Why Can't Adam Duritz Get Any Respect? : Rolling Stone

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Later in the week, onstage in another, even smaller New York club, Duritz is having a much better time. "Middle finger flying high, middle finger to the sky," he chants into a microphone, between gulps from a Corona. Duritz, a lifelong hip-hop fan, is playing backup vocalist to a New York rapper named Notar, whom he signed to his indie label, Tyrannosaurus. He's also drinking with such enthusiasm that beer keeps spilling on his Kiss Destroyer T-shirt. Beforehand, Duritz surveyed the female-heavy audience with admiration. "Hot chicks love Notar," he shouted in my ear. "When he's famous, it's gonna be out of control — and because he's a rapper, it'll be cool for him."

Duritz's own love life has created the impression that his morose lyrics come from a guy with zero to bitch about: Back when Friends was a national religion, he somehow managed to date both Jennifer Aniston (very briefly — "We never even slept together," he says) and Courteney Cox (a lot more seriously). "Why should I have to pay for that?" Duritz asks, launching into a short aria of self-pity. "Why does that make me an asshole? Chris Martin marries Gwyneth Paltrow. Why is he not an asshole? I mean, I've met him, he's not an asshole. I don't understand it exactly, 'cause I'm really a nice person. I'm generous." He's been paired in tabloids with an endless procession of women he says he barely knows and he doesn't find it amusing. "It's always set up as 'How does that fat fuck get all these women?'" he says.

Duritz thinks he could have prevented some of the vitriol if he had revealed his psychological problems earlier. "My life looks perfect, and I've been whining about it for years," he says. "I could have said at the very beginning, 'I have lost my mind. I am mentally ill. I have to take all these medications that make me fat.' And then everything would have been different. There are still people who would have hated us, who just disliked us musically. But so much of our stuff got reviewed on people's judgment of me personally."

After Notar's performance, the crowd thins out, but Duritz and a couple of dozen others stick around past midnight. A karaoke DJ sets up, and before long a random, Euro-looking dude with slicked-back hair gets on the stage as the intro of "Mr. Jones" plays over the PA. Before breaking into a tone-deaf rendition of the song, Euro-dude dedicates it by name to Duritz, whose usual policy is to leave a bar the moment a Crows song comes on. Instead, he just buries his face in his hands. "If I wasn't raised to be polite, I'd be out the door right now," he says.

But after the first verse, his roommate, Emily, jumps onstage and joins in, singing words Duritz wrote long ago. "When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely," she chirps, smiling wide and pointing at him. "When everybody loves me, I'm gonna be just about as happy as I can be."

Duritz settles back onto a bar stool, taking in the lyrics as if for the first time. He shakes his head and laughs. "It's good to leave the house once in a while," he says.

[From Issue 1049 — April 3, 2008]