A Conversation with Adam Duritz – HuffPost 4.25.14
Mike Ragogna: Adam, the Echoes Of The Outlaw Roadshow continues pretty much into the summer and with Toad The Wet Sprocket.
Adam Duritz: Yeah, pretty much. Daniel And The Lion is coming out with us too. So yeah, it should be a lot like last time.
MR: What has the evolution been like as far as the road shows?
AD: I don’t know if it’s changed all that much. We were always changing the set every night and we still do, there’s no big plan for it. We play whatever we want that night. We’ve always done that.
MR: Have you become comfortable enough with your music that you’re able to emphasize other elements of communicating or connecting with the audience beyond the songs themselves?
AD: The music’s changed from the very beginning, it’s constantly in a state of evolution. Songs are different every night. The communication that goes on is between you and the guys you’re playing with. The audience doesn’t really have to do anything, they’re there to be entertained as far as I’m concerned. They’re not really a part of it. It’s you and the guys you’re playing with, and that communication is constantly turned on and constantly evolving through the songs. I’m sure they are very different now than they were twenty years ago, but they were different the first week of the first tour than they were the second week of the first tour. That’s a constant thing. We’ve never felt the need to play the song the way it was on the record. There’s no slavery to that.
MR: Right, because they’re coming for a different experience. If they want to hear the record, they’ve got the record.
AD: No, it’s more that we’re there every night. The record was just one moment, and I like it. It’s a moment that you try to capture in time and be as good as it can be, but you’re not necessarily going to feel the exact same way you play a song. It’s more important to me to play it how you’re feeling than it is to try to recapture some exact moment that doesn’t really matter anyways. For us, this is how the song stays fresh and doesn’t get boring. To me, it’s still still interesting playing every night because I think we haven’t been trying to reproduce something over and over again by rote, and as a result I’m not bored with playing shows. That’s not an audience thing.
MR: Most of the time, your band is on the road rather than recording in the studio. What has the evolution been like for the members of Counting Crows due to that?
AD: I’m not sure. We’ve been putting on shows for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s like a lifestyle. Sometimes you’re on the road, sometimes you’re at home. I do think that being a musician involves three very important parts of the job: One of them is creating something from nothing, writing and composing; the time that you spend in the studio when you’re really trying in a very concentrated manner to crystalize something into what seems like a lasting, perfect form. I think that’s really important. I can’t stress how important I think making records is. But I also think that once that’s done and it’s there for people to listen to and you’ve created this work that hopefully lasts, then you go out and play every night and that’s a different thing entirely. You filter your life through the songs every night and the song come out differently. Or by the same token it makes you filter your songs through your life, but the point is that they come out differently every night, and that’s an ongoing experience. But that’s kind of the same as it’s always been. That’s sort of a philosophy about it that I probably had at the very beginning, that they were all really equally important. No one more important than the other, but those three things, to be the kind of band that we are you have to do all three of those things.
MR: How have some of these songs changed perspective or grown for you over the years?
AD: I think especially on the first album where we didn’t know how to play that well, songs got a lot better on the road. I love that record for the songs that it has on it but there are performances that I don’t think are up to par on that record because we weren’t that good at it yet and we didn’t know how to do what we were doing. But all of the songs change that way not because it’s like, “This is what I meant to say.” That’s more the first album, where I just could’ve sung them better. I didn’t know them that well. They also change because you change. The way you look at the experiences in a song is different now than it was then. It’s always going to be a reflection of the experiences that you’ve had in your life since then. And that’s true of every song. It’s impossible to not look at them a little differently as you’re going through them because you’ve had different experiences. Even as simple of a thing as you thought of a different melody for one part and then you go there. I don’t even notice it sometimes but there are some melodies that I’ve been singing a certain way for years and years and I didn’t realize I changed the record melodies until one happens to come on the radio one day and I’m like, “Whoa, that is really different from how I’m singing it nowadays.” So I don’t necessarily notice that.
MR: Are there things that you do differently now before you go out on a tour?
AD: Not so much beforehand, but there’s things I do on tour. I’m the one person with a real physical instrument to play every night and it’s vulnerable in ways that everyone else’s stuff isn’t. The guitars are vulnerable to temperature changes but essentially you can always use another guitar, they don’t wear down the same way, but my voice does. When we were younger I had a lot more fun out there in between shows, but I feel really bad when I f**k up something… Because you can lose your voice and that’s like a whole city. It’s just one of forty concerts that summer for you, but it’s the only one they were going to. So you have to be really careful about risking that shit because for all the best reasons in the world a town may never forgive you for the experience of driving out one night to do something fun and then they get there and the show’s cancelled. Even if there’s a perfrectly good reason, it doesn’t matter, they still may never forgive you for it, so you have to be really careful about doing that. Keeping a career going for this long is very much a result of consistency and being dependable for people in that, even though you don’t think of it in that kind of a work form, but the truth is, it is. So I’m a lot more careful, I don’t do much on tour except for play shows nowadays. I used to go out more. Even just going out to have dinner, the noise level in a restaurant’s pretty high, so just talking in can wipe your voice out. We’re playing two-plus hour shows every night, that’s a lot of strain.
I used to have a lot of problems and have to take a lot of steroids and stuff to keep my voice together. I sort of stopped doing that because it was killing me, but without that, I really have to be careful about f**king around too much when I’m out there. I’m really careful about it. One simple thing, I have a warmup I’ve done for years. It’s about twenty-five minutes, I do it before soundcheck in the afternoon, I do it before the show at night, always. Then a couple years ago I got some additional sets of exercises that were more therapeutic for your voice, and I added those in the afternoon, so my afternoon warmup before soundcheck is now more like forty minutes long. So I do an extra long thing in the afternoon before singing and I think that helps me out. I think it keeps my voice stronger. I’ve been singing longer shows with no problems than I’ve ever done before in my life and it shouldn’t really work that way, as I get older it should get harder and harder, but my voice sounds a lot stronger and I think it has to do with those warmups. It could also be some ritual that’s just making me feel more comfortable and it’s just a placebo. But there’s nothing that I really do off the road other than that I have a packing list in my phone so that I know what to take with me when I leave on tour, so I don’t forget things.
MR: Are there any particular microphones you insist on when on the road?
AD: Probably, but I don’t know which ones they are, really. There’s a mic that we’ve used for years in the studio for me that works really well, it’s been the best one for my voice. I don’t know the brand or type, but I recognize it seeing it. That’s not really my thing. We’ll use one mic on stage that I really like, but my monitor guy who’s also our production manager comes to me and says, “Hey, will you try this different thing out at sound check?” and I say, “Sure.” I’ll work through them and see how they feel, maybe he feels like they’re more durable so he wants to check if they sound good and how I feel about them. We test things out all the time, but I don’t really worry about that part of it because I don’t need to. There’s so many other things I need to deal with on the road that I can’t be collecting mics, too. I’m running the whole business of the band so I don’t really have time for mics.
MR: Has the connection gotten stronger with the fans over the years? Are you growing with them as a family?
AD: Oh I don’t know. I’ve always been really involved in the social media component of things. When I moved to LA, which was like 1995, before we made Recovering The Satellites, I realized that AOL had these message boards, like forums, for every band. Well, not every band, probably, but a shitload of bands. And I found that there was a Counting Crows forum on there and there were people writing and posting and talking about shows and being worried about whether the band was going to be back or questions about what the next album was going to be like, there was all this stuff and I thought, “Well, this is interesting. I could communicate directly with people instead of through the press or through interviews or through radio stations. I could just talk to people!” And this was like twenty years ago, way before Twitter and Facebook. It just occurred to me that it was an interesting thing. The way the music business was set up for years, everything was set up through intermediaries. You went through your record company–you couldn’t make records without one because it was too expensive–you didn’t talk to your fans save for signing autographs after a show, maybe.
That’s the thing; the internet seemed very different to me. Even in 1995, I thought it was a really good idea, so I started writing on the message board, and it took me a while to convince people it was me, but eventually I did, and that started a running conversation between me and our fans that’s been going on ever since then and continues on Facebook and Twitter. I always thought that was a good idea, so I always did it. I don’t want to be disingenous about it, I don’t know if we’re family, because I don’t know most of them. There are people I do know who I met twenty years ago or kids that I met a year ago in an MLB Fancave who’s a really sweet kid. There’s stuff like that, I know that I can see the same people that I’ve seen for twenty years popping up, but there’s also eighteen year old kids in the front row who clearly weren’t there twenty years ago because they didn’t exist. The fact is that people don’t stay obsessed. When you’re young, especially college-aged, you’re really into bands. You’re really into listening to lots of music. You may be obsessed with going to see somebody every weekend when you’re in college. There could be thirty bands that you absolutely love. Most people who aren’t music geeks like me, as they get older it becomes two or three bands, maybe.
So I don’t know whether they all stick together, but I do know that there is still on the message boards people planning trips together to go see shows, people get together with other people that they met on Twitter and messageboards and go to shows, I know that when Ryan Spaulding, my friend who runs the music blog Ryan’s Smashing Life, when we started putting on the Outlaw Roadshow at CMJ and South By Southwest, people started coming in groups and talking to each other, people that were Counting Crows fans and people who were just music fans of indie bands. There’s a network of people especially through the Outlaw Roadshow, people that can not wait to go to South By Southwest together or find each other down there or see us down there or come to CMJ and wander around. I do see a lot of those people. I don’t know if it’s a family of Counting Crows fans or just a family of musicians that play the Outlaw Roadshow that are friends and friends of friends and friends of their friends, but there does seem to be a network building around the road show.
MR: Nice. Yeah, I probably should’ve asked if your social media techniques make you feel more connected as the years pass by.
AD: I know musicians who, when they’re on stage, it is really important to them that they communicate with the crowd and more importantly that the crowd loves everything that they do, and they struggle on nights when they’re not getting the thunderous applause that they’re used to. They have a hard time. They can confuse a bad show with a show where people are simply sitting down. It occured to me a long time ago that you’re very vulnerable to that. To me, the place the show needs to be great is on stage. The people you need to communicate with are your band mates. You owe that because you have to be good every night, and you have to be good on a night when the audience isn’t paying attention, because you know what? You still owe them that show. You still owe them the absolute best performance whether they’re on their feet screaming the entire time or sitting down quietly, because there are still people out there who love it. It doesn’t matter if they love it or hate it, it’s not their responsibility as an audience to do anything as far as I’m concerned. If they want to fall asleep they can, they paid for the tickets. It’s my responsibility to put on a great show, and so the people I’ve really got to be in touch with on stage, the family I’ve got to have is the band and to a certain extent the crew, because they’re the ones I have to play with. If the audience doesn’t clap at all, I’ve still got to be great. I’ve still got to play them a great song.
It occurred to me a long time ago that it wasn’t about the connection between me and the audience. That does happen, and it’s part of it, and I’m glad, obviously it works or they wouldn’t come back, but I have to really pay attention to the connection on stage because I know people who are very, very vulnerable to confusing bad performances with good performances because they don’t get the response they want. When I’m playing a great show, I know I’m playing a great show. I know guys, I’ve seen them play great shows, and they didn’t know it was great. They thought it was shitty because no one was clapping or something and you’d see them peter out midway through the show because of it. That’s not good. You still owe a show, there. I think you have to be great because someone out in the audience is obsessed no matter what. So I kind of never tried to make it about me and the audience. There’s a connection that gets established every night nonetheless, and that is important, but it’s not in the forefront of my thinking because I don’t want to put the responsibility on people who paid for tickets to get there. I love when an audience is going crazy, it’s really fun, but I don’t want to put the responsibility on them and say, “Well, we didn’t play a great show tonight, fuck you it’s your fault.” That just seems shitty to me. It’s not their responsibility, so I don’t feel like that’s the first connection I try to make. I do feel like it’s nevertheless made every night. But the one I’m looking for is at Jim [Bogios] on the drums and [David] Immy [Immerglück] on the guitar. Those are the connections that I’m really, really focused on during the show.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
AD: Music’s something you should do if you have to do it. It’s also a hobby for a lot of people, but it’s not a hobby once you start doing it for your life. Hobbies are things people do for fun and the fact is that like every other kind of work, when you choose to spend your life doing something, it is not going to be fun all the time. You have to get through arguing with band mates and fighting over things that are important to you, things that you might not want to deal with if you’re just playing on the weekends with a band. That’s a hump every real musician has to get over, the point where they realize it’s not just fun anymore. If you really want to love an arform it can’t be based on just having fun, because it’s not going to be. That’s a hard thing to do. For a lot of people, that’s not what they’re in it for.
But if you’ve got to do it, then you should do it. I don’t have any other advice than that because the truth is everybody who needs to express themselves should express themselves but most people expressing themselves will get no recognition, no monetary success, no public recognition because the truth is, and this is historically true, 99.999% of the time, no one notices. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t still do it. In his lifetime absolutely no one bought a single painting that Van Gogh painted, but I’d hate to have been the guy who told him to stop painting, and thank god he didn’t stop painting. Art needs to be made by artists, but you can’t base that on recognition or monetary success, because the success is in the making of it. Everything else is fucking lucky if it works out. But it mostly doesn’t! You’ve got to have satisfaction in doing it.
I was twenty-seven the first time anyone from a record company even came to see a band that I was in. I was twenty-eight when we got signed. That’s like ten years in clubs. At some point in there, I made the decision I was going to do this with my life. It was clear to me that no one was ever going to see it. Things changed, and I got really lucky and all this crap happened, but I had made the decision before that and nothing had happened. Like I said, I was twenty-eight. I wasn’t just starting out when I got signed. It’s ten years. I have no regrets about it at all, but people have got to realize that. The success has got to be the success you feel for yourself about what you’re doing. Not the clapping, not the money, that may never happen. You’ve just got to play for yourself. I’d encourage anyone to do it.
MR: And of course the road still continues, right?
AD: Mm-hmm!
Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne