Second
Time Around
Counting
Crows
Films about Ghosts: The Best Of (Geffen)
Around here (clever, right?) people were looking for reasons to say mean things about Adam Duritz and the Counting Crows from day one, way before the locals went into the studio with T-Bone Burnett and recorded 1993's smash August and Everything After, which went on to sell six million copies. It wasn't the simulated confessions, the intricate, casual-but-not-really-but-(wink)-really, glib '60s-isms, or Duritz's obsessive engagement with himself ("Pete and Repete went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was left? Repete." "Pete and Repete went out in a ...") that pissed everyone off. What really got under people's skin – and things were so bad that head-bobbers, shoegazers, rhetoric majors, and grad students accused anyone who liked the Counting Crows of being secretly boomer-friendly (really!) – was that it was absolutely clear from halfway through the first song of the first set of the first time you heard them that they were going to be not just big stars, but really big stars. It was like some bored rock genie saw Duritz at age five playing air guitar in front of the mirror and granted him three wishes concerning girls, talent, and charisma. And when the kid said, "Oh, and I want to be a big star, too," instead of saying, "Sorry, you've had your three wishes," the genie said, "Oh sure, no problem."
In 1993 the shotgun sang the song when it came to rock myth, and your favorite band – if you ever used the dumb word "favorite" without quotation marks around it – was quirky and destined to play only one gig ever, at some abandoned warehouse, and on that one night the bus didn't come, and you missed the gig. And then there were the Counting Crows, who, when you dug down to the core of things, had nothing beyond a vague uneasiness about having no core. And to top it off, you'd go see them play, and there was Duritz up there onstage acting like he was uncomfortable with the inevitability of rock stardom. As if he didn't know damn well that someday soon he was going to be in Rolling Stone almost every issue for 10 fucking years and that he was going to move to L.A. and, just to try out the idea of keeping his head on straight, was going to take a job tending bar at the Vulture Room or some place even though he was Adam Duritz, a really big star who had more money than God and used to go to shopping malls just so people would stare at him. As if he didn't know he'd get to sleep with more Hollywood stars than President Kennedy did, even – because he was such a nice guy with such mixed feelings about having looks, talent, money, and fame – Tori Spelling, who was homely in spite of all that cosmetic surgery, and that when his best-of album came out (which is so good that the Crows can cover Joni Mitchell and the Dead and get away with it), he'd get to include this shout-out, which was obviously written for some famous actress-celebrity-babe who knows it's for her: "I would like to thank with all my heart anyone out there who cringes when they hear my name. I meant well." So if he knew all that – and if he didn't, he was the only one – and if he really wanted to be someone who believes, like he sang on "Mr. Jones," then why did he let his old buddy Marty Jones disappear in the rearview? And Holy Keanu, Baudrillard, why didn't he swallow the pill and do something about it? (J.H. Tompkins)
