Features

Who’s Afraid of Ryan Adams? (Relix Revisited)

Today we look back at the August 2005 issue of Relix and this feature story on Ryan Adams.

Photo by Danny Clinch

Ryan Adams is standing in the center of his tour bus staring at drummer Brad Pemberton, who is trying to leave the bus to go on stage at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey – an act that is essentially pointless, of course, unless Adams leaves too. But Adams looks panic-stricken. It seems like only minutes ago – in fact, it was only minutes ago — that Adams was sitting calmly on the bus, a glass of red wine at his side, strumming an acoustic guitar and chatting amiably with guitarist JP Bowerstock, as a live version of the Grateful Dead performing “Terrapin Station Part One” floated out of his iPod speakers. The impending gig seemed an eternity away.

Ah, but eternity proved evanescent as Adams’ OCD kicked in. He organized the storage bins on the bus, washed the wine glasses and arranged them in their proper order, put on and taken off and put on various shirts, but he still couldn’t bring himself to walk out the door and play the show. The other band members – Pemberton, Bowerstock, pedal steel player Jon Graboff and bassist Catherine Popper – were now climbing on and off the bus in moods ranging from irascible to Zen-like detachment, their own pre-show rituals plunged into chaos by Adams’ maddening hesitation.

A veteran of Adams’ Stonesy side project, the Pink Hearts, Pemberton is Adams’ oldest friend in the band, and he’s been through this wringer before – and worse. He waits patiently as Adams, looking, strangely, like a lost, vulnerable, frightened child with an improbable full beard, begins to speak. “Brad, it’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” he asks. The question is dead serious. His voice trembles and he looks as if he’s about to cry.

“Yes, Ryan, it’s always all right,” Pemberton replies quietly, his voice a perfectly modulated blend of empathy, encouragement and let’s-get-the-fuck-on-stage pragmatism.

Adams follows Pemberton through the door and moves through the parking lot toward the club’s backstage entrance. The entire way, up to the very second he walks onto the stage, he’s insisting to his new road manager – on his second night on the job getting a burning baptism of fire – that it’s not his fault, no one told him what time he was supposed to go on, he’ll just play a quick set tonight and be done with it. He strides to the mike and announces to the cheering, sold-out crowd of 1300 people, “Hi, we’re gonna do two hours tonight, but it will be a solid two hours.” Two sets, 24 songs and more than three hours later, Ryan Adams & the Cardinals are done with their exhausting, exhilarating night’s work.

By all reliable accounts that was the end of a pretty typical day in the life of Ryan Adams. He had slept late into the afternoon, the result of a nearly four-hour show the Cardinals had played the night before in Clifton Park, New York, just outside Albany. The band sound checked at the Starland Ballroom without him, and then everybody started waiting.

As they relax in one of the club’s dressing rooms, the band banters to kill time. Catherine Popper slips off her shoes and stretched her long legs out on a coffee table. Shooting footage for a documentary on Adams being directed by photographer Danny Clinch, Jon Graboff focuses his camera on the soles of Popper’s bare feet. As if posing for a fetish video, she lifts her legs and smiles for the camera.

“God, could you believe Rick offered me $200 to run through that truck stop naked last night?” she asks, referring to tour manager Rick Marino. Brad Pemberton raises an eyebrow. “I believe the question was, ‘How much would you offer me to run through that truck stop naked?’” he says. Everybody in the room laughs.

“Well, you’re supposed to protect me by not making the offer too good,” Popper says, smiling. “I mean, $200 is a lot of money.”