Adam Duritz isn’t always easy to get a hold of and even when you do pin him down, he isn’t always in the mood to talk. But, when you catch him on the right day, on the right tour in the right mindset, he’ll talk so much, it’s nearly impossible to get in a question. He’ll want to tell you about The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show tour he thought of with longtime friends Michael Franti & Spearhead and Augustana—how he plans to turn the traditional rock show in its head by curetting a seamless night of inter-band collaborations and Last Waltz-style jams. Living up to his lyrics, he’ll also wax poetic on girls, friendship and the continuing influence his heroes in Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker have on his work. And, if you’re lucky enough, he’ll even serenade you with one of his trademark folk-pop songs. Relix and Jambands.com were lucky enough to catch up with Duritz in one of his talkative moods and discussed not only his current summer outing with Spearhead and Augustana, but his recent health problems, newest set of lyrics and why he “has lots of songs, but all the girls are gone.”
The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show is a pretty unique concept for a modern rock show. What initially sparked the idea for the tour?
Well, it started because last year, a few of our guys’ wives were pregnant, and they had to leave the tour a few weeks early. So a bunch of the guys from Augustana were going to help them out with some songs and they were working on getting ready to do that during the tour. It started to occur to me that I didn’t want people to think they were getting less of a concert because there were less Counting Crows there and I thought, “What if we make the show all about all the different members of from the different bands, and make the point of the show that you’re seeing all these different people.” I thought, “We’ll do all different kind of songs together—let’s have them plan even more songs, help with the original songs, involve Franti with all people—let’s overwhelm the audience with fun stuff.” That’s kind of what we wanted to do. And it was so much fun that the last two weeks of that tour, we were missing two members, but we had such a blast. I thought, “This is what I want to do, I don’t want to play concerts anymore. I’m tired of it.”
I’d imagine that part of the concept was also to expose your fans to some new music?
We have this amazing band nobody sees opening the show or that people recognize some of their music but go get a beer during their set. I wanted everyone to see all the music-I wanted all of us to play together, I wanted to have fun. And I know people don’t really have a lot of money these days, so I want to give them a real show so where they show up and the show starts with 18 people on the stage. The curtain goes up, and we haul the curtain up ourselves, and there’s 18 people out on stage, and it just launches. And we all play together for a few songs and we’ll get up and stand for a minute, then a Counting Crows set, then we play some stuff together again, then Spearhead plays, then we all play together, and the concert goes on for a long time. And then intermission, and then we come back, then Counting Crows plays a set, Spearhead plays a set. Then, Augustana and Counting Crows come back on and play a song together, then Augustana plays a set. And then we all come back on to…Oh no! We had a little extra time, so we all run out and played “Mr. Jones.” One time we ran out, literally, and played “Mr. Jones.” We thought we had the extra time for it, and everyone came back on stage and played two more songs to finish it out, all together, everybody out there. And then we played a half-hour encore with all the bands out there.
Counting Crows have played several shows with Augustana recently but you actually have a much deeper, surprisingly long history with Michael Franti and Spearhead. How did you initially meet?
Much longer history. I grew up playing basketball with Michael. The first record Michael ever made is produced by Dave Bryson, our guitar player. Right in the studio, Dave produced it. I can remember having a birthday one year where I said, “Don’t even try to throw me a party, if you want to find me on my birthday, I’ll be watching the Beatnigs and the Ophelias.” The Beatnigs was Michael’s band, and the Ophelias was David Immergluck’s indie band—our guitar player. We’ve all known each other forever. Michael and I played basketball from after work ‘till the sun went down. There was a great full court game that ran in North Berkeley on the upper Hurst court—17 people would show up, and we’d run five on five full court, winner stayed on all day until the sun went down and you could see me and Mike—we’d do it all night after work.
We would play every day. Michael was really good. Michael played Division One basketball. He played at USF, so he was a really good basketball player. I just love playing. So you know, we’ve all known each other for a really long time. I hadn’t seen Michael in maybe ten years when we got back together to start rehearsals for this tour. It’s funny, because I hadn’t seen him a long time. But we all know each other, and have forever. And they’re all very good guys in that band.
It seems like Spearhead and Counting Crows were always passing in the night.
You know we all met up in Illinois and rehearsed for about three days a couple of months ago, with all three bands, and everyone got to know each other, and we just had a blast doing it together. We found ways to play songs together, came up with cool stuff, put human beat boxing on Counting Crows songs, developed ideas with Dan from Augustana, had two of the Spearhead guys singing behind Michael on this new song he had just written—we came up with all kinds of cool stuff. We would have so much more variety by now, but people got really sick. Michael almost died early in the tour. He played the first three weeks of the tour with incredible stomach pain—I forgot what it was, but they finally realized his appendix had burst, two weeks before, undiagnosed—just intense pain for two weeks. And by the time they discovered it, it was septic, it was poison, his whole body was totally poisoned. I blew out my knee last week, I smashed it so many times after cutting it at one point that it got infected.
How did that happen?
I opened my knee up, and literally, opened it up and washed out, like an open operation. The antibiotics pretty much took it almost all the way down. Then three nights ago on stage I walked off after our second half of the set, and realized I forgot to introduce Spearhead, and we all ran on stage and I had slammed my mic stand down and left my mic on the ground, I went running back across the stage, dove head first and slid on my stomach across the stage on the floor, came to a halt right there and screamed, “Spearhead!” They came on stage, and I walked off I went around the corner, down the hallway, entered our dressing room, took a look down and I had bandages—they had to cut off a lot of my knee, it had pretty much healed up but there was a little bit of stuff underneath it. I had bandages over it, gauze over that, an ace bandage over that and my jeans on. And when I looked down at my leg, all of 30 seconds after coming off stage, it was an eight inch diameter circle of blood and there was a pool of blood. I don’t know how much blood I lost that night, but—a ton. It was enough to soak through four layers of stuff and jeans.
It’s rock and roll. And I had to go back out, I literally had just enough time to quickly rinse it off, get that ace bandage off, put a new one on with some bandages, and get back on stage with time to sing back up for Spearhead—horribly bloodstained. But Michael, to do what Michael does, it’s reckless. You know three surgeries, a multitude of injuries…That’s from bashing into each other with eighteen people for a great deal of the show. How we don’t just have injuries from smashing guitars into our heads, I don’t know. That hasn’t happened yet. No one’s gotten clocked with a guitar yet, which really—shit happens. That should really happen, there’s so many guitars out there at any one time that you should really get clocked with a guitar at some point. And we have marching bands, I have this great idea: we have three drummers you know, great drummers and when we’re all on stage, I said, “I don’t want you guys just standing around. Let’s get marching band stuff! Let’s get a marching band bass drum, just like a brass band would have, and let’s get a snare, a neck snare. Some of these songs, the marching band equipment would be cool.”
When thinking of the tour, you must almost conceptualize it as a performance rather than a concert.
It’s a great theater out there, you know? South, big bass drum, a 100 model plane remote control, the world would be a Spirit Vine: you got the big bass drum and Jim’s got our drum, we got the snare drum, they break it down to the drums at one point, they break it down to the drums at one point, and Jim’s up there with Michael and just doing the drum solo off the snare drum. And Michael’s got a guitar, of course, Jim starts playing on Michael’s guitar, then playing on the drums, then playing on Michael’s guitar, then playing on the drums with the drum sticks. It’s pretty cool, it’s a lot of goofy fun.
Let’s talk about the setlist. Did each band bring its own list of songs or did you have a say in the evening’s set? Or did you look at this as an opportunity to rework some of your back catalogue?
It was a mixture. I mean there are places in the set where we all play together, we found covers that we both wanted to do or we talked about it a lot beforehand. A lot of times we wanted to do together some covers, when Michael was out, Augustana and I, we found a couple of more things that we wanted to do together, you hear someone flying and you’re like, “Can I sing on that?” I knew something I wanted to do, I really wanted everyone to be on “Remote Control,” it’s just such a lethal song. I wanted everyone to be on “Rain King.” We found—I would never have expected it, but, “Why Should you Come When I Call?,” is straight up, Smile-era, Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations” level harmonies—really hard to do by ourselves. But with everybody, we could completely do it. I didn’t have to play the piano anymore, everybody could sing, and set up the seven-part harmonies, which are really hard for a seven-piece band to do. We have 12-part harmonies, which are really easy for an 18-piece band to do, and I don’t have to play the piano. And in the middle of it also, Michael comes up and says, “I have an idea, when we enter the stops, I’ll go to human beat box, me and you.” I’m like “Oh, awesome! Look at that!”
The collaborations almost seem to be shaping the song selection.
So we brought down our human beat box, and I could go off. I’m not singing the chorus, I’m just doing my own thing. And while we’re doing it, I’m standing next to the other guys, Dan Layus the singer, started singing these other harmonies behind us and they just pick up with this decrescendo, and at one point, I drop my arm down, and everything stopped, and we just sang the first line of the chorus a cappella 12-part harmony or something, and then Dan crashes back.
The beat box keeps going, and what they were singing, background music will change with you. So there was some things that we wanted to do, and some things that we ended up doing. Michael had written a new song called “Sounds of Sunshine.” It was really, really beautiful. We all loved it, we all said, “You should play it for the tour, it’s such a good song.” We heard him playing it one day, and then we ended up having Michael and his drummer playing, and then his bass player, playing some bass—I think he’s playing bass, I know he’s singing, and then me and Dan singing back-up.
Different songs have different configurations. Sometimes we’re playing all together, there are Augustana songs that I play, I sing on, Charlie plays on. There’s one called “Dust,” Dan plays on. I think Dave Bryson is playing this one called “Twenty Years.” I know Dan Layus is out there singing with artists with Spearhead on a couple of their songs. I’m on three Spearhead songs. I sang on 25 songs last night.
Part of my job during the Spearhead songs is to be like a Flava Flav. I’m mostly bouncing around getting the crowd up and singing the chorus and the background vocals. But my role largely is to echo whatever Michael wants the crowd to do that moment. I’m like bouncing and jumping on things, complete cardio exhaustion. Like the second song in the show is usually “Hello, Bonjour,” which is one of their greats, but I’m all over the stage bouncing up and down, it’s a complete work out, and then it goes into a Counting Crows song after that, usually. And we started doing, “A Long December,“—but—it just—it’s a huge hit, but it’s too down for that moment, to go down to the piano from “Hello Bonjour.” So we switched to playing “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” more often. But the great thing about, “A Long December” is that I can sit the fuck down. I was exhausted at that point, and this is “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby,” I’ve got to stay on my feet. Like, last night, in Miami, that heat and that humidity, it was hard feeling the heat.
We ended hanging around at the end of the set, and went off stage, then came back on to play, “Cecilia” with everybody, and people are out there playing, “Cecilia” all over these big telecoms, every beating drum just kind of banging, from the mandolins and banjos, and it’s very simple instrumentation but everybody’s singing. You know that Simon and Garfunkel song? It’s an easy song to play, it’s like a breath song, except that I was so tired, I was falling around. I’m going to Chris, John, the guitar player and the piano player for that, Augustana. Last night, I was literally hanging on, I could not stand up. They were completely supporting me. Literally physically holding me up, I was not on my feet.
Both Counting Crows and Spearhead are known for their ability to change and rearrange their classic material over the years. Is there any Counting Crows song you feel has gone through a transformation on this tour?
Well, “Rain King” has always been a work in progress—it’s now in complete shambles. It’s become insanity. It’s like, “Everybody down on ‘Rain King.’” We changed the chorus, they snap at these break-downs, all these choruses, and I jump on the piano, we roll a piano out, and we play, “With A Little Help from my Friends.” The Beatles song, over the music of “Rain King,” and then it just stops, and I start doing it, Michael comes to sit down by where I’m playing, and I start playing The Beatles song, and they start answering me in the harmonies, and then it becomes a huge wall of harmony and me and Michael are trading vocals, and after the first chorus starts breaking down, I start singing something and Michael starts answering me and then I was like—“I just want somebody to love, I just want somebody to love, I just want somebody.” And then all of the sudden, Dan Layus all the way on the other side on the stage goes, “But you can’t always get what you want!” I’m still playing guitar and singing, and all of the sudden, there’s like nine of us singing this total soul round, going around, and that’s become cooler every night. And we’re just making this up, no one knows what the hell is going on. No one remembers what we did the night before, because it’s just such chaos, we just make it up every night. And then I made up a version one night of, “Goodnight Elisabeth,” that comes out of that.
I know you often insert new lyrics and portions of cover songs into your own work live. Do you have an recent examples of that exercise?
I rewrote “Goodnight Elisabeth,” and stole a title from Cracker. The first verse of it is: “I’ve wasted the afternoon waiting on the train. I woke up a piece of Elisabeth had disappeared again. You get to measure all the measure all the love you lose against these songs you gain, because in the end, it’s just another song about the rain.” If you’re not careful, you can spend your whole life trading actual human contacts for songs. I don’t know why it occurred to me one day: That old Cracker song about “Just Another Song About the Rain.” It was occurred to me that I have lots of songs, but all the girls are gone.
