Title: CROWS FLY HIGH; TODAY, THE BAND THAT WAS 'ALTERNATIVE' HEADLINES AT RFK
Authors: Julian Rubinstein, Special to The Washington Post
Source: Washington Post, Final Edition
Date: Saturday May 14, 1994 Sec: D STYLE p: 1
Length: Long (1541 words) Type: Feature; Biography
Illus: Photograph
Subjects: Musicians & conductors; Personal profiles; Popular music
Companies: Counting Crows
Abstract: The band Counting Crows is profiled, and its ascension from
alternative icon to No 6 on the Billboard pop chart is
examined.
In the dank cold of the 9:30 club's basement dressing room, Adam Duritz -- Counting Crows' lead singer and philosopher -- nestles into a threadbare couch, fiddling with the broken knob of a portable heater. 'See what being on 'Saturday Night Live' can do for you,' he says dryly. But there is plenty of evidence of his band's rise to celebrity. A small army of fans is shivering outside, in the hopes of getting into the sold-out show.
The Crows' debut, 'August and Everything After,' marketed by Geffen Records as 'alternative' when it was released in September, is currently at No. 6 on the Billboard pop chart and has sold nearly 1.5 million copies. The Crows' music is being played on mainstream radio and in sports arenas and shopping malls around the country. Today they will headline the sold-out HFStival at RFK Stadium. And they will return to RFK in August as the opening act for the Rolling Stones.
But on this chilly winter night, the cramped 9:30 club is the Counting Crows' venue. After the gig, reporters crowd the squalid dressing room and keep Duritz talking long after everyone else -- including the rest of the band -- has left the club.
'It's nice to have a forum for your thoughts,' he says.
Still, the Baltimore-born Duritz, 29, is uncomfortable with his new-found celebrity. 'I'm in a period of adjustment right now,' he says. 'You don't think about it when you're baring your soul, but you're baring it to everyone -- and they're going to want to come back and talk to you about it because you've let them so far in. It's not easy.'
The album -- catapulted by vivid lyrics and sobering themes that have struck a chord with much of a generation -- went platinum in five months, faster than Pearl Jam's debut, 'Ten,' or Nirvana's 'Nevermind.' But though Duritz, like Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain before him, is a reluctant visitor to stardom, he hasn't damned the whole plantation.
'I'm happy with the fame in a lot of ways. I won't deny that,' he says. 'But it's kind of scary. Something has definitely changed in my life, and I can't go back now if I wanted to.'
Three short years ago, there were only dwindling hopes for five musicians familiar with each other from years of playing in the close-knit San Francisco music scene. Bassist Matt Malley sold his equipment and moved to Vancouver, B.C., to become a house painter. Keyboardist Charlie Gillingham, a computer whiz, took a job in the burgeoning high-tech industry. Drummer Steve Bowman recorded a self-promo tape in hopes of hooking up with an established act. Guitarist David Bryson took a steady job with a local music producer. And Duritz, mired in the post-adolescent angst he so often sings about, took off for Europe with an open-ended rail pass. (The Crows' sixth member, guitarist Dan Vickrey, joined the band after the release of the album.)
The night before Duritz left San Francisco, a friend took him to a jam session with Bryson. Months later in Greece, Duritz received a tape of that session and decided to return home. He and Bryson formed an acoustic duo and started playing Talking Heads and Cure covers, along with some originals, at open-mike nights. Duritz's raw emotion and urgent lyrics created a small but intensely loyal following, and soon the pair was packing local coffeehouses and watering holes.
Eventually, the two called on their favorite musicians -- Malley, Gillingham and Bowman -- to fill out their sound. The group recorded a demo tape that made its way into the hands of Gary Gersh, the Geffen A&R rep (now president of Capitol Records) who signed Nirvana. 'I was blown away,' Gersh says. 'I listen to a lot of tapes and it's extremely rare for me to be so taken by something.'
In February 1992, the day after the band played a showcase at San Francisco's I-Beam club, a Crows bidding war broke out among nine record labels. Two months later, the Counting Crows signed a deal with Gersh and Geffen believed to be so lucrative that industry wags dubbed them Accounting Crows.
And the buzz started building: When Van Morrison canceled his scheduled appearance at last January's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame banquet in Los Angeles, Robbie Robertson, formerly of the Band, asked the Crows to take Morrison's place. They played onstage with the Doors and Cream. The Crows also played at the star-studded benefit for singer Victoria Williams in L.A. And when T-Bone Burnett, who has worked with Bob Dylan and U2's Bono, got hold of the Crows' demo, he agreed to produce 'August and Everything After.'
At Robertson's suggestion, the Crows rented a house in a canyon outside Santa Monica to record the album, as the Band did for 'Music From Big Pink.' For two months in cramped quarters -- Gillingham slept on a mattress in a bathroom -- they struggled to get to the core of their songs. The title track didn't even make the album because Duritz never recorded a version he liked.
'We had to rediscover ourselves and reinvent the music,' says Gillingham. ' 'Perfect Blue Buildings,' when we started with it, was like a pop-rock anthem. We realized in order to get to the lyric -- about staying up late and contemplating suicide and drug addictions and pain -- we had to bring it way down and make it very intimate. We turned out the lights and brought out the acoustic guitars and played it as quietly as we could.'
The album runs from blues to country, and from jazz to upbeat guitar-driven rockers and slow keyboard-based ballads. 'August' isn't groundbreaking like Nirvana's music, but its lyrics are literate and -- if sales are any indication -- easy to identify with.
The name Counting Crows comes from an old English divination rhyme that suggests life is as pointless as counting crows. And Duritz's songs -- mostly brooding and melancholy, perfect for his bluesy, elegiac voice -- are often about loneliness, a sense of rootlessness and a longing for meaning in life.
I wanted to see you walking backwards
And get the sensation of you coming home
I wanted to see you walking away from me
Without the sensation of you leaving me alone.
'I think this is certainly a generation in search of who they are as Americans,' Duritz says. 'All of my characters -- and myself, I suppose -- are constantly searching for something. ... All over there are people crying out wanting to be rooted, wanting to have a home, wanting to have someone and being unable to stay once they have it, because they get there and they can't stand the attachment so they go looking for something else.'
Yet for all of his willingness to speak about his generation, Duritz does not want to be its spokesman. In fact, he says he'll probably never write a good political song.
'Adam's the kind of guy who is kind of wandering on the edge of a cliff and you never know when he might slide over the edge,' says keyboardist Gillingham. 'The good news is I feel like Adam's got his feet on the ground for the first time in his life.'
The son of a doctor, Duritz led a nomadic childhood: By the time his family settled in the Bay Area when he was in his teens, Duritz had lived in Baltimore, Boston, Houston, El Paso and Denver. He graduated from a Connecticut boarding school, then attended and dropped out of Berkeley -- an English major two credits shy of a diploma.
For several years, Duritz, who is Jewish, struggled to reconcile his own alienation with the sense of community provided by his religious practice. He says that when he was 17, during his second visit to Israel, he realized that while Judaism is 'about understanding,' it required a commitment that would rival his musicmaking. 'The next day I got on a plane out of the country, and I never had anything to do with Judaism again.'
During his freshman year in college, he wrote his first song, a ballad about his then-16-year-old sister, while sitting in a chemistry class. 'That was a revelation,' he says. 'Once you know you can create something out of nothing, everything changes.'
The formation -- and now the success -- of Counting Crows has also represented an important discovery for Duritz: 'I never felt comfortable with myself before now,' he says. 'When I'm onstage, I'm everything I wanted to be.'
But there's a line from the Counting Crows song 'Mr. Jones' that goes, 'We all want to be big stars and we have different reasons for that.' Lately Duritz has been singing the line this way: 'We all want to be big stars and we had no idea what it means to be that.'