looked like Skillet—‘I’m gonna wear this brown sweater’—dumbass. But he played great. The tour’s goin’ really good. There have only been a couple of minor incidents that were my fault. I just got overcapacitated a couple of times and fell out from exhaustion, not sleeping enough.”

  One of those “minor incidents” would pass into lore, as recounted by Ryan himself in Rock’s Backpages a couple of years later. Ryan said he was “resuscitated from a drug-induced coma” on the tour bus, waking up to paramedics trying to determine how out-of-it he was by asking: “What year is it?” Overhearing this, Thomas O’Keefe replied, “If you know Ryan, that’s not really a fair question.”

  Crawford was in his thirties, a grown-up. I remember thinking that he might settle Ryan down a bit. He certainly brought a high level of technical proficiency to Whiskeytown’s lead-guitar slot, with all the punk credibility one could ask for. “Turn Around” always rocked harder onstage than on-record, and Crawford helped mutate it into a fascinatingly twisted concoction along the lines of the Ramones covering Fleetwood Mac.

  Still, the Whiskeytown live experience remained as unpredictable as ever. Winston-Salem Journal critic Ed Bumgardner interviewed Ryan around this time, despite serious reservations based on an unpleasant encounter with Ryan during the Patty Duke Syndrome days. But Ryan called at the appointed time and was chatty, smart, funny, and completely professional about the interview. Told he was being “so unlike yourself,” Ryan laughed and said he’d quit drinking because “I didn’t like who I was becoming.” Encouraged, Bumgardner went to Whiskeytown’s show in Winston-Salem—where, he said, Ryan was visibly intoxicated.

  “
Not just a little drunk, either, but weaving, slurring, roaring drunk,” Bumgardner said in 2011. “The first song, Ryan walks over to his amp, turns his guitar up and lets it feed back. The band tries to soldier on, but he keeps doing that and turns it up even louder. The amp is just screaming and he doesn’t stop. People start to boo, he turns it up louder still. People start to leave, he keeps going. Finally the rest of the band walks off, disgusted, and he keeps standing there in front of the amp feeding back and drinking a beer. At this point there are maybe ten people left, mostly me and a few musicians from town. Then Ryan picks up an acoustic guitar and plays one of the most beautiful forty-minute sets I’ve ever heard. No band, just him.”

  On the phone from Seattle, Ryan brushed off discouraging words about onstage eccentricities. What he was most excited about was an album that Whiskeytown had quickly knocked out back in North Carolina over the holidays, with Chris Stamey producing and Ben Folds sitting in on piano. Titled Forever Valentine, the album was made as a Christmas present for Outpost’s Mark Williams.

  “I’m not at liberty to talk about it because it’s gonna get bootlegged,” Ryan said conspiratorially. “The two copies we had on the tour bus are gone. It’s so fuckin’ good, I’m shittin’ gold, man. We could put it out next week and it would be classic, but we’re not gonna. We’re gonna put out some other record first, and people will want this one more and more. Then if I get into a golfing accident, I’ll have some backlog. But Ed’s on it and Skillet’s on it and we’re a real band! The only problem is Jenni Snyder’s not on it. Chris Stamey played bass. We were doing sixteen songs in two weeks and I was just throwing out ideas as fast as I could. I needed someone who could catch them and go with them, and that was Stamey. It’s really good, a rock record, but in the sense that [Television’s] Marquee Moon is a rock record. It’s ballad-oriented, but two or three songs are like Elvis Costello or Ron Sexsmith, that kind of pop. There’s some Southern soul, and some screaming loud, out-of-control guitars.”

  Noting that some of its songs were “like Strangers Almanac, Part Two,” Ryan concluded with a satisfied cackle, “We’re gonna call it Passers Out Almanac.”

  In a harbinger of future developments, Forever Valentine was an interesting yet unfocused record consisting of eleven quite good but quite different songs. It had a few Faithless Street–style twangy shuffles, moody pop songs that would have fit right in on Strangers Almanac, and some meat-and-potatoes riff-rock songs. The songs from that third category bore Crawford’s stamp, especially “Rays of Blinding Light”—still one of Ryan’s best-ever balls-out rockers. But Forever Valentine would never get a proper release (although two of its songs later turned up on Whiskeytown’s final album Pneumonia). Instead, it became one of the leading entries in Ryan’s catalog of “lost” albums. Ryan was always writing and recording songs faster than any label could put them out, but he was never one to slow down. Another batch of songs was just a bar napkin away, and they weren’t going to suck, either.

  That spring, Whiskeytown played a show in Durham and crossed paths with Ross Grady. In the midst of much drinking, talk turned to speculation over whether or not Grady deserved credit for releasing the high points of Whiskeytown’s recording career—the “Blank Generation” cover on Who the Hell as well as an original called “The Great Divide” on a compilation titled Power of Tower (a benefit for Duke University radio station WXDU, which had lost its broadcast antenna to Hurricane Fran in 1996). One thing led to another, and Ryan pulled out a red Sharpie to write up a “contract” on the insert from that compilation. Viewable at ibiblio.org/grady/suck, it reads as follows:

  I hearby give Ross Fucking Grady the rights to anything I did that sucked.

  “Ryan said that due to our long association, he felt comfortable with me releasing anything and everything of his that sucked,” Grady said in 2011, laughing at the memory. “It was not clear if he was asserting there was no such body of work. That might have been our last conversation.”

  By late April, this model of Whiskeytown had breathed its last. While on the road in Europe, Ryan posted an explanatory recap in the No Depression Folder:

  Jenny Snyder was let go from the band before Europe due to lack of, or ability to play well. Ed is her boyfriend, and yes that is a very one way thing, he is HER boyfriend, so in effect you can imagine that Ed is sitting at home right this very minute as I post from tour here in the motherlands. Damn Shame. Ironically enough, we never knew how good we sounded without all those extra members rotting the cheese. Mike Santoro is playing bass with us now, and Daly has taken over yet another instrument to juggle with while on stage. Caitlin is very happy as she does not have to tolerate or babysit anymore, not to mention the guitar level has tettered off enough to hear her fiddle. I will name a new guitar player before the next tour, album as it happens to come around. All is well and I must admit I am enjoying myself these days with the band and all and couldnt be happier. I only wish Id have waited to go sober after this tour, the beer looks pretty fucking tasty. oh well. Tell everyone back home hello and that Im a ego centric rat bastard with a temper and a bad haircut. theyll believe ya.

  Ryan assembled still another version of Whiskeytown in June 1998 with Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster and two members of the recently disbanded Backsliders, guitarist Brad Rice and bassist Danny Kurtz. Formerly of Finger as well as the Backsliders, Rice was a player Ryan had long admired—an incendiary lead guitarist with exquisite taste. A perfect fit, he also upped the band’s rock ante even further. I saw this configuration of Whiskeytown play an absolutely brilliant show at the Brewery in Raleigh that month, a set that featured a dozen new songs. It was a send-off for a run of dates opening for iconic Creedence Clearwater Revival leader John Fogerty.

  “That show at the Brewery was one of my most satisfying musical experiences ever,” Jon Wurster said four years later. “That band was just so good, and Ryan is the most natural musician I’ve ever played with. It just comes so naturally to him, everything about music. It’s insane in a way. He’s kind of like Dylan, in that he gets bored with stuff pretty quickly. Once something is down and he knows it, he’s ready to move on.”

  Indeed, the twelve new songs at that Brewery show should have been a tip-off. Ryan wasn’t interested in playing half-hour sets to promote an album he’d grown tired of, especially in daylight for indifferent crowds of someone else’s fans. A tour that seemed like an opportunity to play for bigger audiences quickly became an ordeal to endure. It went badly enough that Ryan’s first order of business afterward was to fire Jenni Sperandeo as Whiskeytown’s manager (he would eventually hook up with Frank Callari, manager of Lucinda Williams and other notables from the alternative-country world).

  “I think the egg timer got set on the John Fogerty tour, which was a low blow for me,” Ryan told me in 2000. “I was super-disappointed we got sent out on that, because I was basically pushed into it. Whatever democracy did exist was that those guys really wanted to go out and I didn’t. We’d always made a point of not opening for people, you become like an oil rag for somebody else’s machine. So we did that tour, and that’s when the sound and the morale of the band kinda got lost. I was struggling to make the show even remotely worthwhile in front of these people who could’ve given a fuck. The biggest reception we got was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, when I came out with a towel around my head and played Boston covers. I rapped, took my shirt off, even played a little drums. Any night when we were up there smoking, we’d finish a song and hear somebody yell, ‘Next!’ I got pissed one night: ‘You’re fuckin’ next, asshole. Come on up here, I dare you.’ That sucked.”

  Never one to suffer in silence, Ryan did bring on some of the heckling himself. “We’re Whiskeytown, and you don’t care, so fuck you,” he said onstage one night. “Up next is John Fogerty, who was born on the bayous of Southern California.” Noted Wurster, “That worked about as well as yelling at your parents.”

  Despite the rough spots, Ryan behaved well enough for Whiskeytown to ma
ke it through the Fogerty tour without imploding. But that egg timer kept ticking as the year wore on and Whiskeytown continued touring. Things came to a head in early September on the West Coast. In Vancouver, the show concluded with a Gibson Firebird guitar that Steve Terry said was “worth more money than God” coming to a bad end.

  “We’d been to a couple of strip clubs before the show and he’d gotten plowed,” said Terry, who was back in as Jon Wurster’s replacement by then. “He smashed that guitar onstage. I thought Thomas O’Keefe was going to strangle him. If you had that guitar today, it’d probably be worth fifty grand. And he just snapped it in two or three pieces. But hey, it was his money.”

  In Los Angeles a few nights later, Ryan excused himself mid-set to run backstage and throw up. And in between was a blowup big enough to dwarf what happened in East Lansing, a show at the fabled Fillmore in San Francisco. Angered at being told he couldn’t smoke onstage (as per California state law), Ryan went into tantrum mode when he saw people smoking out in the crowd. So he kicked both monitors off the stage and flung his microphone stand into the audience.

  “Yeah, that one turned into a full-blown riot after I smashed the monitors,” Ryan told me a few months after it happened. “We actually played a great show that night. The last twenty-five shows of the Strangers Almanac tour, we closed with this punk song called ‘Piss on Your Fucking Grave.’ The chorus goes, ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck off,’ real pretty, but it’s real punk on the jam. We were playing a great version that night, almost Black Flag, but it really made people angry. A cup hit the stage, so I decided to push the monitors into the crowd—not on top of anybody, nobody was in harm’s way. But the crowd still came back with every cup and bottle they had. I knew I was just opening up my checkbook when I did it. I don’t wanna walk out of this business someday going, ‘I got six really good guitars out of this.’ I’d rather just smash it all. So the sound-man walked out to hit me, the crowd was yelling, ‘Fuck you!,’ there were two bouncers waiting by the side of the stage to kill me. The crowd was heckling and also participating, throwing bottles, cups, cigarettes—you’re not supposed to smoke in clubs out there but I told everybody to do it and I’d pay the fines. So this soundman came over and took a swing at me. I was laughing, but I swung back and connected.”