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Crows' legs
Adam Duritz and company have more to offer
by Matt Ashare
I wish Adam Duritz didn't like the sound of his own voice quite as much as he seems to. It's hard to trust people like that when they open their mouth. There's always a chance they're just talking, or singing, to hear that sound -- not because they mean a word of what they say.
It's one of the things that's made us distrustful of Bill Clinton, and it helped contribute to the uneasiness that a lot of people felt when Duritz and his Counting Crows (who play the Orpheum next Thursday and Friday) went platinum behind the single "Mr. Jones" two years ago. Duritz wants you to know that he, too, feels your pain: "Believe in me/Because I don't believe in anything," he crooned on "Mr. Jones," coining what might have been an appropriate campaign slogan for Clinton. But it was the song's shameless "Sha la la la la la" refrain that left the biggest impression. Who the hell was this dreadlocked white guy from the Bay Area to be singing like Van Morrison? And could he be trusted to inherit the legacy of Morrison, the Band, R.E.M., and U2 -- which provided just a few of the salient, populist-rock feathers in Counting Crows' cap?
A chat with Counting Crows
Recovering the Satellites (DGC), the band's epic, hour-long follow-up to their debut, August and Everything After (DGC), doesn't really answer either question. But it does prove that the first disc wasn't a fluke; that, like it or not, Duritz loves the sound of his own voice for good reason; that Counting Crows may just turn out to be the most potent, rewarding, consistent embodiment of classic mainstream rock we've got. And maybe that's not such a bad thing after all.
This time Duritz knows he's not just singing for himself. There are now fans and critics out there as well. He doesn't tone down his act for either, but he does make a couple of passes at pre-empting those who would call him a whiner. "I wanna be scattered from here in this catapult," he growls against a violently whining guitar lead on the disc's anthemic opening track ("Catapult"). "What a big baby/Won't somebody save me please" is his answer to himself. And on "Goodnight Elisabeth," a wistful, soul-searching ballad, he seems to be referring to himself when he chokes out the line "We couldn't all be cowboys so some of us are clowns."
Duritz is like that kid who innocently belted out Annie's "Tomorrow" in the sixth-grade school play, unaware that pleasing the teachers and the parents was decidedly uncool. And he's the college-age rebel without a clue who thought way too much about the drama of life, romanticizing the boredom and confusion of coming of age without shame. "We're such crazy babies . . . we're so fucked up, you and me," he sings on the rousing title track of Recovering the Satellites. And there's not a trace of irony in his delivery of the line.
It's that earnest, unselfconscious quality that makes him such an effective frontman. He's not afraid to dance around like a fool on the Letterman show, to pour his self-absorption into a song like "Catapult," or to sing like a mini Van Morrison, which he does again here on the jazzy, keyboard-and-strings-laced "Miller's Angels." Which is what rock and roll was all about before the age of irony arrived and enticed even U2's holier-than-thou Bono with its elusive cool.
Duritz doesn't care about being cool or about filtering out the unattractive strains of self-pity that run through his stream-of-consciousness outpourings. Recovering the Satellites is full of songs about women who have left him for one reason or another (maybe adding all that facial hair to the dreadlock look was just too much for them). And the tracks that aren't about the singer's love life generally touch on loneliness of some kind. But through all the self-doubt -- which reaches a navel-gazing nadir on "Have You Seen Me Lately?", with Duritz complaining that "These days I feel like I'm fading away/Like sometimes when I hear myself on the radio" -- he still manages to bring his lyrics to life by refusing (or forgetting) to keep his innate awkwardness in check. When he alludes to the King of Pain in "Goodnight Elisabeth" with the lyric "Baby, I am the king of rain," it's hard not to remember how genuinely arrogant Sting can be. But Duritz delivers the line with more than enough self-effacing humility to block some of the narcissistic glare.
Counting Crows aren't just the Adam Duritz project, and that's another thing the singer has going for him. Although Recovering the Satellites has a higher proportion of tunes written solely by Duritz than August and Everything After, and it's his voice that defines the band, it's the chemistry of the group and the rich, musical backdrops they create that makes listening to Duritz worthwhile. On August and Everything After, rhythm guitarist David Bryson (who is sort of the practical, everyman Peter Buck to Duritz's artsy, self-absorbed Michael Stipe), multi-instrumentalist David Immergluck, and keyboardist Charles Gillingham wove together loose threads from a dozen or more classic sources, from the Band on up to R.E.M. The comfortable folk-rock tapestry they created felt fleetingly familiar, reassuringly comfortable, yet still forward-looking.
With Immergluck gone, original drummer Steve Bowman replaced by the harder-hitting Ben Mize, and lead guitarist Dan Vickery on board, the Crows are a tougher, more forceful and adventurous unit. Recovering the Satellites incorporates strings, darker-hued guitar textures, and cutting arena-rock leads, adding more muscle to the memorable melodies, and challenging Duritz's voice for prominence in the mix. Producer Gil Norton (Pixies, Echo and the Bunnymen) goes for a rawer sound than the more austere T-Bone Burnett, who produced the first Crows' disc. And the result seems less retro, more dense and angry, and more confident than August and Everything After.
I still wouldn't be surprised if Duritz were more interested in hearing himself sing than in finding a soulmate when he croons "Someone should be with me here/'Cause I don't want to be alone" in the first verse of "Catapult." But the warm rush of power chords, the serrated guitar that snakes its way into a hook, and, yes, the sheer force of Duritz's voice is convincing enough for me to give Counting Crows four more years.
Counting Crows play the Orpheum next Thursday and Friday, November 14 and 15, with openers Cake.
A chat with Counting Crows