Ed Masley

The Republic | azcentral.com

A lot of artists come to view the song that made them famous as an albatross they’re forced to deal with every time they do a show. But Adam Duritz still loves playing “Mr. Jones,” the breakthrough single from Counting Crows' “August and Everything After” – in part because he’s never felt obliged to play it.

The fans deserve better than having to deal with a song they came to hear if he’s not feeling it, he says.

“I can see where it would be really easy to feel pressured into playing ‘Mr. Jones' and start to hate it,” the front man explains. “But we’ve been pretty good throughout our career with the idea that if we don’t want to play it, it just won’t get played. My feeling is people deserve your complete passionate commitment. They deserve that. They don’t necessarily deserve a set list of the songs they want to hear. They deserve you being up there playing your ass off.”

And it's hard to do that when you’re going through the motions.

Mr. Jones: 'I love playing it because I haven’t made myself hate playing it'

“When you come to see Counting Crows, that’s the one night you’re there, and it’s important for us to understand that," Duritz says. "But by the same token, we’re gonna do that every night for the next few years. And if you start doing something you don’t like and then doing it over and over again out of a sense of obligation, that’s gonna teach you to hate your own s--t.”

They sat “Mr. Jones” on the sidelines once for an entire year, he says. And it was nice. “But for the last year or so, we’ve played it at almost every gig because it is fresh in our lives. That’s a great song. I love playing it. But I love playing it because I haven’t made myself hate playing it.”

We caught up with Duritz as he and the bandmates he’s played with for 20-odd years were gearing up to spend another summer on the road while coping with the recent passing of a member of their crew.

He talked about 2014’s “Somewhere Under Wonderland” and the album of covers that in many ways inspired it, “Underwater Sunshine (or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation).” He also shared his thoughts on how he’s grown in his role as a bandleader and what it means to be part of the Counting Crows extended family.

'Palisades Park': 'I think it’s the best thing we’ve ever done"

Question: I interviewed you just as "Somewhere Under Wonderland" was about to be released. And I was wondering, two years later, how those songs have evolved, if at all.

Answer: That’s the best any album has probably translated to live performance. The songs are really interesting, complex and fun to play. And I think the band took a lot more ownership. The only person who had some struggle with the songs a little bit was me on just a couple songs. Two of the singles, "Earthquake Driver" and "Scarecrow," I struggled with a little bit at first because they’re so good melodically that it’s tempting to stick to just exactly how they are. And I was feeling kind of stiff. But once I got around that and figured out how to sing them, they got great, too.

Two or three months before the album release, we were playing songs from the record and trying to figure out where to put them in the set. On the second night, we decided to play "Palisades Park" in the opening slot on the encore, which is theoretically a terrible place to put a nine-minute song that nobody knows. But dramatically it seemed really cool and we wanted to see if it worked. And it’s been there for two years now, which is troubling to me in some ways because that’s where we always used to play "Washington Square," which is one of my favorite songs to play.

Same with "Scarecrow." That jumped in the second song of the set and has stayed there forever while other songs go in and out of the first and third slot. No matter what we play first, "Scarecrow" is really cool second. We change the set every night. But the two songs that really haven’t moved in a while are "Scarecrow" and "Palisades."

Q: "Palisades" is probably my favorite song you guys have done.

A: Me, too. I think it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. And I felt very proud of it because I know how difficult it was to write it, to learn how to play it and to record it. Those were all really challenging things. And then to play it live and realize I was gonna have to conduct it onstage the same way I conducted in the studio. You usually don’t have to do that. But there’s no time on that song so I had to conduct things in the breaks, which is hard with all of us playing at once. But it works. It actually ends up being kind of cool theater.

Q: Will this latest album be the focus of the set list?

A: I generally try and put songs from every album in every night. We’re playing a little shorter of a set this summer because with Rob (Thomas) opening for us, we have to give him a little more time. We’ve been playing two-plus-hour sets every night for the last few years, and we’ll have to be shorter than that on this tour, probably by about two or three songs. But there’s usually a mix of songs from every record. When we make the set list, we have a piece of paper that has every song divided up by album so when I decide to play something, I mark it on there so I can see how many I choose from each record.

'For everyone else in the band ... every album is an album of covers'

Q: The album before "Wonderland" was an album of covers. Are you doing many covers on this tour?

A: I actually love that record. It’s one of my favorite records we’ve ever done. The band really took ownership of the playing and those songs immediately translated into great live songs. I think people think sometimes that bands don’t have as much of an investment in an album of covers. Maybe some bands don’t. But the way I’ve always looked at it, the truth is, for everyone else in the band, for the most part, every album is an album of covers. Since I wrote a lot of it, it’s always covers in a way.

The main thing that makes us Counting Crows and makes us a great band is the work we do together taking these skeletons of songs I’ve written and turning them into songs on a record and then live. And that’s the same thing that goes into an album like "Underwater Sunshine."

We just took these songs we thought were great material and every bit as good as any of my songs and all put a lot of original thought into making it a great record. We’re really addicted to playing those songs because they kind of feel like our songs, honestly. We worked so hard to come up with our own versions of things that I feel as personally attached to the songs on that record as I do to anything. The truth is we start every single soundcheck playing “Start Again,” the Teenage Fanclub song from that record.

Q: Have you given any thought at all to the next release?

A: Not really. Me and Dan (Vickrey) and Millard (Powers) got together and spent about a week at my place to just start brainstorming through the ideas I had and stuff they had so we could get started on laying the groundwork for the next group of songs. But we only had that one week, then we had some gigs and everybody got kind of busy. Then, band tragedy stuff happened so we weren’t able to get back together and do more.

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Q: You had a band tragedy happen?

One of our crew guys died. He had a motorcycle accident. The weird thing about us is that it’s not just the band that’s been together this long. The crew has, too. Our tour manager came on in April, ’94. Both my guitar techs were around in ’93, ’94. Our monitor guy, who’s our production manager now, came on for the first gig of “Recovering Satellites,” which was ’96, and the stage manager, who passed away a few weeks ago, he came in 1999.

I just thought this was what bands and crews did (laughs). I realized at one point that we’re just weird. But there’s like 15 of us who have been together for 10-20 years-plus. So, it killed everybody. We all met up in L.A. for the funeral. All the band and the crew were there. And it was kind of brutal. So that sort of took the time when we were going to be doing some work, and we didn’t.

Q: I’m sorry to hear that. It sounds like the guys in the band and the crew are something of a family unit.

A: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I ever realized how much until this. We’ve been together a long time and we work together every day and we travel together. Most people don’t hold jobs for this long and certainly not with the same group of 15 people for 20-plus years. It’s a very deep bond, more than I ever even realized.

'Kind of a benevolent dictatorship' to keep band going

Q: How would you say your working relationship as bandmates has grown and evolved in those 20-plus years?

A: Well, I think I was probably really s----y as a bandleader in the beginning (laughs). But everybody would be. It’s just a really hard thing to be. You’re a boss but you’re leading a creative endeavor. You feel a certain motivation yourself but it’s important to realize that not everybody’s motivated the same way you are, and you can be really brutal about it.

Also, if you’ve never been in charge of anything before, then you don’t know what it is to hold power. You’re never sure how fragile it is or when you have a disagreement whether you can afford to be open-minded about someone else’s opinion or whether that will destroy your authority, which is a weird thing when you’re gonna be in charge of something and there’s a lot of important decisions to be made. And you’re sort of in charge because you simply decided one day that you were in charge, without any real reason.

When you start out in bands, they’re like these democratic things and it’s really great that way. It’s fun, although I realized at a certain point that democracy’s great for a country. It’s not so great for an artistic endeavor. You need to have kind of a benevolent dictatorship, someone who makes decisions but also is secure enough to listen to everyone’s ideas so you get the best ideas. And that’s hard to do at first. I was not very good at it. I felt like every little disagreement was threatening an authority I wasn’t even sure I deserved to have.

I just know that I was terrible at it when we made the first record. It was brutal on everybody. And I learned a lot of lessons back then. But I have to say now I got really good at it because we’ve all been together 25-plus years. Bands don’t last that long.

Q: So, how do you think you were able to get better at it? Was it just maturity? Or are there things you changed about the way you do things?

A: Well, I think I was also smart enough to realize what was important to me, which was the band. I watch this with my friends’ bands all the time. It is very easy to do the math in a certain way to figure out that you deserve more. There’s a justification for everybody. If you want to look for a reason why you deserve more and that other guy deserves less? It’s not hard. It’s vague enough. The problem is, if you don’t leave enough for everybody else, it doesn’t really matter if you deserve more.

You have to think what’s really important to you – getting more or having a band? I think I realized early on that I love being in a band. With these guys. And that all of us being together was more important than whatever else might stand in the way. And so when things came up and I was thinking about do I take this or do we share this, what I would think about is “I really love this band. What’s gonna make everybody OK?” And if that’s your priority, then you think of ways to make sure everybody’s OK.

A group dynamic is a hard dynamic. You’ve gotta decide what your priorities are. And I think I figured that out pretty early. I think I was also lucky enough that I was with a group of guys who trusted me through the f--kups. Even when I was a terrible band leader, they were willing to be patient through that because of the songs and because of whatever vision I had and maybe because they could see that I wasn’t gonna be a total d--k forever.

Q: What would you say is the best part of the live experience for you at this point?

A: Have you ever seen the movie “Almost Famous?” People like the movie for a lot of different reasons. One reason I like it is because I’ve never seen a movie portray what it’s like to be on stage as well as that did. When the cameras are showing the band in that movie, they show them looking across the stage at each other and the communication on stage. For me, that’s what I love.

It doesn’t really matter about the audience. You want to play your best show ever for them. And that’s really cool that they’re there. But the communication that’s really going on is on the stage. I like feeling hooked up to all these different brains, all communicating at the same time and how cool that is, the jazz of that. Even though we don’t play jazz music, that’s what jazz music is – the idea that you’re all playing at once and everybody is listening to everybody else so you can react in a second. You’re not just playing something you rehearsed. You’re playing something that’s alive.

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Counting Crows with Rob Thomas

When: 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 13.

Where: Ak-Chin Pavilion, 2121 N. 83rd Ave., Phoenix.

Admission: $26-$80.50.

Details: 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter.com/EdMasley.