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Telegraph
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Counting Crows' Adam Duritz: ‘I've known Springsteen for decades and I still can't speak around him'
It's not often – if ever – that an American pop song name checks The Telegraph. But now, we can add at least one track to that list, thanks to alt-rock veterans Counting Crows. Their latest single, Under the Aurora, opens with an image of London commuters grasping this very newspaper. 'Almost the entirety of our new record was written in England, which is why there's that reference,' explains Adam Duritz, the band's lead singer and principal songwriter. He's talking to me from his home in New York, ahead of the release of Counting Crows' new album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! Other nods to Britain are scattered across the album: one track references a 'shrinking English sky'; another sneaks in the British colloquialism of 'telly' for television. But while his recent stay in England clearly influenced the album, Duritz is a longtime Anglophile. 'I can't describe to you what a thrill it was that first time we went to London,' he says. 'As a kid, you see pictures of the Beatles coming to America and getting off the plane. Going to London for the first time was like that in reverse for me.' That first overseas tour came in the mid-1990s. Counting Crows had experienced a smash success with their debut album, August and Everything After. It seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, the breakout single, Mr. Jones, was about an aspiring singer who dreamed of fame. 'When everybody loves you / You can never be lonely,' Duritz sang. But he soon found that celebrity had its drawbacks. 'It was a really hard adjustment,' Duritz recalls. 'I didn't know how to be famous. When I got home at the end of touring, there were kids camped out on my lawn – I mean literally!' To escape, he started working a menial job – albeit in an exclusive location. 'I bartended at the Viper Room for a while,' he says. Founded by Johnny Depp and his 21 Jump Street co-star Sal Jenco, the club became the infamous epicentre of 1990s Hollywood culture. 'I was among friends and I was comfortable,' Duritz tells me of his time at the Viper Room. 'I have been a really shy person my whole life. I had trouble going up to people and saying 'Hi'. But when I got famous, I didn't have to go up to people anymore. They came up to me.' Duritz found he was more comfortable being approached in that contained world than out in public. 'The Viper Room gave me a home at a time when I needed one,' he remembered in a 2021 documentary about the club. 'I will treasure Johnny Depp for the rest of my life because of that. It changed my life. It was the making of me in some ways – the remaking of me.' Duritz became a key figure in the venue's celebrity scene, where he met – and dated – a string of A-list actresses. 'I met Jennifer Aniston there because a bunch of my friends lied to me and told me she had a crush on me,' Duritz recalled in the documentary. 'I honestly had no idea who she was. I had been on the road during all of Friends.' He also dated Aniston's Friends co-star, Courteney Cox, who appeared in the music video for the Counting Crows song A Long December. After their debut, the band continued to find success – their second album went to Number 1, and they also picked up an Oscar nomination for their song Accidentally in Love, from Shrek 2. But that first album and single still seemed to overshadow everything else. A recent video promoting their tour acknowledges this with good humour. Duritz lies on an analyst's couch, while a therapist (played by Brain Fallon from New Jersey rock band The Gaslight Anthem) enquires: 'None of your other records have sold as well as your first one. How does that make you feel?' Duritz may be able to poke fun at the diminishing returns of his band's output. But it's still a sore point. In fact, it's a key reason why Counting Crows haven't released a full-length album in 11 years. 'I really loved our last record,' Duritz says, referring to 2014's Somewhere Under Wonderland. 'Our label did everything to promote it. And I felt like it still barely made any impression on the general public. After that, I got discouraged about the idea of doing really good work and then having it just disappear.' As Duritz acknowledges, the seismic changes that reshaped the music industry have put bands from an earlier era at risk of being left behind. 'I got the feeling we didn't know how to put records out in this new world,' he admits. 'Radio doesn't really do it any more. There's no MTV. I love social media and its possibilities. But I missed the boat on Instagram and TikTok.' Throughout our conversation, Duritz defaults to this kind of self-criticism. Rock stars are supposed to ooze confidence. But he seems more focused on his shortcomings – particularly his mental health struggles with dissociative disorder and social anxiety. 'I can be a complete frozen nightmare with my heroes,' he tells me. 'I've known Bruce Springsteen for 35 years and I still have trouble forming sentences around him.' This lack of confidence is another reason for the 11-year gap between albums. 'I sat on these new songs for two-and-a-half years without even playing them for the band,' Duritz says. 'It was hard for me to know if they were good. I really started doubting them and I lost a lot of confidence.' One is tempted to draw an analogy with the Biblical Sampson, whose powers were bound up in his hair. After all, this new album will be the band's first since Duritz shaved off his trademark dreadlocks. It was a haircut so significant that it made headlines around the world. It also sparked a social media storm among Counting Crows fans. Most were supportive, though some took the opportunity to mock Duritz's departed dreads, which had reportedly been reinforced by extensions. 'Where will the crows nest?' one commenter quipped. But whether the hair was real or fake, the Old Testament analogy is apt. Duritz admits that his new look has had a major impact on his identity and self-esteem. 'Since I cut the dreads off I've become much less recognisable,' he says. 'I've found myself struggling to talk to people again.' At a recent party, he found himself next to actors Michael McKean and Bob Odenkirk. 'Neither of them knew who I was,' Duritz says. When a partygoer outed him as 'the singer from Counting Crows', McKean joked, 'Let me shake your hand again now I know you're famous.' 'It was funny,' Duritz acknowledges. 'But I'm having this weird experience where I'm suddenly not famous. I'm having to do that thing I had to do when I was a kid which is introduce myself to everybody. But I'm still paralysingly shy.' However, the party ended with a more affirmative encounter, when Duritz was recognised by Jack Antonoff, superstar producer for Taylor Swift and frontman of indie band Bleachers. 'He was probably the only person there who actually knew who I was,' Duritz says. 'I said to him, 'Ever since I shaved my dreads, nobody recognises me.' Then he was like, 'It was never the dreads, man. It was always you.' He was really nice.' Duritz could have used such positive reinforcement two-and-a-half years earlier. Because when he did finally share his new songs with the band, he found his doubts had been misplaced. 'It just felt great. We ended up going in a couple weeks later to make the record.' Now, everything will come full circle, as the band's upcoming tour culminates with a final show in London – like the Beatles in reverse again. 'It's still the coolest thing coming to London,' Duritz says. 'It's still a thrill.' Beyond that, he has hopes for the future of Counting Crows, albeit in his usual self-deprecating way. 'I suppose at some point it's going to run out,' he reflects. 'No one's going to want to see us or we'll get sick or someone will die. But as long as we can play, we will. Because why not? I mean, who gets to spend a whole life playing rock'n'roll? It's pretty rare.'
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
‘I get PTSD when I watch it': The inside story of Dig!, the most outrageous music documentary of all time
The year is 1996, and a psychedelic rock band with revolution in their ears and methamphetamine in their veins are in full flow at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. The Brian Jonestown Massacre, led by their mercurial, messianic frontman Anton Newcombe, believe they are on the verge of breaking big. A gaggle of music industry power players have been invited to bless their ascension, yet instead what they witness is a chaotic onstage brawl that culminates in smashed instruments and tattered dreams. Newcombe, ejected into the night by security, seethes: 'You f***ing broke my sitar, motherf***er!' This scene plays out early in Dig!, perhaps the most rock'n'roll documentary ever made. Ondi Timoner's 2004 film revolves around the contrasting fortunes of the Jonestown and their more industry-savvy friends and later rivals the Dandy Warhols. The camera travels from grimy bedsits to lavish video shoots and sold-out festival appearances, capturing the grit, the debauched determination and the righteous fervour required to believe your music really might change the world. The actor Jonah Hill has declared it to be a landmark work comparable to Goodfellas. Dave Grohl called it 'the most honest, warts-and-all description of what it's like when you and your friends join a band, jump in a van and try to start a revolution'. Twenty years on from its release, a new extended cut of the film, dubbed Dig! XX, is back in cinemas and set for digital release. The additional footage adds depth and context, including the backstory to Newcombe's oft-quoted sitar line. More than that, thanks to the additional perspective offered by the last two decades, the film now plays as a fascinating snapshot of music industry excess just before the business was kneecapped by streaming. In 2025 it can't help but pose questions about whether joining a band, jumping in a van and trying to start a revolution is even a dream anyone entertains anymore. For Timoner, Dig! was always supposed to be about larger themes than just the warring bands at the centre of the narrative. An idealistic student at Yale in the early 1990s, she had hit on the idea while trying to release her debut feature, 1994's The Nature of the Beast, about an incarcerated woman in Connecticut. The compromises and sacrifices she had to make in order to get the film out into the world left her questioning her pursuit of the artist's life. 'Is my heart just going to be broken?' she remembers thinking when we speak. 'Am I going to destroy everything just by trying to reach an audience? Is it possible to maintain your integrity and accomplish that? I thought looking at bands would be the best way to answer that question.' At the time, America's alternative music scene was still dominated by the grunge emanating from Seattle, but a host of younger groups on the West Coast wanted to return to a janglier, more melodic sound. Timoner and her brother David started filming 10 struggling bands trying to make it, but it was only after they got turned onto the retro, Sixties-indebted sound of the Jonestown that their film took flight. 'Everyone else we were filming was cowering in the shadows of the industry and waiting for their free lunch,' Timoner says. 'By contrast, Anton was like: 'I'm the letter writer, they're the postman.'' The night of the Viper Room show, Newcombe told Timoner: 'We're starting a revolution. Go meet the Dandy Warhols. We're taking over your documentary.' The Dandy Warhols, led by the high-cheekboned rock god-in-waiting Courtney Taylor-Taylor, are a Portland-based psych rock group who had played with the Jonestown and bonded with them over their shared love of shoegaze guitars and recreational narcotics. Both bands were early in their careers, and Timoner found in Newcombe and Taylor-Taylor the perfect foils with which to explore her art vs commerce thesis. Where Newcombe was endlessly creative but also tortured and often self-sabotaging, Taylor-Taylor was able to play by the industry's rules enough to land his band a major label record deal, shoot a music video with celebrity photographer David LaChapelle and eventually hit it big in the UK after letting their 2000 single 'Bohemian Like You' be used in an advert for a mobile phone company. The film is just the tip of the iceberg. That kind of intensity was every day. It was exhausting, but we were young, so you have more energy for chaos Billy Pleasant, Jonestown drummer In one telling scene in Dig!, Newcombe hosts a sordid party at his squat-like LA base, only for the Dandys to turn up the next morning and stage a photo shoot there. 'That photo shoot is so poignant, and so emblematic of their relationship dynamic because [the Dandys are] like: we'll visit, but we don't want to stay in this squalor,' says Timoner. 'Anton cultivates a certain edge and creates from that place, [whereas] Courtney is like a tourist.' Zia McCabe, the Dandys' keyboardist, witnessed both the obvious affection and later tension between the two frontmen up close. 'For Anton, music is life or death,' she explains over video from Portland, pointing out that music poured out of Newcombe whether he liked it or not. 'Courtney has to wait for those precious moments and then capitalise on them. I think he's always been a bit jealous that Anton can't shut it off, but really, if you step back and look at the big picture, quality of life often suffers, right?' The Timoners (Ondi and her brother David) followed the two bands for seven years between 1996 and 2003, eventually piecing together Dig! from over 2,500 hours of footage. That gave them a front-row seat for Newcombe's descent into heroin addiction and his band's often disastrous low-budget tours, marred by frequent breakups and occasional drug arrests. 'The film is just the tip of the iceberg,' remembers erstwhile Jonestown drummer Billy Pleasant. 'There just happened to be a camera rolling on the bits that everybody sees but, my gosh, that kind of intensity was every day. It was exhausting, but we were young, so you have more energy for chaos.' At the opposite end of the spectrum, the filmmakers also prolonged the production in order to capture the Dandys' rise through the upper echelons of pop culture. 'They did keep wanting to wrap it up, and then s*** just kept happening [to the Dandys] that they couldn't not put in the film,' remembers McCabe, who was 19 when she joined the band. 'I was young and I had given up questioning anything, so everything was just my reality. 'Oh, now we do major labels. Now we fly to other countries. Now we have tour buses. Oh, a film crew comes and films every single thing you do.'' When the film debuted at Sundance in 2004, it was an instant hit, winning the Grand Jury Prize in the documentary category. 'I've had a lot of films at Sundance, but nothing that caused that kind of kinetic reaction,' recalls Timoner, pointing out that the film spoke to the wider artistic experience. 'People say: 'What is Dig! about? Well, it's about these two bands, you know, it's about art versus commerce, but it's also about friendship and rivalry and madness and mental health.' The film reached an even wider audience when it became a featured inflight movie on Virgin Atlantic and entered the zeitgeist enough that the Jonestown's onstage brawl was spoofed on the US TV comedy-drama Gilmore Girls. The band's impish tambourine player, Joel Gion, makes an appearance in the episode. '[The writers] were just fans of the movie,' Gion explains when I call him to ask how that unlikely cameo came about. 'It was weird, but I get more steady checks from [that programme] than I do from being in the band.' Gion is one of the stars of the original movie – it was his face, complete with bug-eyed sunglasses, that adorned the posters. He often plays the role of comic relief, keeping things light as his band implodes around him. 'For me, the minute the camera got put in my face I immediately envisioned a movie audience out there,' he remembers. 'I just went straight into 'Beatles movie' zone. You know, the Maysles Brothers' film about the Beatles' first US visit when they're on the train? That's what I grew up on. That's what made me want to be in a band. I'm not talking to Ondi behind the camera or to myself about how fabulous what I'm doing is. I'm talking to some imaginary audience. That was a pretty far-flung stretch of the imagination when you're living on a mattress in a punk rock band factory, but I'm not mad at how it turned out.' In Dig! XX, Gion provides additional narration, counterbalancing the original voiceover by Taylor-Taylor and adding background for many of the Jonestown sequences. The end of the new version brings the story up to date and shows that however precarious their existence appeared in 2004, both bands have defied the odds and are still together, touring and making music. 'Cutting the new ending was emotional, because it's a happy ending. They're all still here,' says David Timoner, who edited the second film. 'When we had the idea for this new version of the film I said I'd love to end it with both bands onstage embracing. It turned out they were playing in Austin, so we got someone to film it and it happened! We had that kumbaya ending, and then [another onstage Jonestown fight in] Melbourne happened, which was kind of perfect too. It's still the Brian Jonestown Massacre. It's still Dig! It's uncanny, the footage of the fight is like a mirror image of the original.' For those who featured in the film, such as the original Dandys drummer Eric Hedford, watching the new version is an emotional experience. 'It brings up a lot of feelings of that time,' he says. 'It's like a wild movie yearbook of my twenties. I get a bit of post-traumatic stress when I watch it, but I'm old enough now to have nostalgia for those days.' For younger viewers discovering Dig! for the first time, the film may appear to depict an alien species. The reason the bands are so willing to squeeze themselves in tiny vans and traverse the country is largely because there was no better way of getting their music out to eager listeners. Today it's possible to send a song around the world at the tap of a touchscreen, but the financial realities have squeezed already thin margins sharply. To be a touring band hoping to find a pot of gold at the end of a run of shows may now be an antiquated concept. Dig! is a time capsule of a more optimistic, hedonistic time for the music industry. 'One major issue that's different now than it was for us is access to income,' points out McCabe. 'I worked two days a week as a dishwasher, lived with five roommates, had food stamps and state health insurance, and we could afford our rock'n'roll lifestyle. We had time to be artists. Now, if you have time to be an artist that means either your parents are backing you or you have a successful OnlyFans. That curtails access to being able to make music and art, because everybody's got to work 40 to 60 hours. That is horses***.' Gion agrees. 'If people don't know who you are, because you can't afford to record, because you have to work, because there's no money in recorded music, then none of this works,' he says. His dream, he adds, is that some of the people who watch Dig! XX get inspired to start doing things their own way. 'We've silenced an entire group of people that have to bump and scrape and fight to live, who maybe have more to say,' he argues. 'It's been a long time since we had a punk rock or psychedelic revolution. People have got to get f***ed-with enough by these breadhead fat cats to [a point where] some new explosion happens, and the landgrabbers in charge of music are told that this won't fly.'
