Redemption Songs

"I really wanted to play football for the fucking Cardinals," he says, noting that he dug the gang mentality. Adams describes his intoxicated twenties as a decade when he was "barreling through life in a speeding car, picking up vital information for life by means of whatever stuck to the sides of it." His output from those years is shocking in its volume: The released discs -- his 2000 solo debut Heartbreaker, Gold, Demolition, Rock N Roll, Love Is Hell and his trio of discs in 2005 -- are just a taste of what Adams wrote and recorded. As a goodbye to his tumultuous past, Adams plans to release a box set containing hundreds of songs recorded between those eight official releases. "I want people to know about the connections between the records," he says.

Adams adds that he's recently begun imposing restrictions on how much time he devotes to songwriting, which allows other influences to creep into his work. "I go to the Met and the Guggenheim, I read nonfiction, I watch documentaries," he says. "A lot of art." He paints. He doesn't have cable TV, but he watches Letterman and SNL religiously. He hangs out with his girl. He drinks coffee during the day, and Lunesta helps him call it a night. He remembers his dreams. Songs still pour out of him. "For the most part," he says,"it's pretty antisocial." With the Cardinals, he aspires to produce the kind of "bottled lightning" that he hears on records like Black Flag's The Process of Weeding Out and Live Dead by the Grateful Dead. And like those records, the more time you spend with Easy Tiger, the more it reveals itself. Adams and his team (including his manager, bandmates and label reps) whittled down more than a hundred songs to choose the thirteen that would eventually appear on Easy Tiger: The first single,"Two" (refrain: "It takes two when it used to take only one"), addresses his past dependence on tranquilizers; on the rocker "Halloweenhead," he asks, "What the fuck's wrong with me?" as his brain is fogged with "tricks and treats." The opening track, "Goodnight Rose," may as well be called "Goodnight Ryan": "Don't live your life in such a hurry/Life goes by us all so fast," he sings. "And the sun will come up again/ And I will be here. . . . Go on to bed/The bar is closed."

In fact, Rose might be a feminine alter-ego Adams has utilized on songs throughout his career on songs including "Cold Roses," "Blossom," "Rosebud" and "Somebody Remembers the Rose." Easy Tiger closes with "I Taught Myself How to Grow Old": "Poor little Rose, beaten by the rain/ . . . I taught myself how to grow/Now I'm crooked on the outside and the inside?s broke." A few weeks later, Adams is testing many of the new songs at a gig at the Metropolitan Theatre in Morgantown, West Virginia. He and the Cardinals are bathed in blue. There are no spotlights, and Adams wears white sunglasses and a gray hoodie drawn tight above them. With his left wrist injured during a backside air on a half-pipe in New York, Adams is unable to play guitar, and forty-five minutes in, he finally removes his sunglasses and yanks down his hood. The audience erupts in applause, but Adams' insecurity becomes visible. Instantly, he hides his face, and a storm of boos rains down on him.

"You shouldn't-a said nothin', then!" he tells the crowd. A guy in the audience yells, "Play whatever you want!" Adams responds, "You got it! That's the idea!" The Cardinals close the gig with a cover of the Alice in Chains power ballad "Down in a Hole." Most of the Cardinals mosey across the street for an after-show drink at Gibbie's Pub, where West Virginia University kids play beer pong. Adams is on the bus, clicking through channels on the satellite TV.

"It's hard to sing without the guitar," he says, thinking about the set he just played. "That used to be no problem, but of course I was fucking wasted."

[From Issue 1032 — August 9, 2007]