Quote of the day

"I finally had enough and piped up: 'Who is it? Who is shouting? Tell me who it is!' I asked the person to raise his hand so I could see him. He did not. Finally people pointed furiously to a seat not far from me in the front. I walked down the few wooden steps in front of the stage to the aisle where all the fingers pointed.

By the time I got there, I was so angry. I felt humiliated, but what else could be done? Either way I had lost something. Unlike a more seasoned comic or musician, I didn't have the experience to ignore a situation like this, or to use wit to turn it around. I felt a kind of disappointment and disillusionment that I had never known - and it was in front of a thousand-plus people.

As I approached the heckler's wooden pew, I was shocked. He was only a few years older than me. Unshaven, bleary-eyed. He had on a baseball hat and seemed so drunk that his limbs hung from his sides like a broken doll. His eyes were like two poached eggs waiting to break. The anger left me, and I felt instantly bad. No one was there for this man. No one stopped him."

Ryan Adams tells the New York Times and its readers the story of the first time he was genuinely unsettled by a heckler, at the legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in 2002. Needless to say, the offending shout was a plea for Bryan Adams' 'Summer Of '69' - a song that Adams has since willingly covered in the same venue.