Ryan Adams

by David Menconi

  As far and wide as Pneumonia ranged, its overall sound and feel were very much of a piece with late 1990s pop in general. Had it come out on its original timetable, the twangy pop of “Choked Up” or “Crazy about You” would have sounded right at home on the radio alongside the Cranberries and Sheryl Crow. But that was not to be.

  As 2000 dragged on with no end to the UniGram corporate stalemate in sight, Whiskeytown’s limbo continued. Ryan developed a gallows-humor attitude about his career. That spring, Whiskeytown played again at South By Southwest, scene of the band’s earlier buzz-band triumph in 1996. Ryan paused between Pneumonia songs to make a sardonic announcement: “So these are all songs off our next record, called It’s Never Ever Gonna Fuckin’ Come Out.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Ryan played solo at the 2000 South By Southwest, too, eliciting the same mesmerized amazement in Austin that he had the previous fall in North Carolina. With Whiskeytown on ice, he was already making plans to do a solo album, and he had just the record label in mind. Ryan wanted to bypass the major labels to do a one-off solo record for the independent label Bloodshot, which had released a few Whiskeytown singles over the years. And just as he had four years earlier in Austin, Ryan bumped into Bloodshot co-owner Rob Miller in a bathroom—although neither was ill this time. Ryan asked if Bloodshot wanted to put out his first solo album, and Miller had a short, emphatic answer: Hell, yes.

  “We may or may not have washed hands before we shook,” Miller noted. And so the deal was set.

  Several months later, a compact disc arrived at Bloodshot’s Chicago office with no fanfare. After flirting with a series of gag titles, I Am Not Shelby Lynne and Englewood Humperdinck among them, Ryan had settled on Heartbreaker (which he later claimed was a reference to pop singer Mariah Carey’s 2000 hit single of the same name). Miller cued up the disc with great anticipation—only to have his heart sink upon hearing the first thirty seconds, an in-the-studio argument between Ryan and guitarist David Rawlings about a supremely arcane record-geek point (which Morrissey album contained the 1988 song “Suedehead”), complete with faux-British accents and much snickering. Once the music kicked in, however, dismay gave way to relief and amazement. Miller and Bloodshot co-owner Nan Warshaw had taken out a bank loan to pay for Heartbreaker, and it turned out to be the best forty thousand dollars they ever spent.

  “A few of its songs absolutely just slayed me right off the bat, and it’s a record I still go back to and find something new in ten years and more later,” Miller said. “That’s the sign of a classic, it just keeps on giving. It was one of those precious moments of clarity where my weird take on the world dovetailed perfectly with the art of a particular person in a way that might do well commercially. I remember getting kind of antsy and agitated. Ever read The Right Stuff, when Alan Shepard is going during a launch, ‘Please, Lord, don’t let me fuck this up’? It was like that. We’d been handed something really special and we didn’t want to fuck it up.”

  My initial reaction to Heartbreaker was disappointment that it didn’t have any of those astonishing Fall 1999 solo songs, especially “Mrs. Lovely” or “Valentine.” But that didn’t last long, because it was an extraordinary record. Cut in Nashville after Ryan had abandoned New York, Heartbreaker marked the beginning of a new personal—as well as professional—chapter. Plenty of the album’s songs were about Amy Lombardi, who was definitely in Ryan’s past by then. And yet there’s an exuberance to Heartbreaker, which is loose in all the right ways.

  Most of the record was Ryan and producer/multi-instrumentalist Ethan Johns cutting things on the fly, with guests including Rawlings, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, and future Wilco member Pat Sansone. The opening that so alarmed Miller, “(Argument with David Rawlings concerning Morrissey),” actually set a perfect tone for Heartbreaker’s freewheeling first-take feel. And it led right into the first track, “To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high),” a cutting blues-rock kiss-off with Ryan’s sneering drawl evoking Highway 61 Revisited–era Bob Dylan.

  “That lead-in is not an edit, it’s exactly what happened directly before we went into ‘To Be Young,’” Johns said. “When Ryan starts to count off and stops, it’s because I’ve got a mouthful of cookies and a soda in my hand. He had to wait for me to put the drink down. They were full-fly into this argument. I thought I had a few minutes, so I’d have a quick snack. And when I heard that, it was so funny I didn’t want to cut it off.”

  Similarly, “Damn, Sam (I love a woman that rains)” begins with a split-second of tape distortion. Ryan wrote “Damn, Sam” on the spot, told Johns to roll tape and began playing; Johns lunged for the “Record” button and didn’t quite hit it in time. Distortion and all, that first take perfectly captured the song’s fever-dream weirdness. Simultaneously earthy and elegant, Ryan’s lyrics claim he’s “as calm as a fruit stand in New York and maybe as strange.” The first time he played “Damn, Sam” live, Ryan introduced it as “my existentialist, absurd Texas singer-songwriter song.” You could imagine Guy Clark or Butch Hancock writing something like it.

  “My Winding Wheel” also has a West Texas feel, gliding along with stoic bravado as Ryan dares a lover to get herself dolled up “for all the boys you think could outdo me.” “My Winding Wheel” is one of the songs where Lombardi’s presence is most felt, but she’s really all over the album. If Heartbreaker was The Freewheelin’ Ryan Adams, Lombardi is the album’s Suze Rotolo figure, directly inspiring “To Be the One,” “Call Me on Your Way Back Home,” and, of course, “AMY.”

  “On this record, there are so many songs concerning her and us,” Ryan would tell me. “I thought if I put it all on the table, I’d actually put one with her name on it, in capital letters.”

  A lush pop tune, “AMY” was far better than most of the experimental pop songs on Pneumonia. And it was certainly direct—“Oh, I love you, Amy/Do you still love me?”—as well as sturdy. On his 2007 covers album Version, British producer/deejay Mark Ronson would do a sly cover of “AMY” (which may or may not have been a reference to Ronson’s most famously tragic production client, the late British soul starlet Amy Winehouse), tarting it up with horns and a dance club backbeat.

  Amy Lombardi wasn’t all that Ryan was pining for on Heartbreaker. “Oh My Sweet Carolina” is a wonderful love letter to The Old North State, enhanced by a stately piano solo from Pat Sansone. “Sweet Carolina” traces Ryan’s wanderings from Cleveland to Kentucky and beyond, and it’s never quite clear whether he’s looking for something or running away from it—especially since all roads eventually take him back to where he once belonged. Twenty thousand roads he went down down down, indeed. Just to emphasize that song’s connection to “Return of the Grievous Angel,” Gram Parsons’s old duet partner Emmylou Harris contributes an incandescent harmony vocal.

  “Come Pick Me Up” is just as evocative, but of a time more than a place. It’s a barfly anthem set in that closing-time moment when late night loneliness is rearing its ugly head and codependency doesn’t sound like such a bad thing because it sure as hell beats facing the rest of the night and tomorrow morning’s hangover alone. It’s probably just as well that Ryan wasn’t a pop star by then, because the thought of mobs of frat boys screaming the titular chorus makes for an unsavory image.

  “Come Pick Me Up” has had an intriguing, up-and-down afterlife, including placement in a Cameron Crowe movie, 2005’s Elizabethtown (as soundtrack to an all-night phone call between romantic leads Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst); a still-unreleased cover by country megastar Tim McGraw, who vowed in a 2010 interview that he’s still going to get it onto an album someday; and a tragicomic, horribly bowdlerized 2011 performance on prime-time television by American Idol finalist Paul McDonald, who literally skipped across the stage as he sang.

  As the little record that could, Heartbreaker eventually defied every expectation anybody ever had for it, including Ryan—who told me at one point that it would be “amazing” if it sold 20,000 copies. He also signed off
an e-mail to me with “dont hate my record.” But Heartbreaker’s haters were few. Even though it was originally intended to be a simple placeholder to keep Ryan busy and visible during Whiskeytown’s downtime, Heartbreaker turned out to be his best and most fully realized solo record.

  The album was also a milestone for Bloodshot Records, a label accustomed to putting out albums that might sell a few thousand copies. But Heartbreaker sold more than 300,000 copies in the United States plus another 100,000-plus overseas, Bloodshot’s top-seller by many multiples. It never made the charts, nor did it have the benefit of major-label distribution and marketing. Yet Heartbreaker would outsell every other album in Ryan’s catalog except for 2001’s Gold.

  Heartbreaker also drew near-universal critical raves, including a finalist nomination for the prestigious Shortlist Prize for Artistic Achievement in Music (an award won by the exotic Icelandic postrock band Sigur Rós) and a No. 26 finish in that year’s Village Voice critics poll. But perhaps the most high-profile testimonial came from Elton John, the iconic piano-man pop star whose commercial peak came around the time Ryan was born in 1974. In the credits of his 2001 album Songs from the West Coast, John included this in the thank-you section:

  Special thanks to Ryan Adams, who inspired me to do better.

  In the summer of 2000, I did a long series of interviews with Ryan before Heartbreaker’s release for a No Depression profile that I hoped would be my first cover story for the magazine (alas, Allison Moorer would get the nod instead for the September–October 2000 issue). I was still in Raleigh, while Ryan was in Nashville, so it was by phone and e-mail. But he was chatty as ever, especially on the subject of all his unreleased albums.

  There was still Whiskeytown’s Forever Valentine, of course; Destroyer, the partially recorded follow-up to Heartbreaker; his collaboration with Replacements/Guns N’ Roses bassist Tommy Stinson, Fucker; the hard-rock SnoKobra; a multidisc compilation of home recordings that Ryan wanted to call either Four-Track Mind or Exile on Franklin Street, in honor of another of his former addresses in Raleigh; and three albums’ worth of songs recorded with various casts of players at dB’s bassist Gene Holder’s studio in Hoboken, New Jersey. But most of all, there was Pneumonia.

  “I’m excited for Pneumonia to come out,” he said. “I can’t guarantee there will be a Whiskeytown then, but I think it’s a really grand record. I’ve decided I want it taken back to the original mix and concept. We did some stuff to it that was pretty unholy with the mixing, trying to turn an arty record into something that would be more accepted. Taking small brush-strokes and making them bigger to accommodate it being on the radio or soundtracks. I want it to be a brilliant last record.”

  Hearing him call Pneumonia “a brilliant last record” got my attention. I had to admit it made sense. Ryan’s solo act was fantastic, and Whiskeytown hadn’t been a real band in years. Heartbreaker was on the way, Caitlin Cary was about to release her first solo record (a mini-album called Waltzie), and even Mike Daly was writing and recording his own songs by then. So I asked Ryan point-blank: Is this it for Whiskeytown?

  “It’s not like we sat down and said, ‘Okay, this is it,’” Ryan said. “But . . . this is pretty much it. I don’t see what validity we’d have at this point, anyway. We kind of did what we’d set out to do anyway. If in fact we are closing out the Whiskeytown chapter, that would be better than going on. Who wants to hang around forever, doing the same shit? It would put to shame any of the good shit we did do. A lot of people already don’t like seeing Whiskeytown anymore because we got too ‘professional.’ They’re mad there’s nobody puking anymore. Whiskeytown was supposed to just be a party band that might accidentally make some good songs. And we did do some songs that were really, really good and played some places we never thought we would. None of us thought we were that good, anyway. I always thought we sucked in a nice way, with really good songs.

  “Anyway,” he concluded, “when you have to fly somewhere to have a band meeting, your band is gay and you should break up.”

  PART THREE

  After

  Chapter Thirteen

  One evening in April of 2001, Ryan called me at home in a highly worked-up state. I was surprised to hear from him because we’d not spoken since that No Depression profile, which unexpectedly caused some hard feelings. Amy Lombardi was upset the story gave her full name and identified the publicity firm where she worked (which I hadn’t thought would be a problem, given the title of the song “AMY” and how openly Ryan talked about her). Ryan’s manager was upset because managers hate everything they don’t have control over. And Ryan was upset because, I guess, he’d seen a shaman in Seattle.

  On the phone that night, however, Ryan acted as if there’d never been a cross word between us. Ostensibly, he called seeking advice. Ryan had played South By Southwest again that spring with his new rock band, the Pink Hearts, drawing a dismissive review in the Independent Weekly. Written by Angie Carlson, music editor of the Triangle-based alternative weekly, it described the show as “throwaway” and “half-baked.” So Ryan wanted to know: Did I think he should confront her over it?

  “No,” I told him, trying to keep my eye-roll out of my tone of voice, “you shouldn’t. Why do you even let this shit bother you?”

  “I dunno, man,” he sputtered. “It’s just . . . well, it’s my old hometown and that review is just so unfair! I don’t know what their problem is with me. I mean, what the fuck?”

  I repeated that he shouldn’t bother, knowing full well that he would. I subsequently heard from Angie Carlson that Ryan did indeed leave a “screaming rant” on her answering machine later that night. That put her in good company. You could assemble a pretty lively compilation of angry voicemails Ryan has left for his critics over the years, including well-traveled tirades directed at the editorial staff of Country Music magazine (to whom Ryan identified himself as “Clint Downwind”); Nashville Tennessean critic Peter Cooper, over a review that called Ryan out for throwing a tantrum at Ryman Auditorium when a heckler yelled out, “Summer of ’69”; and Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times. Of course, DeRogatis had a radio show as well as a column, which meant that Ryan’s voicemail hit the airwaves as well as the Internet. That inspired Ryan to take to the Internet himself with a long and rambling response that concluded:

  good luck jim/ art is the voice of god and he is always speaking and he is never wrong.

  Back on the phone, I listened to Ryan vent for a while, and then we talked about what he was up to. He’d signed another major-label deal with a Universal-distributed startup imprint called Lost Highway, formed by his manager Frank Callari and Nashville record executive Luke Lewis. Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia was finally going to come out, as the new label’s first release.

  Ryan had left Nashville for Los Angeles by then, and his new town seemed to agree with him. As usual, he had three different records going. He was also writing a screenplay called Sweetheart, and a book called The Bastard Diaries of Los Angeles. Probably because of that, the subject of my novel came up.

  “I’ve been told,” he said, “that the lead character is like an unholy cross between myself and Dexter Romweber”—the legendarily unhinged guitarist/savant of Chapel Hill rockabilly duo Flat Duo Jets (and yes, I did base the character on Dexter as well as Ryan). I told Ryan he’d have to read the book and let me know what he thought.

  “Maybe I will,” he said.

  But what excited Ryan most of all was his next album, to be called Gold. As usual, he had a huge cache of songs to draw from, and he intended for several dozen of them to come out on two discs—one about New York, the other about L.A., and both about heartbreak and misadventure.

  “It’s so fuckin’ good, man,” he enthused, still sounding just like that excitable, eager-to-please kid I’d met six years earlier. “I hope you like it.”

  “I hope so, too,” I said, and we rang off.

  That was the last time Ryan and I would ever speak.

  As Ryan had
predicted, Whiskeytown were no more by the time Pneumonia finally came out in May 2001. Just in case anyone missed the point, there was a none-too-subtle postscript at the end of the credits in the CD booklet: Thank you and goodnight.

  This version of Pneumonia wasn’t the same record that had become the toast of the underground as a bootleg. That version had a polished mix by Outpost partner Scott, but Ryan decided he wanted the rough edges back and remixed it with Ethan Johns. This “official” version also featured a different sequence and track list. Two of the bootleg version’s best songs, “Tilt-A-Whirl” and “Choked Up,” had been dropped altogether (a California band called Minibar recorded a version of the latter song for the soundtrack to the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, as well as their debut album Road Movies). In place of those two songs were “Sit and Listen to the Rain” and an unlisted hidden track called “To Be Evil.”

  The changes didn’t ruin Pneumonia, but to my mind they certainly didn’t improve it, either—except for the extended version of the penultimate song, “Bar Lights,” which fell apart at the end as Ryan laughed off a broken guitar string. The new sequence was sleepier, and the revised track list made an unfocused record even more so. Downcast and moody, “Sit and Listen to the Rain” had an atmospheric guitar riff and hypnotic cadence reminiscent of Don Henley’s 1984 hit “The Boys of Summer.” A good song, but it felt like it belonged on Strangers Almanac. And in fact, those two reference points were why Ryan had kept it off the original version of the album.

  “I took it off because it mirrored sentiments in ‘Boys of Summer,’” Ryan had told me in 1999. “It has that kind of desperation, and that style of intense emotion from Strangers. The lyrics were self-loathing, lines about feeling cheated by myself, lost and unsure and afraid. Everyone was shocked when I pulled it because everybody loved it, including me. But Strangers is not all that Whiskeytown is. My one-third of what the band should be is that we’re not repetitive.”