Ryan Adams

The Heartbreak Kid

Features Timeline Oct 2011

By Jason SchneiderThere will probably come a time ― hopefully far in the future ― after Ryan Adams leaves this world, when music scholars will pore over the hundreds of songs he's written, looking for clues as to who he was. There certainly will be plenty of leads for them to follow, but today, 20 years after making an inauspicious recording debut, Adams is still using his work to try to figure out those answers himself. He is one of Americana's central figures, who admittedly dislikes country music. He has also been called an enfant terrible for alleged antics on stage and off, but remains committed to doing whatever is necessary to make as much of his wide-ranging creative output available to his audience. Ashes & Fire is Adams' first collection of new recordings in over two years, an incredibly long gap for him. During that time, he threatened to stop making music altogether, citing a rare inner ear disorder, and an overall frustration with the business. But more importantly, the hopeless romantic finally settled down, and the album's greatest strength lies in its maturity ― a word that the younger Adams would have considered an insult. Times have changed, though. "It isn't difficult for me to do what I do, and I don't think it's that different from writing a column," he says. "I'm sort of writing my life. At the same time, I wouldn't call my songs confessional. They're studies of my life and studies of things around me. From time to time I'll jot down some ideas for songs, and at this point it just is what it is."

1974 to 1990
David Ryan Adams is born November 5, 1974 in Jacksonville, on the southern coast of North Carolina, home to the U.S. Marine Corps' Base Camp Lejeune. His father, Robert, leaves the family when Ryan is nine years old, and his mother Susan, an English teacher, encourages him to read to help cope with the loss. Adams first connects to the work of Edgar Allen Poe, which fuels his already present interest in writing short stories. He soon draws inspiration from books by Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and other American literary icons. In 1988, a skateboarding buddy, Shane Duhe, lends Adams some So-Cal punk records and he immediately falls in love with Black Flag. Adams' mother and stepfather buy him an electric guitar around this time, but his first experience with a band finds him playing drums for Blank Label, an offshoot of Pumphouse, the band Duhe had formed with Jere McIlwean, the source of Adams' new favourite music through his job at Jacksonville's indie record store. Adams drops out of school at the start of his tenth grade year and moves into the band house that McIlwean rents on the outskirts of Jacksonville where Blank Label put on regular free shows.

1991 to 1994
Blank Label record a three-song seven-inch in October 1991 and press 200 copies on their own Fishbeat label, but the band break up when Duhe enlists in the Marines. Adams begins playing guitar and writing songs in earnest, and forms his own band Kotten while simultaneously playing with McIlwean in the Hüsker Dü-inspired trio the Patty Duke Syndrome. Looking to make a clean break from his family, Adams asks Duhe to drive him to Raleigh, NC where he moves in with a band called Regraped. This connection leads Adams to befriend Raleigh scenester Tom Cushman, with whom he forms the art punk outfit Ass, and its more refined successor, Lazy Stars. (A CD version of an unreleased 11-song Lazy Stars cassette made by Cushman entitled Exile On Daisy Street will turn up on eBay in 2001.) Meanwhile, McIlwean moves to Raleigh and the Patty Duke Syndrome reform long enough to put out their only recording, a split seven-inch with Glamour Puss. All of this is on top of Adams' involvement in many other short-lived bands and one-off projects such as Knife, U.S. Tobacco Company, Space Madness, Spawn and the Skylarks. As well, Adams earns his high school equivalency degree. The Patty Duke Syndrome break up for good over McIlwean's anger at Adams' increased drinking. (Sadly, McIlwean will later die from a heroin overdose, and Adams will write "Theme For A Trucker" in tribute.) By now, Adams' musical tastes are veering toward punk/country hybrid bands like the Gun Club and Uncle Tupelo. Word gets around Raleigh in the fall of 1994 that Adams is looking to form a new band in that style, and he first hooks up with drummer Eric "Skillet" Gilmore, who offers his bar, Sadlack's, as a rehearsal space. The group, christened Whiskeytown, is filled out by guitarist Phil Wandscher, bassist Steve Grothman, and fiddler Caitlin Cary. Adams will explain to No Depression in 1997, "Down here, when somebody gets really fucked up, they put the word 'town' on the end of something. Like, 'Goddamn that guy's fuckin' coketown,' or 'God, I was so stoned, man, it was like fuckin' hallucinationtown.' So, sort of metaphorically speaking, Whiskeytown pretty much means loaded. I also liked the idea of a fictional place where everybody was drunk. Actually, not here, it isn't [fictional] at all, because just about everyone I know is drunk. Pretty much all the time."

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1Comments

Posted by Nameless Poseur On 2011-10-02 18:20:45Solid overview of a prolific career. Must have been a seriously taxing research process. Ashes and Fire is a good album, too. Not his best, not the album of his career, but his best since Easy Tiger for sure.