Following the leader

It's been almost seven years since Camper Van Beethoven multi-instrumentalist David Immergluck introduced singer Adam Duritz to guitarist David Bryson. As legend now has it, the duo hit it off immediately, forming a songwriting partnership that would grow into the Counting Crows two years later and blossom with the platinum-selling DGC-label debut August and Everything After in 1993. Although the Crows have gone through a few personnel changes -- Dan Vickery joined as lead guitarist before their first tour and Ben Mize replaced drummer Steve Bowman in September '94 -- Duritz and Bryson are still the heart and soul of the band, in that order.

"I've always appreciated a singer who can jam," Bryson reflects from a hotel room in LA, where the band are rehearsing for a tour that begins Tuesday and hits the Orpheum in Boston on Thursday and Friday. "You know, someone who can just start singing along when you start playing a guitar part, as opposed to someone who has to work everything out by himself while sitting at a piano. The first time I met Adam, we just sat down and wrote a song together. And it's still like that. Adam is great at sitting down at a piano and banging out the chords to a song. But he's also great at coming up with this stream-of-consciousness thing when the band starts jamming. He can write an entire song that way, just making up the words as we go along. In fact, `Round Here' was written that way."

Parts of Recovering the Satellites were written that way, but eight of the disc's 14 tracks are credited solely to Duritz, who, as Bryson recounts, spent time penning tunes on his own before the group convened to record at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

"After the last tour we took six months off. We pretty much didn't even talk to each other or anything. Adam and I hadn't written any songs in a year and a half, so we were planning on starting with nothing. But Adam got a creative bug and wrote four songs on his own in LA when no one was around to collaborate with him. And then he got a little spurt of creativity and wrote a couple more tunes on his own while we were recording: `Long December' and `Monkey.' With `Long December,' he came in one morning, sat down at the piano, and started playing the chords. By the end of the day we had recorded the song in its entirety."

Bryson is the first to admit that, though Counting Crows function as a band in every sense of the word, Duritz is the undisputed leader -- at least now. "Part of the last three years has been figuring out what each person's role is in the band. There were some changes. We have a different drummer now because I think Steve [Bowman] was at the root of a lot of fights we used to have. Steve was my best buddy in the band, but he had a harder time accepting the fact that Adam is very much the leader. Adam is in control and that is his personality. All of us accept that. There's no struggle for power, no struggle for more playing, no struggle for attention. Adam is a great leader, he's a very smart guy, and we just let him do his thing."

-- MA