It was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming of sorts. Ryan Adams, solo acoustic, at the Ryman Auditorium — just blocks from where he’d cut Heartbreaker, the album that made him. Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings were there to join him on “Bartering Lines.” The room was full. The pews were warm.
A few songs in, the muttering started. Indecipherable at first. Adams dropped his pick. The distraction became alarming. Then it got clear: someone in the crowd kept shouting for “Summer of ‘69” — Bryan Adams’ cheese-rock hit from 1985. The joke that follows Ryan Adams everywhere, because their names sound alike.
By the time Welch and Rawlings came out, the vibes were tense. The heckler wouldn’t stop. Security did nothing. Adams looked down the long, dark aisles and saw guards standing idle.
He stopped the show. He asked the crowd to point the guy out. He had the house lights turned on. He walked into the audience.
“By the time I got there, I was so angry. I felt humiliated,” Adams later wrote in a New York Times op-ed. When he arrived to find the heckler was only a few years older than him and blatantly drunk, “the anger left me, and I instantly felt bad.”
He handed the man $30 or $40 — a cash refund — and had him removed.
Peter Cooper reviewed it for the Nashville Tennessean. The story went out over the Associated Press wire and became a sensation. Robbie Fulks offered to reimburse the ticket price for anyone who could get themselves thrown out of a Ryan Adams show. In Raleigh, Adams’ hometown, yelling “Summer of ‘69” became the local version of yelling “Freebird.”
“I was now a joke,” Adams wrote. “All of my hard work was lost in a story picked up by the AP. I soon became an attraction for people who wanted to pay money to hurl insults at someone.”
He called the Ryman “a shithole” on Tumblr. He swore he’d never play there again. He told Spin in 2006: “I had to go into therapy because of the whole Bryan Adams ‘Summer of ‘69’ thing.”
Years later, from a cleaner vantage point, he saw it differently: “That was the beginning of who I am today.” And: “I toasted the last drink I ever drank to that heckler the day I cleaned up.”
He’d be back.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons