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Listen to excerpts from the interview
As a teenager, Ryan Adams dropped some acid and smoked some weed. And even though he drank Mad Dog 20/20 once in a while, he wasn't too impressed with the effects of alcohol. "I always thought it made people stupid," he says. "People who were drunk seemed hypernostalgic." But just shy of his twentieth birthday, Adams was playing a gig with his first band, the Patty Duke Syndrome, at the Fallout Shelter in Raleigh, North Carolina. After the first song, the audience clapped. "I was paralyzed with some kind of irrational fear, but I couldn't place what that fear was," Adams says. "I didn't understand what I was going through." He spotted an open bottle of Rolling Rock at the side of the stage. "I remember thinking, 'I should probably have some of that. Maybe it will calm me down.'"
Later, he formed a band called Whiskeytown ("You can imagine what that was like") and kicked off a decade-long addiction to drugs and alcohol that would help him write an endless stream of songs, inure him to stage fright, alienate him from friends and family, and nearly kill him. "I was just looking for a way to feel transcendental when I wrote," says Adams, who has been sober since May 7th, 2006. "I'd wake up, work, work, work, go for a drink or two, and then be exhausted. So I would have drugs to keep my physical being going in order to never have to stop working in the night." In 2005 alone, Adams released three albums, Jacksonville City Nights, 29 and Cold Roses.
"My life had no other purpose," he says. "I was doing nothing but working and getting high. I lost all my connections to everyone and everything." Toward the end, his snort of choice became speedballs, an intense combination of coke and heroin -- and he hit rock-bottom. Adams quit cold turkey, with the assistance of his current girlfriend, Jessica Joffe, who had earlier discovered a path to sobriety.
"To think about falling off a bicycle and smashing your nuts on that bar or whatever the most horrible sports-accident thing you can think of: That doesn't cover what it would be like for me to imagine drinking or doing drugs again," he says, taking a puff off his American Spirit cigarette in S.I.R. studios in Manhattan, where he and his band, the Cardinals, are rehearsing for a string of dates behind his new disc, Easy Tiger. He looks younger than thirty-two, and without the greasy flop of hair that used to hide his face, he resembles his own description of himself as a fifteen-year-old growing up in Jacksonville, North Carolina. On this hot spring day, he's wearing a Slayer T-shirt, sliding a skateboard under his feet and talking about collecting comic books. In fact, the Cardinals are named after his high school football team.
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"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]