Dutch Ryan-Adams fansite

Article from Amplifier Magazine
Issue 39 nov/dec 2003
By Bryan Baker, Pictures by Eliot Wilder

There is an inordinate amount of static on Ryan Adams’ telephone connection. His voice breaks and dips as the interference rises and falls, and I pass it off as a result of weak cell phone coverage or that perhaps he’s moving from room to room until I hear the unmistakable sound of silverware being trundled from one place to another. “I’m sorry for the noise,” says Adams from his New York apartment. “I’m doing my dishes while we talk. I’m trying to be a good boy.”

Given the reports of his behavior both on and off stage during the past year, being a good boy by anyone’s constrictive yardstick would seem to be the last earthly thing on Ryan Adams’ mind. And yet here he is, only marginally late for an interview that by all accounts he might just as well have blown off only 12 months ago. What’s got the new bad boy of rock playing nice on the eve of his new album, Rock N Roll?

“I was getting my teeth kicked in by the press for a little while, and duly so,” says Adams with a small laugh. “It was my turn. They turn on everybody. I was pretty vindictive and I’ve always spoken my mind and I wasn’t doing a lot so it was time to get my ass kicked.” It’s a point well taken. Adams has been what my grandmother would have called “a handful,” especially in the wake of the grueling tour and press junkets for 2001′s Gold, which spawned the inadvertent and high profile post-9/11 hit “New York New York.” His increasingly truculent behavior spiked during a Nashville show last year when Adams stopped his performance to have ushers remove an audience member who had shouted a request for “Summer of ’69,” the Bryan Adams song. It’s only a mildly funny joke to begin with, but Adams found no humor whatsoever in the prank.

That lack of humor seems out of character for a former punk guitarist whose first major band was named the Patty Duke Syndrome and whose raucous work in the ’80s led not so naturally to the sturm and twang of the eventually acclaimed Whiskeytown in the ’90s. With the collapse of Whiskeytown, Adams signed with Americana mavericks Bloodshot and embarked on the solo career that has been the talk of the town, one way or another, ever since.

Adams’ 2000 solo debut Heartbreaker (recorded with bluegrass traditionalists Gillian Welch and David Rawlings) hinted at his potential, laced as it was with the edgy Americana that had been Whiskeytown’s hallmark. Although Heartbreaker turned out to be a transitional album in Adams’ musical evolution, his rootsy sound gained more attention with his signing to Universal’s alt-country imprint Lost Highway and their 2001 release of Whiskeytown’s final album, Pneumonia (which had been shelved when Geffen/Outpost was dismantled in the PolyGram/Universal merger).

Adams went a long way toward downplaying his roots profile with the 2001 release of Gold, an album rife with the energy and sounds of the ’70s. Given the buzz surrounding Whiskeytown’s demise and Adams’ budding solo career (boosted by a very vocal Elton John, who praised Adams at every opportunity), Gold’s success may have been a foregone conclusion. But in the aftermath of 9/11, radio transformed “New York New York,” Adams’ pop/rock nugget about the end of a romance, into an anthem of strength and perseverance. In short order, Adams found himself the cover boy of the moment and the subject of a great deal of media scrutiny.

Because of his successes, there was little downtime for Adams to contemplate rationally about either his past triumphs or his subsequent direction. In a monumental testament to time management, Adams somehow found the time to write more than 60 songs in 2002, a set list he pared down to a baker’s dozen and recorded in the rawest form possible for last year’s Demolition release.

Adams almost immediately set to work on a new batch of songs that ultimately coalesced into a proposed double album entitled Love Is Hell. The album began to attract publicity and even made its way onto release sheets earlier this year, but was postponed when Lost Highway expressed concerns about the release. Given the general chaos that has surrounded Adams, it wasn’t hard to imagine the artist/label skirmish that many had speculated upon, but Adams is quick to defend his employers.

“They had a right to be confused,” says Adams. “It really is an absurd album. It isn’t like Love Is Hell is a career-leaping standout album. Not that they’re that kind of label, but if they were tense or weirded out by it as a career move, they had every right to be. They didn’t tell me I couldn’t release it; their point at the time was that they weren’t sure it was the right thing to put out then. And I think they had a point, but I don’t think that way. They keep their eye on the ball closer than I do. I see things as rock ‘n’ roll and music and records and they think like a business. Sometimes it’s for the best.”

With Love Is Hell temporarily sidetracked, Adams hooked up with drummer Johnny T. (his partner, along with rocker Jesse Malin, in the New York bar Niagara and also his drummer in the Finger, a punk band whose official existence is denied as though it were an alien conspiracy on The X-Files) to begin some informal work. After setting up the dressing room area in the basement of Hi Fi (formerly Brownie’s) as a rehearsal space, Adams and Johnny T. started to jam on material that Adams characterizes as “if Rush and Yes were drunk and stupid and having a good time.” As the sessions progressed, Adams brought in a four track.

“This basement space is like two blocks from Niagara, and we’d be out drinking and it became this impetus for us to say, ‘Let’s go rehearse, or just play music,’” says Adams. “It made going out having drinks seem more desirable because we could be out and then have something to do.”

Adams had already been validated as a guitarist after his work (which included production) on Malin’s The Fine Art of Destruction, and he decided to do the same for his own work. “Jesse’s album probably helped me on that the most,” says Adams. “I played guitar on a lot of his record per his request. I couldn’t believe somebody liked my guitar playing. When Jim Barber got to producing and he heard all the demos, he was like, ‘Who the fuck is playing guitar?’ And I’m like, ‘That’s me.’ And he’s like, ‘Why haven’t you been on your own records?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m slack.’ And he was like, ‘Well, that stops now.’”

Between Malin’s album, the Love Is Hell sessions and the Hi Fi basement jams, Adams was becoming increasingly confident in his new role as guitarist and less inclined to hand the job over to someone else. “I kinda got tired of other guitar opinions,” he says. “It’s not where I got more competent or cocky as a guitar player, I just thought that everyone’s guitar playing is bad to a degree, so why not just have mine?”

The loose and spontaneous Hi Fi jams were characterized in tone and attitude by the provisional title Adams had bestowed upon them: The War on Drugs. But it wasn’t long before Adams began naturally applying his songwriting skills to the aimless jams and it took little more than a chemically sparked caprice to set the gears of real work in motion. “We had a night where we’d eaten something and it sort of came together,” says Adams. “The next day, we were like, ‘Whoa, what happened? There’s some good stuff here.’ Finally some real songs came out of it.”

As the basement tapes were beginning to coalesce, the next major inspirational component of the process was about to play itself out in the form of Johnny T.’s annual Motherfucker party in New York – an annual debauched celebration of ’80s new wave and alternative music. As Adams took in the sights and sounds of Motherfucker, the slow dawning light of creative epiphany began to break across his thoughts on his most recent work.

“I went to this party and it’s all new wave kids and trannies and punks and super femme punk gays – it’s total insanity – and they’re playing this great new wave and ’80s alternative stuff like the Smiths and New Order and I remember thinking, ‘Man, I used to play music like this, and not even that long ago. When did I stop? When I stopped being the guitar player I was in the Patty Duke Syndrome?’ The next couple of recordings, something clicked in me and I remembered that I had all these riffs and these ideas that weren’t confessional folk music.”

Adams’ jam partner was also picking up on the vibe and encouraged him to ride the creative wave that was swelling underneath him. “Johnny said, ‘You should really embrace this and not be afraid of it because something really natural’s happening to you right now.’ It’s in my nature to second-guess it; ‘Oh, I gotta go back and do a really serious-sounding record.’ Johnny was like, ‘Don’t overanalyze this, just keep recording.’”

Adams did better than that. He began layering pieces of songs with other pieces of songs to see how they coexisted. “Sometimes I’d like one part from one song and another part from another part from another song and try to marry those two parts and see how they lived together. All this tweaking begat all these different ideas for these songs. It just started flowing. I was more shocked than anybody. I wasn’t counting on this.”

“I think for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t sitting down to write a record specifically because I felt a certain way and I wanted to express that. There was no concept, I was literally just having fun and somehow out of all that fun, a bunch of really snotty, horrible little songs came out of it. Even some romantic songs came out of it. It was really exciting.”

Every facet of creating this batch of songs was a new experience for Adams, particularly when it came to apply lyrics to the music he and Johnny T. had been assembling. “The lyrics were coming without my permission anyway,” says Adams with a laugh. “Once a melody or a riff happens, I can try to not write for it, but if I keep approaching it, they come. I know not to worry about that because I’ve done it enough to know that I typically have something to say even if it’s stupid. The melodies and lyrics became apparent; everything sort of came together at the right time.”

“It was interesting. In the past, if I made music without lyrics I would be concerned that I wouldn’t be able to finish it and all the stress I would put on the song would collapse the song. Then I would get so walled up in my head about that I wouldn’t be able to finish. But this time I didn’t work like that. I think it’s because I kept moving on. Making music with the melody line and move on, and write a lyric for that and move on. If something came together, I let it happen.”

When the basement dust cleared, Adams had created one of his noisiest and most affecting albums to date – Rock N Roll – an evocation of the best of ’80s alternative rock shot through with slabs of ’70s riffage and volume. Although the album itself lacks a thematic concept, Adams clearly has something in mind with the presentation of the title as a mirror image, but that message is somewhat cryptic at this stage of the game.

“I’ve been calling it Rock N Roll Reverse,” Adams says. “It’s printed backward and that’s how it’s supposed to look in print, but not a lot of people are getting it yet.”

The title song itself stands as a fascinating dichotomy, a gentle piano ballad about the humanity of rock ‘n’ roll and the hearts behind the attitudes, as Adams sings, “Everybody’s cool playing rock ‘n’ roll / I don’t feel cool feel cool at all.”

“That was the last song I recorded for Love Is Hell,” says Adams. “Interestingly, I was so beaten up by the process of making that record, which was on or off for six to eight months. It was longwinded – I started it in New York, took it New Orleans, finished in LA and brought it back to New York with a Stones tour thrown in the middle. I remember doing that song in Los Angeles, which is a bad fucking place for me, always has been. It was the impetus for Gold. LA’s no more dangerous than New York and they certainly don’t have better drugs but it’s like this place where you will seek out anything to mute it. At least I will. There’s only so many times you can go to In and Out Burger before you’re just fucking bored. I always like to pretend that LA is the thing I hear in X records, but I think they’re glamorizing. It’s a sad, fucked up little place. I love it for that, but it still is what it is. I’m a sad fucked up little guy.”

Adams’ ennui over LA combined with his boredom at waiting while tracks were being mixed drove him to the piano where “Rock N Roll” blossomed. “I went through a long period of self-defeat when I was making Love Is Hell,” recalls Adams. “I started feeling like I wasn’t what I thought I was, I wasn’t a good musician and that maybe I’d had enough of playing for awhile. I realized that the thing I missed the most was the thing I identified with the most, which is just playing stupid guitar rock and that I’d gotten so serious.”

Even after the demo sessions, there were a number of surprises in the wings as Adams and Johnny T. took the material to producer Jim Barber to hammer out the finished product. One afternoon, Adams found himself a bit restless in the studio, as Barber was preoccupied with sessions for the new Courtney Love album. Adams went into the studio late in the day and enlisted the help of engineer Jamie Candiloro to work up some additional tracks.

“I said, ‘I’m bored and I’m over-caffeinated – let’s do some four track. I want to play drums then guitar and bass.’ And on the spot, as a joke, I wrote ’1974′ and ‘Note to Self: Don’t Die.’ But the lyrics were like comedy lyrics; one line from ‘Note to Self’ was ‘Note to self, don’t date a fucking idiot.’ It was retarded.”

Although Adams had no intention of pursuing these four-track jams any further, Johnny T. convinced him to flesh them out and write real lyrics. Barber’s reaction was even more to the point: “He said, ‘You just took this really good record and made it a monster.’” “We had rock tracks but we didn’t have anything sinister yet that was really wild,” says Adams. “As a joke, these two tracks were born and it changed the direction of the whole record. It’s cool that they both came out of a real natural place of just jamming. A lot of people seem to put too much emphasis on damning the jamming process, but dicking around on guitar is the best thing you could do for your songwriting. I write shit all the time when I’m just dicking around. Mind you, I’m always dicking around.”

Adams may always be “dicking around,” but the odd circumstance is that something always seems to come of it. He’s an in-demand session guy and he’s currently juggling three project bands: a Nashville punk outfit known as the Pink Hearts, a straight-up rock combo with Evan Dando, James Iha and Melissa Auf Der Maur called the Fucking Virgins and the Finger with Johnny T. and Jesse Malin. All of them have proposed albums on the horizon during the next several months. And then there is the much-rumored (and quite plausible) reunion of Whiskeytown, which Adams has gone on record as both endorsing and eagerly anticipating.

In a move that recalls Lost Highway’s release of Gold and Whiskeytown’s lost Pneumonia in the same year, Adams’ more recent lost work, Love Is Hell will also finally see the light of day. Although the album has been characterized as being more subtle and atmospheric and less guitar-driven and hooky, Lost Highway has always recognized its significance and will release the double album as two separate specially priced EPs; the first comes out the same day as Rock N Roll, the second volume hits the street a month later.

While there is a certain vindication in having Love Is Hell released – and on his terms – Adams is incredibly proud of the work that has resulted in Rock N Roll. The proof of the album’s success in his mind came when he revisited the album not as its creator but as a listener, albeit a slightly altered one.

in having Love Is Hell released – and on his terms – Adams is incredibly proud of the work that has resulted in Rock N Roll. The proof of the album’s success in his mind came when he revisited the album not as its creator but as a listener, albeit a slightly altered one.

“I gave it the stoner test the other night,” says Adams with a laugh. “I burned a big one and listened to it on the iPod for the first time. The thing I noticed that I didn’t know was in the record and that I’m really proud of, is that it’s funny. There are one-liners all over the record, they’re just buried and they sound serious. Like, ‘So I’m in the twilight of my youth, not that I’m going to remember.’ That’s fucking funny. I was thinking, ‘I did a good thing.’”

A good thing indeed. Maybe Ryan Adams’ life, and maybe all of our lives in turn, will be changed by Rock N Roll.