Author: Max Weidman
Backed by his sometimes band the Cardinals, Ryan Adams played to a small but thoroughly enthused audience at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Wednesday, January 30. His style, which some critics have narrowly deemed “alternative country,” was on full display as he burned through nearly 30 songs.
If you haven’t heard of the man, it should come as no real surprise; popular music tends to treat country music (on the recorded version of Rescue Blues, Adams supplies the example of “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”) and singer-songwriter emo (think Elliott Smith) as fairly distinct categories. In the lulls between songs, the sound of a steel slide guitar twanging out melodies was replaced by casual banter about drug addiction, LA and Adam Levine playing bingo. Ryan Adams is clearly the kind of animal who defies the categories the music industry has instituted to make CD browsing and buying easier.
One of the things which constitutes this distinction is Adams’ often disarming, self-loathing self-consciousness. A lot of his jokes-of which there were many-referred to what the band is not: one audience member was singled out, his interior monologue supplied by Adams, “I wish I was at a Death Cab For Cutie concert.” Coldplay was also invoked, underscoring the fact that Adams is acutely aware of the category in which his lyrics have landed him. They are often lyrics of painful, dark emotionality, like “Come Pick Me Up,” in the chorus of which a doting boy says to a girl “screw all my friends.” The first time through it is a promise of undivided attention, that the boy will gladly ignore his friends for her. In the second chorus it’s an accusation of philandering. Adams seems to walk this particular line, between love/devotion and break-ups/contempt, the same way he deals with other contradictions: with a tragedy that is not only cathartic, but joyous. He told a story about breaking his arm off because he was addicted to drugs, going to rehab and then waking up in the middle of the night because his numb arm felt like a stranger’s touch.
The first set was stronger than the second. An especially haunting version of Oasis’s “Wonderwall” preceded an even jumpier-than-usual rendition of “Shakedown On 9th Street.” An improvised death metal song called “Sarcophagus” (inspired by the garbled cries of a fan, “Sick concert!”) got the audience on its toes, while a slew of songs from his most recent album, “Easy Tiger,” kept things in the comfort zone. A seemingly impromptu entr’acte about people buying alcohol and peanuts in the lobby provided a fittingly comedic segue. The second set’s highlights were a joke by Jon Graboff, “A Kiss Before I Go” and the apropos “Goodnight, Hollywood Boulevard.” The show’s last number, “10:56,” put a loud, fuzzy cap on the evening; there was no encore.
The audience was surprisingly diverse, especially for a show at a college campus. Beyond the few boys with longish hair, dressed as though they wished they were Ryan Adams, there were a number of baby boomers-a constituency I never would have pegged as fans. The auditorium has some 1,800 seats, which were not quite filled. The show’s technical aspects were faultless; the lighting for each tune was different, the acoustics were superb and the sound both loud and clear. Despite a habit of microphone clutch-and-scrunching (a la Cobain), Adams’s lyrics came through crisply. Except for his occasional loss of a mysterious “clip”-which produced a long string of expletives in one, smokey breath-Adams seemed mostly sober and on his game.
The night was, overall, a brilliant showcase for one of the most unique talents in contemporary music. The audience was seated for the entire show, save a brief moment when Adams made us stand up and make eyeballs out of our heads by putting our hands above them. As such, the main event was neither the set-a desert complete with cactuses-nor the event itself; it was the music. What started as a casual welcome, “Thanks for coming to the rock show,” turned out to be a promise. Adams made good on his word, and personally reaffirmed my faith in (one of his albums’ titles, as it turns out) rock and roll.
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