Crows flying in new directions
Counting Crows
With: Twin Forks
When: Monday at 8 p.m.
Where: Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, 11455 87th Ave.
Tickets: $62.95 to $116.40 at Ticketmaster.ca
The first time the Counting Crows went to England, they were scheduled to play the iconic British TV show Top of the Pops. It was during the height of the hype from the group’s alt-rock debut album August and Everything After, which went on to sell 10 million units.
At the time, bands on Top of the Pops mimed their songs to the recorded track, the prospect of which made lead singer Adam Duritz uncomfortable.
“I didn’t know what I was going to regret later, and what I was going to be OK about,” Duritz, now 50, says 20 years later, over the phone from his home in New York City. “I just wanted things to feel real. A lot of stuff feels fake in this business.” (A lot of stuff feels especially fake for Duritz, who has a type of dissociative disorder that makes the world seem unreal.)
“We cancelled that appearance. And that not only cost us an appearance on Top of the Pops, it cost us, like, 10 years of bad relationships with our record company over there, with the TV shows over there. They were all p---ed cause you know what? It’s their national TV show. The Beatles did it. Everybody did it.
“When I look back on it now, I understand entirely why I said no, but maybe I could have taken 3-1/2 minutes out of my life, suffered through it and dealt with a show which was more than happy to put us on and promote us. Maybe in that case, I should have courted fame.”
Not being 100-per-cent comfy with the spotlight is what prevented the band from being astronomically famous (none of their records peaked quite like their first), and also probably what’s given them incredible longevity, says Duritz. They just tried to do what felt right.
The frontman is chatty, affable and genuinely stoked to be touring Canada extensively for the next month. But aside from being open about his debilitating dissociative disorder (he wrote about it in Men’s Health Magazine in 2008), he’s also been candid about his intimacy issues. He’s had several unsuccessful relationships with famous actresses — Winona Ryder, Courteney Cox, Monica Potter, Mary Louise Parker, Emmy Rossum — many or all of whom turn up later in wistful, bittersweet songs. Being famous hasn’t been all roses.
Counting Crows’ latest studio album, Somewhere Under Wonderland (their seventh), was released last fall. It’s a real growth record. He had come off a year writing for a play — the first time he’d written for someone other than his own band.
“What I realized writing the play was, it’s possible to communicate how I feel while telling stories that aren’t from my life at all.” Hence, the album’s first track, Palisades Park: a sprawling, eight- minute, nostalgia-rich tune about an old (and lost) friendship that Duritz says isn’t autobiographical.
Musically, the sounds on Wonderland are familiar to anyone who’s listened to most of the Counting Crows discography.
There are those super-storytelling ones like Palisades Park, hooky tunes like Earthquake Driver, and southern-rock jams like Scarecrow.
And there are heartfelt songs like Possibility Days that could easily translate to a full-on piano ballad. “The worst part of a good day is knowing it’s slipping away/ that’s one more possibility day/that is gone,” Duritz says on that final track. And that bittersweet, I-can-never-get-too-happy mood is familiar to longtime fans.
Next year, the band will have been together 25 years. There’s Duritz, songwriter and singer; guitarist David Bryson, with whom he originally started playing small gigs in San Francisco; Charlie Gillingham on keys; lead guitarist Dan Vickrey and multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück, who’ve been playing together since the ’90s. Drummer Jim Bogios and bass player Millard Powers joined in the 2000s.
“From the beginning, we always thought about the long-term,” Duritz says. He also thought a lot about math. “I have a lot of friends in great bands. At some point, someone in that band did the math and figured out absolutely for sure why they should be getting more money. But it occurred to me very early on, it doesn’t really matter how much money I deserve. If there’s not enough for everybody else to feel good, we’re not even in a band.”
It’s something he tries to pass along to the young bands he showcases in the Outlaw Roadshow, a concert series Duritz presents with Ryan Spaulding of music blog Ryan’s Smashing Life. Mentoring new bands — such as Twin Forks, who Duritz says are “so freaking good” and “incredible live” — never gets old for him.
The tour with Twin Forks brings Counting Crows to smaller places like Cold Lake, Thunder Bay and Moncton — a real treat, Duritz says. “To come to a country that I’ve been to many times, and where at least half the gigs or more I’ve never been to before? I’ve never been to Cold Lake, Kelowna, Thunder Bay, Moose Jaw, Halifax, St. John’s, Moncton? I’m kind of thrilled about it.” jleconte@edmontonjournal.com Twitter: @julialeconte