In my head, Ryan Adams’ Rock N Roll (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) record will always be called This Is It. That was the working title while we were recording an album that was conceived as a raised middle finger to the all the negative forces that were swirling around Ryan during the summer of 2003.
He’d made Love Is Hell (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) in New Orleans earlier that year and the label folks at Lost Highway didn’t think it sounded like a proper followup to Gold, suggesting that maybe he could record something that rocked a bit more. They promised to release Love Is Hell, but maybe he could record something they could work to radio first?
The only part of that suggestion that Ryan heard was ROCK. He knew I liked the Gun Club’s The Fire of Love (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) as much as he did and (I think) knew I was in the middle of a stalled project where I was also having a few disagreements about what rock music was supposed to sound like.
Would I like to make a record with him in NYC and start next week? Of course I did. Lost Highway agreed with my choice to hire the great Jamie Candiloro as engineer and mixer and we set to get started at Globe Studios in Manhattan, which had recently been where Sheryl Crow recorded The Globe Sessions (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify).
That room turned out to be a bad choice for us and, within a day, we’d relocated a few blocks away to Stratosphere Sound, an amazing room owned by Adam Schlesinger, James Iha, and Andy Chase. The Neve console sounded like magic, and we were lucky enough to have Rudyard Lee Cullers as the house engineer.
Ryan’s friend Johnny T. had played drums on some demos, so Ryan wanted him to play drums on the record. Eli Janney, who I knew from Girls Against Boys and you may know from his current gig playing keyboards in the 8G Band on Late Night with Seth Meyers, did some essential editing as we built an assembly line to make a record as quickly as possible.
Ryan played almost all the bass guitar parts with Jamie filling in on a few tracks. The walls of guitars are all Ryan. There are backing vocals from Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Hole’s Melissa Auf der Maur, and Ryan’s then-girlfriend Parker Posey.
My favorite moment in the session is the one-take vocal for “So Alive.” Sure, there’s a cracked vocal moment near the end, but Ryan was fully channeling Morrissey in the moment and we were laughing and whooping in the control room.
At a moment when Industry Standards wanted all music locked to the grid, every performance mistake corrected, and all vocals tweaked to death in Autotune, I wanted to make a record that was loose, had some push and pull in the tempos, and celebrated the emotional release that our favorite records gave us.
These sessions were fast, much faster than I remembered. The first photos in my library are from July 21, 2003 at Globe and our scheduled mastering date was August 14, 2003 with Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound. That’s 25 days start to finish, or it would have been if the New York City blackout of 2003 hadn’t hit around 4pm during the middle of our Sterling session. We reconvened a couple of weeks later to finish the mastering for a November 4 release.
Ryan Adams was sharing management with The Strokes that summer, and someone in the band heard that our record was going to be called This Is It, which was a most intentional reply to the title of the Strokes’ 2001 debut LP Is This It? (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify). The Strokes were not amused, and they demanded that Ryan Gentles stop working with Ryan Adams.
I spent a lot of time in NYC in 2002-2003. It was a dark, decadent time as everyone tried to rebuild their emotional lives after 9/11 ripped the heart out of downtown. Lizzy Goodman chronicled the era in her 2017 oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, and she got a lot of us to share stories that we might have normally kept to ourselves in her interviews for the book. Thanks to Lizzy for the therapy sessions masquerading as interviews. They definitely helped me make some sense of a weird time.
There was a nihilistic edge to the city in 2003, and musicians were living frayed lives that not all everyone survived. I saw a lot of sunrises that year on my way home from all-night parties. No one knew what was supposed to happen next, a stark change from the hustle of the late ‘90s when the music and media businesses were at their peak.
When I listen to Rock N Roll, I hear a group of people pushing back against the depression, celebrating loud and loose music in all of its silliness, stupdity, and reckless joy. Some of the riffs that uptight writers complained were unimaginative or uninspired were actually elaborate pisstakes that had all of us laughing in the studio.
Rock N Roll is an album scrawled on notebook paper with a blue ball-point pen, drawn by kids who were bored with what everyone else around them was doing. If this record doesn’t make you laugh, you’re missing the point.
Some of my favorite sounds on Rock N Roll is the mixture of ‘70s metal guitars with the ‘80s new wave sounds of the Roland Juno synth. You can most easily hear the effect on “Luminol” and the slide into the chorus on “This Is It.” The best non-guitar sounds on the album are the Slay Bells in the chorus of “This Is It,” right after that synth slide. My favorite song has always been “Burning Photographs,” and I made a few suggestions on the video. There’s also a Zombies “Time of the Season” backing vocal thing that I’m just as hypnotized now as I was the day we recorded it.
Hi-Res Audio and Surround Sound
In the fall of 2003, Universal Music was making a big push into the new SACD/DVD-Audio market and Rock N Roll was generating enough advance buzz for them to want 5.1 surround mixes. Fortunately, Jamie had been working on R.E.M. 5.1 surround mixes with Eliott Scheiner and had the experience and skills needed to get it done quickly.
You can still buy the SACD and DVD-Audio discs. The best reason to buy either of them is the 24-bit/96 kHz stereo version of the album, which is my absolutely favorite way to listen to the record. That’s what we heard in the studio, and those files are the source for the hi-res version that’s streaming on Qobuz.
Rock N Roll was a quick-and-dirty recording, and one conceived for a stereo mix. When we reconvened for the 5.1 surround mixes and started listening to the tracks, I wished we’d recorded a few more guitars and quite a bit more percussion to give us more discrete sounds to place in the circle that surround sound is supposed to create.
Jamie certainly knew what to do in that situation and performed some wizardry that filled out the sound without any additional tracks being added since Ryan wasn’t there to play anything new or approve anything that we might have added.
I left with some pretty strong feelings about creating surround sound mixes from recordings that weren’t conceived for the format. Surround sound can be enlightening if the artist is involved in the creative part of the process, but I’ll almost always pick a high resolution stereo mix over a Spatial Audio/surround version.
Vinyls
In 2003, a vinyl release was purely a vanity product, since very few stores even bothered to carry it. Pressings were very small, and no marketing folks at Lost Highway objected when Ryan decided he wanted alternate cover artwork for the American and UK versions of the album. The only copies I’ve ever seen in person are the ones that Lost Highway sent to me.
We were thinking CD when we recorded Rock N Roll and there’s plenty of audio data in the mix that wouldn’t fit onto an LP. I have always maintained that anything recorded for CD or digital needs a completely different mix if you’re going to issue it on vinyl, and these LPs support my theory that fact. The artwork is amazing and they’re fun to have, but you really want this one on CD unless you’ve got the gear to listen to SACD or DVD-Audio. The LPs just don’t pack the punch this record was designed to have.
I need to do a full post on why records sound different when they’re released in different formats, one that will include a full explanation of why very few albums recorded after the late ‘80s sound good on vinyl.
The only time Ryan ever really revisited the sound of Rock N Roll was “Halloweenhead,” a song from the 2007 LP Easy Tiger (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), which was produced and engineered by Jamie. It’s my favorite song from his catalog.
I saw Ryan Adams & the Cardinals a couple of months back at the fake Roxy in Cobb County’s Braves World Amusement Village. There was an eager crowd, excited to hear “Come Pick Me Up,” “New York, New York,” “To Be Young” or “When Stars Go Blue” with an all-star band featuring Chris Stills and Don Was.
What we all got was space rock jams that drew heavily on the Cold Roses era mixed in with some Black Sabbath, Prince, and KISS covers. There was even a version of Creed’s “Higher” that skipped the signature guitar riff and turned the song into a dirge ballad. The crowd was confused and ultimately a bit hostile, but the 300 or so people up front (and me in the back) thought the show was incredible. Five stars, keep on chasing your muse, old friend.
I didn’t keep notes when we were working on this record, so anything in this post is based on whatever I remember from those few months two decades ago. I’m sure that Ryan or Jamie or Johnny T. have different memories of those sessions and some of those memories may even conflict with mine. Add up all the memories and I think you’ll get close to the truth, even if not everyone has their facts straight.
Whenever I meet someone who loves Rock N Roll, they really love it. They inevitably mention details about the sounds or the arrangements or the mix that reveal just how much they’ve listened to the album, and the things that mean the most to them are inevitably the things that meant the most to me when we were making it.
Rock N Roll was defiantly outside the commercial mainstream and conflicted with the tastes of the gatekeepers in 2003. I thought our approach was a roadmap for how rock music could make a cultural comeback. The label industry and its radio gatekeepers didn’t agree, but I’m overwhelmed whenever someone shares how much this record has meant to them. Because that’s the point of all this, right?
Recently reviewed:
Victrola Hi-Res Onyx review: This is a great Bluetooth turntable (buy here)
I met Bucky and his wife in Sanibel Florida in 2020. We hung around a bit, he showed how to fish for snook in the wave break and we shared many interests, old cars, woodworking, old country music, fishi g and boating. I was looking g forward to a long friendship with a very interesting guy. I was heartbroken when Manny Green(aka Bill Gerlloff) informed me of his passing. Bill played with him many moons ago around there area.
RIP Bucky
Jim did you know a pedal steel player by the name of Bucky Baxter? He hung with Adams