Counting Crows Shoot For The Stars, Part One

By Michael Goldberg

Hollywood, CA

Counting Crows leader Adam Duritz lives in the kind of woodsy Laurel Canyon house you'd expect. Well, it's what I'd expect. Up on a hillside, with a garden below it, the place is a mess. Looks like a college student lost in the Beat Generation lives here. Books everywhere. A coffee table covered with stuff: candles, "Death" playing cards, a Bob Dylan lyrics book. Large paintings hang on the dark walls, including one of a sad clown. Clothes thrown about. A couple of large couches in the living room. Feels like you're in a cluttered cabin out in the woods. But you're not. You're in Hollywood.

Duritz stands at over six feet. He's wearing his trademark dreads, a short sleeve shirt, jeans. With his shaggy beard he looks a bit like Jim Morrison. He asks me if I want something to drink, then disappears, only to return with a huge plastic glass filled with Diet 7-Up.

I've never been here before, but I experience a sense of deja vu. I first interviewed Duritz and his buddies in Counting Crows (I was one of the first journalists to interview them), in a big house--also messy, filled with CDs and books (and a few college students too, as I recall) on a hillside in Berkeley, CA. That was a long, long time ago. July of 1993, in fact. Shortly before the group's debut, August And Everything After, was released.

I had been sent an advance tape by this Bay Area group that a few people I knew had been talking about. They were called Counting Crows. I was told they sounded like R.E.M., but when I put on the tape, I heard much, much more than an R.E.M. clone band. I heard a band picking up where some of the great '60s artists--Van Morrison, the Band--had left off.

I had driven around for at least a month playing the tape over and over. I fell in love with the album. Nearly every song--"Round Here," "Perfect Blue Buildings," "Sullivan Street," and of course "Mr. Jones"--was incredible. How could I resist an album that started off with the line: "Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog / where no one notices the contrast of white on white." Or that had a song in which the singer stated so frankly: "I want to be Bob Dylan."

I didn't know if the album was going to sell many copies, but I knew it was one of the best albums that was going to be released that year. For the story that I was going to write for Rolling Stone, I arranged to attend a practice session in the basement studio where the band rehearsed in Berkeley. There, cramped into an impossibly small space, I watched them run through a half-dozen songs off that first album, along with a couple of works in progress. Then we headed upstairs for a wide-ranging interview, before heading down the hill to grab a brew or two at a nearby bar.

This time it's just Duritz and me. Things have gotten decidedly "big time" since we'd last spoken. A few weeks earlier, when I had suggested to a Geffen Records publicist that I attend one of the group's rehearsal sessions again "like I did a few years ago," he just laughed. Just getting one of the numbered "security release" advance copies of the new album, Recovering the Satellites, took some effort.

I visited Duritz about a month before the release of the album. At the time he had no idea how it would be received, although he said he expected something of a backlash from the critics. And in fact, the album has gotten mixed reviews. I think it's a powerful, rich work (see the review in ATN's "44.1 kHz" section). In late October, the album entered the charts at #1.

Adjusting to success--August and Everything After sold six million copies--has not been easy for Duritz. In conversation, he is intense, opinionated, passionate. But he also seems vulnerable. It's not what you expect from a rich star. But then while "money changes everything," as the Brains once sang, it doesn't ever seem to change how you feel about yourself. Duritz seems insecure. He talked extensively about his difficulty in feeling that he actually exists. That life isn't a dream. And his need for a relationship in which his lover would confirm his existence. At one point during the interview, he said, "I don't know that I'm going to ever know that someone cares enough that I'm actually here."

SATTELITES IMITATES LIFE
Addicted To Noise: The album, it seems like a lot of the themes that were there in the first album are still there, which makes a lot of sense because it seems to me there are big themes that one writes about and that move you and you're going to keep being inspired in different ways. Does that make sense?

Adam Duritz: Uh huh.

ATN: In the other album and this album, there's this idea of "I'm fading away" or "Step out the front door / Feel like a ghost." Is that how you feel sometimes?

Duritz: Life is a constant struggle to actually exist. From the moment you're born, basically you're dying. You're on the way to there. I think that not only in the fact that your life is actually going to end and you are going to eventually disintegrate or fade away that the emotional struggle is to not fade away as well. Just to feel that you actually are there. Because I think that what happens is when you're in enough pain you have the desire to fade away, the desire to get away from it. It's also this struggle to not be alone or at least to not feel alone, which is sort of the same thing. Or to deal with the essential aloneness of life.

You are essentially alone. You have your own self and your own mind and no one actually can get inside there. And hopefully you'll be able to have someone close enough that it does. But you never really know whether it's going to do that. And so you try to stay here and exist. It's the sense of not being alone that makes you feel like you exist, you know what I mean? That it's not all in your imagination. It's the sense that there's someone else uncontrolled by you who spontaneously cares, that lets you know that you're actually there, that it's not a dream.

Do you ever have those dreams where something wonderful is happening and you wake up and you go back to sleep and you could sort of make it happen again but you know it's different? Because you know you're pulling puppet strings at that point and so it doesn't feel like anything anymore. Well, the sense that someone else outside you spontaneously cares and wants to be there lets you know that you exist, that it's not a dream, that life is actually happening. Otherwise, it's always a dream, it's always disintegrating. You never know whether you're waking up or even want to. Maybe you just want to go to sleep from it sometimes or you want to wake up from it sometimes.

But life is so often something that you want to fade away from. And it makes you feel like you're fading away from it. And I think my songs are about that, about attempts... And the fact that I wanted to write songs in the first place was about this as well. About wanting to get outside of this and over to somebody else so that I could know for sure. And to have someone come over to me and acknowledge that I was here so that you know that you exist and you know that maybe you're not completely alone. Those two things are intertwined, the sense of one and the other. I could go around and around describing it to you, one in relation to the other. But it's the two things: one that you are actually here and the acknowledgment that you're here by the fact that you're not completely alone.

ATN: One of the things I get out of the songs is this feeling... There seem to me these two desires. One is to have this deep relationship with somebody, to not feel alone, to somehow escape from that feeling of being alone and I think the escape from that is a meaningful relationship with someone where you really connect. So there's that desire and need. And then there's at the same time your desire to communicate with a lot of people. Your art. But that aspect of it seems like it's never satisfying. You sell six million records. Tons of people listen to the songs over and over again. You'll hear them on the radio. And yet you still feel alone.

Duritz: Well, it's not them though. I think those things are separate. I want to be a great artist. I wanted to be here. I want to have been here.

ATN: Do you mean making your mark on history? That 20 years from now, in the history of whatever, people will talk about these records just the way they talk about certain records? The way we talk now about certain records that were made. Certain Howlin' Wolf records or certain Elvis records or certain Band records or certain Beatles records?

Duritz: I want to have been here. I don't know how to explain it. I need to have existed on a lot of different levels. It's important to me to know that I was here. Sometimes I don't think it's happening. I don't mean, "Wow, I'm famous. I can't believe it's happening." Sometimes I just don't know that it's happening. Any of it, from getting up in the morning to playing in front of a hundred thousand people, whatever it is. That's not it, the numbers because that's also unreal.

I said to T-Bone when we started the first album, I wanted to scar the world. A violent act. I wanted to leave a mark and I want it there. Because the fading, you don't know, I don't know whether I'm going to have anything in the end. I don't know whether you can stop that fading. I don't know whether you can ever get a sense that you don't live in that shadow. I'm not sure whether you ever get that feeling of being in the light of God or whatever. I'm just using the words from my song now. I don't really talk this way. I don't know if that's ever going to change. I don't know that I'm going to get the acknowledgment in the other way. I don't know that I'm going to ever know that someone cares enough that I'm actually here. But I'm going to make these records and I'm going to know for sure because of that if it sold 10 or 10 million. I know for sure. I knew when we finished August And Everything After that I'd done it right then.

ATN: That's what matters, that you feel that making records, writing songs that this is art, this is important and you need to do that. Sure, there's people who think that everything that could possibly be called rock & roll is meaningless. There's people like that in the world but so what?

Duritz: But we know it's not. I know that art is turning liquid thought into solid form. Art is born inside someone and comes out into something that you can experience and that's all it is. There's no difference between Beethoven and Johnny Rotten. There's no difference between Beethoven and me. You can say someone's better than someone else and I'll agree that's possible. It's relative. You can make those judgments about it. It's very subjective. But essentially, as far as what defines it, I know I'm gonna get slammed for this in some sound bite somewhere that someone takes off your magazine, but you can go from Mark Rothko to Beethoven and me. It all comes from the same reason.

You're not gonna have much argument from me if you tell me that Beethoven and Mark Rothko are more important than me. I'll give you that. But it's still the same thing. That's all art ever was. So you give it what you can give it and you give it as honestly as you can. I know I do that.

For the level that I could hope to attain right now, I'm running at my highest level for me. Other people have levels that are higher and lower than that. And I go buy their records or I go not buy their records. That's what art is. I know that. I have no doubts or qualms or.... I never have a moment where I sit around thinking to myself, oh, it's only rock & roll, it's not art. Because I don't believe that. I'll never believe that. If I believed it, I wouldn't do it. There's never been a moment like that for me. I knew the first moment I wrote a song that I wrote it because I was deeply moved to write it and nobody ever made art for any other reason. No good art that I can think of.

RECOVERING YOURSELF
ATN: Talk about some of the songs, like "Recovering the Satellites."

Duritz: I kind of think it sums up the whole album, which is strange because it's sort of a found piece of material.

ATN: How so?

Duritz: It makes sense as the title song for the album. It makes sense as a summary for the album. But I found it or Bonnie [Simmons] found it. I was looking for a tape of "August And Everything After," the song, which was recorded in my basement at my old house in Berkeley one night when I finished writing it. And I couldn't find a copy of it. There wasn't one at the office and no one at Geffen had one. I wanted to stick it on the end of this record. I called my dad and he said, "Yeah, I have the tape and there's some other song on it too. It's really cool. You should check it out." Then he couldn't find the tape. But he said, "I made one for Bonnie a couple of years ago so I'll call Bonnie."

And so Bonnie called me and she said, "Yeah, I've got the tape, it's cool, I'm duping it for you right now." And I go, is there some other song on after? She goes, "I don't know, it's ending right now." We're on the phone together and the song comes on. "Oh my God, what the fuck is this?" I remembered it but I didn't. I cannibalized a great deal of it for other songs at one point.

During the making of the first record, I rewrote the second verse of "Rain King" and I used part of "Satellites" and also the end of "Goodnight Elizabeth" I used some of it as well. I also decided at some point it wasn't a very good song and took what was a couple of good moments out of it and cannibalized a huge chunk of the song and rendered the rest of it somewhat meaningless. But having found it in some ways some parts of it also seemed to totally summarize what this album was all about, which is that somehow we got shot up into the sky a couple of years ago and we flew around a bunch of times and although I don't think we're has-beens or anything, my personal life crashed disastrously to the ground.

And I never wanted to write any songs again. I didn't want anything to do with playing music. I couldn't stand it. But I came down here, I got my shit together, I took some time off and you fix that. And so, I rewrote a large chunk of the song. I kept the music but I rewrote a large chunk of the song. And then we totally rethought the music in the way we play it on the album.

I wrote four songs during the making of the album: "Monkey," "Mercury," "A Long December," and "Recovering The Satellites." And they're all related to one another. And "Walkaways" we also found. It had been from some live tape we'd done one day. And we found "Walkaways." And they all are related to each other. Those five songs together... They're interwoven lyrically too. "Mercury" refers to the fact that she's leaving on a walkaway. "Walkaways" of course includes that. There are some references to "Monkey" in "Satellites."

ATN: What does the term "walkaway" mean? I take that as someone just walking out.

Duritz: I wanted to use it as a one-word thing because I wanted to suggest that it's a habitual thing, that it's actually something we have a word for, which suggests that it's something one does over and over again. And since it's something that I have done over and over again and had done to me, I called it that. "No big difference these days/ Just the same old walkaways/ And someday I'm gonna stay but not today."

ATN: That's the last line of the album.

Duritz: It was the first song on the album and I re-thought it and moved it to the end.

ATN: The first line of the album is...

Duritz: "All of a sudden she disappears."

ATN: Yeah. And then the last line is the "Walkaway" line. Brings the whole thing full circle...

Duritz: It's an album about the uncertainty about the attempt to recover yourself. And it's also about the attempt to throw yourself off the cliff, that you have to recover yourself from. Because certainly the earlier portions of the album are about a great deal of turmoil inside myself and quite honestly, the desire to hurl myself off into oblivion on a couple of these songs.

ATN: There's also that line in that song which is something like we're up in the sky for a moment.

Duritz: Oh yeah. We only stay in orbit for a moment of time and then everybody's satellite I wish that you were mine...

ATN: Right. I read that and saw that as like for a minute you're having a relationship with someone who was also in the public eye and then you weren't so now "just a satellite for everybody or something / I wish you were still mine."

Duritz: That line, I think, has a lot of different meanings to it 'cause it's someone talking to someone else like that. It certainly is. It specifically is talking to someone referred to in the song actually about exactly what you just said. And it's also the person talking to himself.

And it's also, I think, the person being talked to by someone. It's all in there.

ATN: Are you talking about looking at your whole life?

Duritz: Yeah. The whole thing. Your life becomes a deck of cards which could be shuffled any way you wanted to. We joke about the fact that when you're on tour, you play a gig and it goes here. And the next one goes here. And the next one may go here. And after awhile, you start to play a pile of gigs and when you play a day and it's gone, it doesn't go here. It goes anywhere. That all of these days are the same as this one, the first one.

It's very disturbing and weird when you're going through it. And you learn to kind of live with it. But my whole life was starting to feel like it was that way. This is my year five, this is my year 30... It could have been anywhere. And I needed to feel like I had a place at home and friends and that I had actually learned something. I wrote it one night in the middle of the night. A friend of mine got hit by a car and was in the hospital. Another friend of mine who I had known for a while but hadn't seen in a while lived with her and I spent [the first three months of recording Sattelites] in a hospital room with the both of them.

ATN: Because there's a line about the smell....

Duritz: "The smell off hospital rooms and the feeling that it's all oysters and no pearls." It seemed like everything was going shitty. At the time I was writing it, we'd started the record and we'd been working on it and we had all this great material, but I think I had a certain ambivalence about it myself. Am I ready to go into this again? It was so hard last time. I so much didn't ever want to play music again. And we were getting a lot of good takes but we hadn't gotten a take yet, the right take on anything and that was getting a little upsetting.

And I spent these two or three months at the end of last year--she got hit in December--in a hospital room, really, every day and then I'd rush to the gig. I'd go there in the morning and I'd come there after I worked at night--not to the gig, to the house where we were recording. And I spent a lot of time with my friend who was on the bed and this other friend of mine who was there all the time. Although I didn't know it at the time and she certainly didn't, I really fell in love. I think we both did at the time, although neither of us knew it, and we developed really great friendship. But the song's really about all the people I didn't have a chance to tell it to and maybe the one person I was actually going to have a chance to finally tell it to at the right time.

There was a repetition in the beginning that maybe it'll be better than last year. And the last line echoes the first line of the song. The first two stanzas end with: "I can't remember the last thing that you said is you were leaving / And how the days go by so fast." Which is sort of about one more time for the same rigmarole. And the last line of it is about: "I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself to hold onto these moments as they pass." That's what I gotta do now. If I keep this thing or I lose this thing, I have to at least recognize what it was, which was something that was a part of my life that existed.

I have to stop letting myself believe that my life is something that is not necessarily happening to me. But it has happened and that there are moments that are worth holding onto and cherishing because I tend to forget that, enough that they may not have actually ever happened.

OUR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY
ATN: You've seen examples of artists and bands that are really good. They make good albums and everything, but they don't become popular. It seems to me there are a lot of examples of that.

Duritz: I guess I felt like we were going to be OK. The album had struck enough of a chord and people were coming out to see us, even if it was small amounts. People appreciated it. And I thought we'd be OK. We had a commitment from the label to stay on the road for a year so that was all we needed to do was tour. As far as I'm concerned, where bands get screwed is when the record labels won't let them tour if they're good live bands. If you let a band tour, it'll work out all right if they're good live.

Some of the stuff that happened, I didn't need. It was easy--not easy--but it was possible to say, "No, no, we'll do it our way or we won't do it" because I didn't need it as much as I needed to keep clean. At the end of the year, I needed to be clean. That was nice.

ATN: I assume that going from putting out an album, being a band that no one knew to suddenly getting to the cover of Rolling Stone and millions of albums sold... That's a pretty whirlwind kind of a thing. How did you deal with that? Were there some rough times?

Duritz: I didn't always deal with it very well. I got really scared at one point because I found it very hard to play gigs. People that were coming seemed so different. They were booing my friends who were opening for us. That was really hard to deal with.

ATN: Who was that? Different bands?

Duritz: My friend Lori Carson came on the road. She's the most incredible songwriter. Do you know Lori from New York?

ATN: Yeah, she was the vocalist on the Golden Palominos. That album is incredible.

Duritz: Her own albums though. She's such a stunning, amazing songwriter but you have to listen. I remember one gig where someone was yelling out stuff to her. And Alex Chilton had a hard time on the road. That was really hard too 'cause he's my idol in a lot of ways. He had a tough time of it. Alex is so tough. He's fine. There's a sense that people weren't there to hear music. They weren't music lovers. They just wanted to see "Mr. Jones" sometimes. That was weird. And I felt like I couldn't go anywhere after a while. There was a period where I just couldn't leave the hotel. I was going from hotel to sound check to a bus to a hotel to a bus to a sound check. I couldn't go anywhere else. I couldn't eat dinner places because people were always just everywhere. Then there's a period where I think I really fell apart. We had to cancel some gigs. My voice fell apart too, which happens to me. I think I hurt my voice. I don't know where I am when I'm singing. I don't take care of my voice while I'm performing. I just lose my head. I'm gone.

ATN: You do really get lost in the performance, don't you?

Duritz: I'm so gone up there. I've got to figure out a way to sing the right way too. I feel like I'm almost like, I don't know, I'm going to burn out my vocal cords if I'm not careful. And I burnt out myself last time, really burnt out myself. I needed to just get off the road for a little while, which we did. We took a little bit of a break. Then after it was all over, I took a big break. I moved down here to get away from home and what that had turned into.

ATN: So it had gotten weird, just people who knew you?

Duritz: No. It actually wasn't. It was people who didn't know me. I think home had gotten--maybe it happens to everyone in their home town. People aren't really happy for you when you get out. They're not. They're bitter. That's weird. Maybe its everyone's home town, maybe it's San Francisco because it's such an arty town. It seems to be about being a struggling artist up there and to succeed in some way was really against the rules. In a big way. You can't imagine. It was just vicious, really vicious.

ATN: Like people would....?

Duritz: Walk up to me on the street and saying shit to me, out of nowhere. Like if I've never seen them before in my life. "Hey, are you Adam?" "Yeah." "Fuck you. You suck." Whatever. Out of the blue. There's enough people who feel it's necessary to come up to me out of nowhere and just say something like that then... I don't know. I don't want to get shot or anything. You just don't know. You feel like you can't leave your house.

ATN: Do you have interactions with other people who just like you are writing songs, making records, with that community? There are tons of musicians here, whether it's Tom Petty and his band... The Cracker guys.

Duritz: I've been very good friends with the guys in Cracker for a long time. We owe them everything. They were so great to us. Took us out on two different tours, when we got bigger than them, it could have been an ugly thing. I've been on tours where that happened and they were just proud. And when we went out to Europe, we took them opening for us and there was no "Oh, too bad we switched roles here."

I will never stop looking up to those guys and I will never stop owing them everything for how proud they were or how many times before we were that big where they shoved us back on-stage for encores, how many times they were, "Hey, let us bring Peter Stewart out." When we had Peter Stewart opening for us, they let us take him out opening for us and them. Hey, Peter's got a contract with Columbia now. He's sold 300,000 records or something and he was our roadie. And Cracker let us bring him. They were just great.

ONE IN A MILLION
ATN: It's an incredible achievement to have arrived at where you have and then you get there and now you get down to the real work in a way. You can do this for the rest of your life. Writing songs... Hopefully you will.

Duritz: Hope so. It's weird. It was very hard last time. I've gotta go out on tour for another two years now and be out of my home here among all my friends. I don't like the world very much. I think it's a big ball of shit. But inside that ball of shit, I have a circle of friends. I have a place that is mine among people who I respect and love and who love and respect me. I'm surrounded by artists here. And I don't have that outside of here.

So I have to now go spend two years away from this and see how I am. I've recovered very nicely here. Now I have to go do that and it's hard and my voice goes out. But I wouldn't turn up my nose at what's happened to me. I recognize it for the miracle that it is. It's not dumb luck. We're a good band and we work real hard. But it is what it is. One in a million.

Go to Part 2

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