Counting up the years with Counting Crows
It’s 25 years and counting, but Adam Duritz isn’t crowing.
It’s been a quartercentury, not to mention 20 million albums sold, since the Counting Crows debuted as a band. To the band’s lead singer, it feels like about five minutes.
“It’s one of the great tragedies of life how quickly time passes,” said Duritz, who will turn 54 on August 1, speaking by telephone from Las Vegas, a stop on the band’s summer tour.
“It has gone by in a rush because I’ve been in it every single day. Counting Crows has been in my life for such a long time that I really don’t remember much of anything else.”
Duritz laughed, but also admitted to feeling a bit philosophical these days.
“I’m always asked what I would be if I wasn’t in a band,” he said. “I say, ‘Unemployed.’ I am a musician. The hard thing is, when you get older doing something you love, time just seems to speed up even faster.”
It has been a nonstop summer for the multi-millionselling folk-rockers from Berkeley, California, who are crisscrossing the country on their ‘25 Years and Counting’ tour, which will hit 40 cities. Don’t expect to hear the same set list in any two of them, however, which pleases Duritz and the band.
That’s to be expected, perhaps, in a band that encourages its fans to swap bootlegs of past shows on its own official website.
“The great thing about having 25 years of music under the belt, and seven studio albums, is we can definitely play a different show every single night,” Duritz said.
“It’s never the same. I want our audiences to be surprised and say that the Counting Crows never give you exactly what you expected.”
They’ve come a long way
The band is celebrating 25plus years of making music, actually, because the Crows’ roots date back to 1991, when singer/keyboardist Duritz and guitarist David Bryson teamed up to play the San Francisco coffeehouse circuit as an acoustic duo.
Eventually Duritz left his band at the moment, the Himalayans, and he and Bryson began to play as the first generation of the Counting Crows – a name taken from a British divination nursery rhyme, One for Sorrow.
“In the rhyme it was about the superstitious counting of the magpies,” Duritz said. “They’re a member of the crow family.”
The two became favourites in the Bay Area and slowly added other members to their flock, including keyboardist/ accordionist Charlie Gillingham, guitar/banjo player Dan Vickrey, guitarist/bassist David Immergluck, drummer Jim Bogios and guitarist/bassist Millard Powers.
It’s hard to pinpoint the first time they all played together as a band, but it was roughly 25 years ago.
“It must have been a club or a bar in the Bay area,” Duritz said.
“I think it might have been the Camel Club in San Francisco. I was in three bands at the time, playing gigs with all of them and waiting for a break. I remember, in the early days, I’d jump on-stage and sing with all the new bands.
“You just wanted to play all the time and played with anyone.”
By 1993 the Counting Crows were more than a local club band: They had been signed by Geffen Records. “It was a pretty big deal when I realised we were certainly going to get a record deal,” Duritz recalled.
“Like, wow. At a certain point it would have been pretty shocking if we didn’t. All these people were interested.”
Rock Stardom
The band looked to their rock heroes – Van Morrison, R.E.M, Bob Dylan and The Band – as inspiration for their debut album, August and Everything
After (1993). It quickly climbed the charts to become the fastest-selling album since Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991). The album, which included the hit song Mr. Jones, eventually sold 7 million copies.
“Our first record blew up when we played Saturday
Night Live,” Duritz recalled. “The record jumped 45 spots that week. We weren’t even in the top 200 before S.N.L. All of a sudden we were selling a ton of albums.”
When did he first feel the heat? “I remember this vividly,” Duritz said.
“We landed in New Orleans to do a gig during Jazz Fest. I went out to the fairgrounds to check things out, which should have been no big deal. I had been going to the fair for years on my own. No one cared. That day I walked those grounds and got mobbed.
“I had no concept of what this felt like until that moment when I actually experienced
it,” he said. “It was a bit of Beatlemania for us there.
“All of a sudden we were in the public consciousness and life got weird.” The album’s lead single, Mr.
Jones, got fans in a tizzy. To this day people ask Duritz who the song is about, with candidates ranging from Himalayans bassist Marty Jones to Bob Dylan – because Duritz’s line “I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky” seems to refer to Dylan’s Ballad of a
Thin Man (1965) – to Duritz
himself.
“There have been a bunch of questions over the years about Mr. Jones,” the singer admitted.
“I always say, ‘You don’t know him.’ The truth is he’s my friend Marty Jones and ... you don’t know him,” he laughed.
The same song includes one of Duritz’s most beautiful lyrics: Come dance this silence down through the morning.
“Yeah, I like that line too,” Duritz said. “But you have to be careful about lyrics like that one. You can write stuff that sounds good, but I’m always wary when something sounds too good. That’s when I’m not sure it’s a great line. If it sounds too much like poetry,
you have to honestly ask yourself: ‘Does it mean something, or does it just sound good?’
“So you’ve got to be careful about writing things that just sound good,” he said.
“Sometimes, if you write things that sound clumsy and raw, you’re actually being more honest.”
The band’s second album was Recovering the Satellites (1996), which was heavier and contained the hit single A Long
December. They went on to This Desert Life (1999), Hard Candy (2002), Films About Ghosts (2003), Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings (2008), Underwater Sunshine (2012)
and Somewhere Under Wonderland (2014). The Counting Crows have spent the better part of their 25 years on the road, but managed to find time to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Song for Accidentally
in Love, which was featured on the soundtrack for Shrek 2.
The band will continue its anniversary tour through the summer and beyond, but will pause for a return to London’s O2 Arena on Oct 28 for London’s Blues Fest, in which the Crows will perform alongside the likes of the Zac Brown Band, John Fogerty, Steve Miller, Van Morrison and Robert Plant.
Underwater Sunshine
Duritz also hosts a popular new podcast called Underwater Sunshine, in which he and music journalist/author James Campion share conversations about music, life and whatever else is on his mind at the time.
“I love the podcast,” Duritz said. “It’s just me and James, and we talk about stuff. The stuff can be movies, music or just whatever. We did a fourweek series on punk music, because we wanted to do it. Then we did a series on guitarpop bands. It just made me so happy to talk about what was on my mind.”
The podcast shares its name with the Counting Crows’ 2012 album.
“I like the idea that there are things that are a little hidden,
like underwater sunshine,” Duritz explained. “We’re shedding light on things that don’t get a lot of light.”
Underwater Sunshine is also the name of a music festival that Duritz has organized, to take place in New York, where he has lived for more than a decade, on Oct 12 and Oct. 13.
“Fifteen bands over two days,” he said with a laugh. “Nothing makes any money. I have a whole industry full of things that make no money.
“I do love them,” Duritz said more seriously.
“They are my true favorite things. I love nothing more than to put on a music festival. Afterward I get to sleep in my bed, which is really comfortable. I’ve had it for 12 years. I guess I like things that last.” Cindy Pearlman, The New York Times Syndicate