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  The iMagazine Feature
Welcome to fame, the ball park where nothing's the same anymore. The Counting
Crows played there, hit a couple of homers clean over the fence, became
heroes for more than one day, felt the hot breathe of the crowd, the crush
and sweat of everybody who wants to know YOU. "You know, you're out on tour for 16 months and you have friends and family and their lives are going everyday, they're kind of out there moving around and you have to settle down once in a while and figure out 'well, I have a life of my own', not just this and get a life away from music. "And that's the opposite of before when you were doing it and it was
like you had a life and you were doing it and you wanted it to be your life.
Then the flip of it just happens and you don't know where you are or how
it happened."
That alienation, loneliness, loss is the bottom line to the Crows' step back into the limelight. Recovering The Satellites is a personal ode to coming down and getting back up again. And it's different to its illustrious lush poetic, ballad-laden predecessor. Sure, the body's still a chunk of perfectly formed and structured melodic rock but the edges are now frayed, cut by experience, smacked with a guitar-licked swagger or awash with orchestration that doesn't paint happy days with blue skies and radiant suns as much as a dark sadness, a strident, strained, emotional whirlpool through which lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz's heart-in-the-mouth lyricism swirls in desperation. Those answers don't come easy. Yep, Duritz, still wears his heart on his sleeve but the poignant reflection of August is now the frustration of a soul snared in the machine, yelling his emotional tide at the world. The ladies of his heart live in his mind, the road seems to go forever on. It's a long way out there and even harder to come back. That said, Duritz and the Crows come straight from the American heartland, Sam Shephard kind of characters, restless, searching for something, but quite what is lost in the uncertainty of life. August reminded most of the Harry Dean Stanton and Natasha Kinski flick "Paris, Texas", particularly those wide-open bare-naked land shots; just earth - cement and concrete plonked on it with little heed for aestheticism, and a long, long, bitumen strip into the heat haze shimmering at its horizon. Back then in late '93, Duritz said, "When you think of the flimsiness of anything you may hang onto in life, you might as well be counting crows," alluding to the old English divination rhyme from which the band takes its name. The sun's shining over the famous beach at Santa Monica and Vickery sounds tired as he looks out over the still sea. "It's a little nicer than Hollyweird," he says, thoughtfully. Two-and-a-half-weeks of cris-crossing Europe with Duritz talking endlessly about recovering satellites has left him a little flat. The facts hang inky on a million soon-to-be-distributed bios. How Duritz was so worn and torn by the time August had finally worn out its welcome that he didn't want to - and couldn't - write. How he hung out at Johnny Depp's famous Viper Room in LA, working as a casual bar hand. And they record the story of remarkable success. Of how August and Everything After in three weeks in January 1994 shot from No 72 to 32 to 13 on the Billboard charts. In the end it would peak at No 4 on the Billboard 200 where its chart run would last 93 weeks. In Australia, the album ran 67 weeks in the charts peaking at No 12 while its seemingly inescapable big smash single Mr Jones hit No 13 and spent 18 weeks up there selling its soulful plaintive tale to an ever growing audience. Add the stream of media hyperbole and awards (MTV and American Music) that greeted August and suddenly it had them as the next-big-thing-plus, and for a man who was making comments like "I'm sort of a displaced person. My songs are about the rootlessness that exists in America", it was obvious that the downside was always going to equal the up. Vickery sighs, knows that it's got to be explained, that there's no escape from an experience that can't be forgotten, can be handled but will be revisited endlessly in the forthcoming weeks. "Adam writes from a personal point of view and it's all there, a product of the times since the last the record. They are his experiences but the feelings he expresses were experienced by the varying members of the band to some degree. I think those were specifically his experiences but I can share in a bit of that. I'm a little bit like Adam in certain ways; I'm a little bit unlike Adam in others. "Look at the band as a whole, there's five other people. It just occurred to me - funny, it hasn't before - that looking at the five other people is like five different parts of my own personality. I think that can be said about everybody in the band and they're certainly part of Adam's personality."
"You go through a lot as a band," he says, "particularly
when you're out on the road A lot of what happened to Adam was just being
recognised in every place we went. That probably wasn't the same to the
degree it was for Adam for anybody else. And, then again, he's a friend
of mine and I can see what's happening to him. I see how it affects things
for him, so I can feel that as well. Now that the band has a new drummer,
Ben Mize, since the last record, I feel like we're settling in as a band.
I think that record has this feel."
Vickery isn't a founding member, he joined in August 1993 just a month before the September 14 release of "August" making the Crows a sextet. But the story begins way earlier. Perhaps, it even begins with Duritz's childhood. It set the tone. His is the displacement of experience. Born in Baltimore, Duritz's childhood was a patchwork of different places and strange faces as he followed the peregrinations of his father, a doctor whose schooling, internship and residency took his family all over America before they settled in Berkeley, California. The Crows' early existence was precarious, one of those flimsy things Duritz sees all around him. In 1991 bassist Matt Malley had sold his music equipment and moved to Vancouver to paint houses. Keyboardist Charlie Gillingham was ready to go to work on artificial intelligence at Berkeley. Duritz, ever the itinerant, was tramping around Europe with his knapsack (how perfect) when he decided to head home to form the first version of Counting Crows. It was The Band's Robbie Robertson, in his role as musical director for the 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner, who gave the Crows their first push from the nest, bringing them in to perform a Van Morrison tune - they chose Caravan - when the notoriously shy Irishman decided not to show up. This, mind you, was in January, nine months before the band even had an album. On the bill were Cream, reunited for the evening, and the Doors, fronted by Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder. And it's that kind of optimism in the face of adversity, the will to keep
going, no matter how hard the struggle that makes the Counting Crows such
an attractive proposition. Emotion - real emotion - is what we all come
seeking. The 'hey, I've been down this path, felt this' kind of emotional
association. Music that's a friend in the lonely dark, in the playful park,
the joyous lark, the sad and strident bark.
Produced by Gil Norton, most infamous for his association with the Pixies, those definitive American pop/grunge/punk fuzzballs, Recovering The Satellites captures a band finding its feet, growing and building its character and identity. It's coruscating, hard-edged and guitar-driven - deliberately so. Rather than duplicate the pastoral grace and mellow comfort of August the Crows drew the songs for "Recovering" from as far back as December '93 and as late as in the studio, consciously created as a band rather than Duritz playing it alone at the piano and found - when it came to sequencing the track listing - that they could approach the body of their work as a double album ("Satellites" will be released in the US as a double vinyl set), the kind they all used to marvel over as kids dreaming of being rock stars, the kind you could open out, stare at the artwork, get a feeling from, become enmeshed in. In many ways Recovering The Satellites is the classic concept album. Check out the slick and see the songs broken down into four distinct parts. There's work to be done by the listener (how pleasing!) but Duritz and the Crows are brave enough to bare all. What remains to be answered is have they recovered the satellites? Vickery chuckles, "We're working on it. I think that song is about adjusting to this, this whole thing. It's a hard adjustment. In a lot of ways it makes your life very - don't get me wrong it's what we always wanted - but, you know, it's a shock to the system. If nothing else the touring and everything that goes with that. I think the lyrics are just saying that after being shot in orbit you're always going to come back down and you've got to learn to deal with it. "You know, it's funny you're just raising this set of problems to your life. It makes a lot of things great but for me personally the problems I had before didn't really end just because we became successful. It's like maybe if you tend to be a depressed person or you have trouble dealing with people, whatever it is, it's not like getting in a band and selling a whole lot of records changes that whole deal for a person." So we talk about how in America the overnight success thing happens bigger,
faster, than anywhere else, and how people's perceptions are "oh well
that's the band of the day and they just came out of nowhere'" no matter
how long that band or artist has been kicking out the jams, struggling to
just stay alive. He pauses, "It is work. That's something people just don't see. They see the whole band thing and the success and that's all they see, like how easy and comfortable it must be. But one thing I've found out and I'm coming to realise - and it isn't necessarily a band thing - is that you've been given this, it's a gift of sorts, whether it the ability to play guitar or write songs, whatever, and once you've gotten into this area where we're in, it is work.. "You're working at something you've never worked at before which can be frustrating but also rewarding when you come up with an album like we have. But there's a lot of work to be done on it. You know, it isn't the easiest thing in the world." And so the Counting Crows go about recovering their satellites knowing that they are about to be will be launched into orbit, again.
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