Ryan Adams sings his best Bryan Adams

By now, it’s the stuff of legend: 12 years ago at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, a heckler in the crowd kept calling out requests for Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ‘69” at a Ryan Adams show.

Get it? Bryan Adams, not Ryan Adams.

“It’s not even a good grampa joke,” said Ryan Adams, who’s surprisingly willing to set the record straight (again) in a phone interview while on tour in North Carolina.

In 2002, long before he would marry and later divorce singer-actress Mandy Moore, Adams was on his first-ever acoustic solo tour, two years after leaving the band Whiskeytown. The singer-songwriter from North Carolina was out on the road singing songs from solo albums “Heartbreaker” and “Gold,” which featured “New York, New York,” his unintentional 9/11 anthem.

That night at the Ryman theater, there was an “extraordinarily drunk” guy who kept “interrupting the entire concert, every song,” he said. Demanding “Summer of ‘69” was only one of many outbursts. The breaking point came during a song with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

So finally Adams, who hopefully won’t have to do this on Friday, May 22 when he plays the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa, put down his guitar, jumped off stage and walked up to the guy in the fourth row. He handed him $40 and told him to leave.

“I looked at the guy and he looked like a newborn baby, he was so drunk,” Adams remembered. “He was like drooling.”

He gave him the money, told him to take a taxi home and “when I walked back to the microphone, everyone in the ----ing place cheered for a long time.”

We wouldn’t be talking about this now if Adams hadn’t covered “Summer of ‘69” for the first time ever at the Ryman several weeks ago, finally honoring the heckler’s request nearly 13 years later.

“The way it’s always been related or translated is that I did some unspeakable act,” he said. “But really I just had self-respect.”

Over the years, he’s become good friends with Bryan Adams. He even called up the Canadian rocker to get advice on singing “the killer bridge” portion of “Summer of ‘69.”

“’Try to sing the lower third if you have to,’” the other Adams told him. “ ‘But I think you can hit it. Just save the gas for it.’ He was totally right.”

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014 or john@beckmediaproductions.com.