Crowing Up In Public

Adam Duritz is a rock star. He looks like a rock star. He talks like a rock star. He s recently left 20,000 rabid Irish fans screaming for more at gigs in Galway, Cork and Dublin. And, more importantly, people look on him as a rock star.

Walking along the quays from the Morrison Hotel to Temple Bar, Adam gets more second glances than a supermodel. One gentleman out walking his dog crosses the road to get a better look, then approaches, says hello and informs Duritz of how much he enjoyed the Crows last Olympia show. Adam smiles, says thanks and we continue on our merry way.
But it wasn t always so easy for Adam Duritz to cope with even the mildest, well-meaning attentions of his fans as this uncommonly candid interviewee will be the first to admit.
Taking their name from an old English divination rhyme, Counting Crows first took flight when Adam was introduced to guitarist David Bryson in 1989 and they started writing and gigging together. Recruiting a variety of musicians from San Francisco s Bay Area, the band gradually took shape through the early nineties and became regulars on the hugely influential Bay Area scene, which Adam remembers fondly.
There was so much going on that we would get the free listings magazines and plan our week around the gigs, he smiles. We were literally out in San Francisco every single night, either at rehearsal or at a club. It was really vital.
San Francisco has always been famous for musical trends that were really faddish but what has been its real bread and butter down through the years is that San Francisco has always had great songwriters. We were just immersed in music and art all day every day there was no escape from that.
The Crows soon developed a reputation as ones to watch, and were snapped up by Geffen in April 1992. Two months later, they opened for Bob Dylan in LA, and the same year they filled in for Van Morrison at his inauguration into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.
As for recording, rather than use a conventional studio, the band rented a house in the Hollywood Hills where they lived and worked on their debut album, August And Everything After, drawing inevitable comparisons with The Band and Big Pink. In fact, it was Robbie Robertson who first suggested to Duritz that his fledgling Crows set up a nest rather than a studio.
We came out of all these indie bands and we were used to going into these little studios where you re forced to record in a linear, layered fashion, he recalls. I wasn t satisfied with the way our band sounded and I was worried about the pressure of making a big record in a big, expensive studio.
A song isn t just a combination of parts, it s a living thing, he continues. I was afraid we would make something too slick and I was afraid we were already too slick. I explained this fear to Robbie [Robertson] and he suggested we do what they did, because it s not expensive and you can take more time to reshape the band. It was still like pulling teeth: it was a big fight, but it totally worked.
It is a strategy that Counting Crows have adhered to for each of their following studio albums, Recovering The Satellites and last year s brilliant This Desert Life, although they generally don t all live in the house now.
The house is more about atmosphere than actually sleeping there, Adam reveals. Because it s not a studio, it s not horrible to hang out there. We got a running poker game 24 hours a day. Friends come by and end up playing on the record. Dave Immergluck came visiting for a week, ended up staying for eight months and is now in the band.
Setting up nest in a house obviously worked for Counting Crows, as the results of that first hatching period, August And Everything After, and the single Mr Jones , propelled the band to megastar status overnight. But while such success may be the stuff of dreams, it took a huge toll on the young Duritz, who already had a history of mental traumas. An acid casualty in his younger days, Duritz once went through a whole year without leaving his father s bedroom.
I wasn t the most balanced human, he smiles grimly. All of a sudden people weren t talking to me like they used to. I don t like people that much and people started coming up to me on the street. I don t want that many people in my life. I m better with it now cos I ve gotten more used to it, but I was this really freaked out kid who had literally been almost vegetable insane when I was younger. I got over a lot of that stuff but all of a sudden there were all these people and it was just too much for me.
Counting Crows were pretty much a college radio/cult band until Mr Jones hit hard. Suddenly the song and band were ubiquitous, featuring on every radio station every day. The accompanying video was on heavy rotation on MTV worldwide. Counting Crows were never your average live band: experimentation and improvisation were, and still are, an intrinsic part of the live show, and their fans seemed to really appreciate this emotional exploration every night . But all that changed when the single made them stars.
All of a sudden, no-one wants to hear us play anymore, Duritz complains. They want to see that video rendered exactly on stage.
The band had planned a summer tour with a variety of opening acts, including Buffalo Tom, Alex Chilton, The Gigolo Aunts, The Cox Family, three generations of Louisiana bluegrass players on one stage. Unfortunately, this did not go well with their new-found fanbase.
Up to that point, I d been so happy that our fans were so open to music and I thought this was going to be the greatest tour ever, he enthuses. Instead, thousands and thousands of yahoos arrive and all they want is Mr Jones . They were rude to our opening bands, booing them and yelling stuff. I m having to go on stage every night after some people have been throwing stuff at friends of mind and idols of mine, in the case of Alex Chilton. Then I gotta go sing to the same front row.
Fights with the record company ensued, mainly over Adam s refusal to attend any award shows bullshit. Then they wanted us to go to England, do Top Of The Pops and fake our song. I don t fake music.
Realising he was close to becoming a vegetable again , Adam phoned his managers and told them he had to come off the road: I d made all this progress in my life, to the point where I was standing up to all these people who want us to be their product, but I was about to collapse. So I went home. In a way, it was like having a nervous breakdown and in another way it was like deciding that I m not having a nervous breakdown.
Back home in Berkeley, things didn t exactly improve. Fans were camped outside his house, and every time he went out of doors into Berkeley or San Francisco, someone would figure out that I was me, and go out of their way to say You suck. You re a fucker. I hate your band. He promptly upped and left, relocating to LA where he worked as a bartender in The Viper Room for a few months.

Around this time, it wasn t only Joe Public who was interested in Adam Duritz and what he was doing; Joe Press had an eye for the dreadlocked singer too. As well as his burgeoning rock stardom, his persistent dating of famous LA actresses made Duritz A-list news, not least in the case of his sojourns with Friends stars, Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox.
You don t date icons, you date people, he sighs. It s a prime rule of journalism to forget that those you write about are people. As a journalist, you have free reign to be completely rude to someone in print in a way you would never be in real life, especially in the post-Lester Bangs era of irreverent journalism. Some of it is clever, some of it is brilliant and some of it is criticism, but a lot of it is really insulting and it s about personal stuff. Whose business is it really if I dated an actress and what does that have to do with my music?
He is still willing enough to volunteer information about how he ended up dating both Aniston and Cox, though.
I was set up on a blind date with Jennifer [Aniston]. She s a great girl but we were so different we dated for about a week, he remembers.
With Courtney, a mutual friend of ours got hit by a car, and me and her spent about three and a half months in the hospital on either side of her bed. Because she was Courtney s room-mate, we spent another six months taking care of her at Courtney s house. I spent so much time in this room across a bed from Courtney that we fell for each other. But to me she was a girl across a hospital bed, not a TV star.
I d never really seen Friends. When you re in a rock band, prime time does not exist. Either I m at a gig or else I m on a night off and the last thing I m gonna do on a night off is sit in a hotel room and watch TV.
For someone who is protective of his personal life, Adam is surprisingly quick to admit to his fondness for those babes of the silver screen indeed, the Friends starlets were merely two of his Hollywood conquests.
I go out with actresses for the same reason that all of us would, he smiles. If we didn t all fall in love with actresses, movies wouldn t make so much money and it wouldn t be an issue that I went out with those girls. The truth is we all sit at home or in movie theatres and fall in love with the actresses. But actresses are not those girls in the movies they re wackos who spend their lives needing to pretend to be other people. I am at least a real person: my songs are meaningful. They are pretending to be someone else all day and they never stop. Well, some of them do: I ve known wonderful girls who are actresses.
But would it be harder for Adam to have a relationship with, say, an accountant, who would not be used to his unorthodox, rock band lifestyle, particularly when he spends months at a time on the road?
My last girlfriend was a journalist, he admits, and it was very hard for her, so much so that she broke up with me. She was just broken-hearted, being alone all the time. I was really in love and somehow it was enough for me to know that she was there. But it made it worse for her to know that she had a boyfriend who wasn t there. It made it so she couldn t get on with her life. Whereas, I have no life to get on with. I don t mean that in a joking way: I go from bus to hotel room to gig. Talking to her every day was my only connection with the real world.
When she broke up with me it was horrible because it didn t leave me free to get on with any life. I just got back on the bus the next day and when I got off it was just a fucking hotel room and there was no-one to call any more. Last March was the worst month of my life.
Because so much of his writing is about his own experiences, a lot of Duritz s failed relationships have appeared in his songs ( Anna Begins , Goodnight Elizabeth etc). Has he ever been confronted by a former lover about a song he wrote about them?
I use everybody s real name, pretty much, or a nickname that they would know, so it tends to be a little obvious, he grins. In life, you do things to people and they do things to you: some of them are your fault and some are theirs. I m not really interested so much in what s their fault. I m really interested in myself, so I don t spend a lot of time in my songs attacking other people too much. The strongest I ever go in a song is the end of St Robinson In His Cadillac Dream , (the closing track on This Desert Life) when I say, There are people who will say they knew me so well/I may not go to heaven, I hope you go to hell . I m not interested in calling other people to account, though. I m willing to judge myself but not so much other people.
When people break up, sometimes the hardest thing isn t the pain of separation, it s that you were the centre of someone s life for a while and all of a sudden you don t seem to matter any more. They get to live with somebody else and you start thinking like you re erased. Anna, Elizabeth they never have to think that. We re not together anymore and they re both married, they have kids, they re living great lives. But they will never have one day in their life when they think that what we had together was meaningless to me, and maybe that reminds them that it meant something to them so that chunk of their life doesn t become worthless.
He goes on to describe Goodnight Elizabeth : That song is about being on my first big tour and how hard that was on me and her. She couldn t really deal with that anymore, and that was the end of that. It gets somewhat bitter: I ll wait for you in Baton Rouge and I ll miss you down in New Orleans/ I ll wait for you while she slips into something comfortable and I ll miss you when I slip in between . It s me realising that I ll wait for you here; I ll wait for you there; I ll wait for you when I m fucking someone else. It s this horrified, bitter verse saying I m never going to get over you, but I m never going to get over you while I m being completely debauched, which is what I did. But the song is beautiful, and it s not about her being a bitch: when I say Goodnight Elizabeth in that song, she knows how important she was to me. There is nothing nasty or bitter about it.

When he s not writing about his failed relationships, Duritz still pens tunes about his own experiences. The band s sophomore album, Recovering The Satellites, included songs dealing with his meteoric rise to fame.
I was this insane guy who had become incredibly famous really quickly. I have ridiculous hair so I was completely recognisable everywhere I went and my songs are really vulnerable and open, he smiles. I had escaped criticism almost completely unscathed with the first album but I had a complete mental breakdown. I fell apart. Fame was really weird, overwhelming and scary to me and I wrote about it.
I grew up obsessively listening to music and reading music criticism. I know that everyone who makes a great, really successful first album writes a second album about the pitfalls of fame and then gets shafted for it. It just brings out the worst in people, who venomously hate famous people whining about their fame. I m writing these songs like Have You Seen Me Lately , Catapult , Goodnight Elizabeth that are about how hard it was to deal with being famous. I remember talking to (producer) Gil Norton about it, and we could see what was going to happen to me but I didn t want to change them.
Duritz was right. He was slated in the media for complaining about his success. It still didn t stop people buying the album, though, nor the subsequent live album, Across A Wire. If anything, last year s This Desert Life is better than both of the above, hitting the creative heights of their debut. Produced by Cracker and former Camper Van Beethoven mainman David Lowery, it is a warm album, and sounds fresher than anything else they ve released. Duritz points out that when they started recording it, they had only one song written. The resulting tour has brought them to Ireland, where they always play to packed houses.
They have struck a particular chord with the Irish, who have taken them to their hearts in a similar way to someone like David Gray, as evidenced by their recent Green Energy gigs in Galway and Cork, and their Point Depot headliner a week later. Does that happen everywhere they go?
No, not at all, he says. You wouldn t normally lump them together because they seem so different but Spain and Ireland are great for us. In Spain they re only 25 years out of fascism World War II went on a lot longer for them than it did for the rest of us and they are really blooming as a people.
Ireland is a country which appreciates its poets and its literature. Bloomsday is a big deal here. Do you think that would be true in any other country? D you think in Illinois, there is anything particularly Hemingway-esque? I don t think so. There is nothing really Irish about us except that we could have been a band from Ireland. Van, U2, The Undertones, Thin Lizzy, The Pogues, these are people to whom what they are doing is deeply important to them. It s real honest.
When I got to be a rock star, my quality of life went downhill in some ways. I couldn t go to the clubs in San Francisco where I d grown up. So I went to a place where it didn t matter that I was a rock star and that was fine. The weird thing about Ireland is that I m totally a rock star here people love me but they talk to me like I m a real person, they don t flip on me. I feel very loved in Ireland and very treasured in a way that I don t get to feel anywhere else. I want to be huge here, even if it doesn t mean a zillion record sales. I wanna be able to come over here and tour for my quality of life.