Pages tagged “counting crows”

Duritz and Co.'s latest a ghost in the fog

I should’ve seen it coming when the Counting Crows went on a minor-league-baseball-stadium tour with Live. (Yes, minor-league. And, yes, that Live.) A devoted Crows fan, I tried to justify it (Bob Dylan tours stadiums and nobody’s got a problem with him!), but I eventually faced the facts: We’re hardly talking about Dylan here, and opening for a washed-up grunge-pop band at the Blair County Ballpark in Altoona, Pa., can’t really be construed as a good thing.

Counting Crows once occupied a coveted space in their industry: They were a mainstream band with street cred, making solid music and lots of money at the same time, which was no small feat. They exploded on the adult-alternative scene with 1993 hit “Mr. Jones,” a foreshadowing song about fairy-tale dreams of making it big. August and Everything After met with critical acclaim and gained the band thousands of lifelong fans. It’s a near-masterpiece—the lyrics read like poetry, the hooks are huge and T-Bone Burnett’s production is remarkable.

For many, August is the band’s best work, and everything after pales in comparison. But while the themes in 1996’s Recovering the Satellites aren’t as inviting (fame after a nervous breakdown, falling in and out of love after a nervous breakdown, and contemplating the universe after a nervous breakdown), most of the music would fit comfortably on August if it weren’t so electric. As for 1999’s This Desert Life, songs like the disarmingly stark “Colorblind” and the super-catchy “Hanginaround” made the lingering aggression worthwhile.

In 2002 came Hard Candy, a record as poppy as its title suggests. Organic Crows fans were miffed by the syrupy production, the often-predictable melodies and—of course—Vanessa Carlton’s appearance on the radio-single cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” But just because music is Top 40-friendly doesn’t mean it sucks—“Holiday in Spain,” “Black And Blue” and “Goodnight L.A.” are traditional Crows slow jams, and Ryan Adams co-wrote and contributed vocals to the waltzy “Butterfly in Reverse.”

Which brings us to date. The band has divided its new record into Saturday Nights (electric-guitar-heavy rockers, fittingly helmed by Gil Norton, who also produced Satellites)—and Sunday Mornings (strummier, whinier, banjo-laden numbers produced by Brian Deck of Modest Mouse/Iron and Wine fame). The plan isn’t executed well enough to be groundbreaking: The fast/slooow/fast sequencing baffles, and sometimes it’s unclear whether you’re listening to Side A or B. Plus, the concept isn’t original. It’s been done before, even recently—by The Foo Fighters (In Your Honor), and by the Counting Crows themselves (Across A Wire: Live in New York).

There are occasional whiffs of classic Crows: when “Cowboys” moves effortlessly from electric frenzy into lilting chorus, in nostalgic lines like “She is the film of a book of the story / Of the smell of her hair” (“On A Tuesday In Amsterdam Long Ago”), and in countless references to shades of darkness and light, the weather, ghosts and California cities. Or better yet, in verses like “I dream of Michelangelo when I’m lying in my bed / I see God upon the ceiling, I see angels overhead” (“When I Dream of Michelangelo”). Sound familiar? That’s because Duritz lifted a line from HIS OWN SONG, “Angels of the Silences.” Some consider these self-referential allusions poetic and thought-provoking—and if the rest of the lyrics were on par with “Angels,” I’d agree—but in this case, it sticks out like a sore thumb down.

Many of the sentiments behind Duritz’s imagery haven’t changed in the last decade either. The tragic insecurity, fear of invisibility, longing for greatness, the fatalistic view of love—it’s all still there. But he used to put it so beautifully, as in the first line of the first song on August, “Round Here”: “Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog / where no one notices the contrast of white on white.” On 1996’s “Have You Seen Me Lately,” that same emotion is phrased a little less poetically, but it’s still striking: “I was out on the radio starting to change / Somewhere out in America, it’s raining / Could you tell me one thing you remember about me?” Now, it’s 2008, and we’ve come to this: “Please won’t you look at me? / Cause I’m not seeing you look at me / Oh, I will make you look at me / or I am not anything.”

Don’t get me wrong—the sentiments aren’t all the same. Some of the very concepts behind Duritz’s lyrics have taken a turn for the careless. We’ve gone from August’s heartbreaking verses regarding women, like “Kindness falls like rain, it washes me away / And Anna begins to change my mind / And every time she sneezes I believe it’s love” (“Anna Begins”), to Saturday’s often trite and decidedly un-poetic lyrics, like “Give me a kiss I think it feels like sunshine / Come on baby light me up / I wanna look into your eyes until I go blind” (from “Sundays”), and “We’re gonna get drunk, find ourselves some skinny girls and go streetwalking, baby” (from “Los Angeles”). Streetwalking? Skinny girls? Seriously?

Granted, on a scale of Celine Dion Live à Paris to OK Computer, this is a fine record. But it’s only fair to consider Saturday Nights, Sunday Mornings in the context of the rest of the Crows’ catalog, and with that in mind—to borrow a phrase from Duritz—this one might fade into the grey.

Click here to read Paste's recent interview with Adam Duritz...

For many, August and Everything After is nothing less than a classic, a record teeming with quality songwriting translated into hit singles. For a then-relatively-unknown San Francisco band called Counting Crows, and, in particular, its lead singer, Adam Duritz, it was a launching point leading to household-name status, world tours and several more albums. The band's latest, Saturday Night and Sunday Mornings, hits record store shelves today.

Paste caught up with Duritz to conduct a standard Q&A piece that transformed into an blow-by-blow re-telling of Counting Crows' history from his personal point of view. Rather than break it up, we kept his stream of consciousness intact, and the story he tells includes painful personal loss, never-ending tours, mental illness and one resilient rock 'n' roll band.

Paste: Can you describe your evolution as a musician during your time in Counting Crows from your first album all the way to Saturday Nights, Sunday Mornings? How have you grown through each release and how do you see your music having evolved over the years?
Duritz: On our demos, we were kind of a Roxy Music Avalon-sounding band. Not completely, but in the drumming and the solos. I knew that there was something that we could be, and I wasn't sure what it would turn out to be, but I knew that we had to get rid of all the preconceptions about the band and just learn to play songs together and everything else would spring from that. We took away all of Dave [Bryson]'s guitar effects, half of Steve [Bowman]'s drum kit, we got Matt Malley an old box teardrop bass and Charlie [Gillingham] just played the piano, no synthesizers. The idea wasn't to go play classic-rock music, it was just to get rid of everything that was making it safe. No effects, no freaky drums. We were just going to sit in a room together and play. It was about stripping it back so all we had was each other.

After that, Dan [Vickrey] joined the band, and then we had louder electric guitars. And when Ben [Mize] replaced Steve later, it was much more of a punk drumming sensibility, so we were playing much more rock music. That allowed us to become the band that could make Recovering the Satellites. Believe me, nobody wanted the band who made August and Everything After and sold 10 million copies to go work with the Pixies producer (Gil Norton). That was not greeted with enthusiasm from the people around us.

After that, all these things were changing, I mean, indie music came back again, and there were bands like Sparklehorse and Cracker was making these really cool albums, and Built to Spill was out there doing stuff, and Radiohead was starting to come out with some interesting kinds of music. Hip-hop had done a lot of interesting stuff too with taking bits of music and mixing them around into other kinds of music and loops. We were really getting into the studio for that album and making it quirky and weird. Again, nobody wanted the band who made "Long December" to go and make a record with [producers] Dennis Herring and David Lowery who had been making these indie records.

After that, I was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the night that Springsteen and McCartney were inducted and [McCartney and I] ended up having this conversation. I told him how he blew my head off singing [that night] and that he looked like he was about 20 years old up on stage, and he goes, "Well, yeah, that's rock 'n' roll. That's what it does, doesn't it? It makes us all 20 years old." I thought, "Yeah." It just keeps you who you are. You play rock 'n' roll, you never think about getting old again. Rock 'n' roll does that, man.

As I was leaving that night, he was on my mind because it was just such an amazing thing that he said to me. I was humming and singing all these Beatles songs all the way home. I suddenly thought, "Man, that guy's written like 50 records, the melodies of which I cannot get out of my head 40 years later." How the fuck do you do that? What is it to be the kind of guy who can write a melody that cannot get out of people's heads? I kind of decided at that moment, "This record that we're going to do right now, every single song will have a melody." You can all judge for yourself how successful that was.

[Hard Candy] turned out to be a record about memories, which, it's not ironic, but kind of the point of it. That was our intention in making that record, and we got [producer Steve] Lillywhite for that, who is so good. I mean, I own like 45 Lillywhite records. It's also why "1492" and "Los Angeles" aren't on that record, because they're not songs about memory. They're absolutely raw songs about disintegration, and so they couldn't go on that record. So we didn’t use them for it.

We toured for a year and a half on This Desert Life, and then we toured while we were making Hard Candy and then we toured on Hard Candy, and then we toured for the greatest hits record [Films About Ghosts: The Best Of...], and then we toured through the Shrek thing, and it just went on for like five years.

At the end of it I had totally lost my mind. Not that I wasn't doing it for 20 years already, but there was this moment when my grandmother died and I lost this girl I had been dating all in the same five-minute moment, where I got the phone call from both of them at the same moment, while sitting in a hotel room in Perth [Australia], literally the most isolated city on Earth. There is no other major city that is as far from other cities as Perth on earth. And the sense of being so far from everywhere I was supposed to be in life was so palpable. That was the egg cracking. There wasn't much egg left anyway, but that just cracked me. After that, I just stopped. We played some gigs, but I was essentially done. I walked off the plane to go to the funeral. I mean, I almost didn't do that, and then we didn’t do anything for a while.

I mean, we played. We still toured every summer. We did some gigs here and there, but I didn't want to make any more records. I knew I didn't know how to live anymore. I knew I had lost my mind. I knew that I'd never make it through another tour, but I also thought, "You can't stop fucking around with this. This is really serious mental illness and you've got to figure out your life before you go and do this again, because there's nowhere lower that you can go." I was wrong about that actually; it did get a lot worse.

Then one day I was sitting around listening to the demo of "1492" and I started thinking, "There's this album here." There is something I wanted to say about beginning to lose yourself in this void of who you are and the disintegration that follows that. Suddenly, I thought, “We have to go in the studio now. Right now.” Everyone came to NYC in June—I still wasn't capable of leaving home—and we did 20 days or something. We got the basis of Saturday Nights, which is all the record was at that time. Then we went on tour, and afterward I just went completely down the pipe and we never went back to work on it.

Around December of that year I just realized, “You’re going to be dead if you don't try to fix this.” By January, I was like, “Okay you've got a grip on some of this.” I was still narcoleptic, still fucked up on the drugs and the medications. But Gil had to start a Foo Fighters records in the beginning of March, so I was like, "Gil, everybody, let's go just another two or three weeks."

After that, I was looking at bands, and a lot of them were produced by Brian Deck, who I hadn't heard of. A lot of indie-folk albums were produced by him. So I called him up and we talked, and he came to visit us and we played some of it for him in my living room and it was clear to me that this was the guy.

We made Sundays, which was maybe even a harder record to make. I mean, I was less insane, so that was good, but it was really hard music to make. To make it work the way we wanted to, we had to be really creative about it.

I was surprised at how big the resistance to making this album the way we did was. Almost no one wanted to make it the way we did. I mean, our producers did, and so did the engineers and so did my publicists, but almost everybody wanted to get rid of the two records and thought that we were wedded to a concept. It's not like the concept had driven the album. It was the complete opposite; the songs had created the record.

Thank God for the label for this: They allowed us to have two songs for free download. I really wanted one song from each side of the album out all over the world to everyone as free downloads. This argument was very important for us to make—the ability to put two songs out there. It will save our band, and maybe the record.

Counting Crows’ uncanny ability to merge roots-oriented songcraft with commercial-radio aspirations has always defined them more readily than any of their individual songs, albums or members. So while this decade-spanning set includes all the familiar tunes—“Mr. Jones,” “Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman),” “A Long December”— chances are pretty good that the two new ones (including a Grateful Dead cover and a glossy original, “She Don’t Want Nobody Near”) will be recognizable, too.

It seemed like a great idea, pairing up veteran college favorites/road warriors Counting Crows with new college favorite/road warrior John Mayer on a lengthy, co-headlining summer tour. With their sensitive, acoustic-flavored pop stylings, both artists have plenty of fans in common, and both are known for putting on dynamic performances. Why then, did their July 11 show at central Washington’s Gorge Amphitheater fall flat?

For starters, the Gorge is at least a two-hour drive for anyone who lives in a city, a sacrifice ordinarily outweighed by the venue’s exceptional setting along the Columbia River. But at $50 for lawn admission and $60 for reserved, plus $30 per car for overnight campers and $4 bottled water in the 95-degree heat, the “Was this worth it?” scale tipped pretty heavily in the direction of NO before the concert even began.

Couple that with the fact that Mayer's been on the road virtually non-stop for two years, touring behind the same album. I think a lot of people are getting tired of “Your Body is a Wonderland” by now. Hopefully, Mayer’s returning fans will catch some relief when his new album Heavier Things comes out September 9.

Though Counting Crows spent the last two summers touring with Live and opening for The Who, they have, in contrast to Mayer, taken a reasonable amount of time off the road. But one has to wonder—are the seven years since the last good Counting Crows album taking their toll on fans’ eagerness to come out in large numbers to see the band?

As the Counting Crows took the stage and the sun sank below hills of gold, I was hoping the band would blow the overhanging clouds of doubt away with a powerful, cathartic live show. Singer Adam Duritz and his seven-man band promptly began an acoustic set, deconstructing songs like “Have You Seen Me Lately?” and “Mr. Jones” by slowly meandering through them with disappointingly little trace of the original melody or arrangement. At least it offered plenty of opportunity for accordion solos.

Thankfully, the electricity flowed freely as the band plugged in for its 7th number, “Rain King,” which was wrapped around Duritz’s freestyle take on the Bruce Springsteen classic “Thunder Road.” Duritz has a gift for re-interpreting melody and continually infusing new emotion into his singing, but without equally energetic support from his band, the performance lacked intensity. The pacing of the set was poor throughout, as the rocking pop anthem “American Girls” was buried between sleepy renditions of “Anna Begins” and “Goodnight L.A.” By the time they wrapped up their 70-minute show with “Hanginaround” and “Hard Candy,” the band’s repeated appeals encouraging the crowd to clap along received a half-hearted response at best.

As some concertgoers stepped out during intermission, their seats were instantly filled by giddy girls pining for a closer look at John Mayer. Witnessing this, the reality of his expanding fame became clear to me. In the eyes of the public Mayer is no longer the sophisticated young singer-songwriter of his early rep, but now a bona fide pinup pop star. Perhaps this explains why he would tour yet again, playing only two new songs while there were at least twice as many new styles of Mayer T-shirts for girls. The immense collective shriek that greeted his arrival on stage may not have been on par with Beatlemania, but it was loud enough to drown out the opening chords of “My Stupid Mouth.” From there, his set was largely an audience sing-along as he trotted out six more songs from his hit album Room For Squares, including the ubiquitous “No Such Thing,” and “Your Body is a Wonderland.” As always, the songs were interlaced with plenty of improvised guitar as well as vocal additions including snippets of 1983 hits at the beginning of “83.” The new song, “Something’s Missing,” had a cool, laid-back feel, and the other new number, “Come Back to Bed,” hit a high point with a long, bluesy guitar solo. Appropriately, he turned a solo-acoustic cover of the Police’s “Message in a Bottle” into “Message to Your Daughters” before bringing back the band to close the show with an amped-up version of one of his best songs, “Why Georgia?”

Both Counting Crows and John Mayer offered plenty of enjoyable moments, but where were the fireworks these artists’ talents warrant? Too many duds and not enough explosive energy—perhaps somebody has been hangin’ around way too long.