Ryan Adams Read online

  In 2001, Skillet Gilmore was quoted as saying about Whiskeytown’s mythological reputation, “You could probably blame all of this on David Menconi.” He had tongue firmly in cheek, of course. But even if he didn’t, I am reminded of Pete Seeger’s reaction to being told he’d “discovered” Joan Baez: That would be like claiming you’d discovered the Grand Canyon. Ryan was hard to miss back then, and if it hadn’t been me writing all those reams of words about him, it would have been somebody else, because he was just too good to stay unknown. It was simply my good fortune to be in the right place at the right time to bear witness.

  And whattaya know, I just happened to be taking notes.

  Ryan Adams

  PART ONE

  Before

  Chapter One

  Rock N Roll, the album that Ryan Adams released in 2003, could almost pass for a back-pages scrapbook about his early underground-rock influences, starting with the packaging. The cover of the compact-disc booklet looks like a photocopied flyer for a punk show, depicting Ryan blank-faced and pigeon-toed, wearing a studded leather belt, and holding a broken guitar. Lyrics take up most of the inside pages, along with pictures of New York City; Jesse Malin, a longtime pal and D Generation frontman whose album Ryan had produced that year; and his then-girlfriend, actress Parker Posey. The booklet’s back page displays an iconic set of tattoos on Ryan’s left arm: a coiled rattlesnake and the word “Heartbreaker,” title of his 2000 solo album; an “X” in the old-English typeface favored by the Los Angeles punk band X; and just below his wrist, “1974.”

  Also the title of Rock N Roll’s third track, 1974 is the year that David Ryan Adams was born in North Carolina, the son of building contractor Robert Adams and English teacher Susan Dedmond Adams. He was the second of their three kids, falling between an older brother and a younger sister. The Adams family lived in Jacksonville, a green-collar town near the coast. The marine base Camp Lejeune is Jacksonville’s primary feature, and the town’s biggest employer. In 1991, the deployment of troops to the first Persian Gulf War depopulated Jacksonville so much that North Carolina Gov. James G. Martin declared surrounding Onslow County an “economic emergency area.”

  For most people farther inland, Jacksonville isn’t much more than a string of generic pawn shops, fast-food joints, and gas stations you drive past on the way to Morehead City or Emerald Isle’s beaches. The main thoroughfare through town is Highway 24, and it takes you right by Camp Lejeune and Midway Park, a fenced-off subdivision for military families. When local troops are on the move, bedsheets turned into makeshift “Welcome Home” or “Bon Voyage” banners cover Midway Park’s fences out by the highway.

  Thanks to the area’s military infrastructure, much of Jacksonville’s population is young, male and transient. For those not in the military, the townies, finding more than minimum-wage work in Jacksonville can be a challenge. By his own account, Ryan found it a difficult and oppressive place to grow up. There wasn’t much for young people to do there besides hang out at Putter’s Palace indoor miniature-golf course and skating rink.

  “Jacksonville itself is a really old-fashioned place,” Ryan said in one of our earliest interviews. “You can’t get Spin there or anything like that, and when you say ‘beer’ to those people, all they think of is Natural Light. It’s a dismal town with a military base. Every time I think of going home, I think about going through Midway Park, either leaving Jacksonville or to get there. The houses there are all exactly the same, row upon row of them, all drab blue.”

  But just as you can’t choose where you’re from, you can’t completely shake off your roots, either. Jacksonville and its totems have been a consistent presence in much of Ryan’s music over the years. The first song on Whiskeytown’s first album was called “Midway Park,” and it was inspired by a girl who lived there. One of the best songs on Whiskeytown’s 2001 swan song Pneumonia was “Jacksonville Skyline,” a remembrance set to a lilting acoustic shuffle as wistful as anything Bruce Springsteen ever wrote about New Jersey. And when Ryan made a 2005 solo album trying to reconnect with his country roots, he called it Jacksonville City Nights and credited it to Ryan Adams & the Cardinals (which may or may not have been a reference to Jacksonville High School’s mascot, or North Carolina’s state bird). That album’s second song is “The End,” on which Ryan sings of “suffocating on the pines in Jacksonville” in a wounded yelp.

  Compare “The End” with “Jacksonville Skyline,” however, and it’s the latter song’s bittersweet affection that rings truer. In an early “autobiographical fragment” composed during Whiskeytown’s mid-1990s heyday (and later archived under the heading “Drunken Confessions” on the website answering-bell.com), Ryan detailed some of his conflicted feelings about his old hometown:

  Most all of the songs I write now concern Jacksonville. For a very long time I wouldn’t write about it or even think about it because I had a very hard time growing up there. And the town itself has been going through a very hard time since before I was born. But I dropped out of high school there—I bought my first records there and I will probably die and be buried there eventually—and for some reason I can identify with that place now—all those fucking people live there because they can’t imagine living anyplace else. It’s all they know and they’re scared and don’t like change. So that place is inhabited by all these old fashioned people with ideas about the world that just aren’t viable anyplace else. They all drink a lot or not. It is the oldest wrongest place in the world and it’s where I’m from and it’s where my songs are coming from.

  Ryan’s parents split up in 1981. After their divorce, he was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, Geemaw, and both women left a profound mark on him. Ryan likened his mother to “a psychedelic game show” in a 2003 interview with Blender magazine, adding, “You don’t know what you’re going to win, you don’t really know what the point of the game is, you just play.”

  With his mom’s encouragement, young Ryan developed a voracious appetite for reading. Favorite authors included Jack Kerouac, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., and, of course, William Faulkner—he grew up in the South, after all. Tom Cushman, a roommate during Ryan’s Raleigh days, remembers him writing a cross and the words “THE BIBLE” on a paperback copy of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Another favorite was North Carolina novelist Reynolds Price, whose name Ryan later adopted as an alias for a private friends-only Facebook account.

  As for Geemaw, Ryan spent a lot of his wonder years at her house, watching television and discussing cultural matters large and small. Country music was always in the air in Jacksonville, thanks to radio station WRNS, 95.1 FM (slogan: “Your country!”), but especially at his grandmother’s house—although Ryan also conned Geemaw into buying him independent label singles and the occasional Black Sabbath album, and he even got her to listen to some of it with him. He also pursued art beyond music, borrowing Geemaw’s typewriter to write short stories. And he had aspirations in the visual arts, too.

  “I used to paint, all through school,” Ryan told me in a 2000 interview. “My attention to detail is more to colors and less to form. Growing up in Jacksonville, I probably did five years of art classes with this same teacher, Mr. Young, who was migrating on up through the grades with me. He got me into some things, had a few paintings in the Onslow County Art Museum. My family was shocked I became a musician. They thought I’d become a commercial artist or go to art school. But then I heard a Johnny Thunders record and that fucked it all up.”

  Punk rock was something else young Ryan took to, along with skateboarding—two things that go hand in hand. Unfortunately, Jacksonville was not the best place to cultivate an interest in underground music, because there wasn’t anything like an independent record store anywhere in the vicinity. That left the Record Bar at the mall as the only game in town. But that’s where Ryan connected with two employees who would become some of his earliest bandmates.

  One was Jere McIlwean, an older-brother figur
e to a generation of young punk kids in Onslow County. McIlwean played in a band called Pumphouse, and he was well versed in hard-to-find punk records he would buy on shopping trips up to Raleigh and Chapel Hill. He took Ryan under his wing when he noticed the kid buying up every punk record he could find at Record Bar.

  “It all kind of started with Jere,” said Brian Walsby, who later played with Ryan and McIlwean in Patty Duke Syndrome. “He was the motivator, mover and shaker of a lot of those kids down there, kind of like the dad.”

  Unfortunately, Record Bar was poorly stocked when it came to the punk records Ryan was reading about in underground magazines. But revelation arrived courtesy of Shane Duhe, another clerk at the store and a skateboarding friend of Ryan’s. One day, a guy came into the store and asked Duhe if he liked punk rock. Sure, he answered.

  “The dude said, ‘I’m going to Okinawa and I can’t take my records with me, so do you want ’em?’” Duhe said in 2011. “I said yes, and this guy brings in a stack of stuff that would be priceless now—Black Flag, GBH, Descendants—just a gold mine of old punk rock. I was the coolest guy in Jacksonville for a while thanks to him, and some of Ryan’s first exposure to punk rock was me bringing records over to his house when he was in ninth grade. I remember letting him borrow Black Flag, and he was just buzzing over that one. ‘You’ve got to listen to this,’ he said the next day. ‘You hear what he just said? I don’t want to live/I wish I was dead—oh my God, who has the balls to write like that?!’ He was just wigging out over that stuff. It made me happy that he was so into it.”

  To be a fan of punk rock is to start playing it yourself, which Ryan and his Jacksonville pals were soon doing. They called their first band Blank Label, and Ryan played drums. McIlwean was on guitar, with a high school friend named Michelle Horn on bass and Duhe as frontman/lead vocalist. Blank Label stayed together long enough to record three Duhe-composed songs in 1991—“Non-Existence,” “Sonic Issue,” and “JLW,” all pretty standard-issue hardcore of the sort you’d expect from a quartet of Black Flag fans. They scraped together enough money to press up two hundred copies of a seven-inch vinyl single, “and we got rid of ’em all,” Duhe said.

  After Blank Label ran their course, various offshoots sprouted up and branched off. Duhe and McIlwean started another punk band, Green Legged Goat, which lasted for a couple of years and played as far away as Virginia. Ryan put down his drumsticks and picked up a guitar, forming the first version of Patty Duke Syndrome with McIlwean and drummer Alan Midget. Patty Duke Syndrome were named after the 1960s-vintage TV star, who played multiple characters on The Patty Duke Show and later developed bipolar disorder.

  “We never played any shows, really,” Ryan said of the Jacksonville version of Patty Duke Syndrome in an early interview. “A party in a barn every now and then, maybe.”

  The Jacksonville Patty Duke Syndrome played something along the lines of Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü’s noisy yet melodic punk, and Ryan had another band called Kotten going at the same time. He took to songwriting with intense enthusiasm and became a dervish almost immediately, generating songs at a pace feverish enough to annoy everyone he knew.

  “Ryan was playing guitar, taking photos, doing everything a hundred miles an hour,” Duhe said. “After he got ahold of a guitar and figured out a couple of chords, he was always aggravating the shit out of us. He’d write another song every ten minutes and make us hear it. ‘Ryan,’ I’d say, ‘I’ve already heard ten songs by you!’ ‘Yeah, you have. Here’s another!’ That’s how passionate he was.”

  As passionate as Ryan was about music, however, he was anything but when it came to school, dropping out of high school in the tenth grade (he would earn a GED later). Things were tense at home, too, and when things there got too unpleasant he’d leave the house to go stay with McIlwean for extended periods. Eventually, Ryan decided he’d had enough and ran away to the nearest big town. That was Raleigh, 120 miles away. He was still just a teenager.

  “Ryan was upset with his parents over something,” Duhe said. “I can’t remember how I got word, but I heard he wanted to run away. ‘Okay, dude,’ I told him, ‘I’ll help you.’ So I went to his house, packed him and his stuff up in my ’86 red Chevy pickup, and drove him on up to Raleigh. He wound up staying in Raleigh for a while.”

  Chapter Two

  Upon arriving in Raleigh, Duhe met a couple of musician friends who played with the local band Regraped, and he dropped Ryan off with them in a parking lot. Adams arrived in town without a job or even a place to live—just friends, acquaintances, and friends of friends to hit up. So he started out crashing where he could, couch-surfing from one dwelling to the next.

  When it came time to get his own place, Ryan took up residence in one of Raleigh’s toniest downtown neighborhoods, Oakwood. A historic district just east of the Governor’s Mansion, Oakwood was a grid of tree-lined streets dotted with large and lovely restored nineteenth-century houses. Ryan lived in a house on Bloodworth Street, although he didn’t exactly have a room of his own.

  He lived in a closet he turned into a bedroom. Except he didn’t have a bed, either, according to his friend Matt Brown, who said he bought Ryan a mattress so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor. Someone else who knew Ryan back then was Johnny Irion, who played in the local rock band Queen Sarah Saturday (and later became the husband/performing partner of Sarah Lee Guthrie, granddaughter of legendary American folk icon Woody Guthrie).

  “Ryan was really like a little kid in a big city,” Irion said in 2011. “That was the vibe he kind of gave off back then. Except it wasn’t a big city. It was Raleigh.”

  Ryan had some girlfriends in Raleigh back then, too. One was Sarah Corbitt, a student at the all-girls school Saint Mary’s. They dated for a brief period while Ryan lived in that closet on Bloodworth, after meeting at a party where they were the only two people who showed up wearing wigs. Sarah’s brother Tom Corbitt played bass in a band called Resol, so they both knew a lot of the same people in the local music community.

  According to Sarah, their first “date” consisted of Ryan trying and failing to make her dinner (a roommate bailed him out by whipping up rice pilaf and a salad). In Corbitt’s telling, it was a rather innocent courtship. Ryan would come visit Corbitt at Saint Mary’s in the parlor where girl students entertained male visitors, under chaperoned conditions within sight of what had been dubbed “the blowjob painting”—so named because it showed a bishop whose posture suggested he was receiving oral sex from the person he was bent over to bless.

  When they were allowed to leave the parlor, Ryan and Sarah went for walks in a park behind Saint Mary’s, or in Oakwood Cemetery. They’d drink, wander around talking, read inscriptions on the weathered headstones, make out, and lie on graves and write poetry. Even over simple things, Ryan’s excitement knew no bounds.

  “He was so charismatic and he could be really sweet, do things that seemed very meaningful and dramatic and romantic to someone in high school,” Corbitt said. “He was funny, totally self-absorbed. He thought he was such a genius, and he’d make these declarations that someday he’d be famous. And he was really good at guitar. He had a lot of them in the living room on stands, and he’d play a song on one, put it down and play a different sort of song on another to demonstrate his range or ability to express different emotions. He was totally pretentious about it, of course, very confident. But it was impressive.”

  Even back then, Ryan didn’t lack for confidence. Matt Brown remembered arriving with Ryan at a party where a kid was playing guitar for a few guests. Ryan walked over, seized the instrument, sat down on a couch, and announced, “I’ve only got a minute to blow y’all’s minds”—then proceeded to do exactly that.

  But such exaggerated bravado couldn’t hide Ryan’s loneliness or desperate need for acceptance. Another local musician, Cheetie Kumar, laughingly recalled another party where Ryan showed up with a Band-Aid on his arm, claiming he’d been shooting up. And Brown remembered a Christmas day when h
e called Ryan, who answered the phone in an inebriated stupor and reported that he’d spent the day hanging out in a cemetery, alone, drinking.

  “I went and picked him up and we hung out,” Brown said. “And that was when I realized he had a hole inside him that was gonna be tough for him to ever fill.”

  By the spring of 1992, Ryan had been in Raleigh long enough to fall under the spell of the aforementioned indie-rock siren Sara Bell, then a graduating senior at North Carolina State University. Bell was earning her history degree that May, an occasion Dana Kletter marked with a party at her house on Elm Street in Oakwood, not far from that closet Ryan was living in. Several hours before the party’s start time, Ryan showed up wearing a suit even though he hadn’t been invited. Not knowing who Ryan was, Kletter sent her roommate out to inquire who was lurking around their backyard, and why.

  Introducing himself, Ryan said, “I’m a musician and I’ve been traveling around, on the road.” Asked where he’d been on his travels, Adams said, “Oh, you know, Rocky Mount. Goldsboro. Fuquay-Varina”—all hamlets within an hour of Raleigh.

  “Hey, Dana,” Kletter’s roommate yelled inside, “we’ve got Jack Kerouac in our backyard!”

  “The rest of the night, we were saying to people, ‘Have you met Jack Kerouac?’” Kletter remembered with a laugh. “‘He’s been on the road—Jacksonville, Spivey’s Corner.’ I’m sure he eventually got drunk and said something crazy.”

  Another notable detail about Sara Bell’s graduation party was that it marked the first public performance of Motorolla, a new power trio that would soon become one of the best bands in the area. Ryan had arrived in Raleigh in the midst of a musical gold rush, although one that didn’t quite pan out the way anybody expected. But his new hometown was an underground-rock paradise, with the potential to become much more than that.