The Benevolent Dictator of the Counting Crows
Adam Duritz is the frontman and lead singer for the band Counting Crows. He’s also a solo performer, a producer, and has started two of his own record labels. Earlier this month, Duritz stopped by the SiriusXM studios to sit down wiht Ron Bennington and talk about music. Excerpts from the interview appear below.
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Ron Bennington: What do you feel like the state of music in America is? I mean, you guys started, to me it was like one of those golden ages. The early 90s had that great feel about it.
Adam Duritz: I think it’s pretty great right now. I mean, I think the same things that made it hard for a lot of us to continue as successfully as we did, made it really good for a lot of young bands to play. It’s possible in ways now – when the record companies all fell apart it meant largely a lot of independent bands used to have to sign to a major label. And now, you can really – bands can survive and thrive for much longer independently. It’s cheaper to make records. There’s more easy ways to sell it on the Internet without any overheard like, you don’t have to ship stuff. So, I think it used to be like bands came and went – they lived really short lives. It may be hard for people to become like superstar famous anymore, but it’s possible for a lot of bands to like – I have friends who’ve never been signed to a major label, who have made five or six records. They’re great bands. You get really good, which is the nice thing about it.
Ron Bennington: But you’re right. You’re going to be the Replacements if you’re lucky, not Rod Stewart lifestyle. You know what I mean? So, you’re going to be able to go out and perform and live playing your music. So, what changes I guess, is the attitude of why people go into music in the first place.
Adam Duritz: Well, but for a fan, it’s pretty great. You’re choice of music and your choice of venues to hear it has just wildly expanded. Not just like satellite radio – not just terrestrial radio, but satellite radio and not just this, but the entire Internet. Any blog that wants to write a story about you can put a song on as well. It’s really easy. I think that’s kind of great. You’re asking me about music – as a music fan, I tend to answer that more as a fan than as a player, I guess. It’s hard to make a living, but easier than it was.
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Adam Talks About Taking Music Seriously
Ron Bennington: You still are a music fan. At what age, and what made you feel like you were going to be connected to music?
Adam Duritz: My parents took me to see the Jackson Five when I was a little kid. That was a pretty big deal for me. It kind of knocked me out. I don’t really remember it very well, but I remember I just wanted to listen to them nonstop after that.
Ron Bennington: And there’s a really perfect performer to look at of why somebody – what attracts somebody to music. Because there he is as a kid and he’s just all heart, but you notice as the years went on, he became about hype and selling and every dark part of the record business probably got to Michael Jackson.
Adam Duritz: I think the deceptive part is probably thinking it wasn’t happening then because it’s all heart, but Motown’s a very pro – a very professional way of being, now. I think you’re probably right, he’s a kid, but he’s – think about how good the five of them are. None of them are 18 yet I don’t think, and they’ve got dance moves. They’ve got everything down better than any of the boy bands that we know get trained nowadays. And they’re just as well trained, the difference is the end product might have just been better music than we’re used to seeing from a boy band. Essentially, they’re still a boy band. They’re trained, and apparently the family, the home thing wasn’t so great with the dad – I don’t know about… I mean, it’s just gossip. But yeah, it’s tough. It’s a tough way to grow up, I think.
Ron Bennington: To grow up being a pro as a young person.
Adam Duritz: Yeah, I don’t think being – there’s a point in your life where you’re at, where if you’re going to be a musician where it does switch. It’s the kind of thing that’s usually a hobby for most people, which means it’s just for fun. There’s a point in every musician’s life where they kind of come up against that moment where it actually gets hard, unpleasant, you’re arguing with people about it and you have to make a decision on whether to really continue to be a musician or just keep it as a hobby. And a lot of people actually stop at that point. Your first band’s really – you really fight over things. I know, it made me want to stop at the time. But I’m not sure it’s – at least I had those years as a kid where it was just fun. Like for him, it was – I know that being a professional musician is different from just enjoying it. And there’s no way he was just having fun, even at 10, 11, 12 – however old he was.
Ron Bennington: Because as soon as money and scheduling and touring, direction. Yeah.
Adam Duritz: There’s a satisfaction to work too. It’s not such a bad thing to become a professional at something, because there’s a real satisfaction to being an adult – doing something and supporting yourself, it’s pretty cool. I like it more, but it was nice to have it where it was just fun too for a little bit when I was a kid.
Ron Bennington: What point does it become work for you though? Touring? Or album?
Adam Duritz: Well, no. Just remember my first band. It’s when you start to care, really. Because once you care a lot about it – five people who care a lot about something aren’t all going to agree, so the first band you’re really serious in, people fight. And then, you’re not used to fighting over something that’s fun and then it’s sort of a pain, yelling at your friends and them yelling at you. After my first serious band, I spent a couple years in it and I didn’t want to play music anymore for a little bit. And I went away and went backpacking around Europe, landscaped for a while and then I came back and started the band when I realized it wasn’t sort of out of me. But it’s not that – people think of it, when you say it’s work, it’s a bad thing. I don’t really think of it that way. There’s a deeper satisfaction in doing your job. There’s a nice feeling about that, it’s better than fun.
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Adam Talks About Playing the Leadership Role in a Band
Ron Bennington: Todd Rundgren said that the big misconception is that people think that bands are democracy, because it’s always really one dude who really wants it the most trying to drag everyone else in different directions. Do you find that to be true?
Adam Duritz: Sure. I mean, the best thing that you can hope for is a benevolent dictator. We have a benevolent dictatorship in our band, which is good. It wasn’t good at the beginning when I wasn’t good at doing it. Learning to be a leader is a tough thing. You start off in it and I just wasn’t really good at it first. I made life miserable for everybody. Part of you realizes it’s nice to be in charge in a way and a part of you realize that after a few minutes being in charge is a lot more about responsibility than it is about doing whatever you want. You have to learn how to like – you still have to make the decisions that you think are the right decisions and you have to do it when everyone else disagrees with you, but you also have to take care of all those other people. And that’s part of being in charge is taking the shit too.
Ron Bennington: And I imagine you need people to go – I know I’ve handed this over, so I’m going to go with it even though I don’t agree 100% yet.
Adam Duritz: Yeah, and usually it’s kind of just force of will. When someone decides to take over at one point, it really is just force of will, which seems outrageous to everyone else at that moment. I know it seemed outrageous to me at the time that I was taking things over when I did. Thankfully, there’s a really good bunch of guys in our band. (Laughs) They tolerated me being a dick for a few years there while I learned to do it.
Ron Bennington: But is that because you wanted it so much that you really felt like – I’ve got to get this thing off?
Adam Duritz: Well, I’ve been in a bunch of bands where I was in charge or I was less in charge or more in charge. My second band after that first one I quit, what I liked about it was it was totally democratic. I was only responsible for writing lyrics and we made decisions together and it was great to not have all the responsibility. But a lot of the reasons – when Counting Crows started, I felt like I had an idea and I felt like I was maybe ready to like – that I had a vision for what I wanted to do. And so at the beginning, I really had pushed and took things over and there’s a point when we decided to do – it was right when we started to make the first record where I decided to take over. Because I had something I wanted to do. I thought I knew the right thing to do. It takes a while for everyone to trust you. Also, it takes a while for you to handle it well because authority is a hard thing to handle. You’re not sure whether – you have to like, clobber people over the head sometimes because you’re afraid you won’t have authority if you don’t. You just have to learn. Learning to be a leader is a pretty tough thing.
Ron Bennington: But particularly when all of a sudden it starts to be successful right off the bat and so the decisions are not so much – Hey, do we want to do these two gigs, but plan this big tour. Or suddenly there’s a lot of money on the table.
Adam Duritz: I had a good lucky run there getting shit right for a while. (Laughs)
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Adam Talks About Doing a Cover Album
Ron Bennington: Well it’s always interesting too, that if you follow a band for a while you will see that sometimes they fall out of love with the songs they have to do. Allman Brothers with “Whipping Post”, then sometimes like 5 years go by and it seems like they’re back into it again. Stones songs are the same way or Elton. Anyone who’s been around long enough, but you guys go in a different direction where you’re still figuring out the song years after it’s come together.
Adam Duritz: Well, yeah. I think there’s lots to discover. I think songs are like coffee filters in a way. You just, you pour your life through them every day so they’re going to change a little bit and that keeps them still vital and still happening. I like it better that way. This last year’s been the best we’ve ever had playing concerts. I don’t know, something happened from making a covers album. I think it was getting to collaborate with a bunch of people who weren’t there. And the band got – we’ve always been a really good live band, but we got great this year. I’m not sure exactly why, but everything just got way better.
Ron Bennington: Do you think because you had to look at music differently since it wasn’t yours? Since it wasn’t originally yours and then you had to make it yours.
Adam Duritz: I think maybe. I’ve been trying to put a thing on it and I think it definitely forces you to look at things differently. It’s weird for me to say this being a writer, but it is pretty limiting if you think about it, to work with only one writer for your entire career. Even the writer being me, I mean just as a singer it was great to work with different ways of rhyming, different ways of looking at the world and turning it into a song, different ways of using melody or rhythm. Something happened when we did it and when we came out on the road and the band was just way better. It’s been a great year that way for us.
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Adam Talks About The Three Parts of Making Music
Ron Bennington: Getting into music since you were a kid. Does that [connection to music] happen for you more in writing, does it happen to you on stage or is it different each place?
Adam Duritz: I think it’s in all of them, definitely. I always think of there being three parts to what we do. There’s writing, there’s recording and there’s playing live. And they’re all invaluable and important in their own way. They’re all equally important. And they’re all different. You’re playing everyday, you do it a lot. Writing, for me, takes place in small chunks. Recording takes place in this one period and then you go out and play everything, but none of them would be any good without the rest of them. The songs in the end are just kind of skeletons until you get in there in studio with the whole band and really make it into a Counting Crows song. And by the same token, they would only develop so far if you didn’t go out and play them every night and continue growing them. I’ve never been able to think of any one part as more important than the others.
Ron Bennington: And they’re all pretty much different skill sets when you think about it. And even what you’re doing here, just being out and keeping people interested in the music. There’s a certain amount of marketing that takes place, which is a completely different skill set than any other part of this thing. It’s a very, very strange thing about what makes a band a band.
Adam Duritz: It’s a lot of weird chemistry. It’s not something you should screw with too much once you got one. People make that mistake a lot. They think – Well I’m successful here, I can tell these guys to fuck off and go somewhere else. That’s a dicey proposition.
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Adam Talks About Dealing With His Emotional Issues
Ron Bennington: You’ve been pretty open about some of the stuff you’ve been through. Does that help you to be able to talk about it?
Adam Duritz: No, not really. I just didn’t for years because at a point where I felt like I was continuing to go down hill I didn’t want to publicly talk about it because then it just becomes everyone’s discussion. I think I probably hurt us in some ways by not doing that because it allowed people to sort of misinterpret things on the records. When we got ready to release “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings”, I felt like I was starting to turn things around a little bit and also I thought I don’t really want this record to be misunderstood too. So, I thought I would just talk about it at that point. And I felt like I was getting a little better so I was a little more comfortable about doing it. But no, there’s no value in the public knowing about your life. I just thought it was better for the band and I felt capable of doing it at that point so it seemed like a good time.
Ron Bennington: It’s interesting to say there’s no value to the public knowing about your life when your work, your lyrics are so much about your life.
Adam Duritz: People experience that emotionally. The rest of it becomes gossip. However much people really want to think about it or care about it, it really does just become gossip. Then you start getting comments from people. This is another reason I didn’t want to talk about it, because I know what happens is like, people stop criticizing or judging the artistic value of the work and then start talking about the plot. They want the plot to go differently and if you write another album about falling apart and getting back together, on your next album you fall apart a little more and they’re like – What’s his problem? He was getting better. The next album should be about even better. Look, what are you talking about? You don’t get to write the plot about my life.
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Ron Bennington: Counting Crows on the road with the Wallflowers all summer long. Adam, thank you so much, man. It was great having you stop by here today.
Adam Duritz: Thanks, and I hope people enjoy that live album. It was a great year touring for us and we wanted to document it and then we thought we’d just give it away. It’s a really cool record though.
Ron Bennington: That’s what you can do when you’re running your own show though, can’t you?
Adam Duritz: It’s nice.
Ron Bennington: All right, man. I’ll see you next time coming through.
Adam Duritz: Thanks very much, you guys.
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