 More Is More
Ryan Adams is one of the most prolific songwriters around. But that doesn’t mean he has forsaken quality for quantity. By Kevin Raub
There is an industry joke out there, and it’s that singer-songwriter Ryan Adams needs an editor. In the seven years since the collapse of Whiskeytown, the maverick, turbulent alt-country band he formed in North Carolina in 1994, Adams has pumped out nine records, including three in 2005 alone. There’s a problem with the punch line, though: Every single one of the albums is good.
There is, perhaps, no other contemporary songwriter whose catalog features a more varied juxtaposition of genres from album to album than Adams’s does. There’s a clear-cut Liam Gallagher–influenced sneer one moment (2003’s Rock N Roll) and a drawn-out Hank Williams lament the next (2005’s Jacksonville City Nights), with extended moments of classic pop and rock thrown in, just in case you were getting comfortable. Since Adams usually chooses to stick with a particular genre within each album, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if there were a few people out there who think there are different artists sharing the stage name Ryan Adams.
But his latest effort, Easy Tiger, billed as a solo album but featuring his band, the Cardinals, marks a distinct stray from that formula. This time out, Adams has decided to play his game of musical potpourri on the same CD. He begins treading in deep countrified sludge (“Goodnight Rose”) and follows with a folksy pop romp with Sheryl Crow (the first single, “Two”) and, a little later, with a ’70s rock frolic (“Halloweenhead”). Again, all of them are good. So it’s true that Adams’s prolific muse may be relentless, but as long as his assorted arsenal continues to be replenished at this caliber, the only editing necessary will be that of music critics’ praise.
You and Stephen King are big fans of each other’s work. How did he come to write your press bio? It was actually just a shot in the dark. I’d been looking for someone to write the liner notes for a future box set of unreleased material and was interested in having someone unusual write it. I pulled Steve’s name out of a hat, thinking it would never happen. One day, he just called me up and started asking me questions for the bio. It was all very intense and kind of awesome. We talked for about half an hour, and I hadn’t even finished my lunch. When I arrived home, he already had it written.
This album is billed as Ryan Adams, though the Cardinals play on it. How do you distinguish between the two? I don’t, really. It’s label stuff. I don’t fully understand it. The vinyl says Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, which is kind of great, but I guess it makes more sense for the label to have it be a solo record. I don’t think it was politics of personal destruction, but, in my mind, it sounded very much like a Cardinals project. I wasn’t happy with [the decision to bill it as a solo record], but the band is a lot more mature about stuff than I am. They were just like, “Let it go.” But there will come a day when I don’t have to answer to stuff like that.
You have been accused of being too prolific. Might it have to do with not flooding the market with Ryan Adams & the Cardinals records? I don’t really know what’s wrong with that. It doesn’t make any sense to me that someone could find fault in that I make too much music. I have never, nor will I ever, succumbed to the pressures of what the world considers to be a reasonable rate of production. It’s not a painting. It doesn’t take up space. It’s just music. I’m playing it anyway. The only reason to record it is to document the idea. I can’t imagine what’s so wrong about having a lot of ideas.
You sobered up this time around. How did that affect your approach to writing Easy Tiger? Sobering up had more to do with me, in that I wasn’t wasted. All my album work and writing have always been done sober. Very little has ever been done under the duress of any kind of drug. I just didn’t write that way. Music looks, to a lot of people, like nothing but fun, and like once you know how to do it, it’d be like tennis, and you just do it. It’s not really like that. It’s not light work to do it enough to remember it in its correct form.
Do you think that your music elicits moods or that people reach for your CD when they are in a particular mood? My simple answer is that I have no frame of reference. I can see the music only from one angle — as the creator of it. It’s like people see the songs as grown-ups, and I’ve been there since before they were born. It would be very presumptuous to pretend like I would know what other people think about it.
When someone tells you their favorite Ryan Adams song, does that say a little something about that person? I rarely hear that. I don’t think in any way that it’s necessarily a hip thing to say you’re into my music. I’m just saying that, as someone who knows, if I wasn’t me, I would maybe like the stuff that I did, but I wouldn’t necessarily be bragging about it. I haven’t really given anybody any reason to think that listening to me is a hipster thing to do. That being said, I’m not saying I’m not pretentious. I’m just not pretentious enough to pretend that I think that I’m cool.
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The Essential One
Pick just one album for the rest of your life. Tricky choice? Imagine how hard it is for a music critic to choose. By Jenna Schnuer
Songs have not remained the same since 1978, when music critic Greil Marcus asked a bevy of rock writers to answer this question: “What one rock-and-roll album would you take to a desert island?” The result of that query was Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (Da Capo), the collection of the writers’ responses. Nearly 30 years later, Phil Freeman, 35, a music critic and the managing editor of Global Rhythm, decided it was time to update the “sacred text.” His collection of essays by critics — with a foreword by Marcus — is Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs (Da Capo). The late ’70s “was an entirely different world,” says Freeman. “Punk was a thing that had come and gone. There was no such thing as rap. Disco was still a big thing. Most of what we listen to today barely existed. Even heavy metal — all there was was Led Zeppelin, maybe the first Van Halen album, and Black Sabbath.” We talked to Freeman about his musical tastes, the world of music writers, and his growing interest in the music of Dionne Warwick.
So we’ll understand where you’re coming from, what kind of music do you favor? Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been into heavy metal. When I started picking my own music, around 12, the first record I ever talked my dad into buying for me was by Judas Priest. When I was about 15, I started listening to jazz as well. I was going through one of those periods when I trusted Rolling Stone. They did this big issue that was on the greatest albums of the last 20 years or something. Two of them were by Miles Davis, so I went out and bought those two albums. Kind of Blue was just really beautiful. The melodies he was playing stuck in my head immediately, so I just started exploring jazz. The dichotomy between metal and jazz has pretty much fueled my music listening ever since.
I know it’s unfair to ask you to generalize, but how would you describe music writers as a whole? There’s a famous quote from Hunter Thompson, who said a photograph of the top 10 political journalists on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. That goes double for music critics. They are largely prematurely balding, prematurely overweight, poorly dressed geeks. I’ve been in a room with tons of them.
My apologies. They accept this about themselves; they’re the shambling Quasimodo figures.
But they do have a passion for something that goes far beyond what other people ever find. It starts early with you guys, right? Oh yeah. The obsessiveness is fascinating to me, because a good music critic can make you want to hear something that you may have had a visceral negative reaction to in the past. The obsessiveness at its best is contagious.
Did you pick the book’s contributors with an expectation of what artist or genre they would focus on? I picked people I liked. And I thought I knew what a couple of them would pick, and then they totally didn’t. I chose them because I wanted to make sure there were writers representing rap and dance music and metal, none of which were really featured in Stranded. Then two of my token metal guys, one went with a rap record and one went with Dionne Warwick.
A lot of the pieces were very personal. Did that surprise you? As editorial formats in magazines and newspapers have gotten a lot tighter, the lengthy personal-essay type of music criticism is really frowned upon in a lot of venues. It was really gratifying to see people take it in that direction, to show that how music impacts people is still important.
What albums are you rethinking after reading the essays? I might end up listening to Dionne Warwick. It could happen.
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Grace, Under Pressure
Holly Hunter hits the small screen playing a detective with big-time problems. By Ken Parish Perkins
 Most of what the viewer needs to know about Holly Hunter’s Grace Hanadarko, the protagonist of TNT’s new series Saving Grace, happens right there in the first few moments, and what a wild few moments they are. She’s a boozing exhibitionist having an affair with a passive-aggressive married man. Her house looks like a war zone, with liquor bottles as weapons. She zips through life as if she doesn’t care much how or when she’ll leave it. Though she’s a detective sworn to serve and protect, it’s clear that she’s the one who needs the protection.
That protection comes in the strangest of ways, and it’s the crust on which Saving Grace is based. She’s visited by an angel one night on a dark, abandoned road after having run over a pedestrian with her sleek black Porsche. The man is lying in the street, his head busted open, and there’s Grace, drunk and rattled, trying to give the poor soul mouth-to-mouth.
He’s a goner, and the way it looks for Grace, so is she.
She begins to cry out to God (which is either temporary insanity or the unveiling of her true self), and with Grace, it’s difficult to figure out what she wants most — for the man to live or for her career to be saved. That’s when the angel appears. And while I believe that angels sent to look over us are reflections of our true selves, hers is an older, scraggly gentleman with bad teeth who looks like he’s just stumbled by after an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. (Come to think of it, maybe it is her reflection.)
“I’m Earl,” he says, chewing what looks like tobacco. “Whaddaya need?”
Earl’s spiel is that she’s flushing her life down the toilet and that he’s there to stop her before it’s too late.
Grace thinks he’s nuts, and it takes several other reminders to prove to her that this guy is the real deal (she’s transported to what looks like the Grand Canyon, and the accident victim disappears and then ends up as a death-row inmate at the local prison), which only makes the ambivalence set in on Grace’s already tormented soul.
Fortunately, her brother is a priest, and she tells him her tale. Unfortunately, he thinks the booze and wild life are talking and dismisses her. “If you’re asking me if God can perform miracles, the answer is yes,” he tells her. “If you’re asking me if God would stage a drunk-driving accident and have an angel take you to the Grand Canyon — I doubt it.”
Saving Grace is set in Oklahoma City, where the presence of God is just about everywhere, from the marquees of churches that sit on nearly every corner to the highway billboards that toss out proverbs to go along with your daily commute to people who say God bless you as easily as they say hello and goodbye. This is a warring place for an atheist to be, particularly an atheist as headstrong as Grace. She’s quite open about having chosen a godless existence, one that now colors her impressions of the angel who’s trying to make her do a 180-degree turn literally overnight.
It’s clear where TNT is coming from with this bold drama: It’s pursuing the possibility of re-creating the success of The Closer, whose Kyra Sedgwick, another veteran film actress whose well has gone dry in feature films, has found gold in good ratings and a steady paycheck.
Always quick-witted and mercurial, even in some of her lesser roles, Hunter — a 1993 Oscar winner (The Piano) who is one year shy of 50, if you can believe that — offers some interesting layers of behavior, which she conveys with heartbreaking emotion and without a trace of showiness. Her Grace is a cop with, I want to say, an attitude, but it’s not even that. She’s a sad and pathetic mess, a woman who refuses to believe that her demons caught up with her long ago.
Still, Grace has the uncanny ability to lighten the mood, as she does when a friend suggests to her that the next time Earl shows up, she take the opportunity to ask some of life’s biggest questions, like “Is Jesus the son of God? Was he conceived by the Holy Spirit? What happens when we die?” To those, Grace adds, “What’s the deal with cramps?”
But here’s another thing: If we were privy to God’s plan, could we live with the truth? Should we? Earl tells Grace in one scene that giving people answers only leaves little room for faith. The true test of faith is believing in the things you can’t see. The things you don’t know.
“So I’m supposed to do what?” Grace wants to know. “Change my life? Go to church? Be nice to people?”
It will be interesting finding out.
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Anger Management
Forty-five years later, the Hulk is still our favorite green giant. By Bryan Reesman
“Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”
 With that thinly veiled threat on The Incredible Hulk, the late Bill Bixby delivered a culturally resonant statement echoing the frustrations of anyone who’s ever been provoked or persecuted by someone or something. Many of us wish that we had our own personal demon to launch upon the world when it comes down on us. Growing up, I was a scrawny kid, and I always thought it would be great to teach local bullies a lesson by transforming into a giant green creature that would scare the bejesus out of them and toss them a mile away.
The Hulk represents our inner id, a wild and unfettered being that can smash and crash through everything, the side of us that seeks to use fists and feet when we decide to cease being rational. And in his various incarnations over the years — from comic books to animation to live action — he has provided plenty of vicarious mayhem for his legion of devoted fans.
The original story, unleashed in 1962 by Marvel Comics guru Stan Lee and legendary comic artist Jack Kirby, was simple: The brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner developed a powerful gamma bomb. Just prior to a trial detonation, teenager Rick Jones recklessly drove out on the test field as part of a dare. Banner ran out and tossed him into a trench but could not join him before the bomb exploded; thus Banner absorbed a massive dose of gamma rays that later transformed him into the rampaging Hulk. Despite his lesser intelligence, the Hulk’s superhuman strength and size allowed him to soar high into the air, hurtle through buildings, and tear asunder everything from lab machines to missiles.
Lee and Kirby’s stories were straightforward. Initially transforming only at night, but later also when experiencing rage or anxiety, Banner worked to conceal his dual nature, while Ross, Talbot, and the armed forces, not to mention a plethora of nemeses, including the gamma-ray-altered Wendigo and the Leader, hounded the Hulk relentlessly. Over the years, the less-than-jolly giant went through numerous incarnations: He was originally gray, and then green, which remained his dominant color. His personas ranged from his savage side to one where his body and Banner’s intelligence were merged. He occasionally joined superhero teams such as the Avengers, the Defenders, and the Pantheon, and he embarked on all manner of adventures — terrestrial, intergalactic, and even subatomic. One thing that stayed the same is that he always had the ability to speak, referring to himself in the third person (“Hulk smash!”), unlike his solely growling television-and-movie self.
The live-action television show developed by Kenneth Johnson in the late ’70s abandoned most of the comic-book ideas and characters, undoubtedly for budgetary reasons but also to make the concept more appealing to a mainstream audience. Bruce Banner became David Banner, a scientist who felt guilt over being unable to rescue his wife from a fiery car wreck and thus delved into exploring the hidden strengths many of us tap into during times of great stress. An accidental but self-administered overexposure to gamma radiation created his mean, green Mr. Hyde persona, which emerged during times of anger or great stress. Banner and his colleague Dr. Elaina Marks tried to contain “the raging spirit within him,” but her accidental death in a massive lab explosion and the mistaken belief that he had also died, along with the mistaken assumption that both deaths had occurred at the hands of the Hulk, put the good doctor on the run.
From there, the series developed a formula: Banner drifted from town to town, using a different surname each time, befriending people who hired him and then becoming entangled in their lives, which usually involved the intrusion of a criminal element that was eventually rectified by the Hulk. His alter ego was now pursued by tabloid reporter Jack McGee.
Johnson’s television series was radically different from its printed origins, but it still worked because of Bill Bixby’s intelligent, sensitive portrayal of Banner and because of Lou Ferrigno’s impressive physique and ability to generate sympathy for the creature. The Incredible Hulk won an acting Emmy for the tragic season-two opener “Married,” one of the only instances in which David Banner found happiness on the series. The show also had a sense of humor, like in “Terror in Times Square,” when a mobster intimidating Banner warns him, with unintentional irony, “You really don’t want to make me angry, and I really don’t want to make you angry.” The three fun but goofy television movies that came after the four-year series was canceled brought us the first screen representations of Marvel heroes Thor (Return of the Incredible Hulk) and Daredevil (Trial of the Incredible Hulk) and portrayed the end of our green hero (Death of the Incredible Hulk). (Cool trivia footnote: The show’s opening title narrator was Ted Cassidy, a.k.a. Lurch, from The Addams Family.)
An essential element to the series’ success was Joseph Harnell’s impressive, multifaceted score. It spanned everything from ominous orchestral sounds for the Hulk to the signature melancholy piano piece for Banner (“The Lonely Man”), which emphasized his isolation and alienation. As the closing theme for a superhero-based show, it was highly unorthodox and eternally memorable.
For my money, The Incredible Hulk series is still fun, and its gradual re-release on DVD will allow a new generation of fans to discover its guilty pleasures. (The Incredible Hulk: The Complete Second Season was released in July through Universal Home Video.) At the very least, it’s cool to imagine yourself being able to transform into a fearsome beast when those who provoke, anger, or prey on you just happen to press your buttons on the wrong day. Perhaps at the end of the day we’re just like the Hulk — we want a little respect.
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