FIRST-CLASS FLYERS

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Rock 'n' roll eats its old. Bands like Green Day, Hootie and the Blowfish and Pearl Jam are built up, and then, when they become successful, trashed by the very same tastemakers and trendmeisters who declared these acts worthwhile to begin with. Only a few bands like U2 and R.E.M. manage to escape the ritual slaughter and mature with grace.

Few bands in recent years have got bigger faster than the folk-rock group Counting Crows. Its 1993 debut album August and Everything After, tuneful and shot through with existential pain, was embraced by legions of listeners looking for thoughtful, mature rock, and eventually sold over 6 million copies. Rolling Stone promptly labeled the group "the Biggest New Band in America."

Few rock stars have fretted more about the fallout of such instant success than Adam Duritz, the Crows' lead singer and chief songwriter. "I couldn't go out. I couldn't go to bars. Everybody had to give their opinion of me," he recalls. Once, he says, "for seven days in a row, someone walked up to me on the street and said something shitty. Just out of the blue, people I didn't know. 'Hey--are you Adam Duritz?' 'Yeah.' 'You're in Counting Crows?' 'Yeah.' 'Man, you ought to be counting your blessings. You guys suck and you're so successful.' It freaked me out that someone cared enough about hating me to come up to me on the street and say it to my face." It freaked him out so badly that a resulting case of writer's block lasted two years.

But now the Crows are back. Recovering the Satellites, the band's highly anticipated and well-worth-the-wait follow-up, appears in stores this week; Duritz can also be heard on the hit song Sixth Avenue Heartache by the Wallflowers (his supporting vocals make the song). While the music on August and Everything After was direct and melodic, the songs on the Crows' new album are more ambitious and challenging. Another Horsedreamer's Blues has a pop-soul feel (Duritz says he was looking for a Fifth Dimension's greatest hits/Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul sound); another, I'm Not Sleeping, is propelled by an assembly of strings that bounce, shriek and push the song to a rich, discordant climax.

But Duritz's vocals are more anguished and torn than ever; he's as emotionally naked as a daytime talk-show guest, baring his soul and searching for empathy. You hear his need. In fact, it comes as something of a surprise to find that in person, the 31-year-old Duritz is sturdier looking than he sounds. North of 6 ft. and bearish in his build, he unexpectedly fills the door frame when welcoming a visitor. But when he sits down and starts to talk, in a rare interview, the vulnerability quivers in the air. "If you're a person who has difficulty relating to people and if you're not completely happy, then success doesn't fix that for you," he says. "You're just a more successful person that still has those hang-ups. If you're a confessional songwriter like I am, people may even find out about your hang-ups."

Shortly after Counting Crows' first tour in 1994, Duritz decided to move to Los Angeles from Berkeley, California, where he had been an English major at the University of California before dropping out. Convinced that his music was in some way causing people to hate him, he stopped composing and tried to avoid the spotlight. He had planned to lay low in L.A. but, instead, ended up doing the one thing in this celebrity-crazed country that, short of a lengthy trial for the brutal slaying of an ex-wife and her companion, would most guarantee that the media glare would find him: he started dating a cast member of the hit NBC comedy Friends. And the cast member Duritz took up with was, arguably, the hottest on the show, or at least the one with the most celebrated hair: Jennifer Aniston.

In a case of life imitating art--or at least imitating television--the way in which Duritz and Aniston met and eventually broke up was like something out of an episode from her show. Says Duritz: "We were set up by our friends. She's a really nice person, but I think our thing had more to do with infatuation. Both of our friends that set us up told us how much each of us wanted to meet the other. They lied. But it got both of us thinking how great it is that this person likes me. And then we hung out, and she's really smart and funny and she's just a great person, but she's like night-and-day different from me. It was exciting for a few days, and then just difficult."

Duritz's difficulties with women provide the raw material for his songwriting. Bad dates, long-distance affairs, the desperate wait for the phone to ring, all resonate in his lyrics. Almost all the songs on Recovering the Satellites are written in the first person, and the first half of the album dwells on Duritz's struggles with the media spotlight. Goodnight Elisabeth is a melancholy ballad about a woman (not Aniston) Duritz dated who had trouble dealing with his constant touring. Have You Seen Me Lately? is a forceful rocker that examines Duritz's uneasy romance with fame ("You got a piece of me/ But it's just a little piece of me").

But there's more to Recovering the Satellites than celebrity kiss-and-telling and post-fame grouching. The second half of the album offers more complex themes. The pop-soul track, Another Horsedreamer's Blues, draws from a surprising source for musical inspiration: the Sam Shepard play Geography of a Horse Dreamer. In the song, a little girl with the ability to foresee horse-race winners in her dreams is manipulated and used by those around her--a metaphor for the use and abuse of artistic talent.

While other bands look to produce chart-topping singles, Counting Crows has a different approach. As with its last album, the band doesn't plan to release any songs from Recovering the Satellites as commercial singles in the U.S., although it will do so in the less frenzied European market. The embargo here is Duritz's way of keeping the radio play of his songs to a minimum; he feels Macarena-style overexposure of songs "ruins" bands and that the focus should be on the album as a whole. Moreover, it avoids tempting the fates or risking a backlash by appearing too successful. "I want to be Bob Dylan," Duritz once sang in a tribute to rock's legendary recluse on the Crows' first hit Mr. Jones. He's not Bob yet, but just being himself is turning out plenty good enough.