News about the American Music Series, and me — I’ll be Asleep At The Wheel

So “Losering” is still semi-current and getting some attention here and there; I’m curious to see whether or not the next Ryan Adams album (whenever one emerges) might generate some more interest. But the book has been out there for more than six months, which means it’s high time to move along to the next thing. I’m happy to have some news about that, as well as the University of Texas Press American Music Series.

My next book will be co-writing a memoir with Ray Benson, founder and guiding light of the Western swing band Asleep At The Wheel, and it’s a project I could not be more excited about. I grew up in Texas during the ’70s progressive-country era, and I wrote my UT Master’s thesis about the Armadillo World Headquarters. I’ve always had a soft spot for that era’s icons, and as icons go Ray is one of the best — a fantastic musician and raconteur who has, as the saying goes, been around the world twice and talked to everybody at least once. This should be a raucous good time.

So that’s what I’ll be working on for the next year or so. While the Benson book is also for UT Press, this one won’t actually be part of the UT Press American Music Series. But work there continues apace. As mentioned previously, David Cantwell’s “Merle Haggard: The Running Kind” is next up, out in September, to be followed by John T. Davis’s “The Flatlanders: One More Road” in 2014. I’ve been asked to keep mum about several other titles in the works, but here are the ones in the pipeline that I can tell you about:

Los Lobos, by Chris Morris
John Prine, by Eddie Huffman
Vic Chesnutt, by Kristin Hersh
Ray Charles, by David Cantwell
Mary J. Blige, by Danny Alexander
Madonna, by Alina Simone

Obviously, the last two names are what jump off that list, possibly leaving you to wonder what the heck is going on here. Thus far the American Music Series has had an Americana focus, which is not surprising given that it’s an outgrowth of No Depression magazine. But the series is still developing an identity, and the truth is that we were always going to have to broaden it in terms of both styles and approaches to make it work. Thus, Mary J. Blige and Madonna.

Now it’s certainly possible that American Music Series might eventually come to mean just “books about music.” Nevertheless, even though Blige and Madonna are both outliers (and probably as far as I’d care to go in this direction), I think you can build a case for both being a better fit than they might seem at first glance. Blige, The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, is firmly grounded in the r&b tradition, and I’ve always thought of her as more soul than hip-hop. A decade from now, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she were singing straight-up gospel because such an evolution would make perfect sense.

That brings us to Madonna, who is admittedly more of a stretch. But I think the real draw here will be Alina Simone, one of the most exciting new writers out there. I first met Alina a few years back when she lived in Chapel Hill and was playing intriguingly dark indie-rock along the lines of Cat Power and PJ Harvey. She really found her voice on 2008′s Everyone Is Crying Out To Me, Beware, a tribute album to the late “Yanka” (Soviet-era punk icon Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva, who is Russia’s answer to Patti Smith). Sung entirely in Russian, Beware is a fascinating album with an even-more-fascinating back-story; you can read some of it here or here. Better still, read Alina’s wonderful 2011 memoir “You Must Go and Win.”

If Steve Earle, Jon Langford or another writerly Americana icon wanted to write a book for our series, I think we’d jump at the chance even if the subject they proposed fell outside the Americana universe. While Alina doesn’t have as high a musical profile as those two, she’s still part of this century’s indie-rock flock — someone that No Depression probably would have been reviewing if the magazine were still publishing when Beware came out. I think Alina’s idiosyncratic take on a cultural icon like Madonna will make for a great book. I can’t wait to read what she comes up with, and to be a part of sharing it with you.

Further artifacts from Ryan Adams’ distant past: the Ass/American Rock Highway recordings

As detailed in Chapter Three of “Losering,” Ryan Adams formed a string of short-lived bands with his roommate Tom Cushman in the early 1990s, before Patty Duke Syndrome and Whiskeytown. Ryan recorded virtually all of his musical endeavors back then (even the ones that didn’t exactly deserve preservation), and some of the recordings survive to the present day — including a Maxell cassette tape featuring two of their Daisy Street bands, Ass and American Rock Highway.

Lo and behold, that very tape is for sale on eBay, albeit at a steep price: bids starting at $3,000 with a buy-it-now price of $4,000. Cushman made the tape (which wound up in the hands of a friend in Raleigh), and he confirms that it’s authentic and being sold with his blessing. Bidding closes next Saturday, June 22. For particulars, below is how the listing reads:

So what is it?  The only known recording of ASS, one of Ryan’s earliest Raleigh bands.  There are no dubs of it, this is it.  Ryan Adams voc/gtr, Tom Cushman bass, John Rea drums.  It’s 6 songs, some in a Patty Duke Syndrome mode, others in a wilder improv infused style.  Hints of things to come all over the place.  As a bonus, the flip side of the tape is AMERICAN ROCK HIGHWAY, highly experimental noise rock with Tom on guitar, Ryan on drums.  A chance to hear some of his pounding drums.  I’m only parting with this gem because I’ve had a health crisis and need the money.  A rare find, the only one in existence, written about in the Menconi book Losering.

GQ says Brian Adams, I say Ryan Adams, let’s call the whole thing off

Oh, GQ magazine. How do you go from bad to worse? Well, you do a listicle in which actor Rainn Wilson details his “10 Essentials,” including a Jura Espresso Machine, Orson Welles and “Songs Played By Sad, Intelligent Men With guitars.” Given the company below, the name between Josh Ritter and Bob Dylan is almost surely supposed to be Ryan Adams. Alas, GQ glitched it as “Brian Adams” (and also misspelled both the Lumineers and Elliott Smith). But the great thing about the web is you can correct flubs like this, which GQ did several hours after this went online — except they compounded their mistake by changing it to not to Ryan, but his birthday doppleganger Bryan Adams. Noooooooooooooo!

Ryan Adams is man enough to look for love

My goodness, Ryan Adams is busy on the cameo front right now — or maybe it’s just that his cameos seem to be actually coming out lately, where before you’d always just read about them without ever actually hearing them. But anyway, he’s popped up online in featured cameo roles on new songs by two different acts more or less simultaneously. First, he’s featured as guitarist on New York City singer-songwriter Krista Polvere’s “Looking For Love,” a song that sounds like something Ryan himself might have done circa Rock n Roll; and second, he’s the big special guest on Dixie Chicks spinoff Courtyard Hounds’ “Are You Man Enough?,” which Ryan co-wrote and produced.

Take a listen and see what you think. Both are not bad; but both also leave me wishing he’d get back to making his own record…

Photoshopped spaghetti in the mirror

I’m in the midst of a hectic stretch right now, but I wanted to share a couple of quick Ryan Adams/Whiskeytown-related tidbits that turned up this week. First up is a poetry blog called Tweetspeak, which publishes a monthly musical playlist as a thematic poetry-writing prompt. June’s theme is “Mirror, Mirror” — and the song of the same name from Whiskeytown’s 2001 Pneumona album is the first of eight tracks listed alongside mirror-titled songs by Death Cab For Cutie, Bright Eyes, RJD2 and others. Some of the poetry this prompted is truly beautiful and inspired, too, well worth checking out.

Speaking of inspirational, dig the cool little piece of genius on the right here. Bloodshot Records (former label home of Ryan’s still-out-of-print 2000 album Heartbreaker) is conducting The Eddie Spaghetti Photoshopped Into Anything Challenge; and this is Whiskeytown’s drummer-turned-artist Skillet Gilmore’s entry, featuring the one and only Chip Robinson. The contest deadline is next Friday, June 14, with Supersuckers frontman Spaghetti himself selecting one winner and fans selecting the other via “Like” votes.

If anyone other than Skillet wins this thing, I’ll be stunned…

Frog Trouble for Ryan Adams: When pigs fly

Well, there’s still no definitive word on Ryan Adams’ next album — if it’s coming out anytime soon, or even whether or not it’s already finished. Even so, he’ll be on at least one release this fall, the upcoming fifth album by the noted children’s author Sandra Boynton. Titled Frog Trouble…and Eleven Other Pretty Serious Songs, it’s Boynton’s first country album and features a dozen Boynton-penned original songs sung by a wide array of big-name guest vocalists including Ryan and his fellow North Carolina expatriate Ben Folds. See the track list below, and look for Frog Trouble on September 3.

1. I’ve Got a Dog, Dwight Yoakam
2. Trucks, Fountains of Wayne
3. Frog Trouble, Mark Lanegan
4. Heartache Song, Kacey Musgraves
5. When Pigs Fly, Ryan Adams
6. Broken Piano, Ben Folds
7. Copycat, Brad Paisley
8. End of a Summer Storm, Alison Krauss
9. Alligator Stroll, Josh Turner
10. Beautiful Baby, Darius Rucker
11. Deepest Blue, Linda Eder
12. More Frog Trouble, Falls Mountain Cowboys (a fictitious group)

Ryan Adams’ literary bonafides

One thing about taking on Ryan Adams as a biography subject, you don’t want to blow it because he’s published a couple of books himself —  “Hello Sunshine” and “Infinity Blues,” both of which came out in 2009 (not quite as robust a display of productivity as his musical 2005, but pretty impressive nevertheless). And while neither book was unanimously acclaimed, they still established enough of a literary reputation for Ryan to land on a recent listicle about “10 Rockers With Serious Literary Cred.”  Ryan comes in at No. 8, just behind Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and ahead of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Nick Cave are all further on up the list, too. And fittingly, the top dog is Leonard Cohen.

Jacksonville Skyline

Unless you’ve done time in the military or driven to the beach from the Raleigh vicinity, chances are good you’ve never been anywhere near Ryan Adams’ birthplace of Jacksonville, North Carolina. And while Greater Jacksonville is not without its charms, it still seems like the sort of town most people want to flee at the earliest opportunity. That was certainly the case for Ryan, who (as recounted in the “Before” segment of “Losering”) ran away to Raleigh the first chance he got.

So if you’re wondering what Jacksonville looks like, Bob Fenster and friends at the Facebook group Theme Music have put together a nice little video tour. They’ve covered “Inn Town,” kickoff track to the signpost Whiskeytown album Strangers Almanac, accompanied by visuals taken from some YouTube videos shot in Jacksonville. Check it out here.

The combination of the landscape shots of scenery (and lack thereof) with “Inn Town”‘s forlorn vibe nails Jacksonville’s transitory facelessness perfectly; it’s a place nobody goes to, just passes through. And the final minute, shot from a car traversing the Highway 24 main drag, evokes pretty much exactly what it feels like to drive through there and wonder about the individual stories behind the desolate storefronts.

Back before I crossed paths with Ryan, I remember passing through Jacksonville and asking myself: Who lives here?…

Totems from Ryan Adams’ “Heartbreaker” period

There’s still no word on when Ryan Adams’ 2000 Heartbreaker album (which has been out of print and officially unavailable since March 1) might be re-released in some fashion. But a promising totem of that era is going around the web today, a photo of Ryan with the Guild guitar he played on Heartbreaker – and looking very much like he might be in the midst of recording…something. Maybe that new record that’s been discussed, which may or may not be coming in October. Here’s hoping!

Maybe the oddest picture of Ryan Adams I’ve ever seen…

The motto for A.M. Saddler Photography is “Capturing The Passion Of Performance.” Passionate or not, its “Concert Photo Of The Day” for today is a picture that shows Ryan Adams in…well, a strange light. Since this was taken by a professional photographer, I shouldn’t just slap the entire picture here. But on the right is a little snippet I cropped out, which I hope will intrigue you enough to want to see the rest of it. To see the complete picture in all its peculiar glory (plus a rather involved and surreal backstory on how this photo from a 2005 show at new York City’s Town Hall came to be posted today), go here.

Personally, I think DRA is rather fetching in pigtails…