evotees of Ryan Adams faced a vexing question at Boston’s Orpheum Theatre last Tuesday: how to sit through Tegan and Sara’s unsettlingly trite performance while waiting for the main attraction. Happily, their set was brief, and merely prologue to an otherwise sparkling evening.
Enter, after a short intermission, one of contemporary rock music’s most soulful and intelligent singer/songwriters. Adams’ posture was delicate as he skirted the stage, fingering his newly-cut hair. He lit a cigarette, drew slowly and deliberately, sipped wine from a plastic cup and finally sat, guitar in hand, to sketch the opening measures of “Oh My Sweet Carolina.” The crowd responded, grateful, but Adams abridged the song: “Don’t do that,” he gestured at the applause, “that makes me nervous. Just pretend you don’t like me and I’ll love you forever. Just ask my girlfriend.” He was self-deprecating but forceful and present, and “Sweet Carolina” was as beautifully rendered as anyone could have hoped.
The Orpheum—gorgeous in its own right—was nearly full to capacity with an older-and-hipper-than-usual crowd, sharply and self-consciously dressed. But the tenor of the evening was intimate. Sound levels were low and sympathetic, and Adams played alone—alternately on an acoustic guitar, a grand piano and a resonator guitar—with limited live strings accompaniment. He played a good number of selections from his debut solo album Heartbreaker, including “My Winding Wheel,” “Sweet Lil’ Gal (21st/3rd)”, “Call Me On Your Way Back Home” and a rollicking version of “When You’re Young You Get Sad (And You Get High)” on the Dobro. “I just got an idea,” he said after several false starts of “When You’re Young,” “or maybe it’s a piss-poor idea…we’ll have to wait and see.” On Adams’ gentle directive, a surly stage technician repositioned a microphone so that Adams’ fast-tapping foot could act as provisional percussion. The effect was brilliant, recalling the simple vitality and soulfulness of old Delta blues recordings.
Since much of Heartbreaker is marked by sparse and deflated instrumentation, Adams’ solo performances weren’t noticeable departures from the studio versions. Fulsome, resonant vocals gave flesh to his otherwise skeletal songs. And despite self-indictments of having smoked “too much pot,” Adams’ playing was nothing short of graceful. That’s not to say, of course, that silly shenanigans were in short supply. Carefully poised between center stage and Adams’ guitar amplifier was a tweed-clad phonograph, which he called upon several times during the evening to play a vinyl of Madonna’s “Material Girl.” “Come on Boston!” Adams implored: “Don’t you like Madonna? She can throw plates at me all she wants…I’ll just duck ’em,” he said, avoiding imaginary flatware.
At another point, an audience member asked Adams to wish “David in the second row” a happy birthday. Adams responded, to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” with impromptu verse: “Thanks for interrupting my gig / Thanks for interrupting my gig / It’s all about you David / Thanks for interrupting my gig.” Even through this tomfoolery, though, his self-possession was unmistakable.
Adams also played several selections from his second solo album, Gold, including “When The Stars Go Blue,” recently covered by the Corrs and Bono, and the elegiac “Sylvia Plath.” Since Gold tends toward heavy production quality that is sometimes at odds with Adams’ rough-grained vocals, the solo live versions of these songs were refreshingly honest and vital. Adams also played an imaginative cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” and finished the set with a sedate “Come Pick Me Up.” It was all the crowd could do to keep from singing along, but anything that might have obscured Adams’ magical voice would have been nothing short of criminal.
