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For half a second, Adam Duritz is airborne — and then he comes down hard. It's early February, during the second song of a rare Counting Crows small-club show in New York, and a moment ago, Duritz was teetering on a monitor speaker at the edge of the stage. Now, he tumbles backward, dreadlocks flailing, and his head collides with a piano. It looks painful. But Duritz springs back up, not missing a note — though his voice seems to quaver even more than usual as he sings, "Have you seen me lately?"
Then he climbs up onto that same speaker, again and again, like a man who has everything to prove. And maybe he does. Duritz is all too aware that some people hate him. They say his voice is whiny. They say his dreads are fake (which they are). And they don't like his band, either. "For some reason, everyone decided we were a piece of shit," he says a few days after the concert, describing a low point a couple of years back. "So the only thing to do was to go out there and show we weren't."
It's easy to forget that before "Mr. Jones" became an unlikely folk-rock smash in 1994, at the height of grunge — helping sell 7 million copies of their debut, August and Everything After — Counting Crows were critics' darlings, signed to DGC, the same hip, indie-style Geffen Records subsidiary that also signed Nirvana, Beck and Sonic Youth. But even as the Crows became a huge, consistently popular touring act, the perception of them turned around. "I do something that people really don't like," Duritz says, shrugging.
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He's sitting in his gigantic, whimsically decorated Greenwich Village apartment, which is dominated by a living room not much smaller than the floor of Madison Square Garden. There's a game area, complete with pingpong table and pinball machine, and tucked away in a side room is a home theater with stadium seating.
In the kitchen is a pretty, blond recent Berkeley grad named Emily, who lives in a spare bedroom, rent-free. She sums up the apartment's vibe: "All it needs is a trampoline and it would be Big." Duritz, a Berkeley drop-out, remains a fanatical follower of the school's sports teams, and he met Emily at one of her soccer games. Their relationship is platonic — he's been helping Emily out since her mom died of cancer in 2006. "You have no idea how fucking cool he is," she tells me.
Duritz, 43, is dressed in his current daily uniform: black rock tee (today's is a spanking-new Velvet Underground model), scuffed jeans, suede boots. His detractors might find him harder to despise in person. He's a warm dude, with big, watery brown eyes that broadcast the same unchecked emotional vulnerability as his songs. He's also a gifted — if fantastically verbose — storyteller: Our first conversation lasts more than five hours, ending only when my digital recorder's battery dies. After a few drinks out one night, he convinces me to sing karaoke — and then unexpectedly joins me onstage to duet on the choruses of Steely Dan's "Black Cow." ("Ballsy song choice," he says.)
His dreadlocks — which he has always freely admitted are hair extensions — are fascinating up close. They're so incongruous with the rest of his appearance ("I'm a Russian Jew American, impersonating African," he sings on the Crows' new album) that you half expect them to begin moving, like a giant tarantula. Not long ago, Duritz's publicist urged him to shave his head, but he wouldn't do it. "Whatever they hide or cover about myself, you know, they feel good," he says. "And I did not want to be skinhead guy."
We're sitting on lawn furniture in a section of the apartment with a faux outdoor theme: There's AstroTurf on the floor instead of carpet, and a porch swing hangs from the ceiling. On top of a nearby piano sits a lamp shaped like a giant light bulb, which is supposed to spark ideas. ("It doesn't work," Duritz laments.) In a speaking voice that's an octave lower than his singing, he discusses the other night's fall. "I'm pretty sure I got a concussion, because I couldn't see for four songs after that," Duritz says. "I was dizzy as hell. But it never occurred to me to lay there on the ground. The song needs to be sung. You can't not get up."
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As recently as 2006, Duritz wasn't sure he would ever sing again. At that point, it had already been four years since the Crows' last studio album, Hard Candy. "All of our records are, like, you're driven to do this because you have something to say," Duritz says. "But I didn't want to say anything for years. I was afraid to say anything again. I went crazy."
Duritz, the son of two doctors, had plunged deeper than ever into what he now acknowledges is a lifelong mental illness. Recently, a new psychiatrist diagnosed the main problem as a dissociative disorder, which can cause sufferers to feel detached from reality. Duritz says the condition left him unable to connect with other people for years, from girlfriends to his family. "This thing would happen to me with every person I'd ever gone out with — just like a shutdown where you can't feel anything," Duritz says. "There was nothing I knew how to do that was gonna fix my ability to have any kind of connection with another person."
He now traces the disorder back to two terrifying moments from his youth. At age fifteen or sixteen, he looked into the mirror and didn't recognize the person he saw. And at around age twenty-one, he had what felt like an acid flashback that he says lasted an entire year. He's been afraid to do drugs ever since. "The world was unreal. It didn't look right," he recalls. "It's never gone away. It looks that way right now to a certain extent. But it just doesn't scare me anymore."
Duritz had been getting heavier and heavier over the years, which he blames on a bad mix of psychiatric medicines. "I endured ten years of fat jokes," he says. By 2006, he weighed 250 pounds. He was depressed, anxious, reclusive. "A year and a half ago, I was in bed," he says. "I hadn't left bed in a long time."
Duritz has since lost fifty or sixty pounds (thanks in part to a diet heavy in protein cookies), and with the help of therapy and new meds, he's found some hope and sanity. When he ended a monthlong relationship on New Year's Day, the breakup was less shattering than any he'd had before — he hasn't even written a song about it yet. "There is a huge difference in my reaction to it," he says. "I am very, very sad, but I'm not depressed. I lost her and I'm OK." He thinks he's ready to get married and have kids — if he can ever get off the road long enough to meet someone and stick around. "I can care now, so I want to care," he says.
Last year, Duritz regrouped with Counting Crows to record a fine fifth studio album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, which tells the story of his recovery while recapturing some of the rubbed-raw emotional and musical impact of the band's earliest work. "We really tried to go for something hard emotionally, for the first time in a long time," says Crows keyboardist Charlie Gillingham, whose organ playing provides much of the band's rootsy soul. "We can make pop music, but that's not the part of the band that I love. I love us when we're dramatic."
That same side of Counting Crows accounts for their surprising popularity among emo bands, who tend to cite them as an early influence: In 2004, a bunch of emo and screamo groups even recorded an entire tribute album to the Crows. More recently, Panic at the Disco have covered "Round Here," and Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba recorded a duet with Duritz. "It took some sack," Duritz says, "for these guys to tell people who think we suck that we're their favorite band."
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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]
Related Stories:
• Counting Crows Photo Gallery
• Album Review: Saturday Nights & Sunday
Morning
• Counting Crows' Artist Page on
Rollingstone.com