Adam Duritz - Musician/Record Label

By: Dominick A. Miserandino

Adam Duritz recently spent some time talking to TheCelebrityCafe.com about his experiences in the music industry.

Adam's band, Counting Crows, has enjoyed their share of fame since their debut album, August and Everything After, back in 1994. The alternative rock band's raw, energetic live performances are the foundation of their successful run on the music scene. In 2004, Counting Crows' "Accidentally in Love" was featured in Shrek 2 and the song was nominated for Best Song at the 2005 Academy Awards, where they gave a live performance of the hit.

DM: How you doing, Adam?

AD: Good, how are you?

DM: Doin' well, doin' well, well. Well, to get right to the chase, you started the new label.

AD: Yes I have.

DM: Why are you going for this a second time, because I know you did a label a couple of years back, then sold it. To Geffen, I believe?

AD: Well, I wouldn't say sold it, because we didn't get any money at all.

DM: (Laughs) Ah, I didn't know that part!

AD: There's probably a better word for it than that.

DM: Donated it! (laughs)

AD: Basically, what happened with the old label was that we started an indie label at a time when we were coming out of being a college radio band. And coming out of the '80s, there were all the great indie labels.

DM: Yeah.

AD: Airline, Sub-Pop, IRS all the rest, some great Minneapolis ones. There were a ton of great indie labels at the time.

DM: I remember them, yeah.

AD: The result of all of that was that there was great distribution in the late '80s, early '90s. But now there was all this business coming out of this, and all the majors [record labels] thought it would be genius to buy them and try to run them like majors. Which is basically what runs them into the ground. So, they ruined all those great labels. But it also kind of ruined indie distribution. Because when all the labels got bought up, we were being distributed by Sony or Universal or Geffen or MCA or RCA or Virgin or whoever bought them. So all of a sudden, the indie distribution companies weren't as efficient as they used to be. So when we started our label, at first we had a lot of trouble dealing with our distribution, because you couldn't get efficient distribution networks up. Distribution companies that had been really good five years before, suddenly stopped being good. They started off doing a good job, but then they started doing a bad job, so…

DM: It was the whole industry itself that was in upheaval, too, with everyone buying each other, basically.

AD: That hadn't quite happened yet, though, and so at the time, Geffen was very interested in my label. I was on a small boutique label with Geffen. The bands that my A&R guy had signed were Sunday Posies, Peter Gabriel, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Rickie Lee Jones, Maria McKee. It was a vast array of different kinds of all formerly college radio level bands that made it. That was Gary Gershin's. There were the Nelsons and the Chers and the Aerosmiths and the Guns 'n' Roses at Geffen too, but Gary's roster was all composed of bands like us that had been kind of indie rock bands that had made it big. Bands who had made it to a major, you know.

DM: Go on….

AD: So Geffen still had that kind of mindset at the time. They were interested in my label, they liked my band, and they offered to distribute us - also I think they just wanted to let me do anything I wanted at that point - because we were the biggest band on the label, probably. Well, there was Guns 'n' Roses, I suppose, but other than that… (laughter). So we agreed to a distribution deal, so we were bought out in that sense, I guess, but we didn't get the money for it. It was just, "We're gonna become part of them and they're gonna distribute our records from now on." But about five minutes after that, Geffen got bought by Interscope. Well, it had already been bought by MCA, which was sold to another label, which then got bought by Interscope, which became folded into Universal, which at the time bought like, twenty labels.

DM: And that merger completely changed the industry.

AD: Exactly. All of a sudden there are really only four record labels in the world. Twenty of these former labels are all on Universal, one of the smallest being Geffen. Of all the labels Universal bought, compared to Interscope and Mercury and whoever else they bought, Geffen was probably the smallest boutique of labels. There were less bands on Geffen, I'm guessing, than on all the others. They're this indie record label owned by one of the artists. They've got a bunch of indie rock, college radio bands on it. It's nobody's fault really, but they now had corporate heads to answer to and everything was on a bottom line. They were busy consolidating and firing everyone - five minutes after we were on Interscope the only person left that I'd ever worked with before at Geffen was my A&R guy, and he was gone two months later!

DM: The whole thing turned over.

AD: They were getting rid of the employees - not just bands - and suddenly they've got this indie label on their label, and they had no interest in us whatsoever. So now we're stuck being distributed by a company that has absolutely no interest in owning us.

DM: That must have put you in a bad position.

AD: Yeah, it really got hard, at that point, to run the label. So eventually we closed it down, because we couldn't get them to do anything.

DM: You know, when you're saying that, it makes me start thinking. I just happened to read an article today about how the sales are down and the labels are upset, and I'm wondering if that consolidation back then is actually having this effect even now.

AD: Well, I think there's a basic business concept that says, "It's always better to consolidate by having less people doing the same thing. It's a great way to save money. I think it's the first place businesses turn to in order to cut their bottom line and that may be true with a lot of businesses, you know?

DM: Yeah, the music business is like any other.

AD: It's better to have less factories than more, it's better to have machines do something instead of people, and that's probably true in a lot of businesses. But the record label is a creative business. And when you start cutting all of those creative people out of the loop, more and more you're faced with people who don't understand anything but this sort of bottom-line mentality. And it's hard to make art in that way. It may pay off for a little while, because someone comes up with a great idea like, "Let's make a TV show and put a dumbass girl on it and make her so stupid that she's hysterical and then we'll sell a billion records for her."

Or, "Let's make a TV show about where we insult musicians and make fun of people who are terrible and in the end we'll make a star out of one of them." You know, what I mean?

DM: Yeah. But sadly that's where the media is going.

AD: I mean, they do, but after a while, the whole thing about rock 'n' roll that people loved, that mattered in people's lives - it stops mattering in the same way. And also the mentality that comes with that is like, "The hula hoop was huge last year, let's make something that's just like the hula hoop!"

DM: (laughs) Of course. Once one idea works, they just repeat it.

AD: And by next year everyone's tired of the hula hoop and they've already got it. So you're trying to sell them a hula hoop a year after everyone's already bought a hula hoop. You know, it was a great original idea, but...Nirvana was a great idea. But we didn't need a hundred Nirvanas for the next five years after that. At a certain point, you're tired of bands that sound just like the one that you bought and you loved. But that's the kind of thinking that goes into the consolidated record business, you know?

DM: Just like TV shows did that.

AD: Yeah. They're not looking for originality, because it's much easier to find something that sounds just like the last thing you sold, than it is to find something original and really believe it will sell. I don't know that we'd get signed nowadays!

DM: (laughs)

AD: There was nothing like Counting Crows before we came along, at least not in years. There wasn't anybody on the radio that sounded like us, there weren't any songs like "'Round Here" out there. People weren't making those kinds of records.

DM: Which was actually my next question, which you answered for yourself. Would you guys be signed now?

AD: Hmmm…I don't know. At the moment there's a wave of bands coming around again, which are kind of very Counting Crows-influenced. Like right now, there are a ton of bands, some that sound sort of like us. For instance, I think there's a real similarity between like, us and Augustana, or someone like Elliot Morris. And then there are a lot of bands that I don't think sound too much like us that are hugely influenced by us. They tell me themselves, like the guys from Dashboard [Confessional] or Panic at the Disco, who grew up huge Counting Crows fans. So maybe we would be. Certainly not at our age, though, because nobody's interested in forty-some-odd-year-old rock musicians. They love you when you're fifteen, you know? But that's true of every generation. Would the Beatles be signed now? I dunno, maybe. They sure are good, though. (laughs)

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