YOU expect a guy who titles his new album Recovering The Satellites to be a bit of a spacer, right? But you don't expect him to say, the moment you meet him in a London hotel, "let's go shopping and do this interview on the move." Nor do you expect, 15 minutes later, to be tape recording the interview in HMV on Oxford Street between bouts of recommending which of these great BBC costume dramas should be bought by Adam Duritz, lead singer songwriter with Counting Crows.
But, hey, it sure is fun to watch Adam almost frantically send videos flying into no less than three red carrier baskets, then hear him say, "oh, cool, no problem" when a shop assistant claims, "this order is too much for one cash register, sir, I'll have to divide up the sale". And how much does he spend on the 50 or so videos? Actually, he doesn't notice and cares even less. So is this one of the perks of being in a band whose debut albums went multi platinum in the States and probably made our Adam a millionaire?
"Yeah, but don't go depicting me as the great bourgeois pig rock star, because the only things I ever spend money on are videos and records! Besides, the real thrill, for me, is to be able to come into a store like this and not get hassled," he says, clearly alluding to the fact that back home he became a target for American tabloids while dating the actor Jennifer Aston, from the sitcom, Friends.
"I dated Jennifer for two weeks and they turned it into a huge story which led to people standing in your face with video cameras when you're kissing the girl goodnight," he responds, his mood suddenly turning to anger.
"And they're saying really vile things like, `what's it like f**king a TV star?' because they want you to punch them so their video jumps in worth from three bucks to 10,000 bucks, which is exactly what Sean Penn was telling me used to happen to him. These guys are scumbags and all this is the part of fame I really could do without."
To anyone who knows the Counting Crows song Mr Jones, this comment will, of course, be doubly ironic. Firstly, because it was this song which led to a breakthrough for the band and, secondly, its theme is the craving for fame that Duritz has nurtured since he wrote his first song, while he was at college in Berkeley. "What really made the whole journey from Berkeley worthwhile was the first gold disc, for 500,000 sales, because that showed I'd really moved out of obscurity, which was always my aim. That amount of sales also proved how good the record was the next eight million are just about how big it got," he reflects. "And the thing is that in the beginning Mr Jones meant something. It was a song about being big. But once we were big it was silly to sing, `when I look at the television/I want to see myself staring back at me' because I didn't!
"So now we do the song totally differently, because I don't want to sing something if I'm not really feeling it. What I love about Van Morrison is that spur of the moment feeling to his songs, the sense that whatever emotion he's feeling right there and then goes into the music. That's what we go for too."
Expressing emotion is of core importance to Adam Duritz. Whether in performance, or through the shamelessly confessional nature of his songs, which blend the sensitivity of the singer songwriter genre with rock, country, soul and new wave influences. Not surprisingly, this tendency prompts certain critics to dismiss his work as "another dose of Adam's angst". However, such comments are plainly insulting when one considers that at least one song on Recovering The Satellites seems to be deals with the kind of emotions that lead people to commit suicide. Is that what the song Daylight Fading is all about?
"Well, that song and Catapult, which bookend Angels Of The Silence, very much deal with the dichotomy of getting the thing you want most, then finding it unliveable and feeling very alone and shattered by that. In my case it had been love, but most brutally, as I suggested earlier, fame. The difference between what I thought I needed and what fame turned out to be was hell to live with. And I now realise that if you are a troubled person and get famous, all you become is a famous troubled person; the pain doesn't go away.
But does the "waiting for the telephone to tell me I'm alive" line in Daylight Fading mean there may also have been a suicide attempt during this period in Adam's life? Likewise, Angels Of The Silences depicts a man lying in bed, thinking of "little angels" that "suck my blood".
"Well, those two songs are also about wishing you could hurl yourself off a cliff or fall into a coma or oblivion - but the narrator realises that is a non life, so he's saying, `help me stay awake'," Adam explains, somewhat tentatively. "And during the recording we did describe those as `suicide songs' though Angels is more about the difficulty in having faith in things you can trust, like a woman you love, or God.
"And I've realised that what I trust and believe in, above everything else, is self expression, art. So you make the choice to either be self destructive or creative and I chose the latter. But I can under stand why, when life becomes too painful, you do just want to kill yourself. I've had tough times but I don't want to go there really though I have felt like that during nights on the road after Betsy and I split up."
The "Betsy" in question is the woman Adam writes about in Goodnight Elizabeth, one of the more bitter sweet songs on the new Counting Crows album. And when he speaks of why he and Betsy broke up, one obviously gets a clearer view of why expressing emotion through his music is of such importance to Adam Duritz. "Well, to give this a context the point is that for so long I didn't know what the hell to do with my life, apart from having this pipedream of being a musician, being somebody special. I just wanted to leave a mark, really badly. Scar the world, which is almost a violent act, and something I address in A Murder Of One, "he explains.
"Because it can be really hard to feel you exist. And at times I feel I don't, so I had to find a way to make sure I existed. The independent love of someone can be proof you exist - but my problem was that when I was with a woman I was living more in my own imagination, with my own perception of that person, rather than who she actually was. So what I say in Goodnight Elizabeth is true. She left me because I was having trouble feeling things. Yet love is like taking layers off yourself, to share with someone else, right? But what happens with me is there comes a stage where I take one layer off and suddenly stop because I reach a layer of self loathing that is so vile I close everything back up and retreat, from myself, from Betsy, whoever. I can't feel any more.
"Yet, at the moment I'm trying to deal with that, trying to really give of myself to a new relationship. And now I have such good communication with this person that although I've done this, closed up, I've also come out the other side, which is extraordinary. So, the first half of this album is about hanging on a meathook, which is what fame was for me; the second part deals with this new woman in my life, as in the song Recovering The Satellites itself."
THAT said, Adam admits that "when it comes to this album, everything turned around with the song Have You Seen Me Lately!" which helped him work his way through; the "feeling of resentment" towards fame that had kept him from writing songs for at last a year. "And part of the reason I didn't write was because I knew that the songs were the problem. You need to write, do the songs, get a record contract, become famous and your life falls apart," he says, back in his hotel, packing his video stuffed bags for the flight to America.
"That made me very bitter for a time. But, at the end of Miller's Angels - which is dedicated to Sean Penn and me because we're so alike - I say, `In the shadow of God's unwavering love/I am a fortunate son'. Now, even though I would contend I mean that in an extraordinarily bitter sense, Sean contends I didn't and says, `you are an incurable romantic'. And maybe he should know because Sean Penn is an absolute moron for romance! So he says, `this is a deeply romantic line and you do believe that your art is the most gorgeous thing and you are entirely grateful for it, so you do believe you are the fortunate son'.
"Maybe he's right. One thing for certain is that when I moved to LA he showed me how to live as an artist, whereas before that I now realise I'd only known how to struggle as an artist. So there is hope. And even though people say my work is full of angst I really do believe, in the end, that performing is like layering light on these things. Even though, fundamentally, I also know that life is a piece of shite - as you Irish might say!"
