The moment everyone at the A&O Ball knew that this wasn’t your normal show was when someone in the crowd threw a pair of panties at Adam Duritz. What was even stranger was that Duritz didn’t even react to the drawers striking him, perhaps too inebriated to notice or care. He certainly showed his mental state later in the night when he couldn’t remember the name to one of his songs (“On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago”), even after describing the situation of his writing it in Amsterdam.
Counting Crows are the product of two seemingly unlike parts. On one hand, there’s the band, made up of tight, professional musicians capable of busting out great solos, bass lines and back beats; on the other sits enigmatic frontman, singer and main songwriter Adam Duritz. Over the course of a 90-minute, 20-song set at the Riviera Theatre, Counting Crows provided Northwestern students of all attitudes with a satisfying show while subtly displaying some of the interesting inner workings of the group.
Thursday night’s show was not what you’d expect from a Counting Crows set. The opener, Wild Sweet Orange, sounded like a Southern U.S. version of the Danish quartet Mew, and the expansive sound was a great contrast with what was to come.
A lot of people probably expected Counting Crows to simply run through Films About Ghosts, its “best of” album released a few years ago, maybe sprinkling in tracks from its newly released concept album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings. However, the band’s set was almost devoid of its biggest songs. Sure, they played “Mr. Jones,” but as a throwaway at the beginning. There was no “Accidentally in Love,” “Round Here,” “Colorblind,” “American Girls,” “Omaha,” “Hanginaround,” “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” or “Big Yellow Taxi.”
Instead, the crowd got deep cuts off of 2002’s Hard Candy, such as “If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel Is Dead),” and seven of the eight tracks from the Sunday Mornings side of the Crows’ new album. This worked for and against the band. It showed its willingness to eschew its success and use its set to display its new work, but at the same time alienated audience members who were there because they knew the band’s hits.
Adam Duritz is an enigma of a performer. He is a surprising sexual icon, famous for his numerous, whirlwind celebrity romances. These actions have caused his own recognition to be astronomically larger than the rest of his bandmates, and this distinction creeps into their performances onstage.
All of the Crows but Duritz function as a well-oiled machine: Duritz fits in only some of the time. On the rockers he works right in, and it is on the upbeat, loud tracks that the band excels. When they slow down, and Duritz takes the limelight, something extremely odd happens. Duritz’s lyrics are extremely emotive, but at concerts he doesn’t share these emotions with the audience through intimate performance. Instead, he retreats inward, closing himself off as a performer and making it harder to connect with his words. During the seven-song journey through the second half of the band’s newest record, the din of talking concertgoers drowned out the song onstage, so much was the disinterest of the crowd.
I commend the band for exploring its catalog and playing an unconventional set, and the musicians behind Duritz for how tight instrumentally they are as a band, but Duritz was the wild card of the night. His slower songs failed to get across in the way his previous hits have, and his erratic behavior left those sober and intuitive audience members wondering why exactly this band still plays together. Duritz battles bouts of depression, and this disconnect from the band shows the wear it has on them as a group, which is unfortunate. He careens between highs and lows of emotion onstage, perhaps best encapsulated by a line at the apex of Saturday Nights standout “1492”: “I am the king of everything/I am the king of nothing.” Duritz can’t decide who he is.
The show Thursday night had something for everyone in attendance: for the drunk party-goers, it had great rock songs; longtime fans saw rarely played tracks live as well as an in-depth performance of Counting Crows’ newest albums; and intuitive observers got a look at the complicated inner workings of a group with a confusing frontman seemingly separated from the rest of his band. A&O has done a great job securing intriguing acts for this year, and other groups are following suit. Here’s hoping that Mayfest has got something just as fantastic up their sleeves for Dillo Day.