Ryan Adams recently played a well-received acoustic bluegrass set with Infamous Stringdusters at last month’s Newport Folk Festival, long-ago site of one of the the rock era’s great confrontations. Newport was where Bob Dylan horrified and enraged folkie purists back in 1965 by putting aside his acoustic guitar to play loud electric-guitar rock backed up by the Butterfield Blues Band. Rock-mythology enthusiast that he is, Ryan made a nod to that history as well as his own penchant for confounding the expectations of his fanbase with the for-the-occasion T-shirts he was selling at the gig:
I would go electric but my fans are already used to disappointment.
The shirts are now available for $19.99 at his online Pax Am store. I’ve gotta say, I like this almost as much as my vintage Ryan Adams Is On Fire T-shirt. And along these lines, there’s a Bob Mould song I’d like to hear Ryan cover.
There’s still no word on when Ryan Adams’ next album might emerge, but he nevertheless has a cool new recorded artifact out there that’s worth hearing. This week, National Public Radio released an hour-long interview Ryan recently conducted with his friend, idol and sometime conspiratorBob Mould.
Along with playing a few songs, they have a freewheeling and often very funny conversation touching on a wide range of topics including punk-rock as polka music, the “caveman mumbling” stage of songwriting, Bob’s new album Patch the Sky (another record featuring Ryan’s long-ago Whiskeytown bandmate Jon Wurster on drums), their mutual need for reclusiveness, Ryan’s made-up term for when the rhythm section drops out and it’s just the guitar playing (“monkey grind”), the fastest band Bob ever saw live (The Dickies), road hobbies, records as through-line jokes in search of punchlines, bands from the Stones to the Swans — you get the idea.
Take a listen here. It’s worth sticking around to the very end, for Ryan’s goofy “invisible airplane” joke.
I’ve always thought Ryan Adams had pretty fantastic comedic instincts (gotta give it up for his “black metal” version of “16 Days,” among many other very funny onstage moments from over the years). But this “commercial” he’s done for tomorrow’s release of his new eponymously titled album…well, I’m sorry, but the two words that come to mind are “excruciatingly” and “awkward,” despite some impressive star power including Garry Shandling, Jeff Garlin, Don Was and Bob Mould. Guess they must have banged this one out while making that video for Mould’s “The War.”
Anyway, take a look. Maybe you’ll find it funnier than I did…
ADDENDA: Wow, looks like they made yet another video, this one in starkly noirish black and white — check it out. And a third, this one, which is genuinely funny. But the soup one, man, I just don’t know…
So good old Jon Wurster, who was one of Whiskeytown’s drummers back in the day, is playing in Bob Mould’s band nowadays amongst many other activities (some of which are cataloged here). In that capacity, he’s in Mould’s very fine new video for “The War,” a song off Mould’s current album Beauty and Ruin (Merge Records) that is brimming with intimations of mortality:
This war has worn me down Broken dreams and a hole in the ground Don’t give up And don’t give in.
Lo and behold, Wurster’s old Whiskeytown bandmate Ryan Adams (who has been known to cover the occasional Mouldsong) also turns up in the video right about as Mould is murmuring those words. Ryan appears in the final 30 seconds of “The War,” in a cameo that seems to imply a passing of the torch. He comes in just before the 4:20 mark, looking pretty 420 himself (heh); check that out here.
While I’m at it, Wurster also appears in Mould’s first Beauty and Ruin video, for “I Don’t Know You Anymore” (which features another high-profile cameo, by Colin Melloy of Decemberists). And Mould is quoted speaking at length about Ryan in this very fine interview feature.
Jon Wurster is best-known as drummer for Superchunk, and he’s also played with Mountain Goats and Bob Mould in recent years. But he did a stint in Whiskeytown during the band’s late-’90s revolving-door period, including a semi-disastrous tour opening for John Fogerty in the summer of 1998. Jon shared some memories about it on his Facebook page last year under the self-deprecating tagline, “Career in Rock (I can’t believe I saved all this stuff),” and also when I interviewed him for “Losering.”
“That tour with Fogerty had some rough moments because [Strangers Almanac] was so far in the past for Ryan and I don’t think he wanted to play those songs anymore,” Jon said. “It looked good on paper, Fogerty had done big business his previous tour with the old Creedence songs. Then he did this shed tour and there was not as much interest as they’d hoped. So we were playing in daylight in the middle of summer for crowds of 2,000 people old enough to be our parents finding their seats. It was too much for him.”
Never one to back down, Ryan took to bantering with hecklers at some of those ’98 Fogerty shows. It didn’t go well. “That worked about as well as yelling at your parents,” Jon said.
Jon’s a good egg, a very fine drummer and a sweetheart of a guy — a perfect combination of ability and affable comic relief — which is why he’ll always have work as a drummer. Plus he’s got mad style. Coming home from South By Southwest this past March, I came upon him getting a shoeshine at DFW airport and couldn’t resist snapping a picture (sorry about the blurriness, but that’s what you get when your camera is a crappy mobile phone).
As good a drummer as Jon is, however, it’s possible he’ll ultimately make a bigger mark in the world of comedy. He first got my attention as a comic back in 1999 when he played the role of clueless rock critic Ronald Thomas Clontle on “Rock, Rot and Rule,” arguably the greatest phone prank of all time. Thirteen years later, Jon and partner-in-crime Tom Scharpling are still doing radio comedy, earning accolades like “punk geniuses.”
This past June, Jon caused a minor sensation when he witnessed a flight attendant freaking out on a grounded flight at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and filed hilarious dispatches via Twitter and Facebook (and if you’re not his Facebook friend, you really should be because there’s nobody funnier to have in your news feed). That landed him on multiple media outlets to recount the story, which was hugely entertaining.
Jon’s latest gambit is even better, playing douchebag boyfriend “Denny Rock” in Aimee Man’s new video— which is a remake of her 1985 Til Tuesday video “Voices Carry.” It also stars “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm, lookin’ smarmy as “video director Tom Scharpling.” Maybe you have to know Wurster for it to register, but this just about put me on the floor the first time I watched it. Whatever he does next, the one thing you can count on is that it will be something hilarious.
ADDENDUM (7/19/2014): Speaking of hilarious, I was able to convince the paper’s editorial braintrust to let me do a Tar Heel of the Week profile on Jon, in advance of Merge 25.
Ryan Adams recently played a well-received acoustic bluegrass set with Infamous Stringdusters at last month’s Newport Folk Festival, long-ago site of one of the the rock era’s great confrontations. Newport was where Bob Dylan horrified and enraged folkie purists back in 1965 by putting aside his acoustic guitar to play loud electric-guitar rock backed up by the Butterfield Blues Band. Rock-mythology enthusiast that he is, Ryan made a nod to that history as well as his own penchant for confounding the expectations of his fanbase with the for-the-occasion T-shirts he was selling at the gig:
There’s still no word on when Ryan Adams’ 
Losering Books 