Ryan Adams Page 4

  After Lazy Stars imploded, Ryan was ready for something a little more ambitious. So he threw his energy into another band he already had going, a reconstituted version of Patty Duke Syndrome. The drummer in this model was Brian Walsby, who had initially spurned Ryan’s overtures to start a band.

  “For whatever reason, I didn’t think I wanted to play with Ryan,” Walsby said in 2010. “But finally, he made me a tape. He was always talking about these bands he was in and I told him to make me a tape. He did, I listened and was impressed; decided I should play with this guy even though he was really young.”

  On bass was Ryan’s old friend Jere McIlwean, who had also played in the original, noisier Jacksonville incarnation of Patty Duke Syndrome. By contrast, this version was surprisingly tight, clean, and poppy—very much along the lines of the Replacements, the scruffily beloved band from Minneapolis that had been a college-radio favorite during the second half of the 1980s. Like the Replacements, Patty Duke Syndrome followed the catchy power-pop blueprint laid out by the ’70s underground band Big Star, roughed up with loud and fast punk dynamics. In spite of the rough edges, it was very accessible music.

  It didn’t hurt that Ryan was still generating songs by the bushel, many of them directly influenced by other bands he’d been hearing. Walsby has described Ryan as “an incredible mimic,” and he could seemingly replicate any sound, song, or vibe after a single listen.

  “You’d hear the influence of whatever we’d been talking about that day,” Walsby said. “Little nods to all kinds of things. We ripped off some local bands that were going on, like Erectus Monotone. We had a song named after them. Also some Hüsker Dü. We had one song called ‘Wired’ that was too much like Nirvana—it could have been a Nevermind outtake. So we never recorded it. He had a lot of on-the-spot ideas that I’d pooh-pooh, but they’d work perfectly. He came up with these Sonic Youth–like chimes for one song where I thought, ‘Aw, man.’ But when I heard it back, it was perfect. He knew what to do even then, before the benefit of a nice, expensive studio. He has some kind of gift, that’s for sure.”

  Patty Duke Syndrome only had one official release, a 1994 split-single with another Raleigh band called GlamourPuss. Each band got two songs on its side, and Patty Duke’s were “History” and “Texas.” Released on yellow seven-inch vinyl by the local label Blast-O-Platter, the single is now a rare and very expensive collector’s item.

  But poke around online, and you can find those songs without paying hundreds of dollars. And it’s easy enough to find the closest thing Patty Duke Syndrome ever made to their own album, eleven tracks recorded at Jerry Kee’s studio in nearby Mebane in a single day in August 1993. Both the split-single tracks are there, although “Texas” has a parenthetical subtitle in the written track list the band left behind: “(Return to the Valley of the Drunk).” Another song is called “Trashed (I Was Drunk),” and it makes the act of drinking oneself to death sound almost heroic. Other songs include “Sara Bell,” “Song for Bob Schick” (tribute to the leader of another local band, Honor Role), and “Erectus Monotone.”

  The Patty Duke recordings find Adams’s recurrent motifs of drinking and youthful heartbreak already well established, along with a near-manic tendency to repeat words, phrases, and even entire verses. You could argue that this was laziness, and Ryan’s way of passing off underwritten songs as finished—but repetition also makes lyrics more memorable. Hear these songs, and you’ll probably be humming them afterward.

  Instrumentally, Ryan’s guitar-playing shows remarkable sophistication for a teenager, with turn-on-a-dime transitions between snarling riffs and chiming arpeggio hooks (another device he would continue to use). The arrangements are rough, but they’re remarkably polished for a one-day project—and Ryan’s limitless potential is there to hear. It’s interesting to ponder what might have been if Patty Duke Syndrome had gotten the record deal that Motorolla did in the summer of 1993. Various songs echo Nirvana, early R.E.M., and even the Beatles. Whether Walsby meant to or not, his cascading drum fills on “What’s Your Name?” bring “Tomorrow Never Knows” to mind.

  A handful of Patty Duke Syndrome performance videos exist, too, including YouTube clips of a 1994 show at Raleigh’s Brewery nightclub. The songs are sharp and so are the performances, all three players locked in. McIlwean sways a bit as he holds down the bassline, but Ryan literally cannot stand still. He stalks about the stage hammering on his guitar, seemingly about to burst, keeping still only whenever he has to stand at the microphone to sing. He was restless about everything.

  “Ryan had a billion ideas and was very quick,” Walsby said. “It kinda jelled right away, especially when he brought in Jere. I’d like to think that part of the reason we had a successful collaboration is that Jere and I would tell him what was good. He came up with so much stuff, maybe he had a hard time telling between his good and bad ideas. So we’d tell him, ‘That one’s good, but the other one is too much like something else.’ All helping shape it into what it was going to be. It was almost magically fast, with no effort whatsoever. The easiest music I’ve ever been a part of.”

  For all the ease of the musical chemistry, however, interpersonal relations within Patty Duke Syndrome were always stormy. Adams was the songwriter, bandleader, and most talented musician, while McIlwean was older and more experienced, which made for a difficult dynamic. Walsby wasn’t shy about expressing opinions, and he and Ryan had some epic battles—exacerbated by drinking and drugging.

  Walsby has written a good bit about this over the years, in cartoon strips as well as essays, including a mostly fond 2002 cartoon history of his time with Ryan in Patty Duke Syndrome (found in Walsby’s 2004 book Manchild). But he also composed a less-than-fond 2003 graphic essay titled RYAN FUCKING ADAMS OWES ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!! A twisted tale of almost obsession.

  Since he worked with them, Tom Cushman frequently found himself stuck listening to Ryan and Brian both complain about each other. He would laugh that off, but it was clear that Patty Duke Syndrome was not built for the long haul. The final breakup finally happened in the summer of 1994.

  “In some ways, Ryan and I are similar,” Walsby said in 2010. “Like most people who obsess over music or art too much, we’re both kind of damaged and I think we bonded over our mutual damage. I guess the breakup was kind of like having a little brother that I thought was messing up. And to tell you the truth, I was not the most mature person, either. We broke up four times until it finally stuck. There was definitely some animosity. Eventually, I did miss playing with him. But there were other things I didn’t miss and he’d probably say the same thing about me. All that aside, it was a special band and a lot of fun. We were just idiots in a band that didn’t get along, and we broke up. We were together for probably just a year. A quick year. No, a long year, although it’s not like it was this trying, horrible thing. Most of the time, everything was a joy. Only at the end was it a drag.”

  A year later, when I interviewed Ryan for the first time, he was still smarting enough to call Patty Duke Syndrome’s demise “an evil breakup.” He also mentioned a song he’d written about his former bandmates, “Bastards I Used to Know.” Though never recorded for release, “Bastards” would occasionally pop up in Ryan’s Whiskeytown set lists over the next few years. The lyrics lament Adams’s surroundings and circumstances, broke in a dirty ol’ town. But Ryan’s harshest words are for his old bandmates, who he says are going around showing off heroin scars.

  “Lucky me,” he concludes, “I’m too drunk to remember their names.”

  The reference to heroin wasn’t poetic license, either. After going on to form another band called Trucker, Jere McIlwean died of a drug overdose in June 1996. Ryan would eulogize McIlwean in a much kinder song, “Theme for a Trucker” (which was released as a single and appeared on the soundtrack to the 1997 film The End of Violence), paying tribute in a murmuring sigh to “the man you once were.”

  Just as Patty Duke Syndrome were breaking up for good, Stephen J
udge was trying to work up enough nerve to approach Ryan with a business proposition. A recent NC State graduate, Judge was angling to break into the music business. He would later manage Athenaeum, a North Carolina pop band that released an album for Atlantic Records in the late 1990s, before going to work for Daniel Lanois’ management company.

  But in the early 1990s, Judge’s music industry experience consisted of working as a clerk at Schoolkids, an independent record store near the Rathskeller on Hillsborough Street. He knew Ryan as a Schoolkids regular who rarely bought anything because he was always broke, which didn’t stop him from coming in almost every day to browse and talk music. Ryan would hang out near the register, Judge said, almost as if he worked there.

  Judge sat up and took notice the first time he saw Patty Duke Syndrome play, a show he pronounced “amazing.” The prospect of asking to be their manager was intimidating, but subsequent Patty Duke shows convinced him the band had the goods. So the next time Ryan came into Schoolkids, Judge came over to make his pitch—only to be told that Patty Duke Syndrome had just broken up.

  “I was really bummed,” Judge said. “‘Oh, man, why?’ I asked him. And Ryan said something about them not getting along. But the main thing he said was, ‘I want to start a country band, because punk rock is too hard to sing.’”

  PART TWO

  During

  Chapter Four

  The spring of 1994 should have been the best of times for Uncle Tupelo, a St. Louis band that was one of the earliest of its generation to start playing “alternative country”—a strain of left-of-center country music owing as much to Johnny Rotten as to Johnny Cash. Uncle Tupelo were the Velvet Underground of ’90s alt-country, because seemingly everyone who bought one of their records went on to form a band of his own.

  Not that they ever sold too many records, of course. Uncle Tupelo spent most of their career in the underground recording for independent labels, going back to 1990’s No Depression (a phrase that would soon come to have wider significance). But the group had moved up to the big leagues for Anodyne, their major-label debut, released in October 1993 on the Warner Brothers imprint Sire Records. Nirvana’s In Utero was No. 1 on the Billboard 200 that month, solidifying alternative rock as “the new mainstream.” If ever there was a moment for Uncle Tupelo to crack the mainstream, this was it.

  But that moment was not to be, and Anodyne turned out to be swan song rather than breakthrough, the band undone by tensions between coleaders Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy. Uncle Tupelo started out as Farrar’s band, and over time Tweedy came to chafe at his subordinate role. With each writing songs going in different directions, it was clear they were on separate paths. So Uncle Tupelo decided to break up after one last tour. The tour ran through May 1, but things got ugly well before then.

  One early boilover happened at Cat’s Cradle on February 16, 1994. After a tense show in which Farrar pointedly refused to sing on Tweedy’s songs, they had it out and didn’t bother trying to keep it behind closed doors. There was a heated shouting match in the club’s parking lot, and Tweedy and Farrar’s bandmates had to separate them before it elevated to actual fisticuffs. Johnny Williams, a musician known around town as “Johnny Rock ’n’ Roll,” saw it happen.

  “Another band fight in another parking lot,” Williams said some years later. “It’s the same fight you can see any night between any couple at any bar. Except most couples don’t have major-label contracts together.”

  Uncle Tupelo’s demise created a void, and Ryan Adams aimed to fill it. At that time, Ryan’s main band was still Patty Duke Syndrome. In fact, the interview that closed with his “six miles shy of Graceland” quote ran in the Durham paper the same week Uncle Tupelo’s postshow dustup happened in the Triangle. But even though he was playing punk rock, Ryan had also fallen under the sway of Uncle Tupelo. Alternative country’s roots may have been secondhand, but the style’s country-by-way-of-punk version of American roots music still came closer to the sound and spirit of old-school traditional country than the slicked-up hat acts dominating country radio at that time.

  Ryan used to trade Uncle Tupelo bootlegs with Schoolkids clerk Stephen Judge, another Tupelo obsessive. But Ryan’s collecting wasn’t just simple fandom. He was also considering his next move—a band combining the country he’d grown up hearing in Jacksonville with the punk he’d been playing all along. Uncle Tupelo were the perfect model, and they weren’t the only band that would dissolve that spring. Nirvana also reached the end of the line after Kurt Cobain’s April 1994 suicide.

  Tweedy and Farrar quickly formed their own bands after Uncle Tupelo’s breakup, Tweedy’s Wilco and Farrar’s Son Volt, which both released their first albums in 1995. But first, Farrar came to Raleigh to discuss a possible management deal with Black Park, a firm that handled the local college-radio pop-rock band the Connells (then riding the momentum of a big hit with “’74–’75,” a major hit single all over Europe).

  “Ryan was so excited that Jay Farrar was going to be in town, it sounded almost like he was stalking him,” Judge said. “He was calling daily to find out when he was coming. I remember Ryan saying he was going to sit outside Black Park until he showed up.”

  In one form or another, country and rock ’n’ roll have been circling each other warily ever since Elvis Presley first twitched his hips on television. Attempts to unite them go back to Bob Dylan’s 1966 masterwork Blonde on Blonde, Johnny Cash, the 1950s rockabilly generation, and even Hank Williams (patron saint of country music, yet still a rocker at heart). But the pioneer who would be the most important role model for ’90s alternative country was Gram Parsons, whose innovations were more cultural than musical. Parsons was a hippie playing straight-up country, awash in contradictions as well as steel guitars. He exuded rebellious rock attitudes and dressed the part, yet his two great subjects were guilt and sin—a tension at the heart of his two landmark albums, the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo in 1968 and the Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin in 1969. The music’s emotional directness captivated generations of impressionable young rockers, even as the Nashville establishment recoiled in horror at the length of Parsons’s hair.

  Parsons went on to a solo career and made two more spectacular albums, GP (1973) and Grievous Angel (1974), both featuring Emmylou Harris as his angel-voiced duet partner. But he perished from one binge too many before Grievous Angel could be released. Parsons was only twenty-six years old and never had his commercial breakthrough moment, either. Yet by the time he died, Parsons’s style of “Cosmic American Music” had registered in the firmament enough to actually start selling. Progressive country came into vogue in Texas with Waylon, Willie, and the boys, among others. Parsons’s fellow Floridians in Lynyrd Skynyrd made the rebellious attitudes more overt, added a shot of blues-rock, and Southern rock was born. And out in California, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and others had enormous success through the ’70s and beyond with slicked-up versions of country-rock.

  The cycle began anew in the 1980s when a generation of punk bands discovered the allure of country music, although none of them was particularly successful commercially. The Los Angeles band X, represented by one of those tattoos on Ryan’s left arm, drew from Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie as much as the Sex Pistols. Rank & File added a dash of atmospheric twang and were one of the first bands to be dubbed “cowpunk.” Long Ryders worshipped directly at the altar of Parsons, to the point that bandleader Sid Griffin namechecked him in a song (“Looking for Lewis and Clark”) the same year he published the 1985 book Gram Parsons: A Music Biography. From Nashville came Jason & the Scorchers, playing jacked-up country songs with blazing heavy-metal guitars. Minneapolis’s Jayhawks made records steeped in grief-stricken stoicism. And San Diego’s Beat Farmers added a gonzo sense of barfly humor.

  Then Uncle Tupelo emerged in the early 1990s as the most visible standard-bearer for another wave of underground country-rock. Direct spin-offs Son Volt and Wilco followed different threads of that band, while
Tupelo’s cronies the Bottle Rockets were proudly blue-collar and often even funnier than the Beat Farmers. Jon Langford, leader of late ’70s British agit-punks the Mekons, moved to Chicago and started a country band called the Waco Brothers (“Half Cash, half Clash”). There were also Alabama’s Drive-By Truckers, who added elements of 1970s-vintage Southern rock; Joe Henry, the Jayhawks’ sometime collaborator, who was already well on his way to becoming a latter-day Tom Waits; the Texas quartet Old 97’s, who played at a rollicking pace that lived up to their train-inspired name; and still-vital elders including Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash.

  With this new generation of acts on the rise, alternative country quickly grew into a thriving underground scene. The style had its own alternative media, too, beginning with the No Depression Folder—an early 1990s America Online discussion group. Named after Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression album (itself a reference to the 1936 Carter Family spiritual “No Depression in Heaven”), the No Depression Folder was a primary medium for news, reviews, and idle chatter about music and bands. When a group of folder regulars decided to start a magazine to cover alternative country, it was only natural that they took the name No Depression and added a deadpan, self-deprecating tagline: The Alternative Country (Whatever That Is) Quarterly. The magazine soon became an authoritative reporting voice of alternative country and had a very successful thirteen-year run before succumbing to the twin declines of the record industry and print media in 2008.

  By the time No Depression’s first issue was published in the fall of 1995, a wave of alternative-country acts was also emerging in the Triangle—one of the best crops of bands anywhere in America. In fact, No Depression coeditor Peter Blackstock would write a 1996 piece calling Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill the emerging musical style’s “home base . . . a geographic region that seems unusually rich in alternative-country acts, in terms of both quantity and quality.”