Counting Crows Shoot For The Stars, Part Two

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 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.

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 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."

This time it's just Duritz and I. 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--six million copies of August and Everything After sold--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."

BECOMING BOB DYLAN
Addicted To Noise: Don't take this question the wrong way, but how did it feel to become in a sense Bob Dylan, to become a big rock star?

All your life, you wanted to I don't know if exactly be a star, but certainly be a successful writer...

Adam Duritz: Well, it was fun in some ways, I guess. It was fun and overwhelming because you come from a certain place when you want to write, and the things that move you and inspire you to do it are one thing and then people's reaction and what they really want to take home from it are somehow sometimes so different. I write a song because I am deeply moved to write a song. It's a very simple process in that way. It's very simple. It's just that. You are inspired. You're moved and it blooms out of that. It couldn't be any more of a linear thing. There's also things that go on around it like the perceptions of other people, the perceptions of the media, the media's judgment of you against the past. And the insinuation by the media that you're thinking about all those things as well, which is sort of ridiculous, you know what I mean? It's not actually the case.

Sure, I want to be Bob Dylan in that I want to be a great writer--not I want to be Bob Dylan so I've been studying the book [gestures to a book of Dylan's song lyrics that's lying on the coffee table in front of him] and now I'm going to write one just like that. That's sort of silly.

It's a media age and there's an insinuation that there's all these other things involved. And that in this age of video cameras and "Entertainment Tonights" and "Extras" and exposes and the Enquirer that we want to be in that scene. You're famous now so you belong to me and my camera. And you belong to me and my autograph book. You belong to me while you're eating dinner and you belong to me while you're on a date. And these questions that I'm asking are relevant to what you're doing even though they're not sometimes. Sometimes they're so irrelevant. And it's all kind of strange to me and it got really overwhelming and really ugly. And also that this isn't a thing that is about deep feelings, that it's a skill that you possess that can be plugged in anywhere. I sing in a live concert for the same reason I wrote the song in the first place because at that moment I am moved to do it.

And without that, I can't sing. Quite honestly, just couldn't do it. I can't get through a song without that.

Someone the other day was asking me why we didn't play "Mr. Jones" and insinuated that we owe something to the history of it to a film for these gigs [two shows that Counting Crows had just played were filmed] to have played it at this moment. But I don't owe anything to my songs, to anyone. I owe nothing to my songs. They are me. You know what I mean? There's no separation. There's no place of honor for "Mr. Jones." It's the way I felt one day. It is me so I can't owe it anything. It's as clear a picture of me at that moment as you could possibly have. We don't play it much because it's sort of irrelevant now. Those things were a nightmare in some ways and fun in other ways. But it's hard to say "I want to see myself on TV" now because I don't.

If "Rain King" had been a big hit, we'd still play it all the time. If "Round Here" was the big hit and it was a pretty big hit, as you can see we still play "Round Here." It's never changed. It has less to do with "Mr. Jones" being a big hit than it being a big hit and what it's about because it's hard to sing some of those lines now. It's hard to sing "I want to be Bob Dylan." I know better.

ATN: That's a feeling I'm sure that came from when you were younger and when you hadn't experienced what you've experienced in the last few years. Duritz: Yeah, the song just doesn't make that much sense. I love it as a song and when I listen to it I think it's great. But playing it is a different matter entirely. Because in order to play a song for me I have to be there. I have to live it at that moment. It's easy to live other songs I've written, older ones. But it's hard to live "Mr. Jones" because I don't...it's an up and down thing. I've enjoyed what's happened to me. I had a life that seemed like a vacuum I was getting sucked into. My life before the first record and before I got signed seemed like a hole I was just very slowly flushing myself down.

ATN: What do you mean by that?

Duritz: I just didn't seem to have any place. [laughs] I didn't seem to have any place to be. I couldn't figure out how to live. I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do with my life. You spend all this time writing songs or doing some job--I had jobs, you know--and they didn't seem like things I wanted to spend my life doing and yet I thought that was what I was going to do. I thought I was supposed to do something really special and it wasn't turning out that way at all. That was really hard to live with back then. Now I've got a life. For better or for worse, for all the difficulties, I've got a life I can pour myself into and I spend a lot of time working on it. Nobody tells us what to do. We run every aspect of this band and we have from the beginning before we were big. In order to get us signed, they had to agree to that. We choose everything. We do everything ourselves. If it was fucked, it's our responsibility. If it's great, that's us too.

ATN: That was probably one of the reasons you went with Geffen Records. They were willing to give you that kind of leeway.

Duritz: Yeah. Although I think Elektra would have as well at the time. Largely, I went to Geffen for Gary [Gersh, now president of Capitol Records]. I knew he would teach me how to be an artist and he would teach us how to make records, teach me how to grow up into what I was going to do and he did. It was great. He saved my life and made this band happen. Not by creating us but by showing us how to be ourselves, you know, by showing us how to take responsibility for our careers, how to make decisions for ourselves, how to be able to handle our band now that he's gone. What are the kind of things we need to do and how to stand up for ourselves. He totally prepared me for how to deal with a life in this business and keep our art separate from it. Not separate from it--immune from it.

STANDING UP AGAINST "SNL"
ATN: I read that Musician magazine interview that you did some years ago, which started off with you going up against "Saturday Night Live" and really holding your ground. That did seem like a very gutsy thing to do at that point in the flow of this whole thing.

Duritz: But it wasn't really. That's the thing. We didn't need to play on "Saturday Night Live," not really. You want to but what for? This is the question that people always get faced with. You get offered something but they want you to do something you don't want to do for it so what do you do? Well, how much do you really need that thing? We were touring and whenever we would play someplace more people would buy the record. And we could have done that for a long time. We might not have sold six million records or however many we sold but we sold records and we made another record and we'd gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. It would have gone well.

We're a good band. We write good songs. We play great gigs. That's not going to go away. It's only brave if you think you really need to be on TV. What do you need it for? You get famous quicker, sell a bunch of records quicker. But you know what the thing was clear to me was? I didn't really need it. I had what I always wanted to have: an opportunity to make records and I made a great record with my band. This band made such a great record. I don't mean it as a bragging thing. Anyone else can think whatever they want of it. I love it.

I'm not one of those people who looks back at their records and says, "Oh, I wish it could have been like this." For better or for worse, if you hate it, that's our fault. If you liked it, we did that too. I didn't need "Saturday Night Live" at that moment. I knew it would be OK to leave because we had gigs scheduled for the next week. We were going to drive down to Asbury Park and play the Stone Pony. Always wanted to. And the crowd was going to be there and they were going to love it because we were going to give them everything.

You know what I don't need, is regrets. And I knew that capitulating at that moment to what they wanted was going to be a regret. It would be much easier to walk away than it would have been to live with that. I've always thought that's a hard fast rule. That's something Gary definitely taught me. Do things the way you want to do them, you'll have no regrets. If it doesn't turn out well, at least you're clean, you know. It's not a dirty moment where it went wrong because you caved in. I know that never happened with us. Say what you want about our success. I know there was no hype. I know for a fact that because we disagreed on a single, there wasn't a single. There was never a single of "Mr. Jones." It just happened because we played and played and played and it caught on.

ATN: It's one of those songs that is like a real "hit song," so to speak.

Duritz: It was natural.

ATN: It's not a record that somebody jams down somebody's throat.

Duritz: It was the real thing. The record got put out there and a bunch of people spontaneously started playing "Mr. Jones." Having had the disagreement with Geffen about what the single was, I certainly did go into radio stations and say what the single was. That's as big a push as it got for a while. I know that was real organic. I've got no regrets about "Mr. Jones." Nobody did anything wrong. It went a little bigger than I thought it would have, you know, but no hype machine there. I'm very proud of that. Our success was our success. We made the record, we played the gigs. We toured for almost two years, a year and a half, a long time, exhausting ourselves.

FAST PACED WORLD OF ROCK & ROLL
ATN: Does it sometimes feel like all that exists is literally what's happening right at the present and essentially, what has come before doesn't seem real? What I mean by that is whether it's two weeks ago or two years ago, it's hard to feel that really is still there?

Duritz: I think it's that. It's also the sense that right now is shaky. I think that I have achieved a certain distance from things in my life That that's a place where I am actually right living it and that the rest of the time, I feel like I'm almost fattening it up for the song. That I keep myself a little bit away from my life or I have kept myself away from my life, which would make it impossible for me to care for anybody else or have anybody else know that I exist. Because I'm not necessarily there. Especially got away from it during that last tour where I was reeling from the influx of people and the influx of that knowledge of my existence. So much people wanting to touch me and take it home with them.

Do you remember as a kid you hear stories about how Indians don't like to have their pictures taken because they think it steals their soul? It's a myth, one of those folklore things about Indians you sort of laugh about, you just think it's a religious thing.

Well, I actually got to the point where I understood that because there was so much feeling that people wanted to take a piece of me home with them that I got really freaked out about the idea of having my picture taken. I still have a lot of problems with it. I'm okay with my friends because I sort of got to feel like a picture is a measure of a memory. It's a memory composed and captured and memories are things you have with people you care about. Memories are things you have with the ones you love. And they're given between two people, not one to another. They're not taken. I understand they kind of are, but the memory should be consensual between both parties.

If my friend takes a picture of me and takes it with him, I give and they gave and it's both fair. But that somehow the memory that everyone wants to take home from me wasn't shared. I won't remember it. And it became so unreal that it scared me and it made me think that things were unreal. It's so unreal to take something of me home with you when you don't know me that it flipped me out. I understand that it's not. I can sort of see how it makes sense because they do have a memory of it and it's important to them. They treasure that moment at the concert with me. But the need to take pictures wherever I went and everyone looking at you while you take them...it started to make me feel like things were not real again, like it wasn't existing. And it felt like a piece of me taken.

The record doesn't. I'm glad you have it. I want to share that with you. I put that out the way I wanted to. You don't take a record from me. I've given it. Even though you have to pay for it but it's something I gave. But the pictures....even to this day when I can clearly see how it's something someone would want to treasure... and I don't begrudge them that. I don't think any less of anyone for wanting the picture but I have a hard time with it. I can't get around that. I can't get around how much it feels like a piece of me that I lose when you take one.

ATN: It's weird because in your case particularly, your songs are so personal that I have to assume that a lot of people who bought that first album and heard those songs--and you know this too because you've been so moved by other artists--it's like you feel like you know them. You shared this thing but you haven't really. Bob Dylan doesn't know me. I've never met Bob Dylan. I've listened to his music for years and years. You feel so close to him.

Duritz: What I'm saying about these things, you have to know that I understand it completely because I'm there. I have my idols and I have people for whom I would like a picture with them and I would like--not a picture anymore, I couldn't even think about it--but I have records that are so meaningful to me I would love to have it signed. And I understand it's an expression from me to them of how much I love their work. When I want the autograph, I feel inside like I'm giving something to them too. I know that and yet it's still disturbing.

A lot of it is just that you don't understand what a shield your anonymity is until it's completely gone and you are naked. It's like that dream of going to school in your underwear when you may have gone to school and forgotten to get dressed and you have that dream and you're running down the hallways in your underwear and you feel so weird. I hear that's a very common dream. It feels like that sometimes. Things that people would never consider doing, just ordinary politeness that people would never consider breaking like when someone's eating dinner at a restaurant, just coming over to the table is something you wouldn't do normally but they do with me. I just didn't have any time. And it wasn't even that it's a big insult to do it because I understand what it's about. It's their caring. But I couldn't eat after that a couple of times. You just get a feeling like everyone's looking at you and you're exposed. I was never the kind of person who's comfortable with that unless I'm on stage because I'm not thinking about it because there I'm just me and really me there.

One of the opening bands that opened for us, Remy Zero, who I fucking love, they opened down here. Genius band, and before the show the other night, the lead singer was saying to me... I asked him how he felt. He said, "Oh, I'm kind of nervous about playing." And I started laughing at him. I know him and he's a lot like me. I said why? Because let me tell you, you may struggle all day with the rest of your day and how to deal with life and how to deal with your record company, how to deal with people, how to just talk to people. But believe me, you're going to be fine up there because you're just going to be you there. There's nothing to be scared of on stage. And there's everything to be scared of the rest of the day. That is alien and you're not yourself and you may not exist here but you damn sure exist there. Believe me. On a level which people can only dream of actually existing, you exist on stage. I am there in color. And I'm never so sure of it the rest of the time.

UNDERSTANDING THE ENEMY
ATN: Do you worry about a backlash in the press? Well, not worry but if that happens?

Duritz: Well, I'm sure it will. The fact of the matter is that people like to find things. Everybody defines themselves by how they relate to other things. That's just the way life is. You define yourself by your position to everything else and that's even more true when you are a critic because you are in essence going around defining everyone else. And I think it would be somewhat impossible not to have something of yourself involved in that as well. That's not a criticism of it. It's just human nature. And when your life is spent judging other things, then you have to judge them in relation to yourself. You have to. So inevitably, people like to find things and lift them up and be a part of lifting them up. And then you have to relate to them where they are then. You can't look down and pull us up now. You can only maybe pull us down. Just because we sold such an obscene amount of records and we had to annoy someone with "Mr. Jones." It annoyed me.

It's probably hard now to look back at "Mr. Jones" and remember how fun it was the first time you heard it and what a joyous song about dreaming it was. It's probably, not impossible, but it's probably hard to think of it as anything less than like a mega hit which is not quite the innocent fun thing that it was. People discovered "Mr. Jones" for themselves. That was part of the charm, I'm sure. Part of the reason it's so successful is because so many radio guys, quite honestly, did it on their own. They didn't have any record company telling them how to do it. They actually went and did it. You get so much shit shoved down your throat when you're a radio guy I'm sure now that part of the charm of "Mr. Jones" and its success must have come from the fact that no one did work it.

I'd worry less if we hadn't made a really good album. But the fact is, I have no regrets. I think it's a fucking great record. I think that I poured my heart into it and I think those other guys did too. I know they did. I know we killed each other to make it, just like we did last time. We broke each other and you pour each other into the crucible of the record-making process and you fucking fry yourselves and I did. I fried those guys and I fried myself and Gil fried all of us and we all fried each other. I'm really proud of it. It has scope. It has range. It has breadth. I wanted it to. It has deeply felt songs on a more bare level than the first album. And I thought the first album was kind of bare that way in emotion. This one is more bare.

I feel even more exposed on this album than I did on the last one. Over a greater range of emotions and it's certainly a much more ambitious sonic quality. I don't mean to gush over my record. It's silly. But it means everything to me and I think it shows. I have no regrets. You'll never catch me saying it could have been this. Not for this record.

ATN: Obviously you've watched and seen what happened with Cracker releasing the follow up to their big album, which I think is a really great album. And yet it didn't happen in terms of the public and radio and MTV never played the video.

Duritz: I think they've been unfairly miscast. David Lowery is one of the fathers of alternative music. Before there were Kurt Cobains, there were David Lowerys and the guys in Black Flag going around the country. And people like the Pixies and Sonic Youth. These are bands that invented the tour circuit that we all go on. The club circuit didn't exist before. And Camper Van Beethoven's an enormously influential band. And he's an enormously influential songwriter and a really brilliant songwriter. And I think that because he came so far into a different kind of musical form with Cracker, people just saw Cracker as sort of a mainstream classic rock band, which I never have. To me, it's still David Lowery's incredible apocalyptic songwriting. And Johnny's perfect riffs and leads and signature guitar moments. They're just a phenomenal band to me.

ATN: What if your album has the same fate? Will you freak or just make another one?

Duritz: No, we'll do what they're doing. We'll tour. You play. Come see it live. I bet you'll go buy it. If the radio doesn't play it. Radio is not the be all, end all of the world. There's MTV. They're fun. It's great to have them because you want to be able to listen to a variety of music. It's there for you. But you know what? Go see a live show. That's what it's really all about. And radio and MTV know that too because they want your live shows on tape. They want to play them on the air sometimes. Sometimes they don't really want to play the whole thing. These are all great formats. It's great to have a lot of different formats to listen to shit on. It's great to be able to see a song. But understand that a video is not the be all, end all of a song. And it's great to be able to hear a song on the radio. But understand that it was just one day in the life of that song. Go see someone live. See how it feels like now. Cracker will win you over playing live. They're brilliant.

I want to say this because I think this is a really important thing. There's a very misguided notion in this business that your sales success denotes success or failure and that if radio doesn't pick you up, your career's going to be over. People get the idea that if you're not successful, that you're not good. It's really stupid because record companies give up too quickly on bands before it. Let me tell you. There's nothing in this world that Cracker needs to feel regretful about that record. It's an amazing record. And people will realize it if not today, then tomorrow and if not tomorrow... If it's 10 years from now, The Golden Age is still the album it is and that's not going anywhere.

Look at what happened to Pet Sounds. Nobody listened to it. Nobody bought it. His career went down the drain. He went crazy. And we all sit around and pay homage to it today. Everyone from Paul McCartney to me sits around and talks about how it's one of the greatest albums ever made and what a genius Brian Wilson was. It's true. He's the man. And that album is brilliant. And look at Big Star's third album (Third/Sister Lovers). Or all the Big Star albums for that matter. What I hope doesn't happen from this is that Virgin actually panics and thinks "Oh now they're a failure because they had one album that didn't sell records." Because they're so good. These songs are so great live.

David Lowery is a songwriter. He's not a flash in the pan. He'll write songs when he's 21 and he'll write songs when he's 51. I can't write a song like "Big Dipper." Not yet. I can think about it, I can dream about it but I'm not going to write "Big Dipper." I can sit around and listen to "Big Dipper" over and over again and think about what it must be like to be that good a songwriter. And then I think to myself, you know what, he's my friend and he likes me and he respects me and so I'm okay. The guy who wrote "Big Dipper" thinks I'm a really good songwriter so I'm going to be all right. And so is Dave because Cracker will always be fine as long as they have David Lowery to write songs and Johnny Hickman to play the guitar. You don't have anything to worry about when you've got that in your band. He's never been erratic. He's never made a bad album in his life. And you know what? He's responsible for Counting Crows too because they carried us. They carried us and they supported us and they made it okay for us when it happened. Those guys. Just go see them live. What more?

THE PRICE OF SUCCESS
ATN: One of the things that certainly have come through in this conversation is that success has not brought you ... Success hasn't made your life a happy, wonderful thing.

Duritz: No. But it has made it better. I'm sure. I'm a songwriter and I get to spend my life being a songwriter. I'm not a songwriter who spends his life digging holes for plants which I was doing. I'm not landscaping, which I liked but I thought I was going to do something else and I am doing it. And while I'm not the happiest guy in the world, I'm learning. And I have something here. I've got a home. I've got a band that's amazing. I have friends who I love. I have a place that's safe to be. I don't know how it'll be once I get on the road. But I feel okay here. And you know what? It's my life and I'm in control of it. No one is making it happen the way they want it to happen. Me and Dave and Dan and Ben and Charlie and Matt run our lives. We have great people who help us but we run our lives. And we get to do exactly what we dreamt about doing our whole lives. So it's not all bad.

ATN: So you're feeling pretty good right now actually, relatively speaking.

Duritz: Well, it's not that. It's not a good or bad thing. I am the person I've always been. I haven't learned to deal with the stuff inside of me. I've always had a lot of problems and a lot of emotional difficulties and I've always been kind of fucked up. And I'm still that guy. That said, I don't have to worry about digging holes for plants on top of that. I'm well off. I can do things for my parents like they did things for me. My parents are okay. They can do fine without me. But I can do things for them like they always did things for me. I can go wherever I want anytime I want. I have the one thing I always wanted in my life is freedom. I have total and utter freedom. Nobody ever makes me do anything. I have to take responsibility for when I fuck up or when I fail but I get that responsibility. It's mine.

I'm a totally free man. I have always wanted to be a free man and I am. Happy, sad, that's different. I'll have to deal with that. I don't regret the stuff that's happened. It has changed my life entirely though. In very good ways. It just didn't solve my life. And in parts of it, it made it harder. But it's not like oh, poor me, I'm famous. You shouldn't feel sorry for me for being famous. It's ridiculous.

I have problems and it didn't fix them. And in some ways exacerbated them but it has changed my life and given me a life. I have a life. It's right here. I have a house full of books and paintings and videos and CDs and records, which is just exactly what I wanted to have a house full of. I can sit around all day and read or watch movies or look at my art, which I love. And I'm going to be okay because I've made a career out of writing songs which is who I am. Not something I necessarily love, but who I am. In that sense, I'm learning to exist too because I fulfill my life by actually being who I am as opposed to being something I'm not and dreaming about being who I am. My life is not a pipe dream that goes on inside my head. I am who I was born to be in some ways. Now, if I can improve that, that's going to be great too. But it is something extraordinary to get here. It's a one in a million shot.

I have friends who are brilliant and who aren't here. To take yourself from the huge morass that is obscurity and anonymity and to make yourself into an artist, of all things, is extraordinary.

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