They say time heals all wounds and for Ryan Adams one of the more recurring wounds is an incident at the Ryman Auditorium in 2002 where he stopped his show to deal with a heckler who was requesting Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.” As the story goes, Adams pulled out a couple $20 bills and told the guy to kick rocks. A reasonable (and, hell, rather generous) request that ended up blown far out of proportion and would follow him throughout his entire career. 

In a brutally honest, recently-published op-ed in The New York Times, Adams recounts that fateful day in 2002, from the promise and hope of stepping on stage at the famed Ryman, just blocks away where he cut his landmark Heartbreaker solo debut, to the torture that followed. “When I heard the worst label person of all time cackle someplace off to the right of the stage, it was my first sign something might go wrong,” he wrote. “I tried to put it out of my mind. But I knew. Disaster was bound to happen. I had rarely come upon things the easy way.”

As Adams recalls, the distractions came a few songs into the show, where he said he heard sporadic “muttering” that was rendered indecipherable. “I started to feel uneasy,” he admits. “I dropped my pick in the middle of a song. I got distracted, and the distraction became alarming.”

It was later on when Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, two musicians who helped Adams on the aforementioned Heartbreaker, came out to join him on “Bartering Lines” where he says “the vibes were tense.” Adams continues as the calls for the Bryan Adams hit grew louder, “I recall looking down the long, dark aisles to see the security guards doing nothing.” 

The incident came to a head when Adams stopped the show, asked the crowd to point out the heckler, and thus he stopped the show to go visit the gentleman. “By the time I got there, I was so angry. I felt humiliated,” he says. When he arrived to notice the heckler “was only a few years older than me” and blatantly drunk, “the anger left me, and I instantly felt bad.” 

The aftermath would soon reveal itself as journalists at the show ran with the incident. “I was now a joke,” Adams says. “All of my hard work was lost in a story picked up by The Associated Press. I soon became an attraction for people who wanted to pay money to hurl insults at someone. They wanted to yell that song like it was some magical power that would transform me into a Golem.”

For all the darkness that came of that night, Adams admits “that was the beginning of who I am today.” The story has a happy ending as he says he’s “grateful for it all” and, perfectly, “I toasted the last drink I ever drank to that heckler the day I cleaned up.”

It all came full circle in 2015 when Adams last visited the Ryman, where he in fact performed the Bryan Adams hit (although he admits that “Run to You” by Adams “is my jam”) in a true tying up of the emotional loose ends. Watch below.