Storm postpones Ryan Adams show
A storm along the east coast kept Charlottesvillians from seeing Ryan Adams at the Paramount Theater yesterday evening. According to promoter Starr Hill Presents, the weather grounded Adams’ flight from LaGuardia Airport on the tarmac for over five hours and the singer-songwriter didn’t get off the ground until 9pm, landing at Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport at around 10:30pm– three hours after his management and Starr Hill had called off the show.
“We didn’t think it was fair to keep everyone waiting when we didn’t know if he was going to make it,” says Starr Hill’s Kirby Hutto.
The Paramount has already announced plans to reschedule the show, and Hutto says he hopes to announce the new date later today, which he says will likely be in September. All tickets sold to last night’s show will be honored, and those fans who will be unable to attend the rescheduled concert can receive refunds.
The Paramount gig was to have been Adams’ first after a 10-day break from the road, and the alt-country star was set to touch down in Charlottesville Monday night, along with his road crew and his touring band the Cardinals, who arrived by bus. However, Adams’ travel plans changed when a meeting with members of the New York media got moved to Tuesday morning, putting him at the mercy of the Federal Aviation Administration and unrelenting winds.
“In hindsight, we should have driven him down in a limo,” says Hutto. “It would have gotten him here in the time he spent on the runway.”
Until recently, Adams had a history of cutting shows short or skipping them completely, which he has recently admitted was due in part to addictions to cocaine and heroin. The most infamous of these instances was a 2002 show in Nashville when Adams left the stage and refused to return after a fan shouted out a request for “Summer of ‘69,” a song made famous by Canadian pop-rocker Bryan Adams. Hutto dismisses any idea that the Charlottesville postponement is a sign that Adams has backslid.
“He’s not drinking; he’s not into drugs; his sobriety is still good,” he says. “This was all out of his control.”
Tonight, Adams is scheduled to play in Louisville, Kentucky, where officials at the Brown Theatre report the show is still a go.