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This week marks the tenth birthday of this blog, and Sam and I were chatting about it and about whether we should mark it at all. With the allegations of abuse by Ryan coming to light last month, we’ve been chatting about the future of this blog in email and in person. We won’t delete anything, but you probably won’t see new content either. We are feminists and being feminists we believe anyone who says they have been victims of abuse. To do so takes a lot of strength and bravery, and the least we can do is believe them.
What life was like for a heavy-drinking, perpetually fucked up mid-2000s East Village resident.
Ryan Adams may have left winter behind for the perennial summer of Los Angeles almost a decade ago, but he gifted us 10 records and god knows how many unreleased songs while in New York that give brief, yet beautiful snapshots into what life was like for a heavy-drinking, perpetually fucked up mid-2000s East Village resident. While we’ll never know the real stories behind the dozens of real Manhattan locations that dot his back catalogue, they gave me a blueprint for where to project my own. For someone who didn’t know much about New York before moving here, reading old interviews where Adams raved about Black & White and Niagara or songs about Chinatown and parades on Broadway helped me start my life.
“We did the cover shoot out in Los Angeles, and we did a lot of different poses and everything. One of the things we had was this big huge flag, and I thought it just looked powerful - that’s what attracted me to it. I also kind of wanted to tweak the whole Bruce Springsteen ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ thing. Instead of me standing there all tough like Bruce, I’m in my slouchy, twitchy posture, my head down, my hair a mess. We thought it looked cool, but it was also meant to be a bit of a goof.”
Ryan Adams recalls the night at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville when a distracting voice in the crowd shouted out a request: a song by Bryan Adams.
By the time Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings came out to sing on my song “Bartering Lines,” the vibes were tense. We got to the quietest moment where it is just our three voices a cappella, and suddenly that voice yelled the song that would then follow me for nearly 15 years: “Summer of ’69,” by Bryan Adams.
Before I could start the next song, the voice bellowed again. I recall looking down the long, dark aisles to see the security guards doing nothing. Had this never happened before? People were yelling, and a small scuffle seemed to happen in the back. I so desperately just wanted to play.
I finally had enough and piped up: “Who is it? Who is shouting? Tell me who it is!” I asked the person to raise his hand so I could see him. He did not. Finally people pointed furiously to a seat not far from me in the front. I walked down the few wooden steps in front of the stage to the aisle where all the fingers pointed.
By the time I got there, I was so angry. I felt humiliated, but what else could be done? Either way I had lost something. Unlike a more seasoned comic or musician, I didn’t have the experience to ignore a situation like this, or to use wit to turn it around. I felt a kind of disappointment and disillusionment that I had never known — and it was in front of a thousand-plus people.
As I approached the heckler’s wooden pew, I was shocked. He was only a few years older than me. Unshaven, bleary-eyed. He had on a baseball hat and seemed so drunk that his limbs hung from his sides like a broken doll. His eyes were like two poached eggs waiting to break. The anger left me, and I instantly felt bad. No one was there for this man. No one stopped him.
I said, “Hey man, if you were trying to ruin the show you succeeded, but I need to try and finish this — it’s my job.” I pulled out two $20 bills and said: “Here is your money, please take a taxi and leave here. Go home and take an aspirin. Please. Leave.”
I walked back to the stage. People applauded. The fourth wall was destroyed in the worst possible way. But this moment, where I decided to do what the security and the people around him would not, felt genuine. It is what I would have done if I were in the audience.
I would soon know the worst of it. A journalist in Nashville had taken the facts of that night and written a tale of madness: It said, more or less, “Ryan Adams throws out fan for requesting ‘Summer of ’69.’”
I was now a joke. 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.
But that was the beginning of who I am today. All of the humor and self-deflection I would ever learn came from that night. I am now grateful for it all. I know the nature of people. I know how they will throw insults and rock a boat just to watch a person go over the side. But I know they are not all cruel. Away from the stage lights, I would study others and look for that good.
I became the person who would send an email every year to the genius writer of that song on his birthday, which is also mine. I would learn how to show empathy, or fight for myself, or make fun of it all, and shine some love on that lonely, crazy person we have all stood next to before, screaming into the night from the shadows. I toasted the last drink I ever drank to that heckler the day I cleaned up.
Aug 30, 2002 – Sometime very late that same night we went back to Ryan’s apartment. Above, my wife Elizabeth listens as he plays some of his new songs. Around dawn, Julian Casablancas of the Strokes arrived to chill for awhile. It was after 8AM by the time we left. // Bob Gruen
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