TEAM LAST CALL

It’s a mid-summer’s day in Paris. The windows are flung wide open. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. And Adam Duritz is complaining.
Whining, of course, is nothing new for the Counting Crows frontman, who has worn uncertainty and despair like a sheriff’s badge for the better part of two decades, even while living the supposed good life in the beds of various Friends stars.
Today, however, he’s got some honest-to-god reasons for being unhappy. Beyond being locked in his hotel room for an hour-and-a-half interview while his bandmates explore the Louvre, Duritz is reeling from his recent days’ activities, which have included three festival shows, one of them in 120-degree heat, and a severe case of food poisoning after an evening shucking clams.
“It’s been a hell of a few days,” he moans as he shifts around under the sheets. But even in his misery, it’s apparent that this is a new Adam Duritz, bathed and baptized in the waters of his own music.
On Counting Crows’ fifth studio album, the wonderfully jarring Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, Duritz not only shows his scars, but reveals the knife that formed them – a scythe of depression and mental illness that’s had him wandering through a half-life for the past 15 years. On the album’s two halves – the fierce and flailing Saturday Nights and the plaintive Sunday Mornings – Duritz, now 43, explores both his slow disintegration and the painful, floundering attempts at rebirth that followed.
Team Last Call talked to Duritz about his disease, how he almost lost those famous dreadlocks and why his long December might finally be coming to an end.

Team Last Call: You’ve described the Saturday Nights half of the album as the binge and Sunday Mornings as the hangover.
Adam Duritz: I was trying to point out to people that Sunday Mornings was not about redemption. So I said to think of it more like a binge and a hangover. But that brought up a lot of misconception that the Saturday Nights part was about partying, which it’s not. Saturday Nights, there’s nothing celebratory. It’s a record about disintegration and falling apart. It’s about, your life is going to hell. Some of it’s done drunken and on drugs, but basically, that’s just about disintegration.

TLC: The hangover seems very different from recovery, which is something you’ve explored before. “There’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last …”
AD: I think recovery is a hangover. When you’re hung over, your body’s putting itself back together. It just hurts like hell. If you wreck your life, you may decide to put it back together, but you don’t have the skill to do that in any way that does anything but hurt. You don’t know how to do any of it right. You screw it up over and over again.
So most of Sunday Mornings is about failure. It’s about trying to do the right sort of stuff, but it’s all about failure. That’s how my friend put it when we were listening to the record. She said, “Boy, the healthier you get, the sadder this record gets.”

TLC: You made this record during a weird span of time when everyone was busy hating your band and you as an individual. Did that have any affect on the writing or the approach?
AD: I think I decided to talk honestly about what has been going on in my head for the last 15 years because of it. It’s understandable – I write these albums about having a difficult time in life, and meanwhile, from the outside, you look at me and you say, “Well, I don’t get it. He’s traveling the world. He’s got a band. He’s selling a lot of records. He’s screwing all these girls.” – by the way, all of which is fiction. Seriously. It never occurred to me that the press was so fake.
If I had the love life I’ve read about, I wouldn’t complain half as much as I have. Although that’s not really true, because if you think heaven on earth is dating a movie star, then you’ve never met one.

TLC: So people read this stuff about you, and then you lose your right to be unhappy because you have this glamorous life.
AD: It seems so stupid to me. They’re basically saying, “Look, you’re rich and famous, so you should be fine.” God, I was like 6 years old the first time my parents told me that being popular in school and having money isn’t the be-all, end-all of life. Isn’t that the first lesson your parents taught you? Money doesn’t bring you happiness. Popularity isn’t everything. Prom queen doesn’t mean shit. I was probably 6 when I heard that. And now at the age of 43 I’m reading some moron writer who actually uses that as a basis for writing a review of the record. All I could think of is, “What a fucking mouth-breather, man! What the hell is going on in your brain?”
Nobody around me wanted me to talk about the mental illness [on this record]. And I said, “Look, it’s gone on for long enough.” I felt like the band was starting to suffer from my reluctance to be honest about things. You’re looking at someone who looks like they have a dream life, and they’re complaining about it. Well, I have a problem. I have a serious mental illness that makes the world seem like a hallucination all day long. And this is the truth that you’ve been shitting on me about all these years.
I didn’t want to become a public spectacle while I was falling apart. But I’m a lot healthier these days, and I feel like I can sustain whatever embarrassment will come from talking about having a serious mental illness. I’ll deal with it. But you just can’t take a free shot at me anymore for being, like, a fat pig who whines. I mean, you can, but the deal is, I have a serious mental illness and I gained a lot of weight on medication. I weigh 60 pounds less now. I’m on my two feet and I made another record. You just don’t get the free shot anymore.
All I wanted to make people do is review the record. You’re still allowed to not like the record. I have utter respect for people who don’t like my record. But review the record, not me.

TLC: A lot of younger bands have started naming Counting Crows as a big influence.
AD: That is where our fan base is. It’s not the people who bought August and Everything After and are now 40. It’s 17- to 22-year-old kids whose older brothers or whatever played it for them. So our fan base has never gotten old. It turns over every year. The “Shrek” thing dropped it right down to the age of 6. [laughs] But you know, those guys, Chris [Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional] and Ryan Ross and Brendan Urie from Panic [at the Disco], at a time when we were maybe a very un-cool band, they went to journalists who interviewed them and they said, “No, no. You’ve got it all wrong. Counting Crows is our favorite band. We get everything from Counting Crows.” And the first few journalists must have shit on them for it. They took a hell of a risk doing that.

TLC: I heard that your publicist wanted you to shave your head for this album.
AD: She said to me one day, “Look, I know this is going to seem really weird to you. Just don’t dismiss it out of hand. I think this might be a really good time for you to think about changing your hair. Make it clear to everyone that you’re a different person.”
I went home and I thought about it. But the truth of the matter is, my whole life I looked in the mirror and I didn’t get it. What I would see in the mirror did not feel like me. And the first time that ever really changed for me was the day I first put those dread extensions in. It’s funny, because it’s a fake thing. They’re not real. But I walked downstairs and down the street … and I saw my reflection and I stopped and turned and looked at myself, and for the first time in my life I felt like, “Oh my god, it’s me!” All the sudden in the mirror there was this crazy thing on my head that seemed like me. It was free and it was insane and it was mad, like me.

TLC: When you think back to moments like that, does that even seem like the same lifetime?
AD: It feels exactly the same. I think that’s one of the things that’s good about me, actually, is that I have not changed very much.
The truth is, you didn’t have anything to do with [your success]. You just made your record, and other people bought it. I always say that fame isn’t something you do to yourself. Fame is something other people do to you.

TLC: You’ve said that your goal is to simply leave behind a legacy that you’re proud of. What else is there for you to do in order to accomplish that?
AD: Children and art – that’s what Sondheim says. There are only two things anyone can really leave behind in this world: children and art.
I’m very different now. There are things I can have in my life like my parents have, like my friends have, that I couldn’t have had back then. I could have children, I could have a family, I could be in love, I could get married. In fact, I met someone, and she makes every day feel like it’s OK. Whether I’m a thousand miles away from her or not, I feel good.