Downloaded from YTS.LT
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.LT
Despite over 30 years of colossal success,
Counting Crows remains
one of the most polarizing bands in rock history.
In this film, I focused on the first two Counting Crows records
because I wanted to trace the roots
of what inspired so much adoration
as well as so much vitriol.
A long December And there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than last
I can't remember The last thing that you said
As you were leaving
But now the days go by so fast
And it's one more day up in the canyon
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think that I could be forgiven
I wish you would
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah
Nah, nah, nah, nah
Yeah
A lot of my songs are about difficult moments in people's lives,
but they're almost always sort of leavened with the idea of hope.
I know I'm the kind of person who thinks about things
being hopeless in a lot of situations, and I especially was when I was younger.
It was, you know, 'cause on top of everything else
and whatever difficulties you might be going through,
I had a mental illness that was really...
I didn't understand what it was, I didn't know what was happening,
and I just knew it was really hard to live with.
It's like, how do you,
you know, move yourself more towards hope
when you can't sleep
and you can't think clearly. And then all of a sudden,
you're in front of the whole world.
And it was great to suddenly have a career.
There are all these things that came with it
that were just fucking really difficult.
These songs made me change the entire kind of person I was.
So, they mean everything to me.
Well, I was down at the New Amsterdam
Staring at this yellow-haired girl
Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation
With a black-haired Flamenco dancer
You know, she dances while his father...
I'm grateful for that band,
that kind of lyrical openness, just saying how you feel.
It's a very brave thing to do,
and you can take a lot of shit for it as an artist.
I wish I was beautiful
He hit hard with a song about wanting to be a rock star
at the exact moment in rock history
when you weren't supposed to admit you wanted to be a rock star.
Mr. Jones and me...
We're at a stoplight,
and these kids in this car started screaming,
"Counting Crows suck!"
She’s looking at you
I don’t think so, she’s looking at me
When you become famous, you can't do what you used to do,
and you become isolated.
Man, when everybody loves me
I hope I never get lonely, yeah
If your inner critic is loud like mine is, like Adam is,
you inevitably go through periods
where you literally don't like yourself.
Believe in me
I don’t believe in anything
What no one prepares you for
is what happens when your first album is enormous.
You should not believe in me
As Mr. Jones and me Go stumbling through the barrio
We stare at all the beautiful women
She's perfect for you
There's got to be someone for me
I want to be Bob Dylan
But Mr. Jones wishes he was someone Just a little more funky
Well, man, when everybody loves you
Sometimes that's just about as fucked up As you could be
Mr. Jones and me
We don’t see each other much anymore
Mr. Jones. Who is Mr. Jones, by the way?
Did we ever find out? Is it James Earl Jones?
Was it Alex Jones? Was it Indiana Jones?
I'm Jones-ing for an answer,
if you could help me figure this out.
Who the fuck was Mr. Jones?
-Are my boots in the shot? -Yeah.
Good, 'cause they're awesome.
We moved to Berkeley, then Oakland, then back to Berkeley.
It was my first time being in a band and writing songs and running it,
and it's hard to do that.
I was kind of at a point where I was trying to find a name for the band.
I had, like, a legal pad with two columns of names,
like, probably about 60 names. They were all terrible.
There was one called Bird Circle and one called Monkey Garden,
or else they were reversed.
I was watching a videotape of Mary-Louise Parker.
It was, like, one of my oldest friends.
It was called Signs of Life.
That time was really wild. I'd just done my first movie.
It stars Beau Bridges, Vince D'Onofrio,
Kevin J. O'Connor.
And there's a scene where Vince and Kevin are standing on a hillside,
trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives,
and a flock of crows flies up. And Vince says...
What's that rhyme about the crows?
What rhyme?
The thing that you say when you see crows.
-Crows? -Yeah.
Kevin says, "I think it was counting dogs."
No, it's not dogs. It's crows.
It's something my mom used to say, "Counting crows."
I tore the piece of paper off the pad and threw it in my parents' fireplace
and decided that was our name, you know.
I promptly was told it was a terrible name.
All band names are terrible until they're not.
He was playing a show at some Grange Hall in Berkeley,
and Adam and I started arguing about records, you know?
I was into Cannes or Captain Beefheart,
and he was talking about Bruce Springsteen.
I was like, "I'm not a member of the church,"
and he goes, "What do you mean?" Couple days later,
there's this knock on my apartment door in Berkeley at about 11:00 in the morning,
and I open up the door, and, "Oh, it's that guy Adam."
And he's got this pile of records.
Bruce Springsteen's entire chronological catalog,
used, that he just bought up at Amoeba Records.
And he says, "Here, these are for you."
"We'll talk later." You know.
And I just like, "I love this guy."
Immerglück was like...
You know, "Let's see if you guys can get along."
And we did. We kind of hit it off immediately.
When we wanted to do some recording, we went into Dave's studio.
Dave owned a little 16-track recording studio
called Dancing Dog.
This recording project became a stunning demo.
Dave Bryson was a very accomplished engineer,
and it sounded like a record.
But, oh, Margery
Takes the blade and walks away from me
We were writing August then.
I mean, Adam really wrote the songs,
but I contributed and wrote some of the bridges and stuff.
So, when I say we, I mean he, ultimately.
We found this guy, Alan Leonard.
It turned out to be a big deal. He was Tom Petty's lawyer,
and he represented Warner Chappell Publishing.
Yeah, sure. Send me a tape.
A demo should have a song on it, maybe two, at longest three.
We had 14 or 15 songs that we sent down to this guy.
His reaction, which was anybody's reaction
to a 15-song demo, is, "What a bunch of rubes."
Alan's like, "This better be good, 'cause it's gonna be on for 30 seconds."
But then when you start listening to it, you know,
half the first album's on it.
Along with a bunch of songs that I never considered
for the first album, but they were really catchy
and they were good songs.
It wasn't 30 seconds to throw it away, it was 30 seconds to call us.
The night he got it, I got a phone call.
"Oh my God. Hey, I'm so excited. I really want to work with you guys."
"Let me just finish this. Okay, bye." Click.
Phone rings again. "This is Alan Leonard."
"I'm that lawyer. You sent me the tape."
"Okay. Okay, sure."
That lawyer passed it around to record executives,
so everyone was copying it,
and it became a lot of their favorite demo going around.
We got offers from every record company there was.
After that, there was a bidding war.
Geffen offered us complete creative freedom
and a higher royalty rate.
And we traded away all the money for that.
I mean, all of it.
Geffen was Nirvana, you know?
Geffen was the vanguard of what was now
the new, cool, enduring, important thing.
If you were 14, hypothetically, at the time,
Nirvana changed everything.
One day I was listening to Poison and Def Leppard,
and the next day I was not.
That's when the '90s started, officially.
At the time, I was living in my parents' house,
you know, and kind of breaking their hearts.
I was ready to just go get a little job
and just try to eke out my existence.
I had another career over in software.
I wanted to be an academic
AI researcher, in artificial intelligence.
Since I was 12, I knew I wanted to be in a band.
I had no idea how impossible it was to be successful.
All of a sudden, we had a major label record deal.
Here we are, this bookish and pudgy folk rock group from the Berkeley Hills.
You know, how are we going to sell millions of records?
I assumed we'd make a record.
Maybe we'd do a tour with tour support in a van,
and then we'd come home.
The band would break up. Your record deal would fall apart.
There's that Wile E. Coyote moment where he's flying
and somebody says, "You can't fly."
And he's like, "I can't?" He drops like a rock, right?
I felt like I could be a rock star, right?
I could just do this.
So, when we went to make the first record, right,
I told the people at my office that,
you know, "Save my office." And I thought, you know,
this is going to take, like, four months and I'll be back at work, right?
But it didn't.
We rented this house up in the hills.
I think it's, like, the Swiss Consulate now.
It was perfect. It had a big main room,
which we could record in.
T-Bone Burnett is one of the great producers,
and we were lucky to have him.
First of all, he's named T-Bone Burnett,
which I think is, like, 75% of his authority,
of his greatness.
It's just like, "This is our producer, T-Bone."
It's like, "Yep."
We played a lot of poker. T-Bone loved to play poker.
And there was, like, one of the first massage chairs
I'd ever seen, right.
T-Bone was always in that chair, always on the phone.
"Love what you're doing. Keep doing it."
"Just keep doing it. Love what you're doing."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He said, "We made a demo that sounds like an album."
"Now, you have to make an album that sounds like a demo."
As much as we were making our first record,
we were also in discovery mode,
trying to figure out who we were.
I thought we needed to get in a circle and listen to each other
and learn to play as a band.
I made everybody...
change.
Dave Bryson had played kind of Stone Rose's affected guitar
with a lot of effects, and we got rid of all those.
Matt had been playing a fretless bass.
We made him get an old Hoffner and an old Vox.
Charlie had been playing some synths,
but we said, "No, just piano and B3 for this record."
As musicians...
I'll just say, I wasn't ready for it.
So, when we were making that first record,
I was scared out of my wits.
I was not sure that I could deliver
what this record deserved or what it needed.
In fact, I was sure I couldn't.
I made everybody's life miserable.
I mean, I think everybody in the band quit at some point
during the making of that record.
It was a difficult transition going from being a 50/50 partnership
to Adam calling the shots.
I remember when he told me
that this is the new world order,
and I thought long and hard about quitting.
I really thought, you know... Can I swear?
-For sure. -"Fuck it. Fuck this."
Imagine, like, working your whole life
to get signed,
and then you get signed 'cause you're such a good band,
and your band leader says, "Yeah, it's great,
but everything you've been doing is wrong,
and we're going to have to change everything."
I mean, you'd be thinking, like, "That guy's crazy."
But after I, you know,
stopped feeling sorry for myself, I realized,
"Let's just see where this goes," you know?
In the studio, he would regularly have really dark episodes
where he didn't know how to communicate
what it is he wanted, and he didn't like the way it was.
It just needed to feel a certain way.
I didn't necessarily know how to tell people what was wrong.
I just knew what it needed to feel like, and I wasn't very good at it.
And I didn't know how to tell people
to be Counting Crows.
I think I could say this because I am the exact same way,
that when he is in the act of creating,
he's, like, not the easiest person.
Because he's striving for something beyond his expectations.
He wants it to surprise him.
He wants it to be better than what he could imagine.
And he's going to be relentless in pursuit of that.
And not everybody is like that.
I spent my life in rock and roll.
My whole life, I've been in bands.
And as a front person,
you have to connect with your band, coming through you.
So, Adam took all this angst that he was going through
and transcended it through music.
Just down the street from your hotel
Baby
I stay at home with my disease
He doesn't like polished music. Polishing up is gonna make it worse.
You have to get, you know, your feelings and the instruments around to a place
where it's not polished. It's coming out raw,
even though it's the 109th take.
You know, we had to make it real. It had to hurt.
I wanted a song like "Perfect Blue Buildings"
to be like having a breakdown.
And so I basically had one.
So I try to keep myself Away from myself and me
Oh, in perfect blue buildings
There's sort of a rambling intimacy to Adam
where you feel like you're listening,
you're watching somebody work something out.
And there's, like, a journaling, you know,
like inner turmoil,
therapeutic sort of feeling, you know,
that you can get from him and that you can share with him,
you know, if you get on that wavelength.
I started writing songs when I was about 18.
It gave me a place to express myself that I had been missing all my life.
I always felt like there's all this stuff inside me.
It doesn't seem to express itself
or show up in all the other stuff I'm doing during childhood.
It's like this place I go to talk about all this stuff in myself,
like I'm living here and it's this place I go to
where I can actually express all the things I'm feeling.
You know, part of dissociative behavior
is you kind of live at a distance from things.
The world often seems like a movie you're watching.
So, you're, you know, at a bit of a distance from your life.
And the nice thing about learning to write songs is
I could go really express a bunch of stuff as opposed to...
One morning, I was 21, I got a really big glass
and I drank this whole glass of water.
And I thought, "Well, I feel really strange."
"I feel different. I feel like..."
And as far as I'm concerned, I was,
It was terrifying, 24 hours a day, every morning I'd wake up
and I'd be afraid to open my eyes at first.
I just really wanted it to be over, and it wouldn't be.
It would just go on, and on, and on.
That's the beginning of when I thought,
"Okay, there's something seriously wrong with me mentally
because this is just nothing to do with drugs. It's just happening."
That's the first time I started getting medicated
by a doctor because I didn't even know how to live.
It was so scary, and it wouldn't stop.
While we were making the first record,
I got a phone call from my manager, said,
"Hey, Van Morrison's not gonna play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."
"He's getting inducted, but he's not coming."
Robbie Robertson was the music director at that point.
And Robbie said, "No, I know this band."
"They're making a record up in the hills right now."
"They'd be perfect."
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was built to exclude people.
Every year, there's, like, "We're gonna let these people in
and not these people." There's a hierarchy.
There's a way that you get in
and that they come to accept you.
Like, I think about Robbie Robertson being like,
"Ladies and gentlemen, these guys,"
and Counting Crows appear, and nobody knows who they are.
And the caravan is on its way
I can hear the merry gypsies play
And I remember when we went to go play,
I had this stupid hat called a mambo sock.
And it's like a cap that's got a long end to it,
and it tucks itself through itself in the back,
through the little tie rope.
Gypsy Robin and sweet Emma Rose
I don't know why I'm wearing that on my head, but I am.
And I've got like this big, heavy coat on.
You know, I get really lost on stage.
And the first time I do the first, like, "Turn it up."
Turn it up.
I throw my head back and the hat flies off
the back of my head, but I catch it.
I have enough sense to keep catching the hat,
but not enough sense
to either get it on my head firmly or throw it away.
And so it just spends the song
migrating around my head in different directions,
like forward and back.
It just keeps coming off and spinning around.
But we played great, you know, it was great.
I think to this day, we're still the only unknown band
to ever play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I just kind of heard one day that, you know,
"Oh, Charlie's quitting all of his bands and he's going to play in this one band."
And I was like, "That's crazy," you know, 'cause why would you do that?
I went and saw them at the Paradise Lounge,
and just hearing the songs, hearing Adam, watching Adam perform, I was just like,
"Charlie, if you guys ever need another guitar player,
I... I'd love to play with you guys."
I took the record home on the weekend
and played it at my parents' house,
and my mom yelled from the kitchen, she said, "That dude's a whiner."
That was the start of that.
We're up. Master T hanging out with the Countin...
Countin... Counting Crows.
-How are ya? All right? -Hi.
All right, fellas, introduce yourselves to the nation.
-I'm Charlie. Hello, nation. -I'm Adam.
-Dan. -Good afternoon, nation. This is Dan.
-Dan, glad to meet you. -All right.
Let's talk about the dreads. How long you have the dreads?
About a year.
-Yeah? -Yeah.
Fresh look.
I've always had troubles looking in the mirror
and feeling like it wasn't me.
There were some times that was more disturbing than others,
but it just didn't look right.
It's not how I felt about myself.
What I would see wasn't me.
It didn't feel like the way I felt
to see the face in the mirror.
It just didn't.
But when I got dreads, I did.
It was just like the first time I'd ever really recognized myself.
And then I spent...
27, 28 years living in that.
You know, and...
I think I learned to be me.
Like, what? Well, it just seemed...
it seemed crazy to me.
Like, why would you do that, you know?
But good Lord,
it became this huge part of who he was,
and he looked great back then, you know?
But the shock of it was like, "Are you kidding me?"
Like, "This is where we're going? Okay."
I bought one of his dreadlocks on eBay.
I planted it, and I'm hoping to grow another Adam Duritz.
I've known him a long time.
I met him about 20 years ago in Washington Square Park.
I thought he was Ani DiFranco and I started hitting on him.
Why did you even ask me to do this?
I'm just gonna make fun of Counting Crows the whole time.
Is this really what you want?
When Counting Crows first hit, I was a writer at MTV.
I was working at 1515 Broadway.
MTV was the place. You had to be on MTV to make it.
MTV told you what was cool. MTV told you who you were.
You know, and maybe you went in the Yo! MTV Raps direction,
maybe you went in the Headbangers Ball direction,
maybe you went in the 120 Minutes direction.
120 Minutes was the kind of indie show
that was on every Sunday from midnight to 2:00 in the morning.
Geffen got a call from MTV,
said, "Where's the video for Counting Crows?"
Geffen said, "Which song?"
The people at MTV were like, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
"What do you mean, which song? It's your album."
The hit, 'Mr. Jones,' you know?"
Like, "Oh, okay, yeah, we'll make that."
My managers had this really genius idea.
You know, nothing gets released between Christmas and New Year's.
There's no charts that week, so they don't release anything.
No songs, no records.
Nothing comes out then because you can't chart.
They had this idea that no one's giving anything to MTV in that week.
So, if we give it to them that week,
they'll put it right up on 120 Minutes for sure.
-I'm Charlie. -I'm Matt.
I'm Adam.
-And we're... -Yeah. We're...
-Counting Crows. -Yeah, we are.
MTV was on, and I heard that beginning riff.
I went, "Oh, this is Adam. This is going to be Adam."
Sha-la-la-la, la-la-la
So come dance this silence Down through the morning
Sha-la-la-la-la
Rock stars of the early '90s taught me, you know,
what rock stardom was and how it felt.
And what they told me is that it was terrible.
Trent Reznor holding the microphone with both hands.
And this, "My head is so heavy with the weights
of my rock stardom." That's Trent Reznor.
Whereas "Mr. Jones," it's like this.
Mr. Jones and me
He understands that the thing he wants
will probably destroy him.
The darkness of this song is immediately apparent,
and is only sort of darkened by the bounciness
of the presentation.
Coming through in stereo
When everybody loves me
I will never be lonely
"Mr. Jones" is about dreaming about being a rock star,
but it's also about how it's not going to turn out
to be what you think it is.
I mean, when he keeps saying, "When everybody loves me,
I'll never be lonely," you're supposed to know that's wrong,
and it's not just about dreaming,
that it's about an emptiness in there, too.
Which doesn't invalidate the dream.
Dream is great, but nothing solves everything,
just like being a rock star doesn't fix it all.
You've got to fix your shit yourself.
We’re gonna be big stars
The lucky thing was that sometime in that fall,
we had played Irving Plaza opening for Cracker,
and we had a great show.
And they pushed us back on stage to do an encore
as an opening band, which just doesn't happen.
In the audience that night was Marcy Klein, Calvin Klein's daughter,
who was the booker for Saturday Night Live.
They called and asked us if we'd be on the show after that.
They said, "'Mr. Jones' first, and then maybe 'Round Here,'
but they both got to be cut down."
You know, there are two songs on Saturday Night Live,
and one is... the difference in viewership
between one and the other is massive.
I really wanted to play "Round Here," and I wanted to play the whole song,
and I thought it was the thing that would define us for people.
"Mr. Jones" is a great song,
but it's a lot like a lot of other songs.
"Round Here" is not like anything.
They disagreed. They wanted us to play the hit.
Finally, Saturday Night Live agreed.
We could play "Round Here," and then we could play "Mr. Jones,"
and we could play them both at the full length.
You do a rehearsal, then you hang out and don't leave the building.
I was so overly excited,
I couldn't relax, I couldn't look anyone in the face.
We'd never been on TV before.
Everyone seemed like a gigantic, famous person.
The very first day we got there, they're like, "Oh, by the way,
I gotta tell you, just to get the scheduling right,
we've actually rethought a bunch of this stuff,
and you're gonna play 'Mr. Jones' first,
and, well, 'Round Here' will be the second song."
"And...
you're gonna need to cut probably a minute
to a minute and a half off of each song."
Basically, everything we'd agreed on was thrown out the window.
And I said, "No, we have an agreement. You promised us this."
They said, "Yeah, we can't do anything about it."
"It's just, you know, with TV shows."
And I said, "No."
Adam just said, "No, we're not going to do that."
And was threatening just to walk.
Which, you know, takes a lot, given--
I mean, anybody would die to have a break on Saturday Night Live.
It's the biggest moment in our lives.
And we've got to do it the right way.
Otherwise, I don't wanna do it.
I can't imagine that everybody thought it was a good idea to fight over that.
I'm supporting Adam here. I'm not, like, blaming him.
But in the times he's done that over the years,
he's pissed a lot of people off.
He's in charge of the band, and he makes decisions.
He doesn't really consult anybody. It's his thing.
One of the reasons we've stuck together so long
is because we all accept that. Yeah. It's okay.
Sometimes it's not okay, but mostly, it's okay.
Ladies and gentlemen, Counting Crows.
Step out the front door Like a ghost into the fog
Where no one notices the contrast Of white on white
It's easy to lose concentration, and all of a sudden, you go clunk,
and it's there to get replayed over and over and over.
And, like, we all knew that.
If we didn't discuss it, you just know it.
I walk in the air between the rain
Through myself and back again Where?
All I could think about was,
"I'm gonna go do the thing I do really well, like,
and it doesn't matter about the cameras."
Round here, we always stand up straight
Round here
Something radiates
And Adam, of course, was electric
and you put Adam in front of a camera, and he comes to life.
Suitcase in her hand
She says she'd like to meet a boy Who looks like Elvis
And she walks...
That song has such drama, you know, and as we played it,
I was so lost. Just gone.
Like, I mean, it just built to this huge climax.
She must be tired of something
Round here
She’s always on my mind
It was like a rocket ship.
There's a part where he just goes, like,
to another level at the end. And, I-- I screamed at him on stage.
I was, like, screaming, like, "Yeah, go!"
We stay up very, very, very late
I can't see nothing
Nothing
Round here
Will you catch me if I’m falling?
Catch me 'cause I’m falling down on you
I said I’m under...
I think we really played it as well as we possibly could have.
And it was on live TV.
Round here
I thought we had just played
a fucking spectacular version of that song.
Marci Klein was up in the balcony with Gary when we played it.
And she said, "Boy, your band?" He says, "Yeah."
She goes, "They're really great." He says, "Yeah."
"Your friend, Adam..." "Yeah?"
"He's a fucking asshole."
We've never been on Saturday Night Live again.
Never. But it made our career.
This is their debut album here.
It's entitled August and Everything After.
And I'm telling you something, if you don't have a copy of this,
there's something wrong with you.
The two weeks following Saturday Night Live
were the first headline shows we played.
Those few weeks were, like, the best tour ever,
because we could do anything on stage we wanted to.
That whole period was crazy surreal.
Being in a van in Sacramento, listening to the radio,
and then we came on the radio.
And we just went nuts, you know?
And we just plowed ahead and, you know, it's just this great period of our lives
of becoming a big band.
It was a crazy time.
It was unstable, but just thrilling.
Being on stage with Adam was, like, really exhilarating,
because I'd never even come close to playing music with anyone like Adam.
Some people have it, some people don't.
Adam had it.
We were just getting bigger and bigger, and bigger,
and now we're opening for The Stones.
I don't think you grow up and dream of opening for people.
I mean, you grow up and dream of being a musician
or being a songwriter or whatever.
I mean, I will say this, though.
What Mick Jagger was doing at age 20,
it made me want to get up from behind the piano and,
you know, be a singer and just stand up and sing.
August and Everything After came out in 1993, so I was 17.
The only bands I really knew were Nirvana and Pearl Jam
and Sound. All the grunge.
But it just had this, kind of, exotic, desert-y,
open-plain freedom of spirit
that I think for 17-year-olds just felt like,
"Wow, how do I get to that state of being?"
I don't think we understood much about,
you know, the daily torture of Adam's life or anything.
I think it just sounded like a free spirit flying.
I can picture that album cover,
August and Everything After so clearly,
it was part of the quilt of alternative rock.
It seemed immediately important and immediately huge.
The sullen, the literary, journaling teenager, you know,
like, this is your shit right here.
We got to Europe,
and Rolling Stone had decided to put us on the cover.
But I was dicey about that, too, because even though,
obviously, you gotta go on the cover of Rolling Stone,
I couldn't help but think what my life was gonna be like after that
and how much it would change.
Because I was very shy.
I was assigned to go over to Paris
and do a cover story on them as things started to explode.
But I think I fell in love with the record
on a, like, all-night flight to Paris.
I couldn't sleep,
and I just listened over and over again.
And that was when the album hit me.
I became that rare rock critic that loved Counting Crows
and still does.
It's hard to describe to people now, but magazine stands were everywhere,
and Rolling Stone was in the front
and they had like a whole rack of Rolling Stone.
And that's your face on every street corner,
in every airport, in every bus station in every--
Everywhere. Your anonymity is fucking gone.
And I couldn't help thinking about the-- there were real repercussions
to saying yes to that, even though there's no way you're saying no.
The entire photo shoot in Paris was useless.
I looked like a donkey. Like, I was so fucking mopey.
The whole band, everyone was furious at each other, too.
It was raining, the weather was fucking horrible,
and nothing came out.
It was terrible. They're all in black and white,
and we're like...
Like, fuck, it's rock and roll.
Black and white pictures of people moping, theoretically,
are exactly what you want.
After all, we're dark and sad people.
But it's so bad that you can't even use them.
They look like a joke about moping, like a parody of a band.
My memory is we had this amazing day,
sort of, just walking around Paris,
and when we got back to the hotel, we were sitting in the lobby,
and I think that's when Adam got the call.
The woman at the front desk said,
"Is there an Adam Duritz here? Can you pick up the courtesy phone?"
And it's Gary Gersh.
He was the president of Capitol,
and he left before we finished mixing the record,
but I was still like his little brother,
and his other little brother was Kurt Cobain.
Hi, I'm Kurt Loder with MTV News.
Nirvana leader, Kurt Cobain,
an extraordinarily gifted singer, songwriter, and guitarist,
was found dead in Seattle on Friday morning,
apparently a suicide.
It was this big and horrible moment
for him more than any of us, because he actually did know Kurt.
I was just a fan.
I had been around, but I didn't know him.
He was very upset when Kurt Cobain died,
and I think it really freaked him out.
We both had some of the same struggles,
but I'm not handling it well.
It's why a lot of this stuff was so scary
because for me, I knew... Nobody else knew,
but I knew that I had a serious mental illness
and there was a big problem.
I'm on all these medications that are, kind of, for...
I don't think I'm bipolar,
but they're treating me for bipolarity, and it was scary.
He didn't have any substance issues.
Like he wasn't drinking heavily, he doesn't do drugs.
I was more worried that he was just gonna quit.
Adam was trying to put the brakes on the excitement around us.
And you couldn't stop it.
The first record was a smash record.
You can't just slow it down if the public's eating it up.
But Adam wanted to slow everything down.
Success has arrived.
Do you think that you will be given the time
you need to develop in your own rhythm?
And do you have the patience yourself?
-No. -No?
No, I think it's already too late.
So, the pace has gotten faster?
Yeah, the pace is a little too fast these days.
For me.
Yeah, so will you be able to take time out when you come back to America?
-No. -No.
When we came back from Europe and we landed in New Orleans,
I went down there to the festival at the fairgrounds and got mobbed.
I had no idea what was happening, but suddenly, like...
people, a huge crowd just surrounding me,
and it's like-- I'd been overseas while it happened.
I didn't realize that it had... hit that high-water mark
or something. Like...
But now it was, like, a mania.
But the weird thing that happened that summer
was that was the change from playing indie rock shows
to playing mania shows
where everybody just wants to hear "Mr. Jones."
I feel like it was at the Greek Theater maybe.
He was like, "Just come on stage with me."
We walked out, the lights went down,
and, like, the sound...
I've acted on stage my whole adult life, but not with that many people
and not with that, kind of, sensation where you walk out
and it's almost like being hit with a wave.
I can't even... I can't even describe it.
The sound was so overwhelming
and just the feeling of anticipation, just all, kind of, rushing at you.
I was like, "Oh, this is why he's... you know, he's struggling."
I started listening to August and Everything After.
It was automatically, as soon as I heard it, my favorite album.
I was living in the Bay, so we became pretty close friends.
But I think Adam and I have a similar disposition,
actually on the quiet and shy side,
but doing something that, you know,
you're performing in front of thousands of people.
So, that's a weird thing to reconcile when people start recognizing you.
On the one hand, it's incredibly flattering.
On the other hand, it's-- You kind of like your privacy
and you feel a little self-conscious.
Being able to figure that out as you're expanding
and dealing with that notoriety, is a weird vibe.
I led the Chainsaw Kittens.
I knew him
because you couldn't not know him at that point.
I really got to see
how they were massively overexposed, basically.
We would just be walking
and some random person would come up
and be like, "You're that guy,"
not absolutely knowing what the band's name was
or who he was, but that he was that guy
that they'd seen on television.
There was a movie theater, like, a few blocks from our hotel.
I sat down in the movies. There's no one in the theater.
The door opens in the back.
This guy walks to where I'm sitting
and then sits down right next to me and says,
"Hey, man, are you the guy from Counting Crows?"
And I said, "Yeah." And he goes, "it's cool if I sit here?"
I said, "Look, man, I'm just trying to have an afternoon off."
"I'm just trying to have a little bit of time."
"Okay, man." He gets up and leaves.
About half-hour later, door opens in the back again.
Guy comes walking down the aisle.
I'm like, "Man, can you just fucking leave me?"
And it's not him.
It's just a guy that was at the concession stand.
Then he said, "Hey, man, I don't know what's going on,
but there's somebody in the lobby
that's been on the phone for the last 30 or 40 minutes
calling everyone he knows, telling them you're here,
and there's like 200 people outside right now."
I go, "You're fucking kidding me."
He goes, "No, look, if you want to sneak out,
there's, like, an exit at the bottom."
So, I go out there, I sneak down this alley,
and I start to walk up the street,
and then I hear this guy yell, and I had to run for it.
Like, this huge crowd of people comes chasing me back to our hotel.
And it just freaked me out.
It's like if you woke up one morning on Mars, you know?
It takes a little while to get used to the gravity.
I'd hear him complaining about it
and I was like, "What, you're having success."
"What's the problem, you know?" And I meet Adam for lunch.
We're sitting at the table, me, and him,
and a couple of other friends, and this, like,
six-year-old girl comes walking up and like,
"Excuse me, can I get your autograph?"
And he goes to reach for whatever she has,
and suddenly, her mother jumps out
from behind this bush, you know, and, like, knocks the kid away.
"Oh my God, I'm such a huge fan, can I get my picture with you?"
You know, it's like, "Oh my God."
That's when I was like, "Oh."
"Oh, I guess it's really-- a lot more's going on
than I thought was going on," you know?
In the early days with his dreads, he was very recognizable.
The "Mr. Jones" video was huge, which made him, you know,
this person who was super famous.
I mean, he couldn't go anywhere without somebody recognizing him.
I think our experience was radically different.
I'm a Little League coach, and I'm a guy in a band.
Like, I wasn't... I'm still not famous.
I'm just in this famous band, you know?
So, there's battling with fame and there's also, you know,
being on the road for three years, which,
you know, from going from zero to three years,
which it was a great move for us to do.
He was adamant about the fact
that we weren't just gonna be this band on the radio.
We were gonna be a band you could go see live.
But touring for three years pretty constantly is,
you know... That'll do your head in as well.
Travel is reality challenging.
You can't tell what's real anymore, right?
Everybody's a little dissociated out on the road,
'cause you don't know where you are. You don't know what day it is.
You know, you're waking up in a different bed every day,
and it's a different planet.
And you find that all your memories are disconnected, you know,
like things that happened a month ago,
they seem like they happened a couple of days ago.
And then things that happened a couple of days ago seem like it was--
When was that? That was weeks ago, you know?
Because you're completely mixed up.
You don't have anything constant in your life
except the show to keep you going.
So, it's rough being on the road.
There was this era when people wanted to just hear the hits,
and those people are not even music fans.
They just want their radio to happen at their concert.
I think when you go to a concert, you wanna hear the song
the way you hear it in your head.
You know, you want them to play the hits
exactly as they are, exactly as you love them.
And Adam Duritz does not do that.
He was making fun of me.
"Pantera Sarah" was started as an insult
and making fun of the fact that I like metal.
I don't remember.
I thought I gave her the name Pantera Sarah.
Adam was like, "Oh, Pantera."
And I was like, "Yeah, I like Pantera."
And he's like, "Into heavy metal?"
And I'm like, "At least they put on a hell of a stage show."
"Can't say the same for you."
I didn't know that. I don't remember that.
"I saw you in Milwaukee, walked out after four songs."
It's the first thing I said to Adam when I met him.
And he was like, "What?"
And I said, "Eagles Ballroom, you sucked."
"Me and my girlfriend walked out."
And he was like, "I remember that show."
That was during that summer where I was like...
By the time I got on stage every night, I was so angry.
The audiences were terrible to our opening bands.
I mean, fucking terrible.
They care about getting to us and seeing "Mr. Jones,"
and they're booing the other bands.
And some of them were friends of mine,
and others were idols of mine, like in Alex's case.
He had a guy named Alex Chilton open up for him.
Nobody had ever heard of him.
Milwaukee crowds are not very forgiving.
When Adam came out, he was mad.
His friend just got booed off the stage.
He was mad at the way he was treated.
And I remember looking at my girlfriend after our first couple songs
of him just kinda angry singing
and thinking, "I don't want this to ruin my love
of the Counting Crows music. Let's leave."
That experience on the summer tour, it really made it hard to want to play.
And I kind of had a little breakdown.
We had to cancel a few shows on that tour at the end of it.
He was very fragile. He wasn't in any way,
shape, or form prepared for what happened.
And what happened was a lot of huge praise
and a lot of huge abuse.
And I don't know any human being can take that.
There was a legitimate backlash.
I mean, the funny thing is that during those first four
or five months, the reviews were incredible.
You know, all these people saying,
"I discovered this band and they're amazing."
But then it quickly pivoted to something else.
Counting Crows wasn't particularly loved in San Francisco.
San Francisco, very fickle place, you know?
And very provincially into being cool, you know?
And cool back then meant trying to sound like the Stooges
or Butthole Surfers or something like that, you know?
And anything that had any whiff of commerciality
or being able to sing in tune was not cool, man.
So, when Counting Crows actually got so successful,
it was reviled in San Francisco.
Guy walked up to me and said, "Man, you're so lucky."
I said, "Thanks." He goes, "No, no, I mean, like,
you're so lucky because you guys are terrible."
"And you've had all this success and, like, better bands haven't."
"I mean, it's just-- Does that make you feel weird
to be so shitty and be so famous?"
I was just like, "Man,
who would come up to a total stranger and just say that to him?"
Yeah, you get flack.
Listen, people used to throw rocks at me for how I dressed.
I've had people, you know, tell me to resign,
you know, email me or, you know,
like, "How'd that guy get my email address?"
You know, that's part of it.
And you really do have to somehow reconcile
the criticism with the life that you get to lead.
We have a house in North Berkeley.
It just seemed like there was a party on our street every night.
Like, it turned into this whole party scene.
And then I realized that it wasn't a big party
on our street, it was that these kids were camped out on our lawn.
They just kind of moved in on our lawn,
and that's where they were living.
So they could see us through the windows every day.
And they were pointing us out through the windows.
And it was, like, I started to have panic attacks,
like, "I can't do anything here. I don't know where to go."
"And everywhere I go, it's just an issue."
You start to shy away from everybody
when people are coming up to you like that.
You know, I was about to become a shut-in, basically.
So, I got this phone call one day.
It was Sal Jenco and Johnny Depp calling from the Viper Room,
And they said, "How you doing?" I said, "Things are okay, you know."
And they said, "What's wrong?"
Because it was probably pretty clear, and I told them.
They said, "Hang on."
They were mumbling some shit to each other, and they put me on hold.
So, they said, "Look, we got you a room at The Bel Age,"
which is the hotel right behind the Viper.
"We got you a seat on the seven o'clock flight,
Oakland to Burbank. We're having a party tonight."
"It's Kate Moss's 21st birthday."
"Just come down, and you got to get out of there."
You got to get out of there now."
So, I left.
That first night, at that Kate Moss party,
at the height of the supermodel thing,
it was every single one of them in one room,
which is weird to look at.
Like, when you walk through an art museum
and then you come upon American Gothic,
and then you go up on that stairwell on the landing
and there's Georgia O'Keeffe's Clouds, and it's really famous,
and then it's right in front of you.
You suddenly show up at this party
when you've been having a terrible week at home,
and there's Elle Macpherson and every other famous model
that there could possibly be.
And by the way, meet William Burroughs.
Meet Tom Petty. Meet Billy Gibbons.
Because they're all in this little room together
in this clubhouse that Johnny and Sal made.
LA was like a real refuge.
It seemed real magic to me at the time.
Like, this whole town full of dreamers.
Whether their dreams are, like,
shallow, or deep, or artistic, or not.
They didn't wanna do what everybody else was doing.
And they wanted to go make something themselves.
You know, dancers, sculptors, painters, models,
actors, writers, directors, musicians.
Christina Applegate bought me a Nikon for Christmas
one year, I think '93 or '94.
So, I just took photos,
and you couldn't have cameras in the Viper Room in those days.
There was no Internet, no cell phones,
and so I, being the manager,
was able to take my Nikon in the bar,
so I have tons of photos.
I always had this little Olympus stylus camera
that would fit in my back pocket.
And it wasn't really as any grand idea
more than I knew that my friends were really fucking cool.
And I didn't wanna forget it.
I was Instagram before Instagram.
Because I would take pictures, go to the 20--
There was like a 23-minute photo on Sunset.
God, I put those people in business.
I would usually get either doubles, or triples of prints,
'cause I would give people the copies of the ones
they were in a lot of the time,
and then I'd put them in a photo album, and I'd bring them to the next night
that I promoted,
and they would get passed around the club.
I was the only... besides Randall sometimes.
I allowed Randall to sometimes take pictures,
because I also knew he wasn't selling them
to the tabloids.
When I was running around with Adam,
I was the only camera there.
So, if I didn't take a picture of it,
it was just in your memory.
And that's what I think really makes those special.
I always say that it was the last good time,
because it was just the beauty of...
being able to hide.
I lived in one of Christina Applegate's houses
and she was gonna rent out one of the other houses.
So, I said to Adam,
"Dude, Christina has a house up for rent."
And I remember driving up Laurel Canyon with him going,
"Remember this drive, because this is gonna be
your drive home from now on."
And the next thing I know, he's moved to the forbidden LA,
where all bad things come from.
All cheese comes from LA.
If you've grown up in the Bay Area,
like, especially Berkeley, you know, it's like,
"God, it's the source of all crap," you know?
Of course, everyone who thinks that has never been to LA, but never mind that.
Except for Randall, the only people I really knew in LA
were people that worked at the Viper Room.
Like, I knew Sal, I had met Johnny,
like, Shannon, and a few people that worked--
They were, like, the only people I knew,
which is why I only hung out there.
I know so many people would disagree with me,
but it had something very small, like Cheers,
small bar vibe to it, because there were big shows.
Sure, Smashing Pumpkins or Oasis, or whatever,
but the people that came five, six nights a week
were like family.
There was, like, a safety net around people
that hung out there, and that included Adam.
Shannon was like, "Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom."
"Do you know how to run the register?" And I said, "Yeah, sure."
She was like, "Hey, can you just do it?"
And I bartended, and ran the register,
and then I did it every day.
It was the only place I was comfortable.
I taught him to bartend,
and then he was so good at it, he would go,
"And the tips aren't for me, they're for her."
He got to meet girls and people,
and I got to party with my friends,
and make a bunch of money. And also, I think,
because he could still talk to people, and not be like,
"That guy from Counting Crows is trying to talk to me."
It's like, "What would you like to drink?"
"Rum and Coke? Okay. Eight dollars or whatever."
You know, he could talk to people and not be in that skin.
I remember hearing someone say,
"Man, that guy looks just like the Counting Crows guy."
You know, 'cause people would not think
that the guy on the cover of Rolling Stone was also giving them an Amstel Light.
We took a lot of time off.
And I remember calling Adam from San Francisco saying,
"You want to get together and write? We could get together and write."
And he's like, "I'm not in a band right now."
We just knew he struggled with things.
We were actually wondering whether or not we're gonna make
a second record,
because it looked like he was ready to just quit.
The thought that kept going through my head was like,
"Is it better to have gotten here,
and then... it ends,
or was it better not to have ever gotten here before,
to not know what it was like," you know what I mean?
I don't even know if this is true,
but I read that Adam went to work in a bar
after the first album,
and I've always held onto that.
In my own way, after everything we do, I try and do something like that.
I can see he's trying to keep his feet on the ground somehow.
And to me, that suggests trying to remember,
"I have to do normal human things too,
to know how to sing about things other people are going through."
That really inspired me. Is that true?
Okay. Oh, well, the Viper Room.
Okay, so, maybe less grounding than, like, the airport lounge at Des Moines.
I was never good at-- I'm still not good at going up and talking to people.
But it kind of didn't matter,
'cause in LA, they came up and talked to me.
And they weren't just fan people.
In fact, they just were acting normal, 'cause everyone was famous.
And even though I was famous, who cares?
There's Jack Nicholson. Who fucking cares about you?
I had Mexican food with Allen Ginsberg one night.
We watched Adam Ant together.
I mean, what more do you want out of life?
And then once I was a little recovered, 'cause I needed some recovery time,
it was magic.
And it gave me this world to write about
that was fucking fascinating.
I couldn't wait to make a record.
I had lived a completely different life that year
than I had ever lived before in my life.
I had been on the road. I had toured the world.
I was a rock star. And then I moved to Hollywood.
And I met all these really cool people.
And I wanted to write about it.
And I thought...
"I'm gonna write the fucking greatest rock and roll album," you know?
I can't imagine the pressure of going
from being an unknown band that sells seven million copies
of your first record without trying, you know?
You don't know that you're gonna do that, you know?
And then you do that, and then everyone's like,
"Do it again."
This time we got this old 1930s Edwardian mansion
up in the hills by Griffith Park.
So, what's the difference when you move in here?
It just gives a different sound to everything?
Well, we could all get in one room. It's echoey.
We thought that the liveliness of the room would help.
I'm not sure whether it does, or it doesn't,
but it'll give it a really unique sound.
Whether it sounds, like, good or not, I don't know.
-But... it'll sound unique. -Right.
It had a big entryway when you walked in
with this big staircase going straight up, one of those classic, like, staircases.
And then the whole living room area to the right
became where the band played, the music room.
I went out and bought everything.
Mic cables and microphones and tape decks
and headphone systems and like, crazy amount of stuff.
This is my friend, Jane Pratt.
She used to be the editor of Sassy magazine
because she's very sassy.
I was between Sassy magazine and Jane magazine,
and I was doing a bunch of TV stuff.
-This was Jim Morrison's piano. -No way.
Yeah, yeah.
My landlord left it at the house.
I actually knew the band
from going over to Adam's house late at night
when he couldn't sleep, and drinking beers and watching TV.
Sounds like shit.
It's supposed to sound like shit, and it does.
-Very good. -Yeah.
We started thinking about producers.
I just had this idea about a different kind of feeling,
and I immediately thought of Gil Norton.
Okay, do you want us to keep going through the chorus,
or keep what you did on the chorus?
He'd worked with the Pixies on Doolittle,
which is, like, this incredible record.
It was intentional to be more rock.
Other than Tony Berg,
I feel like everybody else we talked to at the record company
wanted another August and Everything After,
and we went in a completely different direction.
I don't wanna make After August and Everything After.
Tony?
I think Adam looks at record-making
as the opportunity to express himself.
It's often something he can't articulate.
It's a gut response.
And you know what? That's how it's supposed to be.
That's the whole fucking point.
When the organ goes, go with it.
-Solo? -When the organ goes, go with it.
Just... We'll see who wins.
Adam wanted for the second record, I think, to be a little heavier,
and he wanted a lead guitar player,
because I think being out there all alone
with nothing else to bounce off of for a singer like him
probably was more than he wanted, you know?
It's just too much attention. You're already getting all the attention.
It's like, it's good to have a foil.
I was living up north,
and staying with a high school buddy of mine.
I was just sitting around watching the OJ trial,
and this guy was just asking me, like, nonstop questions.
We'd been on tour for, like, three years,
and I was just like, "I gotta get out of here."
So, Adam's like, "Come on down."
-Is Dave in here? -Yes.
-Yeah. -Dave's here. Dan's here?
Yes.
-Charlie? -Everybody's here.
-Yes. -Matt?
-Yo, yeah. -Get a bass.
Where's Charlie?
-Yo! -Let's go.
I'd never really been in a studio.
I'd done one-off recordings with friends,
and like, some living room recordings.
So, it was my first record, and here it is,
this record that I know is going to get heard, obviously.
So, I was just trying to, you know, keep my shit together,
and get through it, you know?
Fuck you, Hollywood!
Well, I guess you left me With some feathers in my hand
Didn’t make it any easier
Dave Bryson's rhythm guitar
is kind of the salient instrument on the first album.
Whereas the second album, you hear Dan and Immy as well.
And Charlie is this constant presence that smooths things quite expertly.
Usually what will happen is Adam will come in
with a song and the band will work on it a lot.
And then Adam will come in at the end of the day
or the next day and tell us
that we're all horrible musicians and we should all quit.
And then we work on it, and finally, he loves us.
It's all about getting Adam to love us.
Oh, you're fired.
I'm fired. That's it. I'm out of the band.
You meet any artist, real artist,
and you'll meet someone who's wanting to mix it up,
wanting to challenge the listener
or the people who might have authority.
I think Adam does that very well.
He does it in an artist's way.
It's not abrasive. It's expressive.
"Catapult" starts off the album with, like,
I've just been sent screaming into the stratosphere,
and then I came crashing down, and I don't know how--
I gotta figure out how to deal with this.
And Recovering the Satellites itself, which is about picking yourself up
after you come crashing out of the sky.
All of the sudden she disappears
Just yesterday she was here
Somebody tell me if I am sleeping
Someone should be with me here
'Cause I don’t wanna be alone
I wanna be the knife That cuts into my hand
And I wanna be scattered
From here in this catapult
What a big baby
Won’t somebody save me please
You won’t find nobody home
Adam and I have lived some kind of weird,
intersecting lives, all of which resulted
in him dating one and a half Friends,
me writing two books about Friends,
and writing the first cover story about Friends in Rolling Stone.
Adam's a handsome guy in a way.
He's, you know, he's got a little bit of an ogre vibe,
but... but a guy that can write those songs.
I guess I'd date him if I was an actress.
When I met Jennifer Aniston,
my friends lied to me, and her friends lied to her.
They told us both that we were really into the other.
I didn't know anything about her. I was busy during prime time.
On a Thursday night at eight o'clock, I'm not watching TV, I'm on stage.
The craziness was, that was the epicenter of fame and projection in the '90s.
Every guy I knew was asking me in the first season of Friends
when I wrote about it, is Jennifer Aniston single?
Like they thought they had a shot because TV stars have that value.
They come into your home and you think,
"Oh, they're just like my friend."
When we were getting ready to record records,
we would do these shows at The Viper Room
and we'd work on all the material.
And Jen came to the show, and she's cool,
she's smart, she's really funny, she's beautiful.
And I was taken. And she likes me, apparently.
So, there he is dating the actresses
that every rock critic thinks they should be dating.
He also then steps into the modern age of celebrity
just as it's exploding.
You know, it's like that was the exact moment
when Rolling Stone was sort of competing
with the Us magazine world, the sort of pop celebrity world.
And he pissed everybody off.
I remember being here once with Jen and Adam,
and we left.
Adam had parked his Karmann Ghia across the street,
and the mob scene
of paparazzi and videos was terrifying.
You did not see Kurt Cobain stepping into like,
the cast of, like, Sabrina the Teenage Witch
and dating people.
And I think maybe that gave him demerits
in the church of, you know, hipness or alternativeness.
The thing is, it's no one's business.
In the course of those years, right,
that I was spending a lot of time with Adam,
he was probably deeply in love, maybe four or five times.
He would fall in love very quickly.
My memories of Adam are 98% platonic,
maybe 98.6.
He could have done without a few of those girlfriends, I think.
Like... like, I could have shaved a few of those off the list very happily.
Here we have tonight's list.
When we were doing our second record,
Recovering the Satellites, he was dating Courtney Cox.
And she's hanging out with us,
or she's on our tour bus with us.
She's painted my fingernails.
You know, there's repeated references
to her on the record. You know, she is "Monkey."
She's the girl that he sees across the hospital room
in "Long December" is Courtney.
That record is very tied to that relationship.
I don't think the relationship was the healthiest thing
in the world, 'cause Adam wasn't the healthiest thing
in the world at that point.
Courtney was probably my longest relationship,
although I don't know... really
whether we were together for a lot of it.
We were very, very, very different people.
And... there were moments
that were absolutely wonderful together.
You know, and there were moments where it was really hard.
We just weren't on the same wavelength.
I get it. It's hard to resist the temptations of fame,
but it's also, it can be quite a destructive element.
I think he recognized at a certain point he was becoming,
or at least flirting with becoming, a cliché.
Keep your private life private.
Save your public persona for your work.
It helps inoculate you
from the things that can feel very hurtful
or very personal.
VH1 Storytellers was the sister,
the equivalent of MTV Unplugged.
What differentiated Storytellers was the storyteller
was supposed to explain to you what the song was about.
Sometimes, I think songs like this can be a little trite.
It seems like everybody who has a big record
writes a song about how hard a time they're having,
and I think that it's a little hard
to get people to sympathize with that sometimes,
because it's like, "Oh, okay, he's famous, poor schmuck."
It's a weird thing, you know? All of a sudden,
the whole world's different.
People look at you differently, people treat you differently.
I adjusted, but there was a period where I had a really hard time.
We were really trying to come up with complete reworkings
and rewritings of all these songs.
Taking a song like "Have You Seen Me Lately?,"
which on record is like super rockin', right?
Like it's all guitar, the piano's going...
and it's just...
But now to deconstruct the song, lays bare the lyrics,
the foundation, you know,
the entire reason for this song existing, you know.
You don't have the comfort of the blaring electric guitar
to distract you from the fact that this is a song
about being miserable, about being a rock star
for you right now.
Get away from me
This isn't gonna be easy But I don't need you, believe me
"Have You Seen Me Lately?," it's just angry.
That was like the first time in my life I really experienced that, like,
existing in more than one place at once.
You know, like, 'cause you live in your own life,
and then you live this imaginary version of yourself
in people's imagination of you,
and you live on the radio.
Like, sometimes I want To hear myself on the radio
Have you seen me lately?
"Have You Seen Me Lately?" is specifically about,
like, your relationship with fame and people's relationship with you
through fame and anger and a rejection of it, you know?
And what do you think of me now?
Now, that I've said, "fuck you," what do you think of me now?
You know, 'cause the idea that can you tell me
a thing, anything, like a single thing you remember about me.
And have you seen me lately? 'Cause I'm not that person even anymore.
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?
"Have You Seen Me Lately?" is the fulfillment of the prophecy,
the dark, terrible prophecy of "Mr. Jones."
There's the prediction and there's the culmination.
You know, yep, I got famous. Yep, I hated it.
Yep, I... I don't know myself anymore.
You know, I don't know who I am, and you don't know who I am either.
You think you do. You've seen me on magazine covers.
You've seen me on MTV.
You've seen me with this or that actress.
And you think you know who I am, but you don't.
You know, like, tell me one thing you remember about me.
Just one thing you remember about me
Remember about me
You guys have heard it now before anybody else, so.
This is called "Walkaways."
I was very excited about it.
You know, also, we have this entrée.
We're not this complete unknowns.
We've had one of the biggest records in the world for the past three years,
and everyone's gonna listen to whatever we put out next.
So, as long as it's great, we're fine,
wish is like, obscurity was the thing you were scared of, not disapproval.
I wasn't worried about people not liking it.
I thought we'd make another great record.
You know. And we did.
“I gotta rush away” she said
I've been to Boston before
And anyway
This change I’ve been feeling
It doesn't make the rain fall
No big differences these days
Just the same old walkaways
You know, August had sold so many copies.
I don't know what it sold at that moment, six million or seven million.
And I'm like, all the records are gonna sell seven million.
Like, duh, you know,
this Satellite is gonna sell seven,
it's gonna sell more, you know, until it didn't.
At the time it was released, no one paid it any attention,
or they dismissed it and they didn't like it.
He's a brilliant artist, and he's delicate.
You know, as tough as he is on the outside,
you have to handle him carefully,
'cause he's a really good songwriter and a really great singer.
If you tell him he sucks in your magazine,
it's gonna affect him.
Someday, I'm gonna stay
But not today
Thanks, good night. Take care.
I would get bummed out on the road.
Reviews come in and they're shitty.
In fact, they're not even shitty, they're just not talking about us at all.
The reviews just talked about people you dated,
and they don't have anything to do with music.
Adam cared about the criticism. He... he was sensitive.
He's a sensitive motherfucker.
Recovering the Satellites went double platinum,
I think, two million, you know, which is not
the success of August and Everything After.
But to sell two million records, you know, in 1996, on your second record,
in the midst of this backlash,
you know, with this environment where everyone is starting to hate you
just because you're too successful.
You know, that's almost more impressive,
you know, than selling seven million records out of nowhere.
For some people, Recovering the Satellites,
the second record, it's, you know, a sophomore jinx,
even though it's a great album and very successful in its own right.
It's a great record.
It just really crushed me at the time. Like, I worked so hard on that record.
Part of it was also that I was really unhealthy then.
I was a mess, mentally.
I thought, this is our last record.
I'm losing this battle with whatever it is,
and I'm going downhill.
I mean, it took him years to really get a grip on his diagnosis.
To tell you the truth, the way I felt is just,
if he needs to cancel a show...
you know, it's a bummer for the business,
but if it helps you to get through the rest of this tour,
that's okay with me.
If we have to cancel the rest of this tour,
'cause you just can't take it, I get that.
Take some time off, you know, figure it out.
Wasn't clear what to do for him exactly, you know...
when it got bad, 'cause it did get bad sometimes.
The doctor told him he needed to go into rehab
to get off the drugs he was on.
Prescribed drugs.
And he went, "Nah," and booked a tour.
And we did this whole tour with him coming off these meds,
crazy out of his mind, and that was tough.
Catch a boat to England, baby
Maybe to Spain
Wherever I have gone
Wherever I've been and gone
Wherever I have gone The blues are all the same
I was really struggling with the mental illness then.
It was dragging me down in a way that I was having trouble overcoming.
Send up for whiskey, baby Send up for gin
Me and room service, honey
Me and room service, baby
Me and room service
Well, we're living a life of sin
I think if my songs are about anything, it's about, you know,
the attempt to at least continue to feel things
while everything around you is encouraging you to be numb,
to deaden your feelings.
I think if there's one message in it, it's that.
I don't really necessarily think it's possible to be happy.
I'm not sure it's a world suited for that.
At one point when I was still living in LA,
I was really a mess,
and I was starting to cut myself.
The worst part about it was that you cut yourself,
and then it seems like it works.
Like that, yeah, it does release some of it.
So, I should cut myself some more, 'cause that's actually making it better.
And I remember kind of going through that logic
and thinking, that's not actually good logic.
Having enough clarity to be like,
"I feel like I'm really doing something productive here, and I'm not."
So, I called the doctor and said,
"Hey, this is a problem. I'm having a problem right now."
And I self-admitted to UCLA Medical Center.
And the day I checked in, Mariah Carey was checking out.
All over the news was just people making fun of Mariah Carey.
They did not treat it with respect or sympathy at all.
They made her, like, a joke, like she was some kind of mess.
And that would, like, confirm to me,
I'm not talking about this in the press while I'm,
you know, not in control of it.
I'd had enough venom directed towards me
to know not to tell any of those people anything.
You know, at first, you couldn't talk about it.
You just couldn't.
I think mental illness is wide and deep in this world
because everybody thinks differently.
And the more we know about how our brains work,
I think the better off we'll be.
We knew that Adam had chronic insomnia.
He wasn't closed off about talking about his mental health.
He was open to being vulnerable about it,
but he just didn't have-- None of us had the language.
To get that much attention that fast,
I feel like it's almost like just...
throwing a bomb into your brain and saying,
"Hey, I hope this all works out for you, you know?"
I think it helped a lot getting a real diagnosis finally.
Having a doctor go, "Okay, these medications
are probably wrong for you."
"We're gonna switch that. This is really what's happening."
And finally something that actually kind of sums it up.
It doesn't go away, but I know how to breathe and not panic.
I know how to get through things, and I live with it.
He turned a corner, and he started working on himself.
He really saw himself at rock bottom and worked his way out of it.
And it was the best thing he ever did.
And how he rebuilt himself from that, the work he put in,
huge credit due to him.
I try not to think about it.
I mean, I just, I don't think about it when we're working.
I do think about it in between.
It definitely soured a lot of things for me.
You just become such a public joke that it's a joke everybody makes
and everybody's comfortable and it's not personal.
Are you familiar with a band called "Counting Crows"?
Their lead singer is this thing called "Adam Duritz."
This Sideshow Bob burnout slept with a primo roster of '90s tail.
There are no match for my lead singer of the Counting Crows,
Adam Duritz impression, the albino version.
Round here
Somebody wrote in 2003,
"Having recognized that he will never be a lean pinup like Enrique Iglesias,
the band's front man, Adam Duritz, has completely gone the other way."
"He comes out looking like a barefoot bus driver
with an octopus strapped to his head."
I would wanna see that show.
I'd rather see that than Enrique Iglesias.
"Adam Duritz has a raw nerve attached to vocal cords."
That's positive.
"Screeching, quivering, withering, stinging."
"The lead singer of Counting Crows
has never met a pain he didn't like to exercise
by opening his mouth and letting it fly."
So, he would read that as a bad review,
but I look at that as, like, passion.
So fuck these reviews.
It's just part of what becomes the popular face of humor,
it's like, you're a diss joke.
And that's the punching bag we became.
Well, I don't fucking know.
You know, it clearly pissed a lot of people off.
And maybe some of that was me going around
telling everyone to fuck off
when they told us to do stuff I didn't wanna do.
To me, a joke's too far
when it comes from a place of anger or jealousy.
When it comes from affection, you can't really go too far.
If I love somebody, I'm writing as a fan
or heckling as a fan,
it's all good.
But when the intention is not affection,
that's when a joke goes too far.
Like, I could make fun of Adam all day.
He knows I love him.
That's why I love Counting Crows music.
It's like Dave Matthews Band without all those intricate guitar parts.
No, I love Counting Crows. It's some of the best music
you'll hear at a CVS at 3:00 a.m.
Did you ever see The Quiet Man?
The John Ford, John Wayne movie about him?
He's an ex-boxer, and he goes to Ireland
to try and live in his home where he was born.
And he gets in this fight with this landowner
in the area who keeps getting really angry
at John Wayne's character.
And he tells his, like, right-hand man, who's his little weasel,
and he's like, "Write a name down."
Set down the name, the one Sean Thornton.
"Did you write it down?" "Yes."
Well, then strike a line through it.
Death for him.
He always says that. "Now, cross it out."
Like, what am I gonna do, write names down and cross it out?
It's like I got better things to do.
Just seems like a waste of my time.
It's a great scene, though. It's a great movie.
I like playing.
I like... I like to do this.
I mean, it's the only thing I really like to do.
I used to have nothing in my life but my music.
And now, it's like the truth is,
I don't live and die by it like I used to.
It means the world to me to continue to be creative
and to write songs.
But I'm not dying of misery alone
in a house by myself with no other outlet except my songs.
I just had a very scary dissociative aloneness.
And then I had songs,
which were a way of connecting to the world.
I met Adam in 2017.
He was charming and a little bit shy and just completely sweet.
Basically, we had dinner and we've been together ever since.
I feel very protective of Adam.
I've had that worry before
of being relied upon for happiness,
but Adam isn't reliant on me or anyone.
I think that the dreadlocks were one of the things
people didn't understand about him and that probably...
was a factor in, like, the way that the public responded to him.
I think there was a little bit of, like, ridicule,
and I think there was a fixation in the media, too,
like, "Oh, this dreadlocked guy dating this beautiful woman,
like, what's up with that?"
And so, in our relationship, I came in, he did have the dreadlocks,
and I had the feeling that whatever they were before,
that they were now closer to, like, a shield.
I felt like they were a barrier,
and when I could get through them and see his face, and I...
I just love his face and his... He's got beautiful eyes and,
like, my favorite smile in the world.
And I always...
gently encouraged him,
like, maybe... maybe you should try...
you know, not having dreadlocks.
I was stunned and so happy for him because he was happy.
He was ready for a new era.
He was ready to be a new version of himself
and a more exposed, maybe, version of himself.
And I was ecstatic for him.
The second record is the record for me. Recovering the Satellites,
I remember hearing it from my brother's room. He got it first.
I didn't know what it was. It didn't sound like the first record.
Like, sonically, it didn't sound like the first record.
It's got a brashness that still speaks to me.
It makes me feel, even at this stage,
young and excited about music.
And it's one of those records
that I still listen to when I need to feel that.
The songs are unmatched, and they're all consistent
since the first one on the first record right to the ones...
that he released recently. So, I just couldn't believe
that somebody could craft emotion that well.
It changed my life. I write songs now because of it.
It gave, I think, a band like us a lot of insight or courage
about was you don't have to write the fastest, loudest song.
You have to write distinct songs.
They could be quiet, they could be slow,
they could be heartfelt.
Sincerity isn't dead.
Earnestness isn't gonna kill you.
It doesn't have to be ironic, but it has to be poetic.
He was very willing to make himself completely open
and vulnerable and tell you how uncool he felt,
which was-- that was the coolest thing.
The people who loved that first record,
maybe they didn't buy Recovering the Satellites,
maybe they did,
but no one's ever stopped loving his songs.
They've never been off the radio.
Let me see.
We're gonna record "A Long December."
-You on your own? -Yep.
Okay.
Are you ready? And...
So this is the encore.
Adam's talent is a lot more important
than hipness, which is a day-to-day thing.
It's like, fuck hipness.
There's a lot of people who Adam got less rave reviews than
as the '90s went on, that no one is listening to now,
that don't have a place in the heart of generations.
A long December
And there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better Than the last
Knowing what I know now, I'd say, as long as what you're singing
is from your heart and what you really want to sing,
there's really nothing else to worry about.
Everyone is going to have a different reaction,
and some people that hate it today will love it tomorrow.
And the best Counting Crows music to me
sounds like it doesn't worry about what anyone else thinks.
It's just telling you his experience or their experience.
And it's one more night in Hollywood
That I could be forgiven
Wish you would
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah
Nah, nah, nah, nah
It is a brother and a sisterhood
of strange people that I have this thing in common with.
We take the stuff that goes on in our lives
and we make it into these weird things that rhyme
as a way of explaining what we're going through.
And all at once Look across a crowded room
To see the way That light attaches to a girl
It's one more day up in the canyons
And it’s one more night in Hollywood
I'm still obsessed with music.
It's not just this place I go to to express stuff anymore.
It's this place I'm living, and I love it.
I think you should
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah
Nah, nah, nah
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah
Get away from me
Just get away from me
This isn't gonna be easy But I don't need you
Believe me
Yeah, you got a piece of me
But it’s just a little piece of me
And I don't need anyone
And these days I feel like I'm fading away
Like sometimes When I hear myself on the radio
Have you seen me lately?
Cause I was out on the radio Starting to change
Somewhere out in America It’s starting to rain
Could you tell me One thing you remember about me?
And have you seen me lately?
I remember me
And all the little things That make up a memory
Like she said, she loved to watch me sleep
Like she said, it’s the breathing
It’s the breathing in and out And in and...