Ryan Adams and the Cardinals Don't Look Back

By Matt Diehl, Photography by Phil Andelman
from blackbookmag.com

"Life on the road hasn't changed at all. I just no longer get dead-drunk wasted and disappear to some hotel in Tijuana." —Ryan Adams, above.

“Let him mess around a bit,” the manager instructs. Sure, the interview was supposed to start 20 minutes ago, and sure, it’s the second attempt at one to boot (he slept through the last one). He’s been sober over a year, yet Ryan Adams still marches to the ticktock of his own internal clock. Indeed, at the moment, Adams proves oblivious to the outside world. He’s strumming away intently on an acoustic guitar in a recording booth at Sunset Sound, the legendary Los Angeles music studio where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds, the Stones tracked Exile on Main Street, and everyone from Dylan and Van Halen to Beck has come for inspiration. So ensconced, Adams won’t surface for maybe an hour or more.

“The drugs aren’t the person, the person is the person,” explains Neal Casal, the wiry, intense guitarist in Adams’s backing band, the Cardinals. “We discovered that when he finished his whole trip—it was like nothing really changed! Ryan got sober and he’s still unpredictable. None of the excitement left, because it was there beforehand. It’s good news that [the chaos] wasn’t a ‘thing.’ It’s not like, ‘God, I wish Aerosmith would start doing drugs again.’”

Adams’s infamy for hedonistic unreliability had started eclipsing his reputation as perhaps the young American songwriter with the greatest potential for instant classic. If the dawn of the new millennium had a “new Dylan,” Adams was so anointed upon the release of his debut album, 2000’s roots-rock masterpiece, Heartbreaker. His capacity for heroin, booze, coke and vitriol, however, was turning him into Gen Y’s Johnny Thunders. He appeared destined to join those tragic rock myths—Nick Drake, Jim Morrison, Jeff Buckley—who disappeared into the ether when their talent was burning brightest.

“I didn’t go somewhere to get sober,” Adams confesses as he settles into a couch in the studio lounge, casually firing up a Marlboro (all of the Cardinals operate with shocking indifference to California smoking laws). “I literally just stopped.” Yet, when Adams decided to finally kick his addictions for good in May 2006, he didn’t sit still. Instead, he clambered right back on the road: Immediately, he joined the Cardinals (which also include Chris Feinstein on bass, Jon Graboff on pedal steel, and Brad Pemberton on drums) on a North American summer tour, which bled into six more weeks in Europe. “It couldn’t have been more than a month or two before I got straight back to work,” he explains. “Life on the road hasn’t changed at all. I just no longer get dead-drunk wasted and disappear to some hotel in Tijuana. But I discovered I had an even greater appetite for how absurd life was.”

Right now, Adams and his Cardinals are living on the road, following the summer 2007 release of Adams’s widely acclaimed new album, Easy Tiger. After a “fucking amazing, unreal” show at Colorado’s Red Rocks, the band was supposed to have a week of R&R at home before jetting to the Southern Hemisphere for shows in Australia and New Zealand. Instead, they’re in Los Angeles recording for a new project. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. “We don’t know what day it is, but it doesn’t matter,” Pemberton jokes. The atmosphere is vital but relaxed: Pot smoke wafts through the air and, between takes, Pemberton—a lanky, convivial Nashville native—shoots hoops in his cowboy boots with Adams’s girlfriend and constant companion, the young British writer (and former model) Jessica Joffe. Adams has been linked to so many boldface names—Winona Ryder, Alanis Morissette, Parker Posey—it’s hard to keep them all straight. Regardless of his romantic history, it’s difficult to prepare for Joffe’s gossamer beauty, which staggers up close. With her healthy waves of ginger hair, pure porcelain complexion, and innately tranquil English-rose demeanor, it’s difficult to imagine Joffe as Adams’s former drug buddy.

Adams keeps his posse close, leading them into battle like a benevolent dictator; the band laughs about the fact that Apocalypse Now is a better reference point for what they’re going through than Spinal Tap. “We have to be open to anything at anytime—all of us,” Casal explains. “There’s a lot of raw belief involved.” “Raw belief” may be a synonym for faith and Adams’s fellow Cardinals have definitely drunk his Kool Aid. “Any cliff that Ryan wants to jump off of isn’t too high,” Casal continues. “Nobody is afraid of anything. Ryan put together the band of his dreams, and we’ve turned into our own little traveling gang. This lineup is totally impenetrable.”

It’s clear that with his sidemen, Adams is attempting to create a unit not unlike what Dylan did during his alliance with the Band: a stealth, fluid organism where everyone is firing together on all cylinders to foment a musical revolution. “The best shit is to come as the full Cardinals, not with my stupid name in front,” Adams says. “People are getting weird about how rock ’n’ roll is finished, how albums are disappearing. Well, don’t worry, because Ghostbusters is coming. We’ve got that totally taken care of.”

Adams thinks what he’s doing now is so important that he’s capturing the whole long, strange trip, an effort recalling Robert Frank’s edgy documentary reportage during the making of the Rolling Stones’ Exile. In addition to directing his own home movies about the band, he’s got two cameramen on the case: Phil Andelman—the former tour lensman for Adams’s favorite, the Grateful Dead—whose pictures accompany this story, and Casal, who provided Easy Tiger’s haunting cover portrait featuring Adams as a nicotine-enhanced twist on Rodin’s famous “Thinker.” “There’s no band that can do what we do,” Casal interjects. “We have a bit of attitude because we know how good it is. No one can touch us—you should write that.”

Adams credits the Cardinals for making it possible for him to create what may be his best music yet—and pulling him out of what critics saw as a creative decline set against an untutored, almost freakish productivity. After leaving his short-lived yet revered band Whiskeytown, Adams received his greatest acclaim for his debut solo album, 2000’s Heartbreaker, released when he was just barely 26-years-old. With his authentic North Carolina twang and vintage-classic songcraft, Heartbreaker led Adams to be anointed the poster boy for country-rockin’ Americana; it also led to a ye olde major label deal with Lost Highway. Adams’s sophomore effort, 2001’s Gold, would sell nearly 400,000 copies and earn two Grammy nominations—he even spawned a minor hit in the song “New York, New York,” a folkie anthem of Manhattan romance that resonated nationally in the wake of 9/11. Still, Adams seemed troubled by being pigeonholed as a roots rocker. In fact, he just seemed troubled.

He became maniacally prolific, recording numerous unreleased, legendary albums (including an all-blues version of the Strokes’ Is This It). More than a hundred of his songs got leaked on the Internet during this time, sometimes by Adams himself, often in styles ranging from hip-hop to hardcore. He’d form punk bands, posting EPs under pseudonyms. Adams’s official releases were equally scattered: 2002’s Demolition was little more than a collection of demos, while Love Is Hell and Rock N Roll proved bizarre concept albums—the former a tribute to Northern English Britpop (featuring a spectral, Grammy-nominated cover of Oasis’ “Wonderwall”), the latter an ambitious if artificial tribute to, well, rock ’n’ roll. Adams himself became a gossip-column fixture, his every starlet dalliance, online trash talk, and contraband-enhanced stumble lovingly documented by the tabloids.

In 2005, Adams formed the Cardinals, which at first seemed to continue his eccentric spiral. He released three albums in a year’s time—two with the Cardinals, Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, and one solo, 29—with seemingly diminishing returns. Despite blasts of brilliance and ambitious, audacious gambles with style and genre, Adams’s muse seemed spread too thin.

Easy Tiger reveals conclusively, however, that there’s a method to Adams’s madness. It proves to be his most acclaimed, consistent effort to date: “Easy Tiger could easily be seen as the album that many of his fans have wanted to hear since Heartbreaker,” gushed one reviewer. He even found a fan in Stephen King, who wrote his official bio for the album (“He’s a cranky badass–he’s cool,” Adams says of his relationship with the best-selling author. “My flow with him is pretty nice.”) Easy Tiger’s songs—like the sodden confessional “Halloweenhead,” the gorgeous single “Two,” and elegiac album closer “I Taught Myself How To Grow Old”—don’t shy away from Adams’s demons. Still, a new positivity had crept into the authentically-frayed grooves–—if you can imagine Neil Young’s tortured addiction classic Tonight’s the Night with a happy ending, then you get the idea. “I knew there were good songs trapped by the personality,” Adams says, “but now we know best how to get them out of me. It’s all about subscribing to the moment. Forward is forward—there’s no going back for me.”

In person, it’s easy to see why Adams commands such do-or-die partners in crime. He’s wildly charismatic and approachable and, while not conventionally handsome, his blue eyes prove magnetically electric, sucking all energy towards them. Besides, Adams has enough energy to fill a room. Coughing, throwing bottles, gesturing wildly with his surprisingly huge hands, Adams fiddles with his famously tousled hair as he talks. Stomping around in his skinny jeans and hooker boots, Adams holds court with flair, an infectious smile and a little healthy paranoia, always acting as the center of attention.
At once, he’s a contradiction—a fearless leader, yet someone you want to take care of, a little dominant and slightly fey all at once. “Ryan’s got endless enthusiasm and optimism, but at the same time he’s a sensitive guy and can’t help but feel he’s been roughed up by life,” Pemberton explains. “My personality changes all the time—I’m totally fucking psychotic,” Adams says. “My dreams are real and my reality is dreamlike. I like the idea that there really aren’t any boundaries.”

“It’s an extreme lifestyle,” Casal admits. “Every day is a challenge. You’re either going to survive it or you’re not.” At this, Pemberton congratulates Adams: Today is his monthly anniversary of sobriety, and clearly he’s glad he’s still here to enjoy the ride.

Appropriately, Adams finds a travel metaphor to explain this latest evolution. “I just landed the thing,” he says. Flicking his ash into a coffee cup, Adams’s magical eyes open up wide for emphasis. “I had a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, and I flew right overhead those last couple of years,” he continues. “I was like, ‘You can’t touch me, motherfucker—I’m up here!’ But I saw this great thing happening on the ground beneath me: my life, family. A couple of those wonderful, fucking goddamn beautiful people who love me tapped me on the shoulder one day and said, ‘We got your back. It’s all good. It’s safe now, you can come down.’ And then I landed.”