Ryan Adams Bayou Music Center December 3, 2014
The story of Ryan Adams' performance at Bayou Music Center Wednesday night can be boiled down to one song called "Amstar." Born of something a fan shouted at the stage, the word was deemed by Adams to be the name of an especially disagreeable intergalactic supervillain with an appetite for shitty weed and other mood-altering ingestibles, so the 40-year-old singer and his four-piece band worked up an impromptu Pink Floyd-style space-rock jam about him.
This "Amstar" turned out to be a pretty decent tune, too; maybe it will even end up on an album sometime. It came toward the end of Adams' two-hour set, and made a fine example of not only his band's musical interplay but the way they were able to prevent the sometimes-unruly audience (more on them later) from seizing the upper hand.
Adams is easily one of the of the most talented and idiosyncratic popular musicians now hovering around the late-thirties/early-forties mark. Wednesday night his stage was adorned with four oversized Fender amps (the kind you can see on the cover of Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps), upon one of which perched a some sort of cat doll; a life-size Bengal tiger that was either stuffed or synthetic; and the classic standup arcade video games Asteroids and Berserk.
Although he has never reached what you might call true mainstream popularity, Adams has produced more than a dozen albums marked by better-than-average songwriting and moments of true brilliance, and done so at a pretty steady clip since his '90s days fronting alt-country holy terrors Whiskeytown. That's plenty to earn enough fans to fill a mid-size hall like Bayou Music Center, because if you're of a certain disposition, when the chance comes around to hear a song as wistfully romantic as "When the Stars Go Blue" or "La Cienega Just Smiled" (just to name two), you're a fool not to take it.
But Adams and his bandmates are also such gifted players they're fun to listen to regardless of the lyrical context, and a two-hour performance is like a guided tour of an artisan's workshop. On a day that we lost former Small Faces/Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, it was especially heart-warming to hear such excellent B-3 playing all night, as on "Dirty Rain" and the country-ish "A Kiss Before I Go." Overall there were plenty of prime opportunities Wednesday to close your eyes and soak in the beautiful music, or open them and enjoy the pastel-pink and purple backdrop of tiny stars.
Unfortunately, the show was also never able to work up much in the way of true momentum. The only song of the entire set that could safely be said to "rock" was "Am I Safe," about three-quarters of the way in. That wasn't what Adams was really going for here, true, but two full hours of almost exclusively slow and midtempo songs can't help but drag in at least a few spots, especially when the band has been known to take a lengthy instrumental solo passage or two. (Or three.) [Ed. Note: thanks Ryan.]
Plus, any artist who changes guitars on almost every song is sometimes going to create a few uncomfortable silences between them; and that's totally besides whatever was going on between Adams and the room's sound engineers.
Story continues on the next page.
