An evening with RA
On Saturday night, I was at the Ryan Adams concert in Lakewood, Ohio, for what seemed like a small eternity. Not that it was a bad thing. It's just that he played for a reallllllllly long time. Two full sets. No opening act. It was a whole lotta Ryan. And I had to pee and wanted to wait til the end.

Admittedly I'm not as huge of a fan of his newer stuff. I liked his first few solo albums, and then the later stuff is kind of hit or miss with me. When he veers country I'm not so much enthralled.

That being said, I still really enjoyed his show. He and his band the Cardinals play well together and sound great. I especially enjoyed the harmonizing the guys did.

For maybe the first 45 minutes, Ryan did not speak between songs. There was a kind of uncomfortable silence when each song was finished and they re-tuned their guitars for the next one. Then every once in a while he'd say something under his breath that would be audible for the crowd and he'd get a laugh. Finally, he broke the silence in a big way and told the crowd how happy he and the band were to be there. Suddenly he launched into a diatribe about Twinkies and asked the crowd if they had ever microwaved a Twinkie. He said it's only something you do "at 3 a.m. ... between 3 a.m. and 3:30 a.m." He also cautioned not to use a plastic bowl to microwave the Twinkie because the Twinkie itself is made mostly of plastic.

The first set focused mostly on newer material, mostly from Easy Tiger, and featured a lot of deviation from the original arrangements and into more trippy, Grateful Dead-esque jam sessions. The second set was more mellow -- as Ryan called it, the "Wanted Dead or Alive" part of the show. There was some Jon Bon Jovi reference that I kind of missed, but I think it was because he and his guitarist were set up next to each other on stools and recalled back to Jon Bon and Richie Sambora. I think. Who knows.

He cranked out a bunch of crowd favorites during the second set, including "Two" off Easy Tiger, Rescue Blues, Let It Ride, Please Do Not Let Me Go, and my favorite, La Cienega Just Smiled. He also went off on "Friends" -- the wedding episode where Ross says the wrong name at the altar. He wanted to know the untold story about Emily, Ross' almost-wife. He surmised that she went back to England and "wrote some unreadable novel" or something like that. Funnier when he said it.

He also left the stage briefly -- or not so briefly -- to allow for his keyboard player to tell the joke of the evening. The joke took maybe 15 seconds, and then ... no Ryan. Awkward silence on stage. Dum de dum ... still no Ryan. So the band members all kind of looked at each other like, "ok ... now what ..." and it was long enough that I was beginning to think that he had just decided he was done and not coming back. Finally, after maybe another minute, he came running back on stage to roaring applause from the crowd.

"Sorry guys, I had some Red Bull before the show and I just had to pee. I'm a human being..."

Yep. Awesome. Guess I should have gone, too. But I didn't want to get up and miss anything.

Thanks, Ryan, for an eccentric and cool show. I wouldn't have expected anything less.