ALWAYSBACK

6622 - WHISKEYTOWN - Faithless Street (1995)(1998)

WHISKEYTOWN
''FAITHLESS STREET''
1998
1995
67:21

1 /Midway Park
Ryan Adams / Skillet Gilmore / Phil Wandscher/3:23
2 /Drank Like a River
Ryan Adams / Caitlin Cary / Phil Wandscher/2:57
3 /Too Drunk to Dream
Ryan Adams/2:53
4 /Tennessee Square
Ryan Adams/2:49
5 /What My Seem Like Love
Phil Wandscher/3:46
6 /Faithless Street
Ryan Adams / Caitlin Cary/3:55
7 /Mining Town
Ryan Adams/2:34
8 /If He Can't Have You
Ryan Adams / Skillet Gilmore/3:51
9 /Black Arrow, Bleeding Heart
Ryan Adams/2:20
10 /Matrimony
Caitlin Cary / Steve Grothmann/3:49
11 /Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight
David Ryan Adams / Ryan Adams/3:20
12 /Desperate Ain't Lonely
Ryan Adams / Caitlin Cary/2:16
13 /Hard Luck Story
Ryan Adams/2:07
14 /Top Dollar
Phil Wandscher/2:38
15 /Lo-Fi Tennessee Mountian Angel
Ryan Adams / Caitlin Cary / Lisa M. Cooper / Samuel Mintu / Kathy Poindexter / Johnny Williams/4:32
16 /Revenge
Ryan Adams / Phil Wandscher/2:43
17 /Empty Baseball Park
Ryan Adams/2:54
18 /Here's to the Rest of the World
Ryan Adams/3:07
19 /16 Days
David Ryan Adams / Ryan Adams/3:45
20 /Yesterday's News
Ryan Adams / Phil Wandscher/2:52
21 /Factory Girl
Ryan Adams / Mick Jagger / Keith Richards / Phil Wandscher/4:50

Ryan Adams /Guitar, Vocals
Caitlin Cary /Violin, Vocals
Phil Wandscher /Guitar, Vocals
Eric "Skillet" Gilmore/Drums
Steve Grothmann/Bass
Bob Ricker/Pedal Steel On 6

REVIEW
By Zac Johnson
Faithless Street serves as an interesting document in the history of alt-country upstarts Whiskeytown, showing 20-year-old bandleader and chief songwriter Ryan Adams' headfirst leap from member of a high-school punk band into an emotionally charged, alcohol-fueled, traditional-minded country singer. The majority of the album was recorded in the summer of 1995 near Whiskeytown's hometown of Raleigh by Chris Stamey (of the dB's) and overflows with beer bottle, front porch, sun-drenched country anguish. Of the recording, Adams would later recall: "All I remember is what we had to drink and Skillet and Ray Duffy's preoccupation with fireworks... the Roman candles and black cats sounded a lot like I'd hope we'd one day sound -- pretty little things all set on fire waiting to get destroyed." Looking back on this statement, the band's history of lineup changes and well-documented onstage fights seems to fit into Adams' five-year plan perfectly. The music itself is often sparse and gritty, brutally honest, and quite beautiful, especially in the introspective "If He Can't Have You," "Desperate Ain't Lonely," and the achingly gorgeous "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight." For all of the attention surrounding Adams' songwriting and Gram Parsons-like self-destructive bluster, one of the album's highlights comes from violinist and vocalist Caitlin Cary's "Matrimony," sung with a fierce independence that is a far cry from Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man," although with a similar heartfelt enthusiasm. Regarding his songwriting in the Faithless Street era, the lead singer later confided: "In retrospect, I knew that was the last optimism I was gonna have for a long time," which sounds implausible regarding most of the album's subject matter, but later proved to be true. Overall, the album (re-released in 1998 by Outpost Recordings with several bonus tracks) stands as a terrific recording on its own, and also foreshadows many of the forthcoming troubles and achievements in the arc of the band's life span.

BIOGRAPHY
By Steve Huey
A band with as turbulent an existence as Whiskeytown was bound to implode sooner or later, but by the time they did, they had one of the largest cult followings of any alt-country band. Most accounts traced the source of all the turmoil to bandleader Ryan Adams, a gifted young songwriter whose flashes of brilliance came hand in hand with a volatile temper and an appetite for alcohol. Adams became notorious for his outbursts and erratic performances, and countless disputes with bandmates (some of them on-stage) inevitably led to frequent personnel changes. Yet during their five-year lifespan, Whiskeytown made some undeniably compelling music that only increased the mystique around their enfant terrible leader.

Whiskeytown was formed in 1994 in Raleigh, NC, by singer/guitarist/banjoist Adams, a 20-year-old ex-punk rocker who'd discovered the country-rock of Gram Parsons. The band's other charter members were fiddler/occasional lead singer Caitlin Cary, guitarist Phil Wandscher, bassist Steve Grothmann, and drummer Eric "Skillet" Gilmore. They cut a seven-song EP called Angels for the local indie Mood Food in 1995 and quickly followed it with their full-length debut, Faithless Street, in early 1996. Strongly indebted to Parsons, Uncle Tupelo, and the Replacements, the album earned rave reviews from the alt-country press (No Depression magazine in particular), and a performance at that year's South by Southwest music festival helped net them a deal with the Geffen roots affiliate Outpost. Mood Food issued Rural Free Delivery, a compilation of early recordings, in 1997, the same year Whiskeytown completed their major-label debut, Stranger's Almanac. There was already a new rhythm section, in the person of bassist Jeff Rice and drummer Steven Terry, and Wandscher left not long after the album was released that summer.

The supporting tour for Stranger's Almanac was a stormy one, doing much to earn Adams his bad-boy reputation, and by the time the dust settled, Adams and Cary were the only members standing. They added multi-instrumentalist Mike Daly, who not only played keyboards, guitar, pedal and lap steel, mandolin, mandocello, and dulcimer, but also co-wrote a great deal of material with Adams for the band's next album. Supporting musicians came and went at a furious pace, including onetime fIREHOSE member Ed Crawford and original drummer Gilmore. Somehow, a semistable studio lineup coalesced long enough to complete Pneumonia, the third official Whiskeytown album, in 1999. However, a series of label mergers shelved the record indefinitely, during which time it was heavily bootlegged and acquired a strong underground reputation. With the album in limbo, Whiskeytown gave up the ghost. Adams released his solo debut, Heartbreaker, in 2000, and Cary issued her own solo EP, Waltzie, that year as well. Pneumonia was finally released in 2001 on the Universal roots subsidiary Lost Highway and earned some of the group's strongest reviews yet for its eclectic approach. Adams' second solo album, Gold, appeared in 2002, and Cary released the solo albums While You Weren't Looking and I'm Staying Out in 2002 and 2003, respectively.