Concert Review: Ryan Adams and the Cardinals at the Uptown

Much like the band’s frontman, Ryan Adams, himself, Friday night’s sold-out Cardinals show at the Uptown was short, dark and depressing.

I’m tempted to make this post merely a photographic supplement to the hilarious and vitriolic review my Star counterpart Tim Finn filed early Saturday morning, which has garnered an amazing 61 comments as of this writing. Well done, Tim.

From what I’ve heard, Adams makes few live appearances at which he does not behave in some way that is frustrating to his audience. This was the second time I’ve seen him. Late 2007 at the Uptown was the first, and my only complaint was that he jabbered too much between songs, but he played for a good three hours and allowed actual concert lighting to be employed, unlike Friday’s show, which was ridiculously poorly lit. (But then again, I heard that on that same ’07 tour, in some other town, he’d stormed off the stage after 40 minutes. Just one of many famous Ryan-Adams-is-a-douche-live stories I’ve heard.) The dude is so neurotic and self-loathing that he is almost incapable of putting on a drama-free performance. He probably does need a nice, long break from music, at least from playing live. Because if you’ve got a great backing band, an awesome original song catalog, a beautiful venue full to capacity of people who have paid 42 bucks a ticket to see you, why the fuck do you have to go and spoil it?

At 8:45, when the band came on to the dopey strains of Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract,” chosen, no doubt, for irono-absurd effect, I should’ve known there’d be trouble. But when the show ended just past 10, after the band had played only 15 songs (and, in the middle, taken a stupid and confusing 10-minute intermission) and given no encore, and the lights came up and the fucking Doobie Brothers song “What A Fool Believes” began playing through the fucking PA, I nonetheless found myself struggling to grasp how disrespectful and disappointing the whole thing was.