A Conversation with Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz – HuffPost 4.13.12
Mike Ragogna: Adam, what is the concept behind the assembled material you recorded for Underwater Sunshine?
Adam Duritz: No concept, they’re just really records we liked, songs we wanted to play.
MR: The material also, for the most part, isn’t about big hits, much of it being a little lower on everyone’s radar.
AD: Well, we weren’t really thinking about doing ones they were or weren’t familiar with. We just picked songs we liked, you know, and doing our versions of them. As it turns out, it’s literally the most obscure covers album ever made, but it sounds like a Counting Crows album, which was what it was supposed to sound like anyway. We never intended to make a covers album that was like a jukebox of their favorite songs, these are our favorite songs.
MR: I’m not sure how many times that’s been done before, if ever, by a major band.
AD: It was kind of accidental. But, I mean, it would never have occurred to me to make the record for the other reason anyway.
MR: What was the approach for gathering the material?
AD: We had some songs we’d been playing for a little while that we wanted to document and come up with really great versions of, and I said to the guys, “Bring in the stuff you want to bring in,” so there’s some of that. Then there’s stuff I surprised them with and I didn’t tell them until that day. I never played the songs for them, sometimes. The Travis song, “Coming Around,” we had a really bad day in the studio and I kind of wanted to wipe that away, so early the next morning, I sent Millard, our bass player and one of our guitar players this Travis track and said, “Look, just don’t play the song for anybody, and don’t spend too much time with it yourself and we’ll just come up with our own version today.” We just sprung it on everyone. If they had heard the song before, they weren’t thinking about it. I don’t know if anybody had heard it because it wasn’t on any records, it was just a single from England. But I remember it from when we were playing festivals together and I always loved that song, so we did it. I don’t know if anyone in the band had ever heard it before we did it, only a couple of us and even they hadn’t listened to it very hard.
MR: Speaking of England, you do a cover of the song “Meet on the Ledge” written by Richard Thomspon, it coming from Fairport Convention. Did that group mean something to you?
AD: Oh, yeah. That was a band that I really loved. They were one of those bands that I read about when I was a kid. But their records weren’t available in America. They were out of print. A lot of records were out of print when I was a kid. So, I made a list. I think a lot of music geeks had a list of the records that you couldn’t find. I had on that list at one point or another Pet Sounds, Smile, The Modern Lovers, all the Big Star records, all the Fairport Convention, all of the Richard Thompson, except for Shoot Out the Lights. Shoot Out the Lights would come out here and you’d read articles about Richard Thompson, Fairport Convention, and how great his records were, but you couldn’t hear them. They weren’t available anywhere.
MR: Did you visit England when you were younger?
AD: My parents took my grandmother to England when I was a kid and I went along. All I did, all day, was go into every used record store in England and Scotland. Everywhere we went, I would go into every record store I could find and I found all the records. The last one I found on the very last day, I picked the one record store on the way to the airport. I literally closed my eyes and touched the phone book and found a store and the last one I found was on the very last day I was there. I brought them all home in this little suitcase. I spent the rest of my life being affected by those records.
MR: You cover a few songs here that have affected a lot of people’s lives. For instance, “Amie” by Pure Prairie League and “Return of the Grievous Angel” by Gram Parsons.
AD: I love Gram Parsons, always have. Gram Parsons was a huge deal for me. The International Submarine Band, The Byrds’ records — that was really life-changing stuff for me. It’s really how I got my way into country music, to some degree. “Amie” by Pure Prairie League has nothing to do with anything except I just love singing that song. We just love singing it. It’s just really fun to sing.
MR: That had been a standard bar sing-a-long song for a long, long time.
AD: I’m sure. It’s just fun to sing. It’s just really fun. I don’t know any other word for it. It felt so good.
MR: I wanted to ask you about your recording the Big Star track, “The Ballad of El Goodo.”
AD: That band means more than any (other) one and is at the heart of anything I do. As much as any musician that made a difference to me, I’d say they did. I was really obsessed with Big Star. When I brought those records home and heard that stuff, it blew my mind. I listened to it non-stop for years and years. When I got in this band and we went on the road, the first thing Dan and I did was we went through Memphis, and there was the drummer from Big Star. We started talking and struck up an acquaintance. In the early ’90s when they played a concert at Columbia and then they played at San Francisco a month or two later, Jodi called and offered us a gig opening for them. I said OK but I would only do it if we could go under an assumed name, ’cause it was at the height of Counting Crows and I didn’t want the club to sell out with Counting Crows fans. I wanted it to sell out with Big Star fans. It’s a great poster — Big Star, The Shatners and The Gigolo Ants. We went as The Shatners. The concert just sold out with all Big Star fans. It was really cool. I met Alex that day. He came out to Florida that summer, he opened for us. He lived in New Orleans back then, which was my home away from home and I spent a lot of time down there so I could see him a lot. I was always really shy around Alex and couldn’t talk very well around him.
MR: Were you also a Chris Bell fan?
AD: Sure. I never met Chris.
MR: Chris Bell’s I Am The Cosmos album, boy… I thank journalist Rob Kemp to this day for turning me on to that album.
AD: That wasn’t available then. That came out a little while later. When they finally got released on CD, the first thing that came out was a German CD with Radio City and #1 Record on it.
MR: What a great influence they had on many others.
AD: I think there’s probably no more influential bands except for maybe the Velvet Underground on modern rock ‘n’ roll. Replacements, R.E.M., and a million great guitar rock bands during the ’80s and ’90s would never have existed without Big Star. I think it was said about Velvet Underground that almost no one bought a Velvet Underground record except almost every one who did pick up a guitar and started a band. That might have been Andy Warhol. I don’t know who said that, but I think it’s very telling about them, and, also with Big Star, although everybody, of course, now knows both bands.
MR: Adam, what advice might you have for new artists?
AD: This is a great time to be in a band, probably the best time I can remember to be a new musician since the ’80s when all the great college radio stations were popular and the big indie labels were starting up. I don’t know if you’re going to be a superstar tomorrow or not, but it’s possible to be in a band and survive and even thrive now in a way that hasn’t been possible in a long time. It’s really great. It’s so much easier to record now, it’s so much less expensive and there are so many great bloggers out there writing about music who love music, as opposed to being like really entertained by how clever it is when they talk about how much they hate music. There are a lot of people out there writing who love music and who are completely motivated to talk about your band. So bands can make records, tour, and build audiences, and they can survive now. I think it’s really great. I tell people to learn to use the studio in your computer and join Twitter. Make friends. I’ve made so many friends through Twitter. So many of my friends are musicians and bloggers I’ve met through Twitter.
MR: What advice would you give Counting Crows, looking back at your career at this point?
AD: Same thing, learn to work a computer and join Twitter. It is a social environment right now for musicians. It’s easy to meet everyone, network with everyone, your friends and your fans. There’s a great camaraderie out there. All these musicians… it’s really cool. One of the jokes that me and my friends have is how long we can go being friends without being in the same room together, without meeting in person. Some of my best friends keep in touch by emailing and tweeting, or whatever for periods of time, until finally we’re in the same place. You meet people because we like each other’s bands or we stumbled upon each other on the Internet. You cannot emphasize how much that eases your way as a musician these days and how important it is.
MR: Of course, you played SXSW this year.
AD: Our showcase wasn’t official, we had 21 bands on three stages in our showcase in a little club. We were on time. We really worked hard promoting it. We had 4,500 to 5,000 people come through the doors of the club that afternoon between noon and six. We set up a download page where we got each of the bands to give us a song to download and we got about 25,000 downloads, 20,000 in the first week. It was pretty amazing. The testament is to how many bands there are now.
MR: Yes, and it’s easier to get your music out there through all sorts of smart innovations.
AD: I don’t think it’s a great time to be on a label or to work at one, but it’s a really good time to be in a band. A lot of choices.
MR: And, Underwater Sunshine is on your own label, right? It’s the first one not on a major label. So far, so good?
AD: Well, yeah. You can do things like those downloads. They (major labels) don’t seem to understand. Until they understand that the Internet exists… If you’re not going to pay attention to the Internet, I’ve got no time for you. I waited long enough and they’re just not coming around.
MR : And, when it comes to music, you get to enjoy others’ music too. You seem to really appreciate it, obvious proof of that being Underwater Sunshine.
AD: That’s why I want to do it.
Transcribed by Brian O’Neal