Ryan Adams Rips the Strokes in Twitter Rant
Ryan Adams unleashed a series of tweets mocking the Strokes Monday, two months after the band detailed the rift between them and the singer-songwriter.
In the book Meet Me in the Bathroom, a look at NYC indie rock in the early 2000s, Adams is painted as a “bad influence” for the Strokes‘ Albert Hammond Jr.
“Ryan would always come and wake me at two in the morning and have drugs, so I’d just do the drugs and kind of numb out,” Hammond said in the oral history. “I knew I would shoot up drugs from a very young age. I’d been wanting to do heroin since I was 14 years old.”
For undisclosed reasons, Adams decided to respond to the Strokes’ allegations on Twitter Monday.
“[Albert] Hammond is a more horrible songwriter than his dad. If that’s possible. It rains in [southern] CA & washes out the dirt As you were,” Adams tweeted, mocking Albert Hammond Sr.’s 1972 song “It Never Rains in Southern California.”
In Meet Me in the Bathroom, it’s also revealed Strokes singer Julian Casablancas allegedly threatened to beat up Adams if he continued to hang out with Hammond Jr. “Did I specifically tell Ryan to stay away from Albert? I can’t remember the details, to be honest,” Casablancas said. “I think heroin just kind of crosses a line. It can take a persons soul away. So it’s like if someone is trying to give your friend a lobotomy — you’re gonna step in.”
Adams’ response to that Monday: “Julian Casablancas: who got you strung out on lasagna tho?”
Adams, a former friend of the band who once recorded his own version of the Strokes’ debut LP Is This It, continued to tease the band in a series of tweets, including their rumored jealousy of the Killers.
“Last Impressions of Actual Songs,” Adams tweeted, a knock on First Impressions of Earth. “I should’ve forced them to get addicted to writing better songs. Too bad @thekillers did it for them.”
Adams then started responding to Strokes fans defending the band on Twitter, resulting at more digs at Casablancas’ side project the Voidz. “I sold more t shirts last night than people who actually made it thru a single Voidz song, bro,” Adams wrote. “What’s he gonna do? Sit on me?”
In Meet Me in the Bathroom, Adams admitted he felt scapegoated by the band for Hammond Jr.’s addiction issues.
“That’s so sad, because Albert and I were friends. If anything, I really felt like I had an eye on him in a way that they never did,” Adams said. “I loved him so deeply. I would never ever have given him a bag of heroin. I remember being incredibly worried about him, even after I continued to do speedballs… It was easy to brand me as the problem. I would suspect that they soon learned that I was not the problem.”
The members of the Strokes have not yet responded to Adams on social media.