Mojo - The Music Magazine

Ryan Adams & Jason Isbell
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
October 14, 2011

The crowd - around a thousand - in the august, Beaux Arts theatre stares at the black-backdropped stage, listening to a pin drop. There's hallowed silence and then there's the interval between ex-Drive By Trucker Jason Isbell's short set and Ryan Adams' long one. It's broken by a disembodied voice announcing that Adams has banned the use of mobiles. Since no concert in America these days goes unshot, unvideoed or unlit by the screens of several hundred iPhones, the strange hush hanging over the audience might be due to shock as much as reverence. The argument in favour of it being the latter is the speed with which tickets for this and the other small venues on Adams' solo acoustic tour sold out.

His stage setup (like Eddie Vedder's recent solo acoustic tour) follows the Neil Young Template: worn rug, old upright piano with an antique lamp, chair, couple of guitars, harmonicas. "I'll see if I can't bum you people out," says Adams, dressed in jeans and a heavy metal T-shirt which, along with the tousled hair and high-backed chair, make him look at least two years pre-pubescence. Picking a red-white-and-blue acoustic and fixing on a harmonica stand, he opens with Oh My Sweet Carolina from his first solo album before following with the title song from Ashes & Fire - one of just four cuts he'll play from the album that this intimate, stripped-down tour was presumably set up to promote.

For a while the audience listen in hushed attention, the only jolts in the mood of mellow bittersweetness coming from Adams himself making comments about his bum "falling asleep" from all the sitting and "taking away from the song". But, with no personal organisers to play with, some of the crowd become restless. They call out song requests, whoop when they hear song intros they recognise, tell Adams to "bring Mandy [Moore] out".

The old Ryan might have jumped into the crowd and rearranged faces; the new Ryan goofs around, plays with the intros and makes up silly new songs on the spot - free-associating on his deliberate misinterpretations of what people are shouting (while generally throwing in a heavy metal reference or two) and anticipating how reviewers will complain that this was "another moment when he could have played a real song". Charming at first, after a while it gets a bit precious.

But those real songs are, simply, gorgeous, and beautifully sung. Tonight they include four from Heartbreaker, three from Love Is Hell, two apiece from Easy Tiger and Gold, as well as Cold Roses, 29, even one by his old band Whiskeytown (Houses On The Hill from '97's Strangers Almanac). After 20 songs, Adams returns with Isbell for the encore: a seemingly ad hoc cover (judging by how it cracks Isbell up) of Alabama's cheesy Love In The First Degree and of the Drive By Truckers' fine Danko/Manuel, ending as it began with a Heartbreaker song, Come Pick Me Up.

Since Adams also banned photos, even official ones, and MOJO's correspondent lacks courtroom sketching skills, to see what it looked and sounded like, go here...

By Sylvie Simmons

Setlist

Oh My Sweet Carolina
Ashes & Fire
If I Am A Stranger
Dirty Rain
Sweet L'il Gal
I See Monsters
Invisible Riverside
Everybody Knows
Firecracker
Winding Wheel
Lucky Now
New York, New York
Let It Ride
Please Do Not Let Me Go
Carolina Rain
Two
English Girls Approximately
Why Do They Leave
Houses On the Hill
Bartering Lines
Love In The First Degree
Danko/Manuel
Come Pick Me Up