Friday, June 28, 2002 | 10:17 a.m.
Adam Duritz, the frontman and most identifiable member of Counting Crows, is on a well-deserved vacation in New York.
Duritz and his folksy-rock band from San Francisco just returned from a series of concert dates in Europe. During the interview he could be heard unzipping luggage and clothing bags.
Or maybe he was packing for the band's upcoming summerlong concert schedule in the states, which tonight brings the Counting Crows to a sold-out show at the Palms' Rain in the Desert nightclub.
Whether packing or unpacking was never clear. What was obvious was Duritz was not particularly enamored of being interviewed again.
"It's supposed to be my vacation," he said regretfully. "But it's not turning out to be one."
It is not that Duritz dislikes the media. The singer-songwriter, known for penning the hits "Mr. Jones," "Round Here" and "A Long December," views the media as a conduit to fans.
"The press can be very useful for me in that way because it's another way for me to open up to people. It's like one more chance to talk about who I really am, and people can read that and understand it a little more clearly," he said. "And maybe that makes a song more comprehensible to them more."
So Duritz tolerates the media. He answers questions that border on if not exceed being too personal, such as celebrities he has dated.
Duritz also listens to pop-psych analogies of his lyrics: "You sing of black and blue on the new album. Is gray no longer your favorite color?" inquired one journalist recently.
"It's so bizarre to me," Duritz said. "I guess that's the cool thing about it. People are going to have their different takes on how things feel." So, is the media wrong? Are the emotions and symbolism we find in Counting Crows songs and attribute to the singer off base?
"It's not that people get it wrong, I think they just get it one-note sometimes," he said. "I think the things people see in the songs are there, it's just usually not all that."
Duritz is that rarity among today's musicians: honest to a fault. He is candid in his lyrics and in interviews, which leaves the singer-songwriter open to interpretation by both listeners and critics.
On the Counting Crows' latest album, "Hard Candy," available July 9, Duritz opens himself up again through his songs.
He sings of past regrets and failed relationships, of loneliness and his life passing him by. The songwriter even got so personal as to discuss a recent bout of insomnia that, while psychically dangerous, was beautiful in a dreamy way.
Duritz said he harbors no regrets for his "life-as-an-open-book" style of writing.
"I do think that's the point of writing songs, that's why you did it in the first place," he said. "You'd be silly to regret doing it. The only place I've ever regretted opening myself up is in the press, because it gets misconstrued and printed on this nationwide basis. And that's sort of a bummer. It's always a bummer when it has the opposite effect and it comes off really poorly.
"The truth of the matter is, I express myself much better in music than I do in speech or day-to-day life; I'm much better onstage than I am in the rest of my day."
Durtiz is selling himself short. He's an articulate, thoughtful interview, who pauses for moments at a time while in mid-sentence. Unlike many famed musicians who may pretend not to be overly concerned with what critics and fans think, Duritz is not so coy.
After the Counting Crows appeared in a Coca-Cola commercial, some of their more vocal fans began posting negative comments on the band's website, calling the group a sellout.
Duritz took exception to their criticism and responded with a posting of his own while the band was on tour in Europe.
In short, he never apologized to fans for the commercial, writing, "As long as we make music the same way we always have and as long as business concerns never affect the way we make our art, then I think you are truly rude to accuse us of selling out just because we made a commercial for a product we actually like."
Durtiz said he was not angry at the fans. Rather, he wanted to set the record straight while easing their concerns that the band sacrificed its integrity for the almighty dollar.
"The truth of the matter is we do things our own way, we keep very high standards for ourselves and we make music that means a great deal ... and we always will," he said.
The notion of the Counting Crows selling out, while not entirely implausible, certainly seems laughable. This is the same band, after all, that threatened a last-minute walkout on "Saturday Night Live" when the group was asked to perform songs in an order they didn't like.
"We were a huge pain in the ass," Duritz acknowledged.
Sometimes those "artistic statements" hurt the band. After the early success of the Counting Crows' first album, "August and Everything After" in 1993, the group was asked to perform on England's long-running TV series "Top of the Pops."
After learning the band would have to mime its songs, Duritz and his bandmates declined. The band's refusal to play on the show unless it could be recorded live infuriated their label, DGC Records, not to mention earning them a bad reputation in England.
It has been almost a decade and the band is just now able to make its relationship right again with British music critics.
"I had a perfectly good reason myself, but look at it from their point of view," Duritz said. "You come to a foreign country and you inform them, very snootily, that you've changed your mind and you will not be performing on their national music show, which has been around a million years; that The Beatles and The Stones and The Who have deemed to play on, but the Counting Crows isn't going to.
"I ran up against a whole bunch of stuff like that in my career. I felt very right in my stubborness early in my career, but I paid for it. Was it worth it? I don't know. Some of them, maybe; some of them, maybe not."
With all the hassles over the years, Duritz thought carefully when his record label first approached the band about a tie-in with Coke.
"My first reaction was absolutely not. And then I started thinking about it," he said. "I really hate to make knee-jerk reactions. You really need to think about things."
Duritz's conclusion was that other bands routinely associate themselves with commercial products with little or no consequences. Why should it be any different for the Counting Crows?
"So I made the decision. Then I thought, 'It's a great marketing tool nowadays. It's so hard to get yourself out there for everybody and we're not a bunch of 16-year-old kids, which is what (record buyers) want to see right now'," Duritz said. "So a company as big as Coke wants the Counting Crows -- and I love Coke -- then why not? What's the harm?
"The thing that's being misconstrued is that ... we made all this money. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm kind of (angry) they didn't pay us a ton of cash. I was like, 'I've been waiting for all these years not doing a single commercial while other people made millions of dollars and you tell me I'm doing it for the exposure.' "
"Well, I guess the exposure's good," Duritz said with a laugh. "But I'd sure like the cash."
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