From the News & Observer: a good summary of last night's outstanding Ryan Adams show. I thought more of the first half of the show than Menconi seems to have done, but otherwise the review is on the money.

Adams takes his time before hometown crowd
By David Menconi

RALEIGH -- Here's a theory about Ryan Adams that explains almost everything: The guy just can't help himself. Whether it's putting out three albums a year when one would do or running a bad joke into the ground, he gives voice to every thought that pops into his head, seemingly incapable of editing himself. That attention-deficit-disorder paradigm goes for Adams' live show as well as his recording career.

Wednesday night, Adams and his new band the Cardinals played a homecoming show at Meymandi Hall, the former Whiskeytown leader's first show in his old hometown in nearly five years. There was some tension in the air, but most of the crowd was with him. When someone yelled out "I love you" after the first song, Adams replied, "Then I apologize in advance."

Throughout the evening, Adams spent his time between songs pacing and flitting around the stage, taking drags from a couple of different smoldering cigarettes and gulps from multiple bottles and cups. He fussed endlessly with his guitar tuning, the height of his microphone, his glasses. He hovered around bassist Catherine Popper so much that she lectured him to stay out of her space. And he babbled endlessly, frequently off the microphone, as his bandmates stood around waiting him out. More than once, drummer Brad Pemberton cut him off by starting another song.

"Where's that clown I ordered?" Adams muttered at one point. "Wait a minute, I'm already here." Later, he cracked to guitarist J.P. Bowersock that they were playing for "an audience hologram" rather than actual people.

A friend likened it to watching Dennis Hopper coming unhinged in "Apocalypse Now." While Adams played a generous set of 26 songs in a bit less than three hours, his between-song self-indulgences kept the show from building up any momentum and flow. And that was a shame, because there were many spectacular moments.

The opening stretch included most of the high points from Adams' new double-album, "Cold Roses" (Lost Highway Records), in rocked-up arrangements. The more forceful onstage versions served as cool counterpoints to the mellower studio versions, more like the Allman Brothers than the Grateful Dead on the jam-band continuum. Adams also threw in a bunch of songs from the other two albums he's putting out this year, which were fine as far as they went. But the unreleased songs had no context, and none registered as anything stronger than pleasant.

While the sold-out crowd was generally well-behaved, its frustration at all the unfamiliar songs grew palpable. People began to yell for songs they wanted to hear, and Adams got a little testy.

"I'll get you there," he said. "You get three hours, I can have two seconds to be a narcissistic bastard ... Hey, I'm three frets away from working at a gas station here."

Fortunately, Adams and his band finally hit their stride the second half of the show with four songs from his 2000 solo debut, "Heartbreaker." "My Winding Wheel" was almost unrecognizable, closer to a sprint than a shuffle. "To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high)" had some of Adams' and Bowersock's best guitar interplay of the night. "Oh My Sweet Carolina," Adams' love letter to his home state, was almost too pretty for words. And Adams jacked up "Shakedown on 9th Street" with the Bo Diddley backbeat from Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," thrashing the bejesus out of his guitar and doing everything but setting it on fire.

Then came the perfect capper, a cameo appearance by Adams' old Whiskeytown bandmate Caitlin Cary. They did five songs together, all in the key of ragged but right. They clearly hadn't rehearsed, yet it was genuinely moving to see them together again after so long. It felt just like those old Whiskeytown shows at the Brewery way back when, right down to the mistakes. It's been so long since Adams and Cary have sang together that they needed a prompt from someone in the crowd to remember the last verse of "The Battle."

After that, a voice rang out from the crowd: "Same as it ever was!"