Adam Duritz should be well past the point stage fright, having regularly sold out arenas with the Counting Crows, but nonetheless director Amy Scott saw firsthand as he idly began to play a few bars of “A Long December” during the making of a documentary for the band that as radiant as the singer/songwriter’s talent is, showing it off hasn’t come naturally.
“He was just riffing at his house and let us film him, but he doesn’t like to be filmed playing piano,” said Scott. “It’s funny, a guy like that can still get… maybe not nervous, but he’s a singer, and too many cameras around piano, he’s like, ‘I keep messing up,’ and I’m like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
Only Scott would know just how fitting an introduction the scene, now appearing sans the moments Duritz might’ve drifted off-key, would be to “Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately,” which chronicles the meteoric rise of the band in 1993 with their multiplatinum debut “August and Everything After” and the fallout from having so much success so fast. Duritz never had issues with drugs, alcohol or typical rock star excesses that might be expected, but when he was unlikely to go down the street before unnoticed with his famous dreadlocks, a long subdued dissociative disorder set in as more and more cameras showed up around him. As many note in Scott’s compelling look at the time between the Crows’ first and second albums, Duritz didn’t exactly walk into the situation unaware when the hook of the band’s first hit single “Mr. Jones” is “I wanna be a rock star” and details how potentially destructive that aim can be and while he didn’t invite the attention, dating “one-and-a-half of the ‘Friends’” at the height of that show’s popularity didn’t exactly discourage it either.
When Scott doesn’t have to spend the requisite half-hour on the road with a band playing gigs in clubs hoping to get noticed or that same amount of time in recovery or dealing with internal tensions as in most rock docs, she ends up getting a bit deeper with the Berkeley-based act for whom success seemed undeniable. After making similarly stirring profiles of Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow and Hal Ashby, the director shows that the struggle wasn’t a traditional one for the Counting Crows when their demo tape ended up in the hands of Tom Petty’s lawyer and passed around the music industry to the point that they were considered such a sure thing they played at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before “August and Everything After” hit store shelves. Other than the unfortunate choice of a hat that wouldn’t stay on Duritz’s head during that performance, their launch into stardom went off without a hitch.
Yet Duritz and his fellow bandmates candidly recount how much the lead singer invested of himself in both the creation of the songs and ultimately singing them, becoming fiercely protective of how the music was put out into the world and risking being drained from putting on a show every night. Scott accentuates the clarity that the band can see this period now when memories exist in the fuzzy analog recordings of the early ‘90s and interviews are presented in HD, sometimes confusing the two and uncovers episodes that there really should be no record of when Duritz made the Viper Room his refuge away from the world before returning to the studio for “Recovering the Satellites” and co-owner Johnny Depp enacted a strict no cameras policy. Although the film depicts a time that surely wasn’t easy to navigate, it honors a band that always mixed melancholy with joy and features interviews with Duritz’s eclectic group of friends who finds ways to speak to his experience from their own, including Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, longtime confidant Mary Louise Parker, comedian Jeff Ross and fellow musicians Cyndi Lauper and Chris Martin. Following premieres at Tribeca and deadCenter earlier this year, “Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately” is debuting as part of Bill Simmons’ Ringer Films Music Box series on HBO tonight and Scott graciously took the time to talk about getting Duritz and the band to open up about this particular chapter in their lives, finding character through story and fitting all that great music into the film.
How’d this come about?
Bill Simmons loves the Counting Crows and I was a big fan of Bill’s work. I’m a fan of the band, but not in a super fan way, which I think helped to come into this with that POV. But Bill really wanted to explore this particular time in the band’s history, the really early days and the first and second records, and just Adam as an artist, so I got really lucky. I wanted to make a film with Ringer and and this really stood out to me.
What was it like to find the right structure for the story when it doesn’t adhere to a traditional one?
Yeah, story structure and how you’re going to unpack the story is everything because you have all the materials and you have a timeline and it’s like, “What are you trying to say?” You never know what’s going to come out of their mouth. You can do all the research in the world and come up with a loose timeline or structure or find these bits of archival and you’re like, “We’re going to build a scene around this.” And then it’s always a surprise. And they show up and it turns out they’re really funny or they’re a really good storyteller or they’re super super deep and super emo about this. There were a lot of things that I [thought], “Oh okay, I did not know this or consider this in this way.”
[This film became about] trying to understand what part of this was the hardest for Adam and then backing it out from there and it was like the monster is fame and sometimes the monster is coming from inside the house, so it was the effects of not necessarily fame, but more the how. There was a reductive element to what people thought about him at that point in time when he became so famous and there’s a celebrity component that all of a sudden put the music in the backseat. That was something that he battled and that’s what I wanted to explore.What was it like to get to know Adam?
I love him. He’s just a wonderful person. Both him and and his partner Zoe led us into their world and we’re really giving and with their time and their home. Early on, we bonded over other people’s music, so it was like Big Star and Jackson C. Frank and all the artists that he loves because he’s a voracious consumer of music and film. He’s a big cinephile. I had just met him and I remember in the winter of 2022 we had this long text exchange about what constitutes a Christmas movie, like “Is ‘Gremlins’ a Christmas movie? And he was so far beyond ‘Gremlins’ as a talking point. He was pulling up all these references from movies from the ’40s, like, “Oh you’ve got to see this,” and I was like, “This guy kills.” He’s so deep. There’s so much there.
It reminds me of the great moment in the film where future band member David Immerglück says he got into an argument with Adam and Adam brought over a stack of records from Amoeba Records right after to change his mind. And throughout the film, you’re always able to reveal his character through stories like that rather than working in reverse. Like with the “Saturday Night Live” sequence where he’s adamant about performing the full song rather than a slightly shorter version or performing “Omaha,” which wasn’t a hit yet versus “Mr. Jones” in the first slot, even though he was aware of the potential consequences. Are there little silos that you build around like that when you’re developing this?
No, you’re absolutely correct, and that [“Saturday Night Live”] one was a lot of work. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame [was also] with the hat going around his head [as he was performing and being unable to control it] — that serves a purpose. It’s wildly entertaining and it’s amazing that they did that stunning performance, but it served as a story as part of the hero’s journey where you really get behind your hero. Then somebody tells that story and you see that footage, you’re like, “Man, I feel for this guy. It’s so relatable.” The SNL thing, by the time you get to that, you want to build a story around that footage and the footage should serve the greater goal. It’s this huge moment [in their career and you think] “Oh my God, they can’t blow it.” And there’s a little tension there because [Adam’s] also figuring out the bounds of his artistic integrity — what he’s willing to concede on and what he’s not and ultimately he didn’t concede at all, which was pretty gangster for that moment in time. No one tells “SNL” that. It was really impressive, but also like, how’s this going to shake out for their career?
For the sequence when Adam was laying low at the Viper Room, as is made clear from the film itself, photography of any kind was hard to come by. Did you actually know before you started to hear the stories you’d be able to illustrate them?
Any time anyone I’m interviewing, celebrity or not, casually drops, “Oh well, somebody was in a corner taking photos,” I just make a mental note and we’ll be following up with that person, which is what we did. We found all those folks – [like double-checking] “Is Pantera Sarah her real name? Could we get her e-mail address?” Or Randall Slayman. These are all these good friends [of Adam’s] and because they’re cool people of the ‘90s that still have a reverence for tactile objects, they still had those photos in physical form. Like the fact that Dave Bryson even kept a tour diary journal uh on the August and Everything After tour, to me, is just mind-blowing and it’s a filmmaker’s dream. He told me, “I do have these tour diaries,” and we were expecting some chicken scratch on post-it notes or something. And it was like, “Nope, this is about as [specific] tour diaries as you could possibly dream up with photos and ticket stubs and his handwriting and ‘here we are at this venue. Uh-oh, the crowds are getting bigger.’” You can just see this rise and I loved it. Pouring through the archival on this film was a dream. Our archivist is a dream too, so I’ve got to give props to her. She found some great stuff.
It’s also such a random assortment of interviews you get, all very intentional and connected to Adam Duritz, but what was it like to end up speaking to Steve Kerr on one end and Mary Louise Parker on the other?
It’s like the wildest dinner party you could imagine. These are Adam’s people. He is the kind of guy that has a lot of different kinds of people in his life and I found that to be really refreshing, the musician who doesn’t just hang out with musicians. He’s really tight with Steve Kerr and a big fan of the Warriors, but I think they share a lot in common just in how they deal with fame and public pushback. He’s also just really good friends with Jeff Ross. They’ve known each other for decades, but to have Jeff in it to break down like what is funny and what’s not [when it came to mocking the Counting Crows] I thought was really important because you can speak to that. And Mary Louise is like [Adam’s] sister. I believe that Adam is her child’s godfather and they’ve always been super tight, so it was interesting. This film more than any of the other ones I’ve done, the cast of characters was so just varied and we went with it because I [thought] you know what? This is cool. It’s who he is.
As a Counting Crows fan, I appreciated that you were able to get all the songs in from those early albums, even if it was in the briefest of cues. Like even “Einstein on the Beach,” which wasn’t on the final album made it in. Was that difficult to figure out?
Yes, and on the one hand, I [thought] the superfans are going to freak about some of these like “Margery Dreams of Horses” [a B-side left off “August and Everything After” and only played live], there’s some demo where we snuck in this alt version and whatnot, and I think it’s going to be really rewarding, but also really frustrating at the same time because you just want more. It’s like, “Give me all of it,” [and because of time, you think] “Where’s the rest of it?” Even with the making-of footage of the second record, it was just so cool that we even had access to that. It was wild. There was a lot of stuff that we thought we had or were going to get access to that actually burned up because there was a fire at the record label, so a lot of stuff was lost. That was a bummer, but we still managed to unearth some treasures.
What’s it been like to share with audiences so far?
I love it so much.You know how people say it’s like a victory lap, in my mind, it’s like a gratitude lap because I’m just thankful that I even had the opportunity to make this. I’m thankful that the band let us in their world. I’m thankful that HBO put this whole thing together and I’m thankful that Tribeca premiered it. There’s a whole operation of people that get it [to the point] so that this film can even have a square on the television and then people make a choice to watch this and I hope that they do because it was really fun to make.
“Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately?” will premiere on HBO on December 18th at 9 pm and available to stream on HBO Max thereafter.