Long before the Grammy nominations, sold-out performances at Carnegie Hall, and Hollywood friends and lovers, Ryan Adams fronted a Raleigh, North Carolina outfit called Whiskeytown. Lumped into the burgeoning alt-country movement, the band soon landed a major label deal and recorded an instant classic: "Strangers Almanac." That's when tour manager Thomas O'Keefe met the young musician.
When Whiskeytown hit the West Coast in September of 1998, we were all fried and frustrated. Ryan didn’t want to be on tour. The band’s major label debut, "Strangers Almanac," had been out for over a year, and he was done with it. He was itching to move on to the next record. Trouble was, the band had already committed to three weeks of headlining dates. Ryan was contractually obligated to head back out, like it or not.
I was Whiskeytown’s tour manager, had been since a couple of months before the "Strangers Almanac" release. Over the previous year and a half, I’d learned that there were four distinct kinds of Whiskeytown shows. There was the "So Incredibly Great It Changed Your Life" set, which happened maybe 10 percent of the time. There was the "Half-Baked Effort," which was about 60 percent. Then there was the "Super-Punk Smash a Bunch of Shit" show, which was maybe 15 percent. The other 15 percent of the gigs were "Beyond Drunk." On this West Coast run, the shows were either half-baked or super-punk. In Vancouver, Ryan got all salty and smashed a 1964 Gibson Firebird that was worth more than my car. Then, after a lackluster show at the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle, we aimed south toward California.
San Francisco’s Fillmore is sacred ground. Rock-and-roll church. On par in music history with Harlem’s Apollo Theater and Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. Starting in the midsixties, the legendary promoter Bill Graham booked pretty much everybody into the Fillmore: The Who, the Dead, the Doors, Hendrix, Creedence, Zeppelin. And on and on. Along the way, Graham defined what it meant to be a rock promoter. He invented backstage catering. He helped make concert posters into an art form, and whenever the show sold out, everyone in attendance got copies of that night’s poster. Near the front door there was a big tub of free apples. Everybody who worked there was friendly and kind—old hippies who greeted you with “Welcome to the Fillmore.” During our load-in and sound check, if I’d knocked back a shot of bourbon every time somebody from the staff asked me “Is there anything else I can do for you?” I would have been plastered by showtime.
Ryan and Whiskeytown had never played the Fillmore, and my hope was that the prominence and history of the venue would command Ryan’s interest. I watched the show from the side of the stage. All was going fine. Better than fine, actually. The band was tight, and the crowd of about 250—not bad for a Tuesday—was digging it.
Then they launched into the last tune of the night, “Piss on Your Fucking Grave,” a full-blast punk rock song that has exactly zero to do with alt-country. The chorus: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck off. Ryan was jumping around, flailing about. He was selling the song’s message, fully committed. It was refreshing to see him so into what he was singing. This was definitely not half-baked. But it also seemed like he was punishing the crowd because he didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be home, writing and recording songs.
At that point I’d been with Ryan long enough to know that he is most in his element when creating rather than performing. I saw this firsthand a few months earlier in Raleigh, where he was living with me. One night, when I was staying up late watching TV, he walked into the house. I asked him what he’d been up to.
“Just having some beers,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bar napkin with some words scribbled on it. “Let me show you this song I wrote.”
He grabbed a guitar, and he played this magical, holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-it sort of tune. He’s always so great, so heartfelt, when it’s just him and an acoustic.
“Goddamn, dude,” I said. “That song’s amazing. When did you write that?”
“Tonight,” he said, putting the guitar down. “About thirty minutes ago.”
“I thought you were at the bar.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s where I was.”
Wait a minute. Something didn’t add up. “You wrote the song while you were drinking at the bar?” I picked up the acoustic. “What guitar did you play?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I just played the guitar in my brain.”
I was dumbfounded. This kid could sit there drinking beer and scrawling lyrics, and while one side of his brain was singing the song, the other side was strumming along on an imaginary guitar. And he could do this so well, that back at my house he could pick up a real guitar and play the song perfectly the first time through? Flawlessly covering a tune that three minutes earlier only existed in his head? This wasn’t songwriting; this was fucking sorcery. Dude was a warlock.
I’d tour managed a handful of bands at that point, and I’ve worked with many more since. Bands with gold records. Bands with Grammy awards. I assure you, this is not normally how songs get written. Nobody writes with such ease and frequency. After getting an up-close look at Ryan’s process, the only explanation I could think of for his productivity was that he had longer antennae than anyone. The songs were already floating in the atmosphere, and he detected them before everybody else. Tunes got beamed down into his head one after another. His job was to jot down the lyrics and internalize the melodies as soon as they hit him. His job was to catch the lightning.
Now onstage at the Fillmore, Ryan was rocking balls-out: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck off. In the crowd, though, the alt-country devotees radiated confusion, steadily moving toward belligerence. They’d discovered they’d been hoodwinked by Ryan’s super-punk element. Wait a second. This isn’t country music. Where’s the lapsteel? Why’s this song about a hundred beats per minute too fast? The energy in the room turned. Nobody yelled Judas!—as an audience member had twenty-two years earlier in Manchester, England, when Bob Dylan unexpectedly went electric on them—but it seemed like lots of them were thinking it. Then somebody threw a cup at Ryan.
He kept going. Singing sweetly but with venom. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck off. In those words, I heard: Fuck you, Fillmore. Fuck off, rock-and-roll sacred ground. I’ll take a hot, steaming piss on the lot of it. He was pissing on the grave of the whole damn music business. Saying fuck you to the idea that Ryan Adams was alt-country’s Kurt Cobain. Fuck you to everybody who had expectations for who and what Ryan Adams was supposed to be. And fuck off to the Ryan Adams he’d created for himself.
The song crescendoed to a big, AC/DC-style finish, and during that wash of power chords and crash cymbals, Ryan kicked one of the monitor wedges off the front of the stage. It fell about five feet and slammed to the floor. An audible boo from the crowd. More detritus flew from the audience to the stage. Later Ryan would claim that he had problems with the monitors, that he was unable to hear himself sing. In his defense, we didn’t have a monitor engineer with us, so we were at the mercy of whatever stage sound the house gave us. Still: Ryan had played the whole set without complaining about the sound, so the monitors weren’t the issue. The issue was that Ryan wanted to put one final fuck you! into a song that was already full of them. The monitor dropped like the exclamation point.
One wedge down, Ryan looked over at a second wedge. I knew he was thinking about double exclamation points. But before his foot hit the speaker, the house monitor engineer jumped out from behind his desk and grabbed Ryan. Multi-instrumentalist Mike Daly then grabbed the monitor guy. There was pushing and elbowing, as more Fillmore staff members took the stage. In the chaos, Ryan somehow slipped to the dressing room, which was just off stage right. The drummer Steven Terry and I followed him in. I locked the door.
“That was awesome,” Steven said, breathing like a vandal who’d just outrun the cops. Somebody pounded on the door.
Ryan laughed. “Fuck this place.”
He had fucked with the Fillmore. He’d pissed not just on the grave but inside the church. And that was precisely his point. Whiskeytown doesn’t discriminate. There are no sacred cows. We put on our same show no matter where we’re playing.
But now, those same hippies who a few hours earlier were asking if there’s was anything else they could do for us, were ready to beat our asses. Peace and love was yesterday’s news. The guys banging on the door wanted to rip out Ryan’s trachea.
“Listen,” I said to Ryan and Steven. “We need to get you out of here. Right now. These stagehands want to kill you.”
“Fuck them,” Steven said.
“This is serious.” I said, leaning against the door, a one-man barricade. “You’ve got to listen to me right now.” I heard an increasing commotion from the other side of the door, a chorus of hippies shouting, “Fuck you!” But the pounding had stopped. Maybe somebody was heading to the production office to get the key to the door. “Okay, guys,” I said to my two band members. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”
I told them that I was going to open the door, and the second I did, the three of us were going to take off running. As fast as we could. Me in the front. Ryan in the middle. Steven in back. “You guys follow me, and I’ll get you out of here,” I said. “Are you ready?”
They said they were.
“I’m going to be running,” I said. “Are you ready?”
They nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I opened the door, and we bolted down to the floor. The crowd had already cleared out, so the floor was wide open except for the mess of cups and cans. I aimed catty-corner for the rear of the building, where I knew there was a door that opened to an outside staircase. The three of us were about halfway to the exit when I heard somebody yell, “Hey, there he is!” A stagehand pointed at Ryan and then started chasing us. A few others joined him.
The door opened to a landing that was about three stories above street level. From there, the staircase ran down the side of the building. I let Ryan and Steven through. At the top of the stairs, I looked out across Geary Boulevard, and I saw a building with neon signs in the windows. “Go to that bar across the street,” I told them. “I’ll come get you later.”
As Ryan and Steven descended the staircase, the stagehands appeared at the landing. I stretched my arms from handrail to handrail so they couldn’t get past.
“Hey, man!” one of the staff members yelled toward Ryan, who was about halfway down. “That was bullshit, what you just did!”
Ryan turned around, flipped the bird, and yelled, “Fuck you!”
While Ryan and Steven waited at the bar across Geary, I had to go try to collect our guarantee. The manager was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, much calmer than his hippie enforcers had been. But his calmness didn’t mean we were getting paid.
“I’m keeping your fifteen hundred until we find out how much it’s gonna cost to get that wedge fixed,” he told me. If there was anything left after fixing the monitor, he’d mail a check to our booking agent. This was a reasonable solution, but we were on a lean budget. Not getting the cash that night hurt.
After load-out, I walked across the street to collect Ryan and Steven. First I asked Ryan to come outside. Alone. I pulled two cigarettes out of a pack and gave him one. We sat down on the sidewalk across from the Fillmore and smoked.
“Tomorrow in Los Angeles I’m going to buy you two guns,” I said.
He took a drag. “Why’s that?”
“So you can shoot yourself in both feet at the same time.”
Neither of us laughed. We just sat there smoking on the sidewalk. I looked at Ryan. I looked at the Fillmore. I was worn out and beaten up. I had put up with Ryan’s antics for so long. It was just too much. I felt like I was about to cry.
“Ryan,” I said, “is there ever going to be a day when you just show up and play a normal show? When you act like a normal person and not do all this shit?” I turned and looked right at him. “Is that day ever going to happen?”
“I don’t know, man,” he said. Tilting his head back, he blew a slow stream of smoke. “Maybe. Someday.”
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