 
Legend has it that in classical Indian music, the young apprentice undergoes a rite of passage where you go lock yourself in a room in some isolated cabin, nail your hair to the wall, and practice your instrument all day and all night. For weeks. It’s part of gaining mastery over the instrument and discipline over your creative impulses. Sonny Rollins did his version of this when he disappeared for a couple of years and then re-emerged as a much more incredible musician. Joao Gilberto, the father of the bossa nova, was a nobobdy pothead, then disappeared for a year and re-emerged as a genius. Like a butterfly coming out of the cocoon. And that, my friends, is just what I suggest Ryan Adams do. I feel like Ryan Adams is only half of what I want him to be. We live in an age of instant gratification, and Mr. Adams has become the musical personification of that impulse. What the heck are you talking about, you may ask at this point. And what’s more, who the bejeezus is Ryan Adams? Why should we care? You should care because what happens to Ryan Adams happens to us all. When the afore-mentioned butterfly sneezes in China, the wind blows south instead of north in Wyoming. There’s a sudden frost and the fruit falls from the vine in Napa and then I have no wine to drink. We’re talking about the end of Two Buck Chuck, for crying out loud! No, wait, that would be a good thing. Think instead about the children. Think about the kids! Quick backstory: Ryan started an “alt-country” group called Whiskeytown back in the late nineties, which did quite well, critics’ darling and all that, before splintering under Adams’ erratic behaviour and drunken rantings. Whiskeytown left behind four or five albums as well as countless bootlegs (“unreleased recordings) and Adams went on to record an indie album for Bloodshot called Heartbreaker, before going major. His major label debut was a double album. Then came a demo collection called Demolition. Another bootleg, the Suicide Handbook, recorded around the time of Heartbreaker, starts going around. That’s followed by the simultaneous issue of Love is Hell part one and two, both EPs and Rock and Roll, a full length. That brings us up to 2005, when he’s so far released a double CD called Cold Roses, another disc called Jacksonville City Nights, and has two more CD supposedly on the way before year’s end. Whew. And now, a true story: I was walking through the record store, minding my own business, feeling cranky, I guess, when I realized that Jerry Garcia, Captain Trips himself, was wailing away on the guitar over the instore sound system. I looked up at the celing and said aloud “Why the HELL are we playing the Dead in the store?!!!!” I was told by my friend Bob that the Dead were actually Ryan Adams. And I’ve listened to Ryan Adams before. I was fooled. Well, fuck. Take Rock and Roll. You can tell the songs:
here’s a U2 song, there’a a Nirvana song and so on. Even
though he has somewhat of an identity, Ryan is way too impressionable
and way too likely to just spit out a song that sound like whatever
he was listening to. Or take Jacksonville. Really kind
of pointless, with barely formed songs that kind of all sound the same. Part of the larger problem is that the people at the record company figure they can sell any old CD that Adams puts out. He has carte blanche to crap out an album if he wants to and they’ll say thank you and lick his toes. And all of my friends that like Ryan Adams inevitably buy it and then lament the inconsistencies and all that. It’s like how Nigel Godrich stood up to Paul McCartney and made him make a good album. Get somebody with some cojones to tell Ryan he’s a fuck-up and make him listen to reason. Get George Martin or Nigel or someone to guide him into making the great classic album he’s obviously capable of. There’s a reason why labels hire producers. Take him up to the hills and nail his hair to a tree until he distills his songs to the ones that really matter. Take away his CD and record collection. Make sure the guy only has his internal dialogue to be inspired by. It matters on a greater scale because we don’t want this lack of quality control to spread. OK, it already has. Adams is just an extreme example of it. But with artists like Britney Spears you pretty much know there’s the hit or two and then the crap. With somebody like Ryan, for some unknown reason, we have come to expect more. Blame it on the Beatles, or Pink Floyd, or anyone else in the original bloom of “album-oriented rock”. Let’s write a letter to our Republican congress. They’d put a stop to this, I know. Wait a minute, no they wouldn’t. That would be obstructing free trade and free trade means the fucking corporations can shove whatever lame product they want down our throats. In that sense, Adams must be just what the doctor ordered: somebody who’s genius enough to make people hang on his every release and prolific enough to put out four albums a year. But we all know that the superhits of the world finance the lesser albums and the flops. Kanye West’s earnings also pay the bills for a lot of other things that didn’t perform up to expectations. And Adams could be on the level of Kanye if only he would tighten it up. But why make him put out a great record when he already does whatever he wants? He’s an artist, right? |
An
Issue of Quality Control