Before it turned into a free-for-all, Mike Daly grabbed Ryan, heaved him over his shoulder, and hustled him out. Going to the van seemed like a bad idea, so Steve Terry took Ryan to a blues bar down the street to have a drink and wait out the chaos. That was where Jac Cain found Ryan. An old Raleigh hand, Cain was touring as soundman for Squirrel Nut Zippers, who were in town the same night. So Cain went to Whiskeytown’s Fillmore show and witnessed the chaos.
When Cain found Ryan and asked why, Ryan responded, “I figure if I cause enough of a ruckus, I’ll get famous.” The next day, Ryan elaborated on that sentiment with a profoundly un-contrite explanation he posted online:
Whiskeytown does not discriminate. We will fuck up your club, . . . . .“for fun”. . . . . . for no charge. If your club is more famous than some other club because some stupid fucking enexcusable slobbering blues ripping piece of shit played there, “back in the day” this will not mean that the club will see a whsikeytown on their best behavoir, waiting to be appreciated by being affiliated with your famous bullshit ass club.
the monitors were great. they were better when they flew about six feet into the audience. to the people with sound mind and stooges records to boot, let us all think about the beautiful sounds of the grills being ripped off the speakers after a “great fucking show”. to anybody else . . . . . . . you wannna talk about destruction . . . . come see sometime, anyfuckin time and tell me different. what the fillmore needed was a service whiskeytown was willing to provide. rocknroll not afraid to bite them back. this band “is” rocknroll, so you eat it. think Im kiddin . . . .
you people are so alternative-country you forgot rock”n”roll made both of those things cool. sit in the hot plastic seat in hell and wait for your new copy of the son volt record———piss off best of luck.
BORING,
Ryan
Chapter Eleven
Like Whiskeytown, the music industry was also in drastic transition as 1998 wound down. Record labels had been changing hands for huge sums of money all through the 1990s, but the biggest purchase of all came down in May 1998: Universal Music Group owner Seagram’s purchase of PolyGram for the staggering sum of $10.6 billion, which created the world’s largest music company by a wide margin. As a subsidiary of Universal-owned Geffen, Outpost Records was a tiny component of the deal, which would take more than a year to complete. It would take even longer for the ripples to reach Whiskeytown.
In the interim, Whiskeytown pushed ahead toward album number three. I saw the band’s final show of 1998, right before Christmas in Chapel Hill, with James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins on guitar. Ryan played piano for most of the set, which featured a lot of brand-new songs too unformed to get a sense of. It was a dispiriting performance; not because it was sloppy (which it was), but because it was so low-energy. If that wasn’t the worst Whiskeytown show I ever saw, it was definitely the sleepiest.
The songs from that set seemed built more for recording than performance, and that was the direction Whiskeytown appeared to be headed. The band would spend most of 1999 out of the public eye at work on an ambitious and grand pop statement with another farewell-themed working title: Happy Go Bye Bye. Ryan had vacated Raleigh to live with Amy Lombardi in New York City by then, and most of the recording took place upstate in Woodstock. In addition to the Ryan–Caitlin–Mike Daly core, the cast of players included bassist Jennifer Condos and guitarists Iha, Brad Rice, and Tommy Stinson from the Replacements.
The album’s drummer, producer, and ringleader was Ethan Johns, whom Ryan had met in Los Angeles while mixing Strangers Almanac. The son of Glyn Johns (the studio legend behind Who’s Next, Exile on Main Street, and other iconic classic-rock milestones), Ethan was producing an album for the scion of another legend, Chris Stills (son of Stephen). They hit it off, and Ryan enlisted Ethan to help build the grand pop cathedral of his dreams. Reports surfaced of wondrous and elaborate doings in the studio, as Ryan made his Brian Wilson move toward a more ornate pop style.
“Yeah,” Caitlin Cary said a few years later, “that was supposed to be our ‘huge’ record where we made back everybody’s money.”
The album was done by the end of summer and penciled in for release in the first quarter of 2000. Even though Outpost’s place in the new Universal/PolyGram empire had yet to be determined, advance copies of Whiskeytown’s still-untitled LP 3 started going around in the fall of 1999. The merger was still grinding along, and one ominous sign was the decision by UniGram’s corporate overlords to shut down Outpost parent Geffen. Finally, word came down in November 1999 that Outpost was to be folded, too. Its two biggest bands, Days of the New and The Crystal Method, were going to wind up on other labels within Universal. But everyone else on the roster, including Whiskeytown, was stuck in limbo.
“When PolyGram and Universal merged, no one thought out the details down to the level of us, a seemingly insignificant little joint venture,” Outpost office manager Jeff Wooding said when the news broke. “Everybody told us, ‘Don’t worry, it will work out.’ So much for that. It is tragic, a what-might’ve-been thing. Cycles come and go, and we would’ve still been here developing artists when it came back to us. But the combination of corporate mergers, downsizing, the pop marketplace, and a lack of vision over what to do with us became our death knell.”
There was still an expectation (or at least hope) that Whiskeytown’s third album would be emerging soon when the band did its first performance in many moons on September 19, 1999. It was in New York City, a Gram Parsons tribute taped for the public television performance show Sessions at West 54th. Ryan was the star of the show, which opened with him singing a duet with Emmylou Harris on “Return of the Grievous Angel”—a huge honor and very symbolic, being tapped to sing with Parsons’s old duet partner on one of his signature songs. Ryan also returned at the end with Whiskeytown to do “A Song for You.”
But perhaps the most significant part of the evening happened after-hours, when most of the players from the Sessions show went to a bar in New York’s East Village. An impromptu hootenanny broke out, Ryan and Caitlin playing with the duo of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on an assortment of songs including “My Heart Is Broken,” “Theme for a Trucker,” Welch’s “Orphan Girl,” and endless covers.
“We ended up playing music until four or five a.m.,” Welch said in 2000. “Ryan seemed kinda burnt on Manhattan and he kept saying, ‘Nobody ever does this up here, just plays for fun.’ We mostly did old covers—George Jones, Hank Williams, the usual fare.”
When I got in touch with Ryan a couple of days later, he was still buzzing about the experience. He had booked some solo shows starting the following month in North Carolina, intending “to [explore] the powers of performing solo and exposing the beauty of song unadorned,” as he put it in an e-mail dated September 22, 1999. He went on:
whiskeytown have made such a beautifully collaborative effort, this album, that I decided I should spent that kind of time by mself writing things that explain me more as an individual. . . .
new york is 58% and a dream. my best to you.
Just under a month later, Ryan walked onstage at Chapel Hill’s Local 506 nightclub, plopped down on a stool, adjusted his glasses, took up his guitar, and opened a vein straight into the heart of every person in the room. Triangle club crowds can be notoriously chattery and indifferent, especially when confronted with something unfamiliar. This was Ryan all by himself, playing songs so new that he had to read the lyrics out of a notebook. You could have heard a pin drop as everyone listened, dumbfounded and mesmerized. As good as Ryan had been that first time I saw him solo, this was an exponentially higher level of magical—as if he were a living, breathing tuning fork dialed into The Lost Chord, stripped down to its barest essence and rendered for all to hear. It’s still one of the most astonishing performances I’ve ever witnessed. I would put Ryan, circa Fall 1999, up against anyone from whatever Hall of Fame you care to mention.
Ryan and Amy Lombardi were going through a diffic
ult stretch that would eventually drive them apart, inspiring Ryan to leave New York for Nashville the next year. He sounded as if he was already bidding her farewell in song after song, each more sadly beautiful than the last, all of them alluding to broken hearts and the fleeting nature of love. Only one song sounded angry, the opening “Born Yesterday”—an enraged rant made even spookier by the deliberate heartbeat of its pace. Steeped in the paranoid jealousy of suspicious minds, “Born Yesterday” was venomous enough to pass for a note left behind at the scene of a murder/suicide.
That one aside, all the new songs were mournful, and Ryan played them as if casting a spell that only broke during the applause after each one. As spare as these songs were, they were nevertheless incredibly evocative snapshots that made you feel exactly the melancholia he was going through. Except Ryan made it sound deeper and more earth-shattering than anything anybody on earth had ever felt.
Early on, he introduced one tune by calling it “a new song that I wrote that I absolutely fucking hate.” The title was “Hey There, Mrs. Lovely,” for my green Ryan’s best love song ever—a small gem of a vignette about two doomed lovers who can’t overcome their own damaged hearts enough to be together. When the girl cries, the boy gets scared and wants “to dry your eyes with cinnamon and pears.” An odd sentiment, but the gently chiming riff was beautiful, and Ryan’s vocal revealed enough naked, raw emotion to put a lump in your throat. I think Ryan hated it because it was as vulnerable as he ever sounded, and I remember thinking that “Mrs. Lovely” sounded like the song every girl wished a boy would write for her. I had to hear it again. Fortuitously, Ryan was playing the very next night in Raleigh. So off to the Brewery I went. That next night’s show was also powerful, but looser and more relaxed. A lot of Ryan’s old Raleigh drinking buddies were in the house, resulting in much good-natured banter back and forth, and Ryan gave as good as he got. “I see you and I know who you are,” he said with a smile, calling out one heckler. “Hell hath no mercy for you!”
I must confess that I indulged in a little heckling myself that night. Early on, Ryan noted that he was playing mostly new songs and thanked the crowd for its receptiveness. That was enough for somebody in the room to mockingly request “Free Bird,” the old Lynyrd Skynyrd warhorse.
“You know,” Ryan said as he tuned his guitar, “I actually heard ‘Free Bird’ recently, it’s really a fuckin’ good song, man. It really is.”
Listen closely to bootleg recordings of that show and you can hear my voice answering back: “No it’s not!”
“Okay,” Ryan said with a laugh. And to my delight, he went right into “Hey There, Mrs. Lovely,” which was just as marvelous as it had been the night before. Ryan was kinder to “Mrs. Lovely” in Raleigh, joking afterward that he should call it “I Have (Continual) Bad Luck with Women.”
Then he split the arrow in the bull’s-eye with his next song, “Oh My Sweet Valentine,” a fare-thee-well that conjures up a cinematic goodbye scene backlit by rain falling through sunshine on a mountain meadow. “Valentine” falls in the same general ballpark as Freddy Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” an ostensibly sad song about endings that nevertheless conveys such joy in the simple fact of being alive that it ultimately feels triumphant. As the last verse concluded, “It’s such fun to be alive.” The whole show was full of moments like that. It was awe-inspiring to witness.
“This is amazing,” Whiskeytown alumnus Jon Wurster whispered when I bumped into him that night. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen him do, by far.”
I think everybody there would have agreed, including Ryan’s two opening acts, Chip Robinson and Kenny Roby. The show concluded with Robinson, Roby, and Caitlin Cary on-stage alongside Ryan to do an encore version of “16 Days,” Whiskeytown’s should’ve-been-a-hit from three years earlier. Roby sang a verse and took a few liberties with it, recasting the last line thus:
God, I wish sometimes I wrote this song . . .
Ryan rang out 1999 with Whiskeytown at Cat’s Cradle, a millennial New Year’s Eve performance featuring all of Faithless Street and Strangers Almanac played in order. It was excellent, especially Ryan’s “Matrimony” serenade to Caitlin and Skillet. And at that time, Ryan was still pledging loyalty to Whiskeytown.
“The band is what I belong to, and comes before solo things,” he told me in a preshow interview, and he seemed to mean it.
But it still felt like the end. Ryan and Caitlin were both well into solo careers as 2000 began, even though they still had a lingering piece of unfinished Whiskeytown business. Outpost Records was gone, but Whiskeytown’s third album was not forgotten. Titled Pneumonia, it was in circulation as a bootleg, trading hands for hundreds of dollars on eBay. By the end of that year, LA New Times was calling it “arguably one of the best albums of 1999, and now 2000.”
That’s an overstatement, but Pneumonia is a very fine album with some spectacular high points, maybe even higher than anything on Strangers Almanac. Yet Pneumonia lacks that album’s vision and sense of purpose, and not just because it’s so much lighter in tone and spirit. Pneumonia is bursting with ambition, but there is a self-consciousness about it, too—the album feels like it’s as much about its own ambition as anything else. That said, the album is full of great songs and even greater ideas, almost too many to be contained on a single record. It suffers from a lack of focus and never quite meshes into something that feels like an organic whole, mostly because its songs sound like they belong on three different albums. Truth be told, the Pneumonia sessions probably could have yielded even more albums than that. Ryan submitted demos for nearly seventy songs, about half of which were recorded for the final fifteen-track album.
Pneumonia’s best moments sound like the logical follow-up to Strangers, wistful pop-rock and country-flavored songs like “Tilt-A-Whirl,” “Bar Lights,” “Easy Hearts,” and most of all the gorgeous “Jacksonville Skyline.” A back-pages remembrance of Ryan’s old hometown with a feel reminiscent of Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection period, “Jacksonville Skyline” finds Ryan at the peak of his powers as a singer. Where his vocals on Strangers were intense to the point of life-and-death, this time he doesn’t sound like he has anything to prove. But that doesn’t translate to laziness. Instead, he sounds confident and in command.
Another Pneumonia subset consists of piano-based pop songs echoing the likes of Randy Newman and Leon Russell, and they’re very good even if they feel a bit like genre exercises. The jaunty “Mirror, Mirror” sounds like one of Paul McCartney’s throwbacks to English music-hall vaudeville, with a cinematic keyboard flourish worthy of a Newman soundtrack theme. And Ryan’s vocal on “The Ballad of Carol Lynn” is a dead ringer for Russell, circa 1972’s “Tight Rope.”
But the album’s more experimental tracks represent a mixed bag, falling on a continuum from excellent to painfully bad. Exemplifying the former, the ornate orchestration of “Under Your Breath” is lovely, underscored by Ryan wringing a maximum amount of emotion from a vocal just this side of a whisper. “What the Devil Wanted” is effectively spooky, ruminating on the lengths to which people will go for love. The ambient arrangement and Ryan’s hushed murmur conjure up the unsettling feeling of awakening from a bad dream unable to remember any details beyond a feeling of dread.
On the painfully bad end of the scale, the cheesy tiki-torch lilt and self-conscious croon of “Paper Moon” are suck-out-loud awful, wrecking some pretty good lyrics. “Paper Moon” was the first song Ryan ever did that I could not stand, and I remember telling him he should’ve saved that one for the box set. But it was a song that meant a lot to him.
“It’s written as a love song without any bitterness or irony in the lyrics,” Ryan told me in a 1999 interview. “No biting or second-guessing. It’s just a pure song about being in love with life and with somebody. It doesn’t harbor any snide backhanded comments. It’s not afraid of itself, it’s just sure of itself and in love with itself. I’d never been able to write something like that, expressing a l
ove of life without some suicidal or manic undertow happening in the words. So it feels a little . . . unnatural. And I’m mumbling under the string section: ‘Love takes care of love, hate just burns you out.’ Which might call bullshit on what I just said because it’s an awful sentiment: Love only takes care of itself and nothing else, while hate fucks people up and makes them die. So if you’re not in love, you’re nowhere. And if you’re hating, it will eat you alive.”
Considered as a whole, Pneumonia felt less like a summation than a transitional effort setting the stage for several possible future directions. Ideally, its songs would have been released as part of a series of different records tracing several years of Whiskeytown’s evolution rather than being crammed into a haphazard single album that didn’t quite hang together. Still, Ryan considered it to be his magnum opus.
“I think this record is amazing,” Ryan said. “It’s not suited to everybody in the same way. But it’s true to what we wanted to do. People have so many expectations of what Whiskeytown is supposed to be, and they don’t seem to care at all about what we want to do. You know, they miss their little folk ballad, or their keg anthem. It’s a beautiful thing to say, this record, and I’m not used to saying beautiful things. I usually say things that make you want to hide in the beer cooler. But this isn’t lampshade-on-your-head rock. There comes a time when you have to figure out where the influences stop and your own identity begins. I wanted this to sound like no one but us, with the influences being only small minor tools to help the songs exist in a better format.”
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