Photo by Marc Millman
This September marks 20 years since Counting Crows released their seminal, breakthrough album August and Everything After. During that time, the Bay Area band has morphed from chart-topping, alt-rock leaning Trad Rockers to one of the hardest touring independent bands around. In recent years, the group has released an album of covers titled Underwater Sunshine, hosted the highly collaborative Traveling Circus and Medicine Show tour and championed a variety of bands through frontman Adam Duritz’s Outlaw Roadshow. This summer, the group will reconnect with their old friends The Wallflowers during an extended theater run. Duritz recently discussed his long history with The Wallflowers, creative cover choices and newfound independence with Relix and Jambands.com.
I know you have a long history with The Wallflowers. You sang on their breakthrough record Bringing Down the Horse and have toured together in the past. I was wondering if you could start by giving us a little background on when you first met those guys and how your friendship developed from there?
Well, I met Jake [Dylan] at the Viper Room through a bunch of mutual friends years ago. He had just come off making an album that hadn’t done well at Capitol. There were some good songs on the record, but it was kind of unfocused. We talked a lot about what he was looking to do. I guess I was probably bartending then because this is before [our] second record. So I suggested T-Bone [Burnett] as a producer because I felt like Jake had a lot of talent and some good songs but he sounded unfocused on that first album. One thing [T-Bone] does well, for his faults, is help bands begin their career.
[T-Bone] makes a lot of really good first albums because he’s really good at helping you find your voice and honing in on what you want to do. He was a big help to me when we made that first album. Jake was more unsure than I was about what he wanted his band to be like. I mean, there was [keyboardist] Rami [Jaffee], who he loved, but I’m not sure Jake really knew what he wanted the band to be at that point. And they didn’t end up using [only] the band on that record. I know [guitarist] Mike Campbell played on a lot of it. So T-Bone really helped Jake establish the sound that was right for him on that record. [It’s] a really nice record that I think now stands as their first album, [even though] it’s actually their second. Bringing Down the Horse was a great move forward for [Jake].
I ended up singing on [“6th Avenue Heartache”] because I used to live up in Laurel Canyon, and they were recording just over the Valley. And they had this song they were working on: They really liked it, but it was kind of sitting flat, so they called to ask if I could come down and sing on it. I said, “Well, sure, I don’t really know it.” And they were like, “Just shut up and come down the hill.”
So, I jumped in my car and I drove down the hill to the studio and had a beer and listened to the song, and then I went in the other room and sang it. It was pretty simple. Later that year, we had [The Wallflowers] open for us when we touring on Recovering the Satellites.
You’ve always championed younger acts, from running your own label to the Outlaw Roadshow showcases you curate with blogger Ryan Spaulding. In the current music industry environment, what method has been most helpful in giving new bands exposure?
You know, [the showcases] have been a really big thing for me and Ryan. I mean, it’s mostly Ryan. I tag along, but I’ve really loved [doing the showcases]. We’ve ended up taking a lot of those bands on tour. We did a great concert on the 4th of July in Maquoketa, Iowa at Codfish Hollow Barn with like four Outlaw Roadshow bands. And we did a seven- or eight-hour show, which was like four or five hours before us, and then we played a three-hour show to cap it off in, like, 130-degree temperatures. It was a great day, a lot of fun.
I think when you start off as a musician, you’re a part of a scene with bunch of other musicians. You’re all playing around San Francisco or New York or Athens, Georgia or wherever you are. Then you go see each other play, you meet other musicians. But then you get signed, and usually you’re the only band at the time who got signed. Then it’s harder because your friends are having a hard time, or they’re quitting their bands back home. That peer group doesn’t exist once you want to go hang out at the Grammys or something, which isn’t really my bag.
So I felt like I had lost out on the culture that made being a musician really cool. And the nice thing about the last few years is that I’ve gotten a lot of that back. Last year we had about 25 people staying at my house at CMJ. I had like four different bands and two or three bloggers, and we were all camped out there while we put on the Outlaw Roadshow. It was just a blast.
I got a thing on Twitter the other day from Port Francis, this great band from Chicago. They said they were coming to New York that weekend to play and wanted to know if I was going to be in town. I said I would. Then, all of a sudden, Shawn Fogel from Golden Bloom, another Outlaw Roadshow band, wrote and said, “Hey! Maybe we should have our Outlaw reunion.” The Outlaw Roadshow has become a family of people that’s just partyin’. Like, it weirdly means a lot to people. They want to remember that they were part of it. So it’s been a great thing for me. It’s made a big impact. I haven’t had as much to do with the label anymore. But the Roadshow… It’s a really big deal for all of us.
I think you’re right about that. The Roadshow has that vibe, that community feeling that’s been essential to the Counting Crows for so long. You have mentioned that one of the things you’re doing this year, in addition to championing some of these other bands, is writing. Are you writing towards another Counting Crows album? And if so, do you plan to preview those songs on tour or do you think you’ll hold them back until you can get into the studio?
Oh, I don’t know. I’m not really big on planning ahead. We don’t even make our setlists until after dinner that night, usually. I mean, I’ll send a text out to the band, the crew, the opening bands if we’re friends, that says, “Anything you want to play tonight? Anything you want to hear?” And then I’ll get texts back from everybody. I don’t follow those religiously, but it helps remind me if somebody wants to play something because I feel like the best show you’re going to play is one full of songs that people actually want to play that night. It’s pretty live up ‘til that moment. There’s nothing sacred. We play different sets every night. But we also soundcheck every day, and we use those to rehearse songs that we haven’t played in a long time or to work on new stuff.
We just got back from the UK and Australia. We were working on a couple pieces that I’ve been writing there. I don’t have the words done yet, but I have a lot of the music for two or three songs. We’ve been working on those since last tour. I would play them if they were ready to be played. It doesn’t hurt to play them in concert—sometimes it helps because you can really feel where a song works and where it doesn’t. We played a lot of songs from Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings before the record was made. We played “Cowboys” as soon as I finished writing it. But there’s no way to predict if we’ll do the same thing on this tour. Like I said, I don’t even know what I’m going to play on a given night ‘til that day.
This tour is about playing and I’m trying to write because I want to make a record. It’s been hard to shift back. I was working on a play for a few years. I was writing in a style I thought I’d never be able to do, which is not writing from my own point of view—writing for other characters, writing for a women’s voice, writing for multiple groups of people. It was a different thing and I really took to it. I really liked it. It was hard to shift to doing that—I’d never done it before in my life. But it was really rewarding and I really dug it. It’s strangely been hard to shift back. I think I really liked not sharing. Sometimes rock and roll as a songwriter is a constant act of oversharing. Like, do you really want to know anything more about me? Sometimes I feel like it’s really bizarre how much we share with everybody. And I sort of liked it not being about me. And the fact that I didn’t have to sing it, that I was writing it for other people to sing. But I’ve been moving it back now. It just took me a little while to get my head around writing for me again. But it’s come along.
It’s interesting: you were writing a play at the same time you did the last Crows album, which was all covers. So you were singing other people’s lyrics from other people’s perspectives, but a lot of those songs must have resonated with you personally, both as a fan and as a performer.
That’s one of the reasons we did that record. I didn’t want to write for two [projects] at the same time. I really wanted to work with the band. I didn’t want to take all that time off and not work with Counting Crows, but I didn’t think I could write from two different perspectives at the same time. I wouldn’t know how to decide where the songs should go: to the play or to me. But we’d been wanting to do those covers for a long time. I mean, I think for a lot of bands covers albums are just karaoke machines, you know what I mean? They just kind of pick something in the songs and they don’t really think much about it. But for us, it’s really an act of interpretation. We really get into it. And for years and years, interpretive singing was what people did because most people didn’t write songs; they were just singers. From Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to The Supremes—none of them wrote songs, really, but they were great singers. Dionne Warwick’s entire career was based on being able to interpret Burt Bacharach songs. And they’re good.
So I’ve always really enjoyed covers because I think you can put yourself in someone else’s head. When you cover a song, it’s like collaborating with someone who’s not there. People have a different way of looking at the world, a different way of translating their life into song. They look at rhymes differently; they look at chords and rhythms differently. There’s a whole other way of using meter and melody. It gets you back into musician mode as opposed to songwriter mode, because I’m just interpreting the song as a singer and an arranger, as opposed to: “How do I want people to think I felt about this?” But it’s not that different from the way we work with Counting Crows – we’re very, very collaborative.
I mean, I might bring in some chords and some words and call it a song, but it’s really just a skeleton. It’s the work we all do together that makes it a Counting Crows song, and that’s what makes it the full-fledged song that you hear on the record. It’s the same with covers: all of us get into a room, take an idea someone’s had and make it into a whole song that we play. Most of these versions are pretty far from their originals. But that was the only real rule for this record. If you have songs you love but have no idea how to make them into anything original, then why do it? On this album we were really looking for our own take on things. The closest we came to just playing along is on “Amie”—it’s just fun to sing that song. [Laughs.] Even then, our version turned out to be pretty different from Pure Prairie League’s – and almost unintentionally, because it was a lot of us just sitting around, playing it and enjoying singing the harmonies. We almost left it off the record because it was just a little too close, but in the end we decided, “Well fuck it, let’s leave it on.”
I like that on the album, you cover a band like Dawes – a young, emerging band that some of your fans hadn’t heard of…
There’s a lot of that on this record. The Dawes song—actually, it’s not even off a Dawes record. I found it on the first Daytrotter session they did. I don’t think it’s on any other records. I’ve never heard it anywhere except for that Daytrotter session and, then, when he played it for me to show me something about it. Coby Brown’s [“Hospital”] is a song that the Outlaw Roadshow [artist] Kasey Anderson recorded. I don’t think a lot of people had heard of them. [Counting Crows’] David Immerglück had been playing with Coby for fun on the side the last few years, and he brought that song in – they had just done a demo of it. It was a brand new song. I’m not even sure all of the lyrics were on the demo, and I had to figure out what Coby was saying. My lyrics are different than [Coby’s] because I figured out wrong. There were no rules except that you love the song. We weren’t trying to be obscure, but we certainly weren’t trying to play a bunch of famous songs. I mean, even the most well-known songs here are only well-known to music geeks like us. It’s not like Big Star is out there in the mass culture very much.
Speaking of your covers and also your unique song selection, I know that when you played the Capitol Theatre here in New York, you covered the Grateful Dead, which was a nod to the venue’s history. Can you talk about your cover of “Friend of the Devil?”
We play it often—not every show, but it’s one of the songs that we play because I really like it. We came up with a really cool, original version of that song. We really made it our own. It’s a song that I loved growing up—we all grew up with that shit. We grew up in the Bay Area, so the Dead was everywhere, for better or worse. [Laughs.] I mean, I love that song, I don’t know why we played it that night. I mean, we’ve got about 100-some-odd songs in rotation, and that’s certainly one of them. I just love the song. Like all the songs on this record, it’s a part of what we love about music.
Speaking of musical influences and getting back to the upcoming Wallflowers tour, I actually saw you guys with The Wallflowers probably 15 or 16 years ago in Saratoga Springs. Levon Helm was sitting in with The Wallflowers, and you mentioned that that was the first time you’d met him. Do you remember that show? Could you talk about meeting him for the first time at SPAC?
I don’t really remember much about it, except that I remember meeting him. I remember thinking, “Wow, Jake grew up with this shit. Crazy.” I mean, because those are people that you idolize your whole life, and for him it was just Uncle Levon—not that [Jake] wasn’t thrilled. I’m sure he was, but I barely spoke to [Levon] that night. I’m not really good at meeting my idols. It’s never been my strong suit. I think I spoke three words to Levon that night. There’s not much that’s memorable about it other than the fact that it actually happened. But I don’t think I talked to him for very long, I was probably far too shy for that.
Well, I guess that’s the good thing about Twitter and the blogosphere. It’s easier to interact with everyone from idols to fans in a very direct way that still feels very guarded in a sense.
It’s true. You know, it’s funny ‘cause Taylor and I—Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes—we became friends through Ryan and other friends’ mutual acquaintances on Twitter. It’s strange: we have a lot of mutual friends, like Sean from Daytrotter and Ryan. We were talking on the phone, emailing and tweeting back and forth for a year and a half before we actually met. It was funny to all of our friends that we had never actually met. And then we did! He was playing a show at Webster Hall, right on [my] corner. And the night before, he was out with one of my best friends—another Outlaw Roadshow musician who also manages a lot of bands. And they called to ask me to come down and have beers, so I did. And we’re sitting there talking for a while and then we realized, “Oh shit, you know, we’ve never met before. We’ve got to tell everybody.” And we did. We got on Twitter and told all of our friends and they’re all talking about how, “Oh, that’s great.” It’s sort of silly. But it’s nice, I guess, you know? I’ve made a lot of friends that way, which isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Yeah, and it’s another medium to bring back that community.
Yeah it really does, especially with musicians, it really does function that way.
One thing that I’ve always really admired about you guys is the way you’ve created this communal feel. I know you did a couple tours with people like Michael Franti where it wasn’t a traditional show with an opener and then a headlining act. It was very collaborative, kind of Hootenanny-style event, with musicians sitting in with each other and no defined beginning, middle or end to the show. And that created a great environment where people saw bands that maybe they wouldn’t have necessarily seen otherwise.
That was, like, the coolest thing we’ve ever done. The Traveling Circus was the greatest thing. The two years that we toured that were just incredible. I mean, it was exhausting, but by the end of it, those turned into like four-hour shows. Not even by the end. By fairly early on, they were becoming four-hour shows. Augustana, Spearhead and us—everybody on stage together, playing songs with each other. It was just crazy and great. And chaos. I mean, it was hard. We rehearsed for like three or four days before we started, and then Michael went off to Europe and we did a few shows with Augustana.
I think all of us were terrified to do the first show. Everybody backed out. Quite a few people came to me and said, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this. Maybe the first three shows we should just have an opening band and then another opening band and then Counting Crows, and we shouldn’t fuck with this because this could be just disastrous.” And I was like, “Well, we could do that.” But I was afraid if we did that, we’d never get out of it. And that we’d had an idea, and we might as well rock it and see how it works. The idea was to rehearse this stuff and get good at playing together, but also with these musicians, we’d be able to do shit. We’d be able to get out there and wing it, because everybody could play and everybody could sing and even if you didn’t know exactly what you were doing, it was doable with this amount of talent. And so I decided we should just do it even if we weren’t sure. We’d get out there and make it work because that’s what you do when you’re on stage: you make it work. And the truth was it worked from the first show. It was fine. It was great.
The problem was that Michael almost died about three days later because his appendix burst. The whole time we were in rehearsals, he was in agony and we kept saying, “Why don’t you go to the hospital? What is going on?” And they needed to go to Europe and do these gigs and then come back to start our tour, and there was all this publicity that needed to be done for him. But Jesus Christ, he must have gone on the plane to Europe with a burst appendix. I mean, can you imagine what that air pressure does? There and back? And then to come back and play these shows? He finally collapsed in pain two or three shows into the tour. And they were going to put it off even more and my tour manager was like, “You gotta go to the hospital now. Forget it. Nothing else. You’re not going off to do this radio thing. Go to the hospital.” And he finally did and it turned out he might have died: it had gone septic. It must have burst weeks before. God knows how long he was living with, like – gee I don’t know, it’s crazy. That is a strong man right there to be playing shows with that going on in his belly, I mean woah!
One of the highlights of being a career musician so many years into it is that you don’t have to do a standard set. There’s no song you have to play every night. You could do more creative, collaborative stuff, and bust out covers, and write the setlist on the fly.
We’ve always been that way, though. We’ve felt from the very beginning that we should play the stuff we wanted to play. When we were getting signed, there was a huge bidding war. Every label in the world tried to sign us at that moment. So we could have had anything we wanted. We could have had, like, castles. They were offering us so much money and so many things. We talked about it and we just really wanted to make sure that we could make our records the right way, even though we didn’t really know what that was then. We were looking for people who we thought we could work with so that we could have a career and so we signed with Geffen, but mostly because they gave us complete creative control and a higher royalty. We traded away all the money upfront, and we went home with, like, I want to say maybe $15,000? I think I got $3,000. And considering that every label in the world was trying to sign us, I mean that’s not very much money.
I took home $3,000 for the first record – that was the advance I got. But we got the higher royalty, which was a big deal, and we got complete creative control. And even though there was no way to really police that, Geffen pretty much stuck by that. Nobody came and interfered. Nobody bugged us when we were making records. Nobody was in our face – they really just let us do our own thing. And that was before our first record, so it’s not like it was because we’d sold a lot of records. It was great. We always had the ability to do things our own way, and we always did – and not just to fuck with people. It keeps things fresh for us. To do something you don’t like over and over and over again, including just playing a song you don’t want to play – why play it? We’ve always figured we should just play whatever we want to play. And as a result, we’re not bored playing gigs. We’re still getting better playing gigs.
Right, and that’s why you still tour so much, so many years into it, which is great.
Yeah, it’s been really great that way. It’s really worked out. We’ve been doing this almost 20 years now.
Looking ahead to the summer, in addition to previewing some new songs you’re working on, is there anything else we can expect from the band’s live show? New covers? Anything new in terms of presentation?
I have no idea. I mean, that sort of happens on the fly. That’s the thing: I really have no idea what’s going to go in the show. I really don’t. I don’t even think about it. I mean, until that day, unless there’s something I want to work on and I might go learn it in soundcheck.
I’ll tell you what is kind of cool that we’re doing this summer. Something happened when we made the covers album: it opened the band up in a really good way. We’ve always been a good live band but we started playing the best shows of our career last year, and they just got better. We really wanted to document them, so we recorded everything from the beginning. Like, every show, really.
But nowadays we record to Pro Tools, so we can record and mix them later. So we went back through all the shows from last year and everybody in the band listened to two or three shows that they thought were good. We found all this material, and we put it together, mixed it and made a live album called Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow. We attached it to our record in Australia and sold it separately in England. But we decided that for the tour this summer, we’re just going to give it away. So everyone who buys a ticket to this tour: when you go to the show that night, you’ll get a code and you can take that home and download the record for free. It comes with your ticket. For every ticket bought, you can go and download the record.
