As the Crows Flew

Most of us will never experience instant stardom, but Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz describes it so plainly that everyone can taste it.

“It’s like a dream where you’re in school, and you’re not wearing the right clothes,” says the singer-songwriter, 32. “You’re in your underwear or your pajamas, or you’re naked. . . . I’ve been naked at school for three years now. I had to learn to adjust to that, you know?”

Duritz found himself living in fame’s fishbowl following the enormous success of the band’s 1993 debut, “August and Everything After,” an album of ready-made classic rock that drew comparisons to the Band, R.E.M. and, most often, Van Morrison.

He didn’t deal with the attention very well.

Although he’s not plagued by the sort of doubts about his worthiness that haunted Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain--the decade’s poster boy for the dangers of overnight success--Duritz’s driving ambition and confidence did not prepare him for the way stardom changed his life.

At a time when alternative rock was all the rage, Counting Crows offered a testament to the endurance of roots-based traditional rock. Their folk-flavored debut album--sparked by heavy adult-alternative radio and MTV airplay of the now prophetic “Mr. Jones,” an infectious tune about an aspiring rock star, complete with Van Morrison-esque “sha la las”--reached No. 4 on the pop charts in 1994 and sold nearly 5 million copies in the United States.

Fans identified with Duritz’s poetic yearnings and confessions of confusion, and the album got a four-star review in Rolling Stone. But many critics derided him for everything from copping Van Morrison’s style to being whiny.

While allowing that “most music has influences,” Gil Norton, the producer of the band’s new album, “Recovering the Satellites,” is a champion of Duritz as a unique songwriter.

“I can’t compare him with anybody,” says Norton in a separate interview. “Van Morrison is a great storyteller, and I think Adam’s a great storyteller too. But Van Morrison did his thing when he did it, and Adam’s doing his now. . . . I don’t see Adam as [copying anyone’s] songwriting and lyrics. He’s a very individual songwriter and a brilliant lyricist.”

Duritz’s sometimes painful adjustment--not only from struggling musician to successful working artist, but also from someone with no place in the world to a person cautiously accumulating a life--is chronicled in excruciating emotional detail on the band’s new collection (see review, Page 85).

The hourlong album is structured as a double LP (although it’s available only in limited-edition vinyl), mirroring Duritz’s emotional and psychological journey.

Although the songs are specifically all about Adam, he gets to the core of the turmoil that change can bring to anyone’s life, so listeners can see some of themselves in his situation.

“The first half of the record is really about dealing with the hysteria and some of the fears that were coming from me, and it [has] somewhat nihilistic views on things,” says Duritz, dressed casually in blue jeans, black boots and a faded blue vintage shirt as he sits in the living room of his rented Laurel Canyon house.

“I mean, I felt like I was fading and disintegrating--and I wanted to, in some ways, at that point.”

Songs such as “Catapult” and “Daylight Fading” express confusion and even court oblivion, while “Angels of the Silences,” the first radio track, is “about faith in God, or a woman, or someone who you want to believe in and who won’t be dependable enough to believe in,” Duritz explains.

“Instead of coming to you and giving you their love, they just tell you, ‘Oh, it’s there.’ And then you just have to wait for it to come, and it doesn’t come.”

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Surrounded by beat-up, newspaper-strewn furniture in a rustic canyon retreat that was built by Tom Mix and once owned by David Niven, the bearded and dreadlocked singer doesn’t seem much like his public image as an enigmatic poet. He says his songs “are not mysteries”--they are about him--so it’s a little surprising to find that he’s not as angst-ridden or self-centered as his lyrics might imply.

During a virtually nonstop 90-minute discourse, he is serious but animated and pleasant. He talks fast and matter-of-factly about the things that torment him--he can’t sleep, he over-analyzes everything. While he’s intense about his band and its work, he’s not completely humorless. Near the end of the conversation, his last session in a long day of interviews, he stretches and comments amiably, “I’m sick of talking about myself.”

Leaning forward a little on a battered, overstuffed couch, Duritz describes how his own crisis of faith peaked last year.

“I feel like we really got launched up into the sky at one point. I mean, much further than we expected, or even maybe wanted, at the time, to go,” he says. “A lot of the adoration and the fame, which is great in some ways, came to me, and a lot of the pressure and the hysteria too. And I definitely came crashing down.”

After completing its opening stint for the Rolling Stones in the summer of 1994, the band canceled a month of U.S. headlining dates in August and September, and Duritz went home to rest. “The sensation that everyone is looking at you all the time is really terrifying,” he says. “You never know what a shield your anonymity is until it’s totally gone.”

He couldn’t even get privacy in his own home. Returning to Berkeley after the tour, he was at first surprised by how lively his old neighborhood had become. “It was the weirdest thing; my street had turned into a big party street,” he says.

“I finally realized one Saturday night: [bandmate] Dan [Vickrey] and I were sitting in the living room and looking out the window, and all of the sudden I hear these kids go, ‘There he is! He’s right there!’ And I realized the party was us. They were going to the drive-in, and we were the movie.”

At the urging of friends who manage the Viper Room nightclub on Sunset Strip, Duritz moved to L.A. in 1995. He was relieved to regain a measure of his anonymity, as well as to connect with an “artists’ community.”

The new album’s second half is about dealing with the negative results of his fame, he says, and he learned to cope with it in Los Angeles.

“I needed to learn to live with being an artist and being successful,” he says, “because so much about being an artist is about struggling. I needed to learn to create now, and not to feel guilty about it, and to deal with all the pressure. . . . I’m not saying that I don’t want this life. But I needed to learn to deal with it.”

The emotional overload of the first half culminates in the bitter “Have You Seen Me Lately?”--the dark side of “Mr. Jones,” in which the dreamed-about fame is slowly erasing the subject’s sense of identity.

“It goes from ‘Have You Seen Me Lately?,’ which is like a howl, to ‘Miller’s Angels,’ which is almost like crying about it,” Duritz explains. “The second half, the third side especially, is about letting yourself feel things. And the fourth side is about the possibilities.”

Although the lyrics describe Duritz’s own trajectory, the songwriting is a collaborative effort with his fellow Counting Crows: guitarists Vickrey and David Bryson, bassist Matt Malley, keyboardist Charlie Gillingham and drummer Ben Mize.

The band began in 1991 as the acoustic duo of Duritz and Bryson, who played clubs in and around their Berkeley home. They soon were joined by Vickrey, Malley, Gillingham and drummer Steve Bowman (later replaced by Mize). They continued to gig in the Bay Area, building a loyal following and eventually becoming the prize in a nine-label bidding war. They were signed to Geffen Records’ DGC label by Gary Gersh, now president of Capitol Records.

The band recorded “August . . . “ with producer T-Bone Burnett in a vacant Hollywood mansion, then hit the road, touring frequently before and after the debut’s September 1993 release, gathering fans and honing their chops as they opened for such acts as Cracker, the Cranberries and Bob Dylan before becoming headliners themselves.

From the beginning, each member has written his own part, leaving a collective stamp on the music.

“What I bring in is a skeleton,” Duritz says. “The song is what we make together. And I really believe that to be true, because you can’t play music the way we play it without all six of us doing it that way. It’s so reactive. The reason I come off as such an emotional singer in some ways is because they are so sensitive to where I go vocally.”

The depth of their rapport is the album’s chief musical strength, as the instrumental shading adds dimension to Duritz’s emotional outbursts.

“They’re very underrated as a band, because they’re spectacular that way,” he says. Duritz is as generous in praising his band as he is determined to protect it from anything he considers outside interference. He has earned the tag of control freak, even from people at his own label, for his legendary insistence on doing things the way he knows is right for the band.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asks flatly. “I am fiercely, fiercely protective and controlling of everything that involves this band and our art out there in the world. Because I don’t care about having huge hit singles tomorrow. I don’t care about making a million dollars next year. I do care about being able to play in this band 10 years from now.”

Partly, it was Duritz’s apparently unshakable faith in the band that ultimately kept him from self-destructing, even as he floundered. But he also had a little help from his friends. In L.A., he not only regained his anonymity, but also found “a place that is mine and where I feel like I belong. With friends and things that I can cherish now, and things that I can hold onto.”

On the album this resolution comes in the penultimate track, “A Long December.” He wrote the song while recording the album, after visiting some friends in the middle of the night.

“I was just realizing as I drove home from their house that, OK, I don’t have everything, and I’m not the happiest person in the world,” he says, “but I have a life and there’s possibilities. And that the things that went on in the last three years did add up to something.”