Today we look back at the August 2005 issue of Relix and this feature story on Ryan Adams.

Photo by Danny Clinch

Ryan Adams is standing in the center of his tour bus staring at drummer Brad Pemberton, who is trying to leave the bus to go on stage at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey – an act that is essentially pointless, of course, unless Adams leaves too. But Adams looks panic-stricken. It seems like only minutes ago – in fact, it was only minutes ago — that Adams was sitting calmly on the bus, a glass of red wine at his side, strumming an acoustic guitar and chatting amiably with guitarist JP Bowerstock, as a live version of the Grateful Dead performing “Terrapin Station Part One” floated out of his iPod speakers. The impending gig seemed an eternity away.

Ah, but eternity proved evanescent as Adams’ OCD kicked in. He organized the storage bins on the bus, washed the wine glasses and arranged them in their proper order, put on and taken off and put on various shirts, but he still couldn’t bring himself to walk out the door and play the show. The other band members – Pemberton, Bowerstock, pedal steel player Jon Graboff and bassist Catherine Popper – were now climbing on and off the bus in moods ranging from irascible to Zen-like detachment, their own pre-show rituals plunged into chaos by Adams’ maddening hesitation.

A veteran of Adams’ Stonesy side project, the Pink Hearts, Pemberton is Adams’ oldest friend in the band, and he’s been through this wringer before – and worse. He waits patiently as Adams, looking, strangely, like a lost, vulnerable, frightened child with an improbable full beard, begins to speak. “Brad, it’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” he asks. The question is dead serious. His voice trembles and he looks as if he’s about to cry.

“Yes, Ryan, it’s always all right,” Pemberton replies quietly, his voice a perfectly modulated blend of empathy, encouragement and let’s-get-the-fuck-on-stage pragmatism.

Adams follows Pemberton through the door and moves through the parking lot toward the club’s backstage entrance. The entire way, up to the very second he walks onto the stage, he’s insisting to his new road manager – on his second night on the job getting a burning baptism of fire – that it’s not his fault, no one told him what time he was supposed to go on, he’ll just play a quick set tonight and be done with it. He strides to the mike and announces to the cheering, sold-out crowd of 1300 people, “Hi, we’re gonna do two hours tonight, but it will be a solid two hours.” Two sets, 24 songs and more than three hours later, Ryan Adams & the Cardinals are done with their exhausting, exhilarating night’s work.

By all reliable accounts that was the end of a pretty typical day in the life of Ryan Adams. He had slept late into the afternoon, the result of a nearly four-hour show the Cardinals had played the night before in Clifton Park, New York, just outside Albany. The band sound checked at the Starland Ballroom without him, and then everybody started waiting.

As they relax in one of the club’s dressing rooms, the band banters to kill time. Catherine Popper slips off her shoes and stretched her long legs out on a coffee table. Shooting footage for a documentary on Adams being directed by photographer Danny Clinch, Jon Graboff focuses his camera on the soles of Popper’s bare feet. As if posing for a fetish video, she lifts her legs and smiles for the camera.

“God, could you believe Rick offered me $200 to run through that truck stop naked last night?” she asks, referring to tour manager Rick Marino. Brad Pemberton raises an eyebrow. “I believe the question was, ‘How much would you offer me to run through that truck stop naked?’” he says. Everybody in the room laughs.
“Well, you’re supposed to protect me by not making the offer too good,” Popper says, smiling. “I mean, $200 is a lot of money.”

Photo by Danny Clinch

The Clifton Park show was the first after a two-week break in the Cardinals’ tour to support Cold Roses, the eighteen-song double-CD Adams and the band had released a few weeks before. The set was explosive. “Ryan very often will do the first two or three songs off the set list, and then it’s wherever he feels like going after that,” Graboff says. “He tries to sense where the audience wants to go, because he sees it as a collaborative effort. Occasionally he’ll spring a song on us that nobody knows but him. It’s sink or swim. The other night I said to Brad as Ryan was doing a couple of songs alone on piano, ‘If and when I ever have another gig, it’s going to be so boring.’ There’s a certain excitement in not knowing what’s around the next corner.”

“The audience was so great last night that we just caught fire,” JP Bowerstock says.
“We ended up playing a really long time, because they couldn’t get enough,” adds Graboff. “I’ve been playing in bands for a long time, but I’ve never encountered anybody quite like Ryan. The sheer volume of material that he’s able to conjure up on a steady basis is amazing. And the quality of it. I’ve watched him write a song in fifteen minutes, and then we’ll record it. I’ve worked with plenty of people who’d spend a year working on a tune and it wouldn’t be half as good.”
“The reason he makes so many records is that he wants to capture his songs as close to the moment of inspiration as possible,” says Bowerstock. “The song is written, and we’re tracking it five or ten minutes later. Everything is on the fly.”

In addition to the Cold Roses two-disc set, Adams has two more albums coming out this year: Jacksonville City Nights, with the Cardinals, and 29, which he says will be his last solo album. On the bus before the gig, Adams responds to the charge that he is too prolific, that if he put out less music and marketed it more conventionally, he could be a much bigger commercial success. “I don’t want to be a superstar,” he says, nibbling on a steak-and-eggs breakfast/dinner. Aptly, he’s wearing an Eagles t-shirt emblazoned “The Long Run.”

“I did everything I could to get out of that room, and I did a damn good job of it,” he continues about his flight from platinum popularity. "I wanted to stay in the room right next to it, where I could have a career, as opposed to, here today, gone tomorrow.’ I didn’t want to go into the room where Hootie went. And, I’m sorry, but I didn’t want to go into the room where John Mayer went, either. I smile for him, and I smile for Hootie. I have all kinds of love and respect for Dokken, Whitesnake and ACDC, and everybody else that got it. But I don’t think that kind of thing would be good for me.
“If it happened, of course, I’d grin and go, ‘Look, man, our record’s number one!’ But those slots are reserved for bands that worked to be that. U2 deserves to be a big-ass fucking band. The Clash. Black fuckin’ Sabbath. Led Zeppelin. But I’m trying to make something totally different happen.”

One of the things Adams is trying to make happen is defining a path around the marketing straightjacket that squeezes the creativity out of so many artists like himself – that is, artists who, given the “right” treatment and a hit single or two could potentially become cash cows, at least for a while. Part of the way that happens is allowing an album to sit in the marketplace long enough for the record company to milk it to death. But the image-crafting, patience, compliance and ambition necessary for that are simply not elements of Adams’ makeup.

Ever since he debuted in the mid-Nineties with the now-enshrined alt-country band Whiskeytown, Adams has been tapped for stardom. His heartthrob looks, charisma and talent have made status as a household name perennially seem just around the corner. The closest he has come is Gold, the solo album that came out in September of 2001, right on the heels of the 9/11 attacks. Gold’s exuberant opening track, “New York, New York,” provided a bracing tonic for a city desperately in need of one, and the American flag on the album’s cover (though, characteristically, upside down) caught the patriotic fervor of the time.

That was the moment when Adams ran out of the room. Since then he has released enough albums – Demolition ; Love Is Hell, Parts 1 and 2; Rock N Roll; the double-disc Cold Roses – to validate an entire career. He hasn’t hesitated to slag other artists and the occasional critic in interviews – and he’s been slagged himself innumerable times. At times he simply seemed to be out of control – unable to edit his own compulsive songwriting into a comprehensible body of work, and unwilling to shut his trap even when discretion was by far the better part of valor. Jealousy, needless to say, shouldn’t be overlooked as a motivator for the haters. He’s drawn well-publicized praise from the likes of Elton John, and beauties Winona Ryder and Parker Posey have been numbered among his girlfriends. Because he seems so sensitive to slights of any kind – and so quick to respond to them — both writers and fans have taken pleasure in provoking him. Or was he provoking them?

Photo by Danny Clinch

“It was a shoving match, and you started it,” Popper insists after overhearing Adams describe his battles in the media, and he doesn’t deny it. “Maybe I provoked them,” he says. “I was playing the same game they were playing with me. Some of the stuff was so harsh that it deserved a response, though — just to say, ‘I’m a human being.’ There was a guy who wrote into a magazine and said, ‘Ryan, why don’t you be like your hero Gram Parsons and die. Think about what it could do for your career.’ It was so mean-spirited. It’s not like I was making records that had mail bombs in them.”

There’s something about the opposition that fires Adams up, however; he sharpens his creative edge against the resistance. When he and the Cardinals played at the Jammys last spring – including a riveting performance of the Grateful Dead’s “Wharf Rat,” with Phil Lesh joining in – the crowd’s initial skepticism only fueled his determination to prove that he belonged there. “We got the vibe on stage that a lot of people were sitting there, thinking, ‘Ryan fucking Adams,’” Bowerstock says. “What’s he doing here? He doesn’t jam. Then Lesh walked out and we went into ‘Wharf Rat,’ and a lot of people looked converted.” Afterwards, Lesh invited Adams to perform with him at Red Rocks later in the summer.

Without question the sound the Cardinals created for Cold Roses and bring to the stage now recalls the ambling, gently psychedelic, song-oriented Grateful Dead of American Beauty – a similarity hinted at in the very title of the album. And Adam is consciously attempting to build a band consciousness in the Cardinals; most notably, the band’s original members (Graboff replaced Cindy Cashdollar, who played steel guitar on the album) share the album’s songwriting credits — and the royalties. That more communal approach is part of Adams’ desire to escape the prison of his sometimes charming, sometimes maddening self-absorption.

“I got tired of doing the solo thing,” he says. “It was fun for a while, when I had that much gas, but you can’t like yourself everyday. We were trying to channel a collaborative process on Cold Roses. We were looking for the song, not my song. It was everybody’s voice, so when I sing those songs live, I feel like I’m interpreting something emotionally, rather than it’s just being Ryan Adams about Ryan Adams doing Ryan Adams bullshit. That really got old. I was lonely. I wanted to be back in something.”

When Adams fell off the stage at a show in Liverpool in January of last year and shattered his wrist, he found himself with plenty of time to think about a more positive new direction. For a time he was unsure if he would be able to play guitar again, or even regain the full use of his hand. In fact, he met Bowerstock when he began taking guitar lessons with him, in part to discover more comfortable ways to play. “When my wrist got fucked up, I think that, in a good way, it knocked some of me out of me,” Adams says. “But I don’t want to use it to gain anything. In the entertainment industry, there’s always this impulse to use it as an angle – like ‘All you people who hated me before, look at me now. I’m hurt.’ That’s just stupid.”

But what had many of Adams’ fans worried is that he would hurt himself even more dramatically. As unfeeling as that comment about Gram Parsons was, Adams has often seemed gripped by the “live fast, die young” mythology that has doomed so many young rockers. He’s not worried. “If I have anything to do with it, I’m here for a while,” he says. “My ride isn’t even half done. I don’t know if people think I’m banging heroin or tripping out all the time, but I don’t take a lot of drugs. I smoke about as much weed as the people who work at the New York Times probably do. I like to stick behind a bottle of wine. You can enjoy it all night if you’re playing. But I don’t think there will ever be a time with this band when I walk on or off that stage impaired.”

“Not even in the Pink Hearts days, which was way crazier than this,” Pemberton testifies.
“But I can see why people wonder about it,” Adams, who is thirty, confesses. "I’ve had times in the past where it’s been an ever-present thing around me when I’ve played. When I was alone on the Demolition tour or during Love Is Hell, I was definitely in that weird place where you’re wondering, ‘Is this the last hurrah of my twenties?’ Some doors opened and creepy people came through. And I was attracted to some of that darkness. I wanted to find out what it meant for me.
“But it’s not around me when I’m not playing, and people don’t see that side. They just see the glory of the pirates on the pirate ship, doing our gigs and thinking, ‘Can you believe that we’re getting away with this?’ Everyday you think someone is going to take it away from you because it’s so much fun. But I don’t carry that into my normal life.”

And well beyond his two new albums, Adams has plenty to look forward to – and he knows it. “Man, I don’t want to lessen my gift,” he says. “I don’t want to misuse it. I try to think of it now as something that it’s important to share. I want to keep everybody rolling and keep the band together – and it’s working. I’m not number one, and I may never be. But I hope to stay down here where I’m not a threat to anyone, and I just keep trucking.”