"It's like it's the '60s and we're the Byrds," grins the singer/songwriter, though with a full beard he looks a whole like more like The Doors' Jim Morrison than a member of the '60s folk-rock combo that scored hits with "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Eight Miles High."

"No, it's the '70s and we're Glen Campbell," counters Cracker leader David Lowery, a friend of Duritz who is co-producing the next Crows album.

"Only while he was writing 'Wichita Lineman,'" adds Duritz.

They both laugh.

The mood here is decidedly low-key. In fact, one of the running jokes is that Duritz and Lowery have spent more time in the pool than working on the tracks. "I spend a lot of time playing poker and reading, you know," says Duritz, fingering a poker chip. "I spend a lot of time going swimming..."

"So do I," says Lowery. "Who's working?"

The two men -- both excellent songwriters, both leaders of roots-rock bands that don't bow to the trend of the moment -- are a study in contrasts. Where Lowery is analytical, reserved and cynical, Duritz is pure emotion. When I ask the Crows singer what he thinks the impact of the Starr report will be on the presidency, he goes off on a 10-minute rant about how the Republicans have it in for Clinton. Along with co-producer Dennis Herring (Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven) and the rest of the Counting Crows -- and inspired by everything from Pet Sounds to Camper Van Beethoven -- Duritz has been crafting the forthcoming Crows album.

"The sound is more colorful, with more texture," says Duritz. "My vocals are a little more up front. The vocals are in-your-face, and stark, with no reverb."

"I think [what we're doing] has elements of the two previous albums," says Lowery."But it's a little sparser. The dynamics are more extreme."

Duritz is a long-time Camper fan; he and Lowery became fans when the bands toured together in the early '90s. Duritz says he wanted Lowery to produce the last Crows album, but scheduling conflicts made that impossible. He cites Cracker's The Golden Age as "a big record for me and for a lot of the guys in the band."

Clearly Duritz brought in Lowery to shake things up a bit. For the first time, the group is composing songs while it makes a record. Says Duritz, "I called up Dave and said, 'How would you feel about coming out early? Let's just start right now. I have a few songs, but no one's ever played them. Let's just do this. I want the band really involved.'" "It's great for the band because it was something we wanted to do to expand. But it also requires everyone to be -- I guess 'proactive' is the word. You can't just wait for me to come up with something; you have to come up with it. It requires all this interaction, a really intense interaction we never had before."

From the open studio door comes the sound of "I Wish I Was A Girl." "Last night we started on this new song, 'I Wish I Was A Girl,' " says Lowery. "Anyway, I just felt like I didn't really need to be involved for a long time. [There was] a good six or eight hours of them playing together, so I could just sit back and listen and go, 'That was good, I like that, I don't like that -- whatever -- if I was asked. And that was cool. Now that we're sort of getting somewhere with this song, there's more room for me to come in."

After talking awhile, the two take me into the control room to play a few rough mixes. The new songs sound great. "Amy Hit the Atmosphere" has a psychedelic feel, combining classic Duritz lyrics ("Amy hit the atmosphere/Caught herself a rocket ride/Out of the gutter/And she's never coming back") with a Beatles-esque chorus and trippy guitar. "Speedway" is a moody, confessional number ("I get so nervous I'm shaking/Get so I have no pride at all/Gets so bad but I keep comin' back for more ...") featuring '60s organ and low, cool guitars.

Duritz and Lowery agree that it's a bit strange to work together, having been friends for a long time. "It's a weird thing because ... How can I explain this?" wonders Duritz. "It's a weird thing making a record with someone who's been your friend -- weird not just for me, but for everybody in the band. There's a real collaborative thing that goes on but there's also a real ... The authority lines are sort of blurred.

"But you really don't want to cross them in the wrong way because it's a friend thing," he continues. "Because with authority figures, sometimes, you can feel the line of authority, but crossing it is a form of rebellion at times. But when it's with your friend, it's not. It's a form of temper tantrum. So it can be really weird."

He looks off into the distance, into the smog, at the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. "This is a weird way to make an album, for us. We've never done one like this before."

Addicted To Noise: On the new Cracker album, Gentlemen's Blues, you sing, "So we're standing like the last rock band on the planet." And I wondered if you guys sometimes feel like you're each leading the last rock bands on the planet, with all the techno and DJ-ing and scratching and sampling and all that kind of stuff that's going on now.

David Lowery: Absolutely I feel like that. We're one of the last bands that believe in rock as an exotic, vibrant sort of art form, with no irony.

Addicted To Noise: Elaborate a little bit more on that subject.

Lowery: Just because of exactly what you said. That these days it seems like a lot of people [are] incorporating a lot of electronic stuff -- synths, drum machines and stuff like that -- into music. And it's actually been around for a while. And it doesn't really feel that much more exotic than what we're doing, in a way. I feel like there's a certain edge that we get from playing rock that you can't get from doing that kind of stuff. It's all a little formula now.

Adam Duritz: I think that's the thing about trends of any kind. It can be vogue to think of yourself as being on the cutting edge of a trend. But you know -- I remember a few years ago that if you didn't have a flannel shirt on and if you didn't play a big, distorted guitar, you weren't considered alternative, or on the edge of music. But in my opinion, five years post-Nirvana, it's not that out on the edge. That's all, say, Spin magazine wanted to write about at that point.

To me, what's really still and always will be the forefront of music is to take your personal thing and push the boundaries of that. Whether it's how you express yourself lyrically or emotionally ... You don't just have to sound like something no one's ever heard before. Because the truth of the matter is, they've never heard you before. They've never heard you express those feelings before, so I don't think it makes a difference whether you're David or me or Adam Yauch or Adam Horovitz.

"We're one of the last bands that believe in rock as an exotic sort of art form, with no irony," Lowery said of Cracker.

What I don't identify with is whatever's the new trend in music. Trends don't often have much of anything to offer me. It's just a bunch of stuff that everyone's saying is new right now, you know what I mean? If it's really fresh and it's a great song, then that's really cool to me, still. I guess that's the soul of it.

To me, you have to have great songs -- whether that's great lyrics, or a great piece of music, or a great hook or whatever it adds up to. I'd like to think that we provide all of those things. And that's what I like about our band or Dave's band. Or the Beastie Boys, for instance.

Lowery: Yeah.

Duritz: I went to see the Beastie Boys concert the other night. I couldn't believe how great it was.

Addicted To Noise: I noticed the hat.

Duritz: That's my favorite hat right now. I've finally got a hat that fits over my head.

That's always going to be the forefront. What can make you feel like you're out there on your own is people saying that you're not in vogue, that you're not current and hip. And it may be fine for some people to change with the tides each time. Some people do a pretty good job of that. I've always sort of liked that about Madonna, that she seems to adjust to whatever the musical vogue is at the time, and make her own cool version of it.

When I look at our band and Dave's band, the music we're playing now is very different from the music I was playing five years ago, or from what Dave was playing five or six years ago. It does grow. I just hope it keeps growing. Cracker's a long way from Camper. It doesn't seem like a step backwards to me. It just seems like that's where Dave's at right now.

Lowery: Yeah. What's fresh is a great song, the way you put it together and having a great emotional commitment to the song. That's what gives something an edge and what makes it exciting. And that can be done in many different ways. I would hate to think that that was just dependent upon the actual sounds you used.

Addicted To Noise: Well, how do you feel about, say, the Beastie Boys? You didn't go to that show.

Lowery: I didn't go to that show, but man, they've done some great records. They're actually a great rock band. I don't think most people call them a rock band. They're a great rock band. They're totally great. I just like whatever gets me on an emotional level, whatever makes me really feel like it's worth listening to, you know? So no matter who it is, or what they're doing, as long as it does that, I like it.

Duritz: I guess what's really tired to me is when you think you can still get away with making crappy songs. And the fact is I guess you can -- when you think you can get away with some crap-assed song just because it sounds like whatever is happening nowadays. That, to me, that's the height of boredom. And the height of what ruins music -- one guy does something, and everybody else does it just like him. I don't care if you do it just like him, as long as your songs are great, you know what I mean?

You don't have to be ground-breaking if you're great. If it's real personal, if it gives me a melody I want to hear again or a groove that's fun to dance to, or a lyric that's really personal and true, just something that is real ... original. But what makes it a world where you can get away with a tired-assed song? Just 'cause it's whatever is happening nowadays.

I never thought I'd like Marilyn Manson at all. But I kind of love that song "The Beautiful People." You know what I mean? I think that's a fucking great song. So, for that, OK, I'm down with the Marilyn Manson thing -- even though my first reaction to it, without ever having heard the music, was that it was a load of bullshit. But then you hear the song.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that you can have all kinds of music that seems very different on a superficial level. But if the heart of the song is great, then it's a great song. That's what's really important. That's what it's all about.

"I never thought I'd like Marilyn Manson. But I kind of love that song 'The Beautiful People,'" Duritz said.

Lowery: Besides, it's pretty much music journalism that cares about genres. Most people don't really care that much about genres. They certainly cross genres when they listen to music.

Addicted To Noise: I think that's a great point to make. You go to any college kid's dorm room, you're not gonna find their CD collection to be just one kind of music. You just won't. You'll find everything from a Miles Davis CD to Ani DiFranco to the Beastie Boys.

Lowery: Exactly.

Duritz: Musicians certainly don't spend their time dividing things into genres. But it's funny because, even as a musician, you get so used to reading about how you're not in the same club as somebody else that you get surprised when you're in a bar and that somebody else walks up to you and says, 'Man, I just love your stuff, I love your music.'

So after a while you realize that this is really what it's all about. They're just like me. They're kids who grew up with big record collections. I grew up in Oakland, where funk and soul music was the thing. It's not in the music I play at all, really. I'm not at all funk- or soul-influenced -- well, maybe soul a little bit, but not funk. But certainly, in my household with my friends, jazz and funk are a staple. I think that's definitely something that's propagated by journalists. It's the thing I don't like about journalism. The tendency to try and make it all a good club and a bad club, and to make it a competition, when it's rarely that among musicians. Or fans, really.

Addicted To Noise: David, what do you think Adam's songwriting strengths are? Obviously, doing this co-producing stuff, I'm sure you've been focusing on the songs.

Lowery: He can put a melody over a chord progression that I would never expect. And I think mine tend to be a little more linear. And that really surprises me. A lot of times while we're at the piano working on chords, he'll start singing, and the melody is something that I wouldn't expect. And he ties it together in a way that I would never expect. That's number one. Number two: he can use his voice like an instrument, which very few people can. He can use it as a lead guitar, and stuff. That's a great thing. Nobody tries to do that anymore. Or few people try to do that anymore. I think that's excellent.

Addicted To Noise: And how about your thoughts on David's songwriting?

Duritz: Well, one of the things I like about David is that since he's such a good rhythm guitar player, he has a beat drive that is so grounded that his voice is freed up to sing in the rhythms. I tend to be so tied to the drums -- I get in these grooves and I have to fit my lyrics into the grooves. Which can be really cool sometimes, but it's like being shackled at other times.

So I feel like David is really freed up, and that he drives through songs. I think that comes from being such a good right hand on the rhythm guitar. I also think that I tend to be a little tunnel-visioned, in that I get kind of close, emotionally. And he has a scope of imagery and an incorporation of the world into the lyrics of his songs. I feel confined in my songwriting compared to that. He has the ability to communicate and connect his personal feelings with events and things that are distant, and to bring all that together.

A song like "Sweethearts" becomes about nostalgia and our political system, and about times that have passed, and about watching newsreels. And somehow it all comes together. Or that you can connect the way you feel personally to the Jack Ruby experience. I'm just thinking of Camper songs 'cause I've been thinking of that album the last few days. There's a scope to that that is much more expansive than mine, which tend to be a little more confined to just me. That's something I've been trying on this record -- to sort of break out of that a little bit. It's happening with varying degrees of success.

I've been listening to Gentlemen's Blues, and it's very present in my mind -- the greater expanse of his lyrics. He does the sort of thing that Robbie Robertson, where he connects this sort of mythic quality of America with the very personal quality of his own experience, and it's larger than him. I don't have that. I have a very intense, personal thing. But I have trouble stretching outside of myself. It's something I'd like to improve upon.

Addicted To Noise: So how does that operate when you're working on this record? Are you pushing Adam?

Lowery: Actually, we don't really deal with lyrics with each other very much, because I don't really worry about it. I'm sure Adam's lyrics are gonna be good. In my experience, they always have been. And I understand the stories and everything. So I don't really deal with that. I have the utmost confidence in him to do that. A lot of it is listening to how the songs go, what the words are and stuff like that and how the story can be better supported, and how the vocal melodies can be better supported. And that's really where we interact a lot on this record.

"I heard if you pissed him off, he chased you around with a bat, and I haven't seen any evidence of that at all," Duritz joked about Lowery.

Duritz: On this album, we're expanding things musically. I'm having to write in new situations. So it's actually kind of pushing me towards the kind of writing I wanted to do. But I haven't done it before so it's hard. I have more doubts about moments in songs than I've had in the past. So I usually just bring it up and I'll go, 'Well, I feel pretty good about this, but I'm not sure about this line.' "

Lowery: And then at that point, I go, 'I like that, I like that.'

Duritz: Or he'll go, 'huh.' We had one last night, where the middle line of this chorus is, 'I could shake the static every time I try to sleep,' or something. I wasn't sure whether it really was impactful enough in the song. He says, 'Oh no, I like that line a lot.' I'm like 'OK, then it's cool.' When I have a doubt about something, I bring it up. I think he's a good monitor of that.

Addicted To Noise: What have you discovered about each other by collaborating on this album that maybe you didn't know before?

Duritz: I heard if you pissed him off, he chased you around with a bat, and I haven't seen any evidence of that at all. [laughter]

Lowery: Sometimes you cultivate an aura for certain ends, you know. There's a little cultivation going on with those kind of stories. They've suited my purpose at times.

Duritz: We've only had one sort of fight during the record. And we both felt so bad about it that it was totally fine.

Lowery: I was kind of pushing the envelope on a couple of issues. It was not a surprise actually, in a way.

Duritz: It's been kind of fun. We've all really known each other for a long time now.

Lowery: But it's totally different to make a record together.

Duritz: Yeah.

Lowery: I hung out with Adam a lot but I kind of thought maybe he was a little more like he is in his songs. And in a way, he's not. He's a little more brutal, you know. Or something. There's a lot more earthiness to Adam that I was sort of surprised at.

Duritz: The band knew.

Lowery: The band knew.

Duritz: It's weird. It's a weird thing because ... How can I explain this? It's a weird thing making a record with someone who's been your friend -- not just for me, but for everybody in the band. There's a real collaborative thing that goes on, but there's also a real ... The authority lines are sort of blurred.

Lowery: Yeah, totally.

Addicted To Noise: Is it hard? Isn't it true that you've tended to be kind of a control freak about stuff? It sounds like you're really letting go of that to some degree.

Duritz: Well, I think it was really important when we were starting out, because I think it supplied a lot of drive for the band, in some ways.

Lowery: You know, I've got to tell you something on this note. Way back, when we were on tour together, and when their first record started to break and become totally huge, some of the negative press kept referring to the fact that the Counting Crows was a band that was dreamed up by some sort of marketing team.

Addicted To Noise: I remember that, yeah.

Lowery: And I was just like, knowing this guy, how could they? There's no possible way. Yeah, if they're dreamed up by a marketing team, it was Adam, you know what I mean? The second show that we played together, I could tell what was going on. This is somebody with a very strong vision, someone who put this band together, and got the record deal, and here we are. It's funny that way. There's certain issues that Adam likes to be really involved with, and stuff like that. There's a lot of latitude and freedom for me to interject ideas and stuff like that. Usually, for instance, when a song gets stuck somewhere, he's not any less or more of a control freak than I am. That's just part of the job of being a songwriter. I totally understand that. Now, the friendship thing is a little weird and ambiguous with doing the production that way, but it's also sort of exciting, because nobody knows what their role is sometimes. Really, we sometimes don't. I just think we get to other places. Like last night, we started on this new song, "I Wish I Was A Girl," which I guess is ... a tentative title, or perhaps the title.

Duritz: We're sticking with it.

Lowery: We're sticking with it. OK, good, I like that title. Anyway, I could just sit back for a while and listen, and then give my opinion, at certain points.

Duritz: It's been kind of cool that way, because sometimes it's David and sometimes it's Dennis.

Lowery: Yeah.

Duritz: One of them is like, "I'm excited about this and I have a direction, where should we go off into." Especially if we get stuck, it's good. Because, whereas we used to just get stuck before, now we all leave, and David will go in there and he'll sit with Ben for a few hours. And David and Ben will come up with some bizarre idea for how to make a song work. And we'll come back in later on. Or Dennis will do something. It's worked really well. Anyway, I guess the thing about the control-freak issue was that I think it was really good for a little while because it got us going in a certain direction. But it started to become clear to me that maybe I was becoming my own worst enemy there. Sometimes I was trying to be responsible and to make the decisions that needed to be made, but I was also kind of smothering the creativity sometimes. Which is why I wanted to get in and record before I had any preconceptions about the songs at all, before I had any thoughts about what they should sound like. Which meant in some cases before we'd ever played them, and in most cases before we'd even written them. And we had lots of ideas. This album's weird -- I've passed a lot of it on to David and Dennis, and I still have my opinions about things. I spend a lot of time playing poker and reading, you know. I spend a lot of time going swimming. And then I come in later ...

Lowery: So do I. Who's working? [laughter]

Duritz: It's been really good. There's enough of us with opinions that no one person is exerting his opinion all the time.

Lowery: Yeah.

Duritz: Everyone's getting room to be creative. It's forcing the band to grow up and take responsibility for themselves too, because they have to. Otherwise, no one's gonna write. Unless those guys do it, it's not gonna happen. They're totally being creative. Everybody is.

Addicted To Noise: Do you feel like you got to a point -- after having toured and worked with your band for a long time -- where you really trusted that these guys have ideas?

Duritz: Not just that. We really set out to become a band that listens to each other. I think the blueprint of The Band was a big blueprint early on. They were very reactive when they were playing. They were very much listening to each other, and in little moments they were accomplishing things that were really live-sounding on records. I like that. But I think we kind of took that as far as we could take it. Just accomplishing that wasn't interesting to me much anymore. I'd been really listening to stuff that David was doing the last few years. [Cracker's] The Golden Age that he did with Dennis [Herring] was a big record for me and for a lot of the guys in the band. I really was moved and impressed by the landscape of it, the sonics, the songs. I really identified with a lot of that. That was like a landmark album for me in the last few years. And also the Sparklehorse album that David produced for Mark Linkhaus of Sparklehorse. Just the combination of all the different sounds and melodies remind me of the Flaming Lips. There was this real three-dimensionality about acoustic sounds and electric sounds and heavily distorted electric sounds, and melodic and not-melodic things. It was a real three-dimensional sculpture of a record. I felt there was much more we could explore as a band than we had. We talked about doing the last album together [The Golden Age], because I was interested in what David was doing back then. But there wasn't time to record before they left on tour. We started talking about collaborating again a while ago. We knew that Dave was going to have to go on tour at some point, so we thought it'd be good to bring someone else in as well. Which is why the two obvious choices were Dennis and Don Smith, because David had done things with them before. This is a sort of weird situation because we started off with David and then, after a while, Dennis arrived. We've had both of them for a while. But now, you've got to leave soon, huh?

Lowery: Yeah, probably. In the next 10 days or so.

Addicted To Noise: Because you've got to now promote and tour with your record, Gentlemen's Blues, right?

Lowery: Yeah, yeah. I'm planning on coming back, though. I'll be back. I have to focus on something else for a little bit. This is great fun. People are always asking me, how do you do all this stuff? Doesn't it conflict? But actually, what it really does, it all builds together, it all works together to build into something else. I love producing people's records because I get ideas for what I wanna do, and stuff goes back and forth. It just all mixes together. I feel like it makes me a better artist, so I really enjoy doing it. It's really great to record somebody else, and then go play a show. Those things seem completely unrelated. I don't know. I get something out of it by doing that and then vice versa, coming back from playing some shows, coming back here. I feel like I bring something back, aside from a hangover or something.

Duritz: That's what I really want to do -- go out and play together.

Lowery: Yeah. So I'm trying to get the record done as fast as possible so that we can tour together. So our records are active at the same time.

Duritz: Practically all we did on our first album [August and Everything After] was tour together.

Lowery: Yeah.

Duritz: Your second album [Kerosene Hat], our first album, we did almost half of the touring together on that album. We did about six months together on that record, split up in three different tours. We didn't get to do it on the last album [Recovering the Satellites] because the timing didn't mesh.

Lowery: Right.

Duritz: So I'm hoping we didn't fuck it up enough on this album, too, because we take forever. We'll see about that. We're gonna go out and play this weekend together. We're playing this Gram Parsons festival. Where the hell is it? Out in the desert ... Drink tequila and play Gram Parsons songs. We did a show together up in Utah awhile ago.

Lowery: Sundance.

Duritz: We were at the Sundance Festival together.

Lowery: Yeah, that was great.

Duritz: So I got to emcee the show. [Dog's Eye View's] Peter Stuart opened. I got to emcee and introduce Peter Stuart. I had to sing a song with Peter. And then I introduced Cracker and I sang a bunch of songs with Cracker. I got to sing lead on "This is Cracker Soul," which I'd been waiting to do for years.

Lowery: He asked me what the words were, though, and I kept giving him the wrong words. 'Wait, no, no, no.' So he'd learn it one way. 'No, no, no, I think that comes before that.' It's one of those songs. It's hard to remember.

Duritz: It's the one song you can't cover when you're in another band either. You can't cover "This is Cracker Soul" in our band. You have to go play it with Cracker. I've been waiting for years. He's like, 'What song do you wanna do?' I'm like, 'Well, I gotta tell you, this is what I wanna do.' That was pretty fun. Who was there? Oh, Joan was there.

Lowery: Yeah, Joan Osborne was there, and we did some stuff with her. Sort of a prototype for some kind of show we should do.

Duritz: A Rolling Thunder Revue [a tour Bob Dylan did in the '70s with guest artists].

Lowery: Yeah, we really ought to do that sometime.

Duritz: Next summer.

Addicted To Noise: It seemed like both bands got caught in some sort of backlash when the second albums came out. The Golden Age didn't get on MTV. It was the greatest album, and it didn't get the kind of reception it deserved. That was my perception anyway. What are your thoughts about that? Do you think that's inaccurate?

Lowery: Oh yeah. I think my album didn't really get a fair shake. But I don't really care that much. Basically, a lot of the bands that were on the radio at the time when we were trying to get our record on the radio are gone. I'm still here. So, in a way, I shouldn't really gloat about that. But, I'm still here. And in a weird way ... For whatever reason, Los Angeles was always a hard place for us to come play and get a crowd and stuff. We do so much better now. I don't know what it is. If it just takes people years to find out about our records or word-of-mouth, but in a lot of cities, it's like that. We just do so much better now, at least on a live level -- so many more people come to see us. So, in a certain way, that record did a lot of good things for us. It solidified our fans, I guess. Our real core fans, who knew more than one song, or whatever. They really loved that record. That's an important record for us to play when we play our live shows. Even with the new record out, there's certain songs off that record that we have to play, or people get pissed. They don't care so much about us playing "Low" or "Get Off This" or "Teen Angst." But there's certain songs on that record that we have to play.

Addicted To Noise: Which ones?

Lowery: "Big Dipper."

Duritz: I've got to hear "Big Dipper."

An Addicted to Noise Article by Michael Goldberg

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