Smash It Up!

Ryan Adams doesn’t have any use for notepads. When he gets an idea, or wants to start a shopping list, he just scribbles on the wall of his expensive New York apartment. In the bathroom, near the light switch, he has scrawled a few important reminders: BUY TOWELS. BUY NEW SHOWER CURTAIN.

Adams is spontaneous and impetuous, the way rock stars used to be, and the fact that he’s not yet a rock star hasn’t impeded him from acting like Keith Richards’s Southern nephew. He feuds with fellow musicians (he once called Jack White a “fucking ponce”), smokes too much, doesn’t comb his hair and likes booze and drugs. He’s also one of the most inspiring songwriters and exciting live performers of the last 10 years, with a talent that particularly impresses rock’s elite.

Last year, the Rolling Stones picked Adams to open some shows, though he turned down the chance to keep touring with them (“Who wants to open for his idols? That’s way too fucking hard,” he says with a shrug). He talks regularly with Elton John, whom he fondly refers to as “perverted Uncle Elton.” And Steve Earle tells Blender that Adams is “the best singer the alternative-country scene has produced, period.”

Adams, 29, lives in a duplex (he once called it a “2 million dollar corner apartment” on his Web site) inside a beaux-arts downtown landmark built by J.P. Morgan and formerly used as a tuberculosis unit, insane asylum and narcotic detox center; two of the Strokes share an apartment a few floors away.

Like a bachelor schoolboy, Adams has decorated his place to resemble a kind of artsy thrift store, simulating the bursting insides of his excitable mind: a Confederate flag hanging on the wall, some crosses, a Smiths LP lying next to a Rimbaud collection, a still-warm bong leaning up against a Smith-Corona typewriter, a skateboard he uses to get around the city, an expensive rug he bought but now regrets.

For his sentimental breakup ballads and brooding steel-guitar passages, as well as his romances with actresses (Winona Ryder, Carrie Hamilton) and singers (Beth Orton; his most recent ex, Leona Naess), Adams earned the title of “alt-country heartthrob.” But his new and best album, Rock N Roll, is an excited, stimulated blast of punk rasp and tuff-rock grooves — from the first single, “So Alive,” which rings like early U2, to the dismissive kiss-off “Burning Photographs” to the Nirvana-style disaster-pounder “Note to Self: Don’t Die.” The culmination of Adams’s promise, the record should finally defenestrate the alt-country tag.

“I don’t really feel like that right now,” he says, shrugging again. “I mean, if you put enough whiskey in anybody, they can make an alt-country record.”

His focused turn in musical style coincides with changes in his state of mind as well. “I’ve certainly been unhappy in stretches of my twenties, but I don’t know anyone who wasn’t. I’ve learned not to celebrate the darkness so much.” Partly, this is due to a new relationship, with actress Parker Posey, a Mississippian and the belle of such indie films as A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, whom he met while he was starting to record Rock N Roll.

To combat the darkness, Adams explains, “I’m sort of planting Post-it notes all over my psyche.” What do these mental reminders say? “Do not skateboard wasted. Do not buy $10,000 rugs. Be careful what you say to journalists.” He laughs, and adds one more: “You don’t have to stay up until 7 A.M. — tomorrow is a new day.”


Adams writes songs about infatuation and desolation, the extreme edges of emotion that leave him either celebrating like a Little Leaguer (“I’m spinning ’round the room in awe,” goes one new lyric) or drunk, ruined and cruel. True to his songs, he’s a bit of a drama queen — either high as a god or low as a suicide. “He’ll sink until just before he can’t breathe, and then he’s able to pull himself out of the quicksand,” says Johnny T. Yerrington, a.k.a. Johnny T., his drummer, friend and late-night partying partner.

Adams summed up his vision on the first song of Heartbreaker, his “really sad” 2000 album: “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High).” He’s a mercurial, heart-on-his-sleeve motormouth, and his audacity gives him a boyish air, like Dennis the Menace in a faded Western shirt.

“Rock music is Ryan’s religion, and he’s a true believer,” according to James Barber, Courtney Love’s longtime boyfriend, who produced Rock N Roll. “He’s so willing to give himself over to what he sees as the cause.”

David Ryan Adams’s consecration in music began in Jacksonville, North Carolina, a small town with lots of car dealerships. After school, he’d come home, smoke pot and listen to Slayer’s Reign in Blood or Sister, by Sonic Youth. “It sounded like drugs to me,” he says. “I thought, ‘I will spend my entire life trying to figure this record out.’”

In a town where most kids dressed like surfers, writing Black Flag’s name in Magic Marker on his Converse sneakers made Adams a weirdo: “Still am one. Fucking weird all over the place.” When everyone in school went to local football games, Adams would sit in the stands and “daydream about accidentally making out with a cheerleader.”

He took his identity from a passion for punk rock, and his grandmother bought him subscriptions to such zines as Flipside and Maximum Rocknroll. His parents divorced when he was 9, and Ryan, the second of three kids, was raised by his mother, a teacher. “If you think I’m weird, you gotta meet her,” he says. “My mom is like a psychedelic game show. You don’t know what you’re going to win, you don’t really know what the point of the game is, you just play.”

His father, who built houses, ran a taxidermy shop and owned a bar, lived outside of town; Adams talks to him only “once in a while” and turns jittery when asked about him: “I’m crawling out of my skin, because you’re hitting on some shit I don’t want to talk about.”

When his mother went back to school, Adams lived with his grandparents, who didn’t allow him to curse but also never realized when he was stoned. Overall, he says, “I was let free to roam.” At age 16, he dropped out of school, moved to Raleigh, got his own apartment and sang in a punk band, the Patty Duke Syndrome.

He played in several bands at the same time — one was the jacked-up country band Whiskeytown, which had a fiddle but still covered Iggy Pop’s punk anthem “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Adams told everyone in Raleigh that Whiskeytown would be huge.

Starting with a 1995 debut EP, records and tours brought Whiskeytown lots of attention, most of it focused on lead singer Adams, who trashed a stage one night in San Francisco, apparently enraged over the club’s no-smoking policy. Whiskeytown seemed to rotate members as though they were soldiers; shortly after the release of their first major-label album, 1997’s Strangers Almanac, three of the five members left. Violinist Caitlin Cary, the only one who stayed for the duration, said Adams was “hard to deal with, and he knows it.” Whiskeytown never got huge, though they seem to have left three myths as their legacy: that Adams was a great if inconsistent writer, a charming performer and a huge asshole.

His latest ex, Leona Naess, has been selling T-shirts on her Web site that read MY X IS A WANKER. Could that be a swipe at Adams? The shirt, Naess tells Blender diplomatically, “is about all the ex-boyfriends in my life. It is not about any one person.”

“I get as much bad press as anybody can get,” Adams says. “I am the accumulator of negative press. I’m from the South, I liked punk rock and it was inherent that I was just going to raise hell. But it’s not like I fight people in bars, or stab people.”

Adams enflamed his reputation last year when he quarreled with rock’s prince of cool, Jack White. Adams was a White Stripes fan; two years ago, in the credits to Gold, a Grammy-nominated record he wrote while “really sad, profoundly lonely,” he even thanked Meg White “for saving rock n’ roll.”

On tour last year, Adams played White Stripes songs and provocatively changed the lyrics to “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” (“Meg White, you do me all right”). Jack White heard about it and confronted Adams in a bar in New York’s East Village. “I just couldn’t believe that someone would be that petty,” Adams marvels.

At times, Adams has skin as thin as velum, and he baited White in the press, claiming that he had turned down a movie role White accepted “because I didn’t see ‘acting’ anywhere on my job application to be a rock fucking star.”

“I don’t consider that trouble,” Adams says now. “It’s OK to make a little fun. I have a big mouth, I guess. If someone treads on my thing, I retaliate.”

Those are hardly words of contrition. But a few seconds later, he dismisses the subject. “I don’t want to talk about it — I’ll just get in more trouble.”

So Blender asks about the high-romantic streak that runs through his records. “A lot of rock songs seem to be like a warning: ‘I’m tough; watch your back.’ That’s not interesting to me. When I write, I try to think of something angry and beautiful, or sad and romantic.

“I’m a little bizarre about my emotions,” he continues. “I’m manic — I overthink, overdo, overanalyze. Why else would I write songs all the time?” He grins mischievously. “I could be covering the White Stripes.” Adams, despite his intentions, gravitates to trouble: “I don’t know how to bite my tongue.”


Adams is a provocateur, but he’s also a charming, almost courtly Southern gentleman, as vulnerable as he is arrogant, and as ingratiating as a con man. A few days after our first meeting, he invites Blender to dinner at Parker Posey’s new home in the East Village, requesting that we bring two bottles of champagne.

Posey and a half-dozen artsy friends prepare a dinner of steak and salad, eaten informally because she hasn’t yet bought any knives. He calls her “Parks” and teases her about being six years older than he is; they share cigarettes and wrestle on the bed like puppies. He does the dishes. As she passes by, he looks longingly at her and whistles lustily: “I could keep knocking that thing out for years.” She even sings on Rock N Roll and has a cowriting credit on “Note to Self: Don’t Die.”

Mutual friends had told Adams and Posey they should meet. “You guys would get along; you’re both nutty,” one said. When he was working in a studio one night this year, she showed up with some friends. He thought she was “really animated and funny as hell,” and soon, they had created a shared life of “late nights and weird parties.”

“Do you smoke pot?” Posey asks, offering Blender a ceramic bong she made herself. Most of the party moves to the roof, while Adams and Johnny T. sit on the floor, playing their own music at jet-airplane volume.

Earlier in the year, Adams made a “really dark, depressing” record, Love Is Hell, which will be released this winter in two parts. Then he started going to Motherfucker, an occasional downtown party Johnny T. copromotes, and he rediscovered New Order, Joy Division, Generation X and lots of other British post-punk dance music: “Then the writing changed.” His label, Lost Highway, “was pretty excited” by the new sound, he reports. “I didn’t sound like I wanted to die. After Love Is Hell, anything would be a relief.”

The group moves to one bar, then quickly to another. Adams sings often about booze and drugs and the haze they cause, and on the cover of Rock N Roll, he makes a reference to his reputation as a wastrel by turning the first letter of his name into Rx, the symbol for a medical prescription.

“To break up the tedium, you go out and have a cocktail,” he says. “But I’ve never woken up surrounded by empty liquor bottles with blood coming out of my mouth in a hotel with a girl I don’t know. I’ve experimented with drugs. But I don’t shoot up. Not many people make it through that.”

As some friends head home, he and Johnny T. head down to a tiny, stuffy basement room where they drunkenly record ridiculous demos late at night. “We get greasy and play like Yes or Rush, but really bad.” He listens back to some recordings in the musty darkness, laughing at the ridiculousness.

The next day, Adams misses a photo session for Blender. He’s “not feeling well,” his publicist tells us. Which is surprising, because we’d last seen him at 2 A.M. that night, drinking champagne from the bottle, and he looked pretty healthy. It seems Adams forgot to check his own Post-it notes.