The realized genius of Ryan Adams
A calm and exquisite set from the manboy wonder
By Caralyn Green
Published: July 9th, 2007 | 3:58pm
June 28, 2007, in Philadelphia — There are two options when confronted with misfortune, whether self-inflected or extrinsically imposed. Close your eyes and lose yourself in the chaos, or bend with the wind.
Ryan Adams’ sold-out concert in the Fillmore at the TLA was supposed to be everything but hardship. All was supposed to be shiny, happy, and new for Adams. On tour for his new album, he’s freshly sober and handsome as ever! He’s coming off a recent Lost Highway release — Easy Tiger — that’s debatably his best since 2001’s Gold, or at least as good as 2005’s Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights combined. Easy Tiger is the distillation of all that Adams has been known to scatter throughout his numerous releases — that voice your momma would invite over for pie, minutes after a quickie in the back of your dusty pick-up; that shameless, little-boy-lost melancholy; that unassuming lyrical brilliance, the amp to your heart’s muted murmurs.
There was such praise and achievement on Adams’ tail the night of the show, but there was palpable hardship still. At 9:20 p.m., Adams and his backing band, the Cardinals, moseyed onstage — no opening act, no if’s, and’s, or but’s — and there was Adams, wearing dark shades in a dark room, off the booze, the heroin, the pills, and the coke. Eyes open, not closed, behind the sunglasses, behind the self-mythologizing. Deep in the ache, in the brood, in the midst of the grief and healing, Adams first slouched, then sat straight up in his chair, and played his guitar, sang his tears into words. Not once in the hour-and-a-half long show did he rise to a stand. He sat there in front of a fawning and polite audience, swaying in the breezes of disorder, negotiating his loneliness, creating some of the most earnest, angsty, and dazzling nu-alt-country in this whole, wide mess of a world.
It wasn’t the most immediately profound Ryan Adams concert. He maintained his composure — he didn’t heckle the audience, he didn’t spit wine at us, or destroy the stage in a fit of onerous self-pity. He didn’t even play “Note to Self: Don’t Die,” the most aggressively attention-mongering of all Adams’ songs. What did he did do was play a solid set of consistently gorgeous, tightly orchestrated singer-songwriter jams, predominately from his more recent work with the Cardinals, and the forlorn Love is Hell collection. Gold, Heartbreaker, and Rock N Roll were all but ignored, with the exception of a totally rearranged “Bartering Lines,” which turned the original slowburner on its head with heavy percussion and a double-time gait. The rest of the show, though, worked at a comfortably moderate pace. “Cold Roses” was calm and exquisite. “Dear Chicago” was calm and exquisite. Non-album favorite “Blue Hotel” was calm and exquisite. And “I See Monsters” was the exquisite calm before the audience’s “What? No encore?!” agitation.
But an encore woulda been too much. Too much suspense, elation and drama for so temperate a night that seemed to transcend the temporal confines of the concert, a night that bent in the winds of Adams’ storms. And that is anything but misfortune.
Issue #35
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