Adam Duritz reveals how media backlash—including AOL fans mocking his band’s future and comparisons to a "Poncey" cat—triggered his stage anxiety, despite early confidence. His dissociative disorder, misdiagnosed as bipolarity, fueled detachment from fame’s pressures, like LA’s attention-seeking culture and corporate music deals, which he calls exploitative. Instead, he built Underwater Sunshine, a non-profit festival supporting indie artists with acoustic sessions and fair touring terms, while rejecting profit-driven labels. Now releasing Butter Miracle on vinyl and touring through October 2021, Duritz’s independent ethos contrasts modern industry greed, proving art thrives outside corporate control. [Automatically generated summary]
I've been a fan of your work for a long fucking time.
And it's always weird when you meet someone that you listen to their music or you've seen their stuff and you're like, oh, you're just a normal human being.
Often very awkward and uncomfortable, but not on stage.
On stage, I always felt like, well, this is one place where everything I do is fine.
So when I started making videos, at first it was just like, this is easy.
Because all I've got to do is do the stuff I'm going to do.
And there's nothing wrong I can do.
I can just be as free as I want.
And that lasted about a year and a half.
Maybe two years.
Something about like...
Getting really famous out of nowhere and then, you know, all the kind of backlash that comes with it.
I noticed a couple years later I was a lot more self-conscious.
I'm still on stage.
I never think about anything.
When I'm playing it, nothing bothers me.
But in front of cameras, I got really self-conscious in front of cameras after Sometime in the middle of our second record, I just noticed that I started to suck on, not to suck on video, but definitely not like that Mr. Jones video.
I think it was that, you know, because at first I just, well, didn't care, and I just thought that there's nowhere in the world I'm more comfortable than here, so I'm fine.
And then I think on our second album when we got a lot of backlash and you get a little too big and everybody, you annoy the shit out of people.
Especially in a band because you get a really successful song, they're gonna play it on the radio every five minutes.
After a while it's like, God, who wouldn't get sick of it, you know?
And then you get some backlash after that, people say some terrible things.
And then I started thinking about like, what do I look like on film?
Then I got really self-conscious, you know?
Does this song make my ass look big?
I noticed that I got kind of crappy just in front of cameras, not the rest of the time.
And not like cameras when I'm on stage at a concert.
Like, you play a big festival, there's lots of cameras.
It doesn't bother me there.
It's just kind of sometimes on TV and in filming, I got kind of self-conscious.
We talk about this genre or that genre as being our gang almost.
And when you're discovering stuff, yeah, it's really cool.
And then when you have to share it with that guy at the water cooler who likes the fucking worst music.
You know, that guy who's been coming in for years, and he's just listening to utter shit, and now he loves your band too, and you're like, I don't want to share this with Captain Asshole over there, you know?
For me, it had happened when I was kind of already into social media, because I remember moving down to LA after our first album, and that year, while I was writing the second record, discovering that AOL had these message boards.
This is 95, say, and I realized that AOL had these forums and message boards for all the bands, and it suddenly occurred to me, well, I could just go on there And talk to people.
Because when I read it, they were worried about, were we ever going to make a second record?
Were we going to shit?
Did we exist anymore?
All the questions that you wonder about your band between records.
And it suddenly occurred to me, well, I have the answers to all those questions.
I could just go on there.
And it took me a little while to convince the people on there that I was me.
Understandably.
Of course.
But eventually I did.
And then we sort of started this...
Kind of community there, you know, way before other social media.
But it occurred to me because the rest of the time, you can't get to your fans except through, or you couldn't then, except through the radio, the DJs, and the press.
So, like, you don't really get to give anybody your own words.
They've got to be filtered through everybody else.
A classic rock guy driving around in a pickup truck.
Like going to drive-in movie theaters.
Because that's this Americana dream vision of like, we all sit around, you know, going to drive-ins and living some dream of a Springsteen song that Springsteen isn't even any part of, you know?
And I would go on there and I'd be like...
Have you guys heard the first Justin Timberlake album?
It's amazing.
It's got, like, Timbaland and the Neptunes doing all the songs.
And I would try and make this thing to tell them, like, you should listen to this.
It's brilliant music.
And they just couldn't grasp the Justin Timberlake thing, because in their mind, NSYNC was the guy at the water cooler.
I come from a country music background in that a lot of the guys in my band, but it doesn't really mesh much with what is country music now, I don't really think.
I met Bob, I don't know how long ago, right when I first started out because my goddaughter's Her mother was really good friends with Lori Loughlin, so she's my goddaughter's godmother.
So when I was recording my first album, I met them and so Bob, I knew through her because he was on Full House and they would always come to shows.
I just stayed friends with him for years and then I met Jeff.
Bob had me come to the premiere of The Aristocrats, or not the premiere, it was like a screening at the Writers Guild just for all the comedians that were in it.
It was like me and a couple friends, and then Bob and 50 comedians.
And Jeff was there, so we met, and he had just made this movie called Patriot Games.
You kind of want to find something that you can bear to people.
I mean, B-A-R-E. The more you can open something up and let people in.
And that's kind of the whole thing, I think, when we're trying to make a record.
You just kind of want to make a world that people can climb into for a while.
Feel something you know go from here to there with you and yeah, so I know I always just kind of thought that was You know, but sometimes you know, there's there's hope and joy in there too, but yeah, it's about feeling stuff mostly I think That was always kind of what it seemed like it was about because I think I always had trouble uh Feeling things with other people, you know, just in normal life, you know?
But, uh, and I always liked music, and when I would listen to it, I think that's one of the things I loved about it, was that you could get lost in it, and you could feel all this stuff, and they seemed to be able to communicate stuff to me when I was listening to a record.
You know, and I was, I just couldn't figure out what to do with music when I was a kid, because, you know, I didn't, I just could sing, so I don't know what that means, high school musicals or something, but where's that going?
As a kid I could always sing, and I liked singing, but I didn't know what to do with singing.
When I was a freshman in college, my first term, I wrote a song.
Within the first month and a half I was at school, there was a I was in chemistry class or something and I started kind of thinking of the song in my head and I wrote it down and was humming it to myself and after class I went back to my dorm because there's a lounge with a piano across the hall from my room and I went there like lock the door and sat there all day trying to figure out humming stuff and trying to figure out what note that was and then See if I could find a chord that worked with that note.
I kind of knew how to make a major and a minor chord, you know, that's all I knew.
And I wrote a song.
And as soon as I'd written that song, I was a songwriter.
We just did like Beatles and, you know, our parents told each of us we could get one song book.
So we just bought the Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin because they had the most shit in the book, you know?
They were the thicker books.
But that's just like cover songs when you're 13 or 14. No, my first band was still a few years away, but I wrote every day from that point on.
I just was obsessed with like, because all of a sudden, I had this way where I could, all the stuff I'd been feeling and thinking, and like, you know, I had all this stuff that I felt like inside me, but you know, you're not, I felt kind of plain when I was talking to people.
It didn't really...
I felt like a pretty average dude and not really impressive in the way I wanted to be, you know, and not special in any way.
And I thought I was supposed to be, you know, but then I wrote a song and I could, you know.
Then it was like, oh, I can communicate all this stuff.
You know, pretty rudimentary back then, but even then it was like...
Well, for me, it was real powerful.
To play a song, people could feel things.
All of a sudden, all this stuff inside me had a place to go.
Well, I've always felt like a band was probably the hardest thing because not only do you have to figure your shit out, But you have to make sure that the other people in the band figure their shit out, too.
And you all have to be dedicated and professional and show up on time and be disciplined and be creative and also work together.
So you have to be cooperative and you have to be understanding and you have to figure out the ego dance and who's putting what and where and who's adding spice to the soup.
But either way, even if it's just all written material, you're still riding...
It's like surfing an audience.
That's terrifying and dependent in a way, because if you have the success of the moment, it builds to the next moment to the next moment in a way that we don't need.
But as a comedian, man, it is such a tightrope to walk.
Dealing with heckler everything that goes into that shit is just like I went to an open mic night last night Yeah, it was wild I hadn't been doing open mic night in a while and it was it was interesting to watch because there was maybe Six or seven audience members and maybe 20 comedians in the audience so they're mostly just kind of practicing talking into a microphone and You know just trying to work it out and you're just seeing You're seeing,
like, single-celled organisms try to divide and become complicated life forms, and you can see, like, the sort of clunkiness to the idea.
Because, you know, a lot of the folks that were on stage last night probably had only been on stage a couple of times, or maybe it was their first time, and you could see it, you know?
I always remember this gig because I don't know that we've played this town since then.
It was a...
Was it Lexington, Kentucky?
I'm trying to remember.
It was a southeastern college town.
We were opening for Cracker, and it was this club, and it was upstairs was the club part of it.
And the stage is one of those ones that's in the corner, like a triangle, like comes across the corner.
And there's just, the audience is all out, the rest of the club is lengthwise.
And the stage is in the corner over here.
And there's no like, the backstage is near the front door.
And you gotta like, they just kept like a border around the club of people so you could walk and you have to walk around everybody to get up to the stage.
So we get up there to open the show, and the monitors are busted.
The tweeter's blown out on the monitors, so it's just like the whole time.
You can't hear anything, and I'm trying to sing.
It's before we had in-ears.
My voice is already wrecked from the first year of touring, because I had never sung that much.
I'm really tired.
So we played, and we were terrible.
I mean terrible.
Because it was just so bad.
I mean, later on that night, Cracker got on stage and they were pretty good, but they hated it so much that he stuck his guitar through that monitor after a while because he couldn't hear anything.
It was just like, you're a club, man.
Fix the goddamn monitor.
The horns are all busted.
So anyways, we get done this particularly terrible set.
And we do a lot of improvisation on stage, too.
We're making whole shit up, which doesn't get any better, by the way, when you can't hear anything and when you're sucking.
We're still trying it and it's still just like...
Just, you know, anything would have been better than what we did.
You know, I was a little high from the drugs, but I was okay.
So I put on like a tux, tails, but I couldn't wear the pants because I had this huge bandage on my knees.
So I just put some shorts on and nice shoes too.
And I got a cane and I went to the Friars Club to this thing.
I wanted to be there to support Jeff, you know.
So he comes, he's up on the dais, it's like in one of the rooms there, not a stage, but he's up on there talking, thanking some people, and he comes down, he got me a chair, it's just a room full of comics, and he got me a chair so I could sit down near the front, everyone else was standing, just because I had surgery.
And he comes down, I want to thank my friend Adam, who came with me, and we went on this trip a little while ago, and he's just a good friend, and he hands me the mic, and For some reason, instead of just saying, you know, congratulations, Jeff, or whatever, I took the mic out of his hand and I walked up on the stage to, like, the podium and put it in the mic thing.
Because, I don't know, some part of me thought, I'm at the Friars Club and I should make a speech for Jeff's thing.
But by the time I got up there and put the mic in, I realized, what am I doing here?
I'm like, I don't know what the fuck to do.
I just, like, sort of looked at them and I said...
So I peed on my girlfriend earlier today.
Because it had happened, you know, like when they finished the surgery, they gave me this epidural, and I'm your whole lower half of your body, so I don't know what's going on.
I'd come out of it and my girlfriend was like, how are you?
I'm like, I don't know.
I feel weird.
I feel pretty good.
Am I bleeding down here?
Am I wet?
And she reaches under the skirt to check me out and she's like, I think you're peeing.
That's all.
You're peeing yourself right now.
I'm like, how do you know?
And she goes, because you're peeing on me right now.
She pulls her hand and I'm like, oh shit, I'm sorry.
I felt weird and like a weird warmth and I asked her if there was something on there and she's like, yeah, you're peeing yourself probably.
And I'm like, how do you know?
And she goes, because you're pissing on me right now.
And I was like, so I'm standing there in the Friars Club and I just said, so I peed on my girlfriend earlier today and the place just breaks up and I was just, I guess that's one more thing she's got in common with my mom.
And I... I don't know.
I went on for a couple minutes, told that story, and I was just like killing.
I was like really good.
I was patient.
I was like not rushing anything.
Probably because I was kind of stoned from the drugs.
And I just like, I got about two minutes of it.
I just drilled.
It was hysterical.
I came down, some older guy comes up to me and goes like, You killed.
Yeah, because I've been there with friends of mine who are comics, and I've bantered with them, played piano, like, in that little keyboard, you know, in the cellar, with Jeff and with Bob sometimes, just done that shit with them, and, uh...
It's always terrifying, but that one moment, I wasn't even with them.
I just did it, and it was the greatest thing.
To this day, I don't know if there's a performing moment that I feel prouder of than that one, even though it was completely accidental.
Every time Jeff wants me to go play with him and do that sort of stuff, first of all, because I can't play piano very well, so I end up just picking four chords and playing them in a circle.
It's not like Mayer's up there with him who can actually play, you know?
I was like Texas and Denver, so I was like 7 and 8. It's a good martial art for kids, teaching some discipline and stuff.
I remember it being fun, but it got me hit.
I don't know when I started doing that.
In like 2000...
Two, maybe?
I started boxing, you know?
I started boxing with this boxing trainer in LA just to get in shape.
I was really out of shape.
And then he would come on the road with us for a while and we would like...
Trained with the whole band in the mornings usually, and then he and I, after soundcheck, we would do like 10 rounds, you know, wherever we were at the gig, and just exercise in the afternoon.
So we'd do it for a while, but like early on when we were doing this, you know, he was doing some stuff where like, I was just working defensive stuff, and he threw like a low hook at me, and I did this thing, you know, I blocked it with my arm, and he's like, what was that?
And I was like, I don't know, it's a...
I just blocked it.
He goes, don't do that.
You'll get...
Why?
He goes, like, don't drop your hands when you're boxing.
It's a bad habit.
Like, okay, you know.
And then I did it one more.
He threw a low hook, and I, you know, just dropped my arm down to block it.
And he goes, where is this block coming from?
What is this kind of thing?
He goes, did you do taekwondo when you were a kid?
I was like...
Yeah, I did.
Weird.
Well, how'd you know that?
He goes, I think that's a Taekwondo block, but that's, you know, like, I think it works in Taekwondo because of the nature of the rules, but, like, you don't want to do that boxing.
Don't drop your hands boxing.
I go, what's the big deal?
He goes, well, because you're going to get hit.
You know, you're going to get hit in the head, too.
Don't drop your hands, especially not your right hand.
You know, that's where hooks come from, that side.
It also happens when people get hit in the legs a lot and they get in pain.
Like when a low kick starts coming, they try to stop it with their arm just because it hurts so much, and then someone sets them up and pretends to throw a low kick.
Well, he went into that fight, apparently, legend has it, with a broken rib.
He had a fucked up rib going into that fight, so he couldn't really move properly, couldn't defend against takedowns, but still figured out a way to win.
Yeah, well, Chell was a beast, but Anderson figured it out.
I mean, that's a guy like him who could do everything.
He can strike, he can submit you, and because he has all these skills, like, even when he's losing, he still could pull it out of his ass out of nowhere.
Like, I used to take my godson to school when I was still making my first album, so I hadn't even made it yet.
I had met Bruce because we played this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing, and his son went to the same school.
They were kids, you know, young kids, eight-something then, four, maybe younger, and so I would see him every day at school, and he would always come up and talk to me and say hi, and I just couldn't make sentences, couldn't think of anything to say.
I just feel like they would be so restricted in the way that community.
I think if you, let me phrase this better.
If Bruce Springsteen could be himself and Obama could be himself, and you could just put a camera on it and just let them shoot the shit, I think it'd be amazing.
But if you're a president, I mean, you're a distinguished statesman, one of the greatest presidents we've ever had, and one of the most historically important presidents we've ever had, first African-American president we've ever had, and one of the all-time greatest speakers ever, right?
So he has this legacy.
And then you're hanging out with Bruce Springsteen, who's also this, like, Incredibly well-spoken, brilliant songwriter, iconic American musician, hero.
And the two of them together, there's so much, the weight of the eyes upon them is so heavy, I would imagine it would be very difficult to just shoot the shit.
But if you could get them, like a little buzzed, Just a couple of shots of tequila.
Just fucking talk, man.
Just to hear them talk for real would be amazing.
I just don't know if you could ever do that.
When I saw the podcast, I'm like, well, there's definitely camera people there.
There's definitely sound people there.
One of the best things about this place is it's just us and Jamie.
There's no one in here.
And so it feels like it's just us and Jamie.
But I've done other people's podcasts before, and I'm like, why are there so many people here?
It's the amazing thing about what Jeff's done in the last decade or so, is making this thing not personal, to turn the roasting into something that's back like what it used to be when we watched Dean Martin when we were kids.
It's funny, it's insulting, it's not about getting the world to think you're a piece of shit.
It's about, I'm making up a joke about how you're a piece of shit right now.
And he's done it without anybody really Somehow he just makes it work without causing a huge uproar.
It's not even a bullshit uproar.
I don't know why.
He's managed to pull it off in a way that's good-hearted enough that I'm not sure how he's managed it.
And also, it's kind of how comics talk to each other anyway.
We always talk shit to each other, but it's with love.
It's funny.
Like if someone shits on your clothes or shits on your face or shits on your head or shits on whatever it is, it's like we're all laughing along with it.
It's like it's an honor to get roasted by Jeff Ross or any really good roaster.
And Jeff is...
Because of his love of old comedy culture, like the Friars Club and that kind of stuff, he always loved that.
When we were in our 20s, he'd be like, I'm going to go to the Friars Club.
I'm like, what the fuck are you doing?
You're in your 20s.
We're not old dead men.
In my mind, I'm like, why are you going to the Friars Club?
Yeah, well, that's how I ended up moving to LA. I was home.
It was getting really miserable in Berkeley.
I'd been home for about a week from the end of touring.
Everywhere I went, it was an issue.
Not, you know, mostly positive, but still, it's like, you feel like everybody's looking at you.
There are kids camped out on my lawn.
A couple days...
Bunch of days in a row at least one like a hundred people come up to me a day But one of them was like hey, are you that guy from County Coors?
Yeah, you're Adam Duritz?
Yeah You guys are so lucky.
Thank you.
I mean because you suck and there's so many good bands in the Bay Area It's wild that a band as shitty as you would be so successful to your face.
Yeah, I was just like It happened like four or five days in a row I mean it was dwarfed by the amount of people that were coming up just loving the band but still it was like it started to feel like If there's going to be one of these every day, is one of them going to have a gun?
Is this Mark David Chapman?
It seems such a weird obsession to walk up to a total stranger in the line for a bank and just say something like that.
It was so weird.
But we got really famous really quickly.
The only people I knew in L.A. really were people at the Viperim.
I'd met a few of them playing across the street at the Whiskey on their first tours.
So I went home that day.
I'd been home for, I think, seven days.
And it happened like six of those seven days.
And I got a phone call, and it was Sal and Johnny.
Sal Jenko, who ran the Viper Room, he's Johnny Depp's partner.
And they called me up, and they're like, hey, we want to invite you to this party tonight.
And I was like kind of half in, half out.
I wasn't really listening.
And finally, they're like, wait, what's going on, man?
And I told them what was happening.
And they're like, hang on a second.
I'm going to put you on hold.
I sat there on the phone and I didn't know what was going on.
They came back and they said, okay, it's Kate Moss's 21st birthday tonight and we're throwing a party here.
The club's closed.
We're just throwing a party for friends.
We wanted to invite you.
We got you a room at the Bellage and you have a reservation on the flight at 6 o'clock, Oakland to Burbank.
Just get on it.
Someone will pick you up at the airport.
You've got a room at the Bellage.
Get the fuck out of there.
So I like...
Grabbed my stuff, went to the airport, went to this party at the Vipram with just like interesting people.
And I was like, I didn't go home again.
That was it.
I moved to LA after that.
I did.
I stayed at the Bellage for a few days.
I moved to like a bungalow at the Sunset Marquee and then eventually...
I rented this house in the hills.
One of the bartenders, Shannon McManus, at the Viper, her best friend was Christine Applegate.
And she was my landlord.
She rented me this old, like, she had this fucking place.
It was like a little cottage in Laurel Canyon.
And it turned out it was built by the cowboy star, Tom Mix, in the 20s.
And then it was David Niven's, like, in-town fuckpad.
And he named it Rogues Retreat when there was a little sign up there after this TV show he was on called The Rogues in, like, the 60s.
And then, I don't know, I I don't know what it was after that, but she owned it, and I stayed there.
I wrote most of our second record in that place before I bought a place.
But yeah, man, the Viper Room, for a couple years there, I bartended all the time because it was just less crowded on that side of the bar.
My friends all worked there, so I would be there anyways hanging out with them.
Because when I was back there and I'd be hanging out with Shannon, smoking a cigarette, drinking beers behind the bar, you know, in the downstairs bar there, the little one.
And I don't know, at one point, I'd help her out with stuff.
And at one point, she's like, I go to the bathroom, there's nobody else.
Will you just, you know, mind the bar?
And I was like...
Yeah, sure.
So I did it.
And I had no qualms about berating people for tips.
I'm a rock star and they're not my tips, so why not?
So I made her a few hundred dollars in the five minutes she was gone.
And she's like, you've got to do this all the time.
If you don't want to, you've got to get a beer for someone else.
Right.
And there was just so many people.
It was like what I thought...
The Left Bank would have been like in Paris in the 20s.
I mean, it was like Allen Ginsberg coming in and William Burroughs, the Hughes Brothers, all these different filmmakers, you know, musicians, Tom Petty.
It's a culture of more art and a lot of really intelligent people.
I lived there when I was a kid from age 7 to 11. And I remember thinking, it was like a very good place to be at the time.
It was a very fortunate place to be at that age of my life, because I was around a lot of eclectic people, a lot of interesting, weird people.
You know, we lived in the center of it all.
We were right down the street from Lombard Street.
So it was like, yeah, and it was during the Vietnam War, you know, so it was like, It was all weirdos and hippies, and my stepfather was a hippie, so it all fit in.
It seemed normal.
And then we moved from there to Florida afterwards, and the contrast was so stark that it made me go, wow, I was really lucky to live there.
That was a cool spot.
People were...
It was just interesting and creative and there was a lot of music and there was a lot of art.
It was just a different place to be.
But it's not a showbiz culture by any stretch of the imagination.
Whereas in Los Angeles, people celebrate overexposure.
They celebrate Overexposure and over-publicized people and people that are on billboards.
Whereas in a place like San Francisco, that's not cool.
That's all fucked up.
They'd be more into going to an antique store or something.
And that's a thing that I... The thing that I came to not like about LA after a number of years was their worship of fame, being famous just for being famous.
And their sort of circular worship of fame.
But what I loved about it was that that all really exists and it's annoying as fuck.
But it exists around a bunch of people who are out there doing stuff too.
And I thought that was really...
It's funny that you came up with the Bay Area to Florida.
We went from Texas to the Bay Area.
My dad was in the Army during Vietnam in El Paso, and I loved it.
We lived in Houston after that.
I didn't like Houston as much, but El Paso was, man, it was just like...
Because I think it's a...
It was a lot of vacant lots and desert and bugs and snakes and shit.
And it's also the first place...
You know when you're a kid, you like...
First, as a kid, you just do stuff with your parents.
You know what I mean?
And the family.
And then, at some point, you go off and do something by yourself with another kid.
At a certain point, you get a little off on your own.
To me, I was six when I got there.
That's part of the first experiences I have with going fucking around with shit on my own.
Just like vacant lots and snakes and spiders and riding my bike.
I just really remember that about El Paso and really loving that.
And actually, I don't know why.
Even the army culture, which was kind of weird, seemed cool.
I went back to the house that I went to high school with recently.
Where was that?
Newton.
Newton, Massachusetts.
Oh, yeah.
I was wandering around that area, and it just seemed...
Familiar, but yet different.
Because your memory is kind of shitty.
If you had to draw a picture of what the street looked like from your memory, you'd be like, I think there was a tree here.
Here's the arch of the bridge.
And...
Randomly, like a year or two later, I'm doing a gig at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, and I'm eating with one of my high school buddies at a restaurant, and this lady comes up to me and she goes, I live in the house where you grew up.
And I'm like, what?!
And I took a picture with her.
That's cool.
But it was like, I'm here smiling with some lady who lives in my old house.
And she lived, yeah, and I had just been there.
Just like a couple years before with my family, wandering around.
I remember thinking, like, it's so odd.
It's so odd when you just try to...
Pieced together that weird, blurry slideshow of a memory, and then you see the actual place vividly, and everything looks so much smaller than you remember.
The thing we were talking about when we were talking about going to LA and the showbiz culture and the culture of fame and all that stuff is there.
I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine about LA. The real thing that gets tainted is not necessarily the people that just happen to be famous, the artists that are doing things.
It's that...
There's a whole swarm of people that are trying to figure out a way how to get into that walled garden.
And they're bartending, and they're waitressing, and they're delivering Uber Eats, and they're doing all these different things.
So there's an anxiety of just...
There's like a feeling of all these people that desperately want in.
And they're all hovering around this area, and it changes the whole vibe of the town.
When you go to a place that doesn't have that, and it's one of the things that I love about Austin, it does not have that.
The feeling is different.
The feeling when you're around people, they're different.
There's people in LA that don't even admit that they wanted to be famous.
They just gave up on the dream.
They came out there for a very specific reason.
They wanted to be an actor or whatever it is.
And then it didn't work out and they became an architect or whatever.
Whatever it is.
But they wanted to be famous.
And then they want to meet people who are famous and then become friends with those people so they can get and hang out with famous people.
So at least they kind of get the rub.
And it's fucking weird, man.
It's a weird culture.
It's like...
There's a shallowness to it, but yet some of the most interesting, creative, and deep people live amongst that shallowness.
So you have all these really intense artists that are surrounded by all these very strange people that are trying to figure out how they can get on the cover of Rolling Stone.
But it's interesting because what you were talking about, it was one of the things that turned me off when I finally left because You're right.
Everybody, even people who do impressive things and are successful, only want to talk to you in conversation about the movie producer they had a meeting with last week.
You can be a very successful lawyer in finance.
You can be doing something very impressive in another field, and they aren't going to talk to you about being a doctor.
They just want to talk to you about the meeting they had for a pitch idea.
But I do think there's a flip side to that, too, that I did find kind of magical about being there, which is that So much of culture is about, I was born here, I grew up here, around all these same people, and we're all gonna do this thing here, too.
And there's a certain amount to which LA is about, like, it's a bunch of people who all decided they didn't want to do what everyone else in their high school did.
Whether it's to be a poet or a sculptor or a painter or a musician or an actor or a model.
But it's still like, I don't want to stay here and just do this thing.
I'm going to go over there.
And there's a certain pioneer aesthetic about doing that.
The problem is if you get there...
And then it just becomes about famous and famous.
I dig the part of it that is like, I got a dream and I'm willing to go all the way over there to get it and to do it.
I love that.
I felt like I had that in common with all those people.
But then there's a side of it you're talking about where, A, you lose what you came there for originally and it just becomes about chasing fame and success as opposed to doing anything for it.
And that got really annoying right after the millennium when the A lot of the reality TV stuff started to become bigger and bigger.
Like, she had just gotten out of college, done her first movie.
I was in my first band.
She was out doing a play in Berkeley at Berkeley Rep, and we became friends.
I had a huge crush on her.
But we became friends, this is like 1980, 87, 88, something like that.
And so we've been friends ever since then.
So I would go in New York and I would visit her and her boyfriend and we'd go see plays all the time and I thought, I was really liking life in New York.
And me and Billy Crudup, who was then her boyfriend, We went to see this play called Private Lives.
It's a Noel Coward play, and it starred Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan.
And after the play, Billy took me backstage, and we ended up going out that night with Alan, having some drinks, and hanging out for the rest of the evening with Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan.
It was just so great.
The whole experience, and I felt, it felt, I don't know, a lot more grown up, kind of.
I don't know, I just felt like I'd been having conversations with people from the real world, and now I was having a conversation with Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan, and I really liked it, and I thought, I think I gotta get out of LA. I think I would like to have these conversations more.
I realized how much I liked going to the theater, just because it was closer to what I do, going on stage and doing it live every night.
I wanted to get the hell out of LA. And I had really appreciated it up until about the millennium.
I had appreciated all the people that were creative and how much variety of it there was.
I really liked all that.
But something happened after the millennium where I just got really burnt out on it.
I think you nailed it with the comment about the reality shows, because that clearly changed the culture of the city, because now people realize you didn't really have to be talented.
That was fucking weird for me because I was really shy, you know, and I had, you know, I have dissociative disorder, which is not dissociative identity disorder.
Well, dissociative disorder is like, it's that you don't quite, it's hard to describe it, you don't quite connect with the world and you feel a little bit like you're at the back of your head watching things as they happen.
Well, yeah, because I was very anxious and very shy and all of a sudden and very awkward in company with people and then all of a sudden everyone in the world is coming up to me and it felt like It felt like claustrophobic, like the world is just pressing on you all the time.
You know, I remember when we got offered the cover of Rolling Stone and I told my manager I wanted to think about it.
You know for a day because you know and of course you're never gonna say no to the cover of Rolling Stone It is if you want to have a career and you get off the cover of Rolling Stone You should fucking do it because that's that's a career maker right there You know, but I also I mean it's not like this nowadays because there are no newsstands really or very few but remember like Having your picture on the cover of a magazine like that meant that you were like omnipresent You're everywhere on every street corner everyone your face was everywhere so like any sort of anonymity is is gone I mean, it scared me.
It did.
It scared the shit out of me.
But, you know, you got to do that stuff.
So, I mean, I struggled with it at first.
It was really different.
People chase you down the street.
I remember going to a movie in Birmingham by myself in the middle of the afternoon.
Just went to see some movie.
It was a block or two from our hotel.
Just a matinee, you know, on a day off.
And I'm in there.
There's no one in the theater.
It's like one of those multiplexes.
There's no one in there, the one I was in.
And then, like, midway through the movie, this guy comes down.
Sits next to me, like in the middle of the theater.
He's like, hey.
I said, hey.
He's like, are you in County Crows?
I said, yeah.
And he goes, ah, I love your band.
Do you mind if I sit here?
And I said, you know, I'm kind of just trying to have some time to myself.
And he goes, okay.
Gets up, walks out.
Walks out of the theater.
Doesn't sit down in the theater, just walks out.
And I'm watching the rest of the movie.
Right at the end of the movie, guy comes in again, walks down a mile, sits next to me.
And I was like, God damn it.
And I turn, but it's a different guy.
And he's wearing the uniform from the place.
And he's like, hey, I'm sorry to bother you.
But the kid came in here earlier.
I said, yeah.
He said, well, he's been out in the lobby for the last hour on the payphone calling everyone he knows, I guess, because he's been on the phone the whole time.
There's like 100 people.
Out front now.
I was just like, fuck.
He goes, if you want to go out that exit, that takes you out the side of the building.
You can sneak out.
I was like, thank you.
I went down and ran.
I was around the side of the building, so I was a good block away before they spotted me.
To get you on a drug, they start you small, and then they give you more.
Yeah.
Ramp you up?
But because the only formulation that worked for me, weirdly enough, was the chewable one, which comes in, like, two milligram package of pills, I had to take the chewable kind.
Because sometimes the formulations are different, you know, in the different kinds of ways they package up drugs.
And so something in the other version didn't work for me, so I had to keep taking the chewable one.
So at one point, I was taking, like...
25 of them.
You get 50 milligrams, and it's like 25 of these little...
Can you imagine taking like 50 or 25 different Flintstones vitamins every morning?
All the liquid in your mouth just gets sucked out, and it becomes this paste.
You're trying to chew these fucking pills.
That's sort of the slightly sweet orange flavor of chewable pills.
She reminded me of this morning, and I just thought, oh my God, I forgot all about that.
Every morning, taking like 25 of these pills and chewing them up and just the fucking paste in my mouth for just this horrible, on top of everything else that's going on, you have this experience every morning, this trauma-inducing paste-in-your-mouth experience.
I called it happy paste, but it was just so fucking gross on top of everything else.
The way, you know, there can be slight differences between generic versions and regular versions of drugs, where, like, just the formulation's a little different.
I don't know.
But the chewable form of it worked, and the other one didn't.
But maybe that's why Stage Fright wasn't an issue by the time it came around, because I had been through other stuff.
Like, I mean, in my first band, as an adult, you know, so I was like 25, 26 maybe, for the first three gigs, I woke up each morning, I remember this, like, our first one was at a street fair in Berkeley, the Solano Stroll, second one was at a club called The Omni, and the third one was at a club called The Hill.
Our first three gigs as a band.
I woke up each day of those gigs with complete and utter laryngitis.
I didn't feel anxious, I didn't feel like anything was wrong, but I couldn't make a sound.
Like, each day, I was like...
Just like some kind of fucking hysterical laryngitis.
Someone suggested that ginger is really good when you lose your voice because that just burns the shit out of your vocal cords and clears anything off them.
So I got those big ginger roots, you know, and I'd take it on stage with a knife.
And I would shave the fucking skin off the ginger root.
Cut off a little piece, like a stick of gum sized piece, put it in your mouth and chew, swallow the ginger juice that comes out of it, which burns your vocal cords clean of anything.
It works for about a minute or two, and then you've got to swallow some more or you don't want to swallow that root, so you've got to throw that and shave a new piece.
Little do they know, but it's not that we're not gonna have to do this.
It's that we're now gonna send him on stage with a knife and some ginger root.
He's gonna be singing all the songs and I'm already like an idiot.
I'm so nervous about not playing piano and singing.
I'm standing up in front of everybody because I came to rehearsal one day.
I was the piano player and singer in my band, you know, and I came to rehearsal one day and there's this other guy there and he's playing piano and he's really, really good.
And they're like, hey, this is Dan.
He's our Dan Eisenberg.
I'm like, oh, nice to meet you.
He's our piano player.
I'm like, I'm our piano player.
They're like, you're our singer.
That was it.
I was like booted out of...
Granted, he was way better than me, but then I had to learn to stand up, so my way of getting around that was I got a trench coat.
I thought Prince was cool.
He had a trench coat.
I could get a trench coat, and I'll stand on stage in a trench coat, and I'll be cool in my trench coat.
It would have worked better if I wasn't, as it turned out, also shaving ginger with a knife and chewing ginger.
Well, I mean, terror is a self-perpetuating thing because your heart rate speeds up.
That makes you more agitated and more scared.
If you slow your breathing down, your heart rate cannot increase.
If you keep yourself and you force yourself to breathe in...
And breathe out.
And breathe in.
Your heart rate is going to slow down.
And that will take some of the edge off that.
You know, it does.
You know, I had to learn to do that that year.
Because for a while after that, I would wake up in the morning and think it was happening again.
And I'd start to panic.
And that's going to cause it to happen.
But you just got to, like, you know, white knuckle it.
I still wake up a lot at, like, 6 a.m.
Like, right as the dawn is coming up, I wake up and...
Have a moment of like, oh god, not this shit.
But now it's like reflexive to just stop it.
But back then I had to make myself breathe.
So by the time I got to the stage fright thing, I wasn't really feeling stage fright.
But also I think I felt like I was in the right place.
I could express anything I wanted up there.
There's nothing wrong.
Any new melody, anything I wanted to sing, any feeling I wanted to put into it, it was all art.
It was all creativity, and there's nothing wrong about any of it.
I mean, you don't want to sing off-key all day long, but basically, you could just express yourself, and that was all By doing it, that's what you're there for.
You're there to express yourself anyway, so anything you do is just a part of that.
I felt pretty confident in that.
Whatever I did was the right thing to do, because that's what we were doing anyways.
I think it made it a lot better, especially finding songs.
Finding the whole idea of songwriting, for one thing, gave me a place to put all that stuff.
That didn't fix the rest of the day, but I'd never had any place to put it before I wrote a song.
And now it's like, whoa, on top of...
People would ask me, is it cathartic to play music?
And I don't think it is.
It's not that—it doesn't process it and get it all out of you.
But if you have to choose between a day where you just feel shitty and a day where you feel shitty but you write a song, take the song.
You accomplish something that day, and that's what we're supposed to be— You know, life is supposed to be about accomplishing things, making things, doing things, so take the day where you do something, and then, you know what, try and do it again tomorrow, because it is better.
It doesn't fix it.
It's not replacing the difficulty, but at least what you know is that I can have difficulty, and I'm not a waste of space on Earth.
I'm not falling apart.
I'm not nothing.
I actually made a song, so in my difficulty of whatever yesterday was, Well, I made something beautiful.
And that's a powerful thing.
It means that while you were going through all that shit, you didn't just put your head in your hands and lay there.
You went ahead and made something, and you can take that with you for the rest of your days.
That song goes along with you, the sense of accomplishment, all the feelings of like...
Because I think that's the hardest thing about mental illness, is you know it's not what everybody's going through, you know it's harder than it needs to be, and there are people who are going through stuff, I mean, as I know now, they have their own difficulties, but it just seemed like it was harder, and there are times where you just want to go, I don't want to carry this today, you know, I'll just go sit here.
Is that also exacerbated by a heavy tour schedule?
I would imagine there's days that you just need to slow down and take breaks.
And when you're out there, bang, bang, bang, show after show after show, I would imagine there's very little of that time where you get to sit by yourself in a movie theater and just chill.
It was the one part of the day where I knew I was where I was supposed to be.
I wasn't struggling with what to do.
I had a...
I even have a set list, you know, so I know a path through the next two hours.
That wasn't the problem, except, you know, I wasn't—my voice is kind of weird.
It can do a lot of great shit, but it's not particularly durable, and I sing really hard.
So it was not the best at recovering, and early on a big part of it was learning— There are limitations to how many days in a row I can do without paying for it.
Even if you just do one three in a row for me, I'll be paying for it and recovering from it for the rest of the tour.
Two on, one off.
Two on, one off works.
We mostly do that.
Every once in a while we'll put an extra day off in there.
But we had to learn.
It took years to learn it that you couldn't You couldn't be too flexible about that.
It might seem like you could only play this one thing.
If you play three in a row, just do it that one time.
But I'd be recovering the rest of the tour from that.
So we had to learn that.
Because losing my voice, dealing with a lot of...
I'm getting nodes in my vocal cords because the only thing that really fixes nodes is one silence and two steroids.
That's why when I scraped my knee up that one time on tour, it eventually got really infected.
And also why it stayed infected, because they'd give me all the antibiotics for it, and the antibiotics kick the shit out of the infection, but you also have that prednisone in there, which keeps bringing it back and keeping it alive so it would come back over.
Right, but the way that steroids work and why they work so much better, I think, than Advil is because they create cell growth that goes faster, which is why if you have a virus...
Steroid side effects may increase the risk of staph infections.
There it is.
New research suggests that long-term use of powerful immune systems suppressing steroids such as prednisone, hydrocortisone, and dexamethasone may increase risk of life-threatening staph blood infections by a factor of six.
Little bits, like, not IV, but they give you a shot of it, and then they give you the antibiotics to take home with you, because my knee turned into a fucking balloon.
The biggest people who are still at risk for getting COVID after being vaccinated are people who had autoimmune disorders or are on medications for things like that.
That's a big factor of obesity is you're dealing with inflammation everywhere.
Yeah.
When you hear about people that are taking different medications to deal with anxiety or depression, the frustrating thing for many of my friends that have been on these kind of medications is trying to find the right one and trying to get it dialed in.
And then dealing with all the stuff that's happening while you're trying to dial it in.
Well, a lot of them were medications that weren't, you know, we don't really know.
That's the other thing that's kind of, it can really kill your Your hope when you're dealing with mental illness is that we don't understand how it works the way we understand how other parts of the body work.
We don't understand the brain and a lot of these medications they realize they work for mental things because they were medications for something else and then it just happened to have this effect so it's good but it has a bunch of side effects.
It was originally designed for something else.
We don't know exactly how to tune it in.
I mean just the fact that like People who are ADD and really hyper, you give them speed, basically, and it makes them calm down.
Meditation, I had a lot of problems with because I felt like It almost felt like I was relaxing all the barriers and structures I had in there to keep this shit under control.
Everything that I had to hold it together, when I would relax into the meditation, it felt like it was like...
I don't know if it's actually what it does or just a way I was conceiving of it.
In my mind, I was picturing like I was letting stuff loose.
I imagine it has something to do with you spend a lot of years keeping things to yourself, not communicating with other people as well as other people do.
You got a lot of stuff pent up.
When you find a way to express it, You dive into that.
Creativity and art is one way.
Also, a lot of us don't deal with authority very well.
Now you find a lifestyle that provides independence.
So you've got directors, executive producers, you've got camera directors, you've got people who are sound guys, you've got all these people.
You have people that are assistants, you have people that are PAs, you have people that are on the set that are They're interns, so they're getting college credits to be on the set, and they're taking notes and talking shit, and then occasionally there's problems, because some PA said something stupid to an intern, and now you have to have HR. You have HR? You have human resources at your podcast?
Oh my god, what have you done?
What the fuck have you done?
You've created an office.
Now you have a corporation.
Like, you used to have just a conversation, where it was you and your buddy, and there was some fucking YouTube video, and you had a couple of cameras running.
And now, because it became successful, you changed what the whole thing is, and now you've got people breathing down your neck, and you've got a bunch of people telling you what to do.
I've been doing this thing, you know, I got, you know, about a month into the quarantine, I started, I went to my girlfriend and I said, I'm really worried that I'll just wake up a year from now and I won't have done anything.
You know, I want to do that.
I'm going to start, I'm going to learn to cook everything.
You know, so I just started like, I've always liked cooking, but I started really, Researching it and trying to make all kinds of shit for her and for our few friends that we were seeing.
And then it seemed kind of cool after a while to be doing this, so I started making little videos and just putting them up on our Instagram stories.
It's like this thing you can only get at the Jazz Fest where it's like...
Kind of make this loaf of bread that's got stuffed cheese and crawfish and spices in it.
I've always wanted it because it's my favorite thing from Jazz Fest, but I never knew how to make it, and it's still a work in progress.
Red sauce, meat sauce, my Italian shit has gotten really good.
What else have I done?
I've done about 20, 30 of them now.
I've been putting them up on Instagram TV. And it's catching on with all these people who are like...
I mean, I have a bunch of friends who are chefs who are really good cooks.
I'm not.
But I've been really trying, you know?
And then I've been trying to show people how to cook stuff that, you know, some of it's as simple as just, look, maybe you don't know how to make grilled cheese.
Grilled cheese is great.
I'm going to show you.
It's really simple.
And some of it is complicated like a 12-hour meat sauce, you know?
But...
You know, as I was doing this, unbeknownst to me, all these people started getting interested.
And my friend who works on American Idol now, she's a producer for it.
She lives here, but she flies out there for that.
She's my piano player's wife.
And she's like, yeah, man, all these people on the set, they're all obsessed with your cooking videos.
And three of them come to me and said, like, what about a TV show?
We should get Adam a cooking show.
And then, you know, I talked to my manager, Mark, and a bunch of people came to him and said, we want to put together a show for Adam, like a cooking show.
And my thought was like, look, I really like what I'm doing.
Then you've got some greasy producer that's like, Adam, we're going to do this again, but this time, you know, I'm not feeling you're having a good time.
I want you to smile.
I want you to smile, and your best friend is in this room, okay?
It's like a band where it could be magic or it could be fucking hell.
It could be the lead singer and the guitar player hate each other and they only do the gig and then they talk shit about each other afterwards.
Or it could be like a brotherhood where they love each other and it's great.
And that's how TV shows are.
That's how any cooperative effort when you get a group of people together are.
It's like you can get lucky.
And you can get really unlucky, and sometimes some really successful shows are really unlucky collaborations, where the people are good at what they do, but the stress of working with these cocksuckers, they fucking hate the other people.
And I know people that work on television shows, and they'll have a drink afterwards and go, fuck man, my executive producer is such a twat, I can't handle this dude, all he wants to do is blah blah blah blah blah, and you're like, oh, I thought you were on TV, I thought everything was great.
It's not.
It's not great.
It's a cooperative effort.
The beautiful thing about doing a cooking show on your own with just a camera and YouTube is it's just you.
It's purity of vision and expression.
There's just singularity.
One guy.
Your thoughts and what you're trying to do.
And you could figure it out.
And you could say, you know, I used to do it like this and I don't like doing it like that anymore.
I've realized I like myself more when I prepare this way or when I do that or when I approach it that way.
You know, we've gone over the metrics, Adam, and it seems like whenever you do this, people tune out.
It's like every show.
It's 13 minutes in.
They're tuning out.
So what do we got to do to keep those people tuning in for another 13?
Because Daddy wants to buy a new house.
What can we do, Adam?
I'm looking at a Lamborghini.
I like to get a Lamborghini.
And I can't get a Lamborghini if this is not successful.
So what do we do, Adam?
I have a Maserati.
I want to pay my lease.
How do I make this show better so I make more money and put my kids through college?
I want to bribe USC so I can get my children into that school.
I need more money to pay off people.
You're dealing with so many different people and so many different issues, and to do something creative, it's so hard to do it with a lot of other people's input.
And sometimes it gets in the way of creativity because they're like, the way you're doing it, I just don't think this is the best way for our image and our brand.
So when it got out, when we finally got a manager and a lawyer and that got out and the rec companies got these demos, it was like they came to see us.
There were two weekends in like 91 or 92, January of 92 maybe, where we played these shows on two consecutive weekends.
And between the two weekends, every rec company in the world came to see us play.
The only people that didn't offer us deals were like people in the same company.
So like, you know, Columbia and Epic were both part of Sony.
So only Columbia offers a deal.
But other than that, We got a shitload of offers and there were millions of dollars on the table.
And we signed with Geffen and we took home, I think, $3,000 each.
Because they gave us complete creative control in the contract and a higher royalty.
Which doesn't matter unless it pays off, but it did.
The problem with Porsche, they have a real situation where their 911 is essentially a poor design in comparison to the Boxster.
The Boxster and the Cayman are a better design in terms of weight distribution because it's a mid-engine car where the engine is right behind the driver and then the axle is behind the engine.
So the balance of weight is beautiful.
It was a great car.
Yeah, but Porsche hamstrings them.
They keep them lower horsepower.
They don't have the same suspension setup.
Particularly horsepower, they don't let it eclipse the 911. No.
I guess in a way, when I look at it overall, I shouldn't be surprised because if there's one thing that we've never really valued as a culture, I mean, humanity has never really valued the arts.
It's like, I mean, we do.
We understand that a painting is going to be worth $7 million or something.
But in general, it's just like something we want to be entertained with.
We'll spend money on new tires or a VCR, but if we can get away with it, we don't want to spend money on records.
That's the kind of thing where if we could get away with taking it, we would.
Partially, this is the fault of the record companies at the time.
If you're going to tell me that a record is worth a certain amount of money, and then you're going to tell me that a CD is worth the same amount of money, and I'm going to take both of those home with me, and now you're going to tell me that a group of ones and zeros that equals that CD Is worth the same amount of money as the CD, I'm gonna call it a little bullshit.
You know what I mean?
When they went to putting out digital music, and iTunes came around and let them sell it on the store there, you know, it should have been $5 for a record, not $15.
And they also were like, well, if people aren't gonna buy these anymore, we don't want to sell things for $5.
They just panicked.
They gotta get the money where they could get it.
But, you know, people weren't stealing records before that.
It's entirely possible that if you'd said, okay, now we're doing digital and it's a $5.
It's $5 for a record because there isn't anything.
You get the music and you get all the art, but it's not costing us anything.
We don't have to get trucks.
We don't have to build physical, which is true.
The hardest thing about being an independent record company, because I had a couple independent record companies, was...
Pressing up the CDs and then getting trucks to take them to mom-and-pop CD stores where you'd get three in there and if you were lucky enough to have the guys who own the store love you they'd play it in the store and then someone would buy them but then they're gone because they only had three and you got to get more out there because now they don't have it at all that was distribution was the hardest thing and that's gone with all sudden you just got to load it up it's easy They should have made it a $5 thing and been like, okay, now you're getting something that has no body to it.
We're not going to make you pay $15 for that.
And they should have done that and they didn't because they panicked.
And so after a while, people felt a little insulted by being told that now they should buy the same thing that they used to take home with them.
They should buy it for the same amount of money now that it doesn't exist at all.
And so when Napster came around and everyone could suddenly just steal it, I think they were like, well, fuck these guys.
And I don't think they were saying fuck you to the artists, really.
I think they were mostly saying fuck you to the record companies.
But when the artists protested, they said fuck you to the artists, too.
That's the part that really bothered me about Napster.
Not that they were taking the stuff, but that when someone like Lars Ulrich from Metallica came out and stood up and said what everybody already knew was true.
Yeah, but see, the thing is, the comparison between that and a VCR and tires is not valid, because you can't just duplicate a VCR and tires instantaneously on a computer.
But you could duplicate these recordings.
Once they were in digital form, you could just duplicate it over and over again and send them to people.
There's no issue whatsoever doing that.
People always felt like it's not costing you any money because someone had to buy it originally.
It's costing you if I won't buy it and then I download it instead, but maybe I was never going to buy it in the first place.
Once you buy a book, you could copy the book and press it up yourself and sell it.
But you're buying something.
That's the thing about art is it can be kind of ephemeral.
You're buying something that sort of exists as an idea.
But the difference is you could print up a book yourself and sell it, but the author deserves probably to get the money more than you do because it was his thoughts that went into it.
The thing about the music...
And the books, because it's happened to books too, is that it just, it was easy to duplicate.
But you are stealing because we know that within a year, record sales had dropped, well not a year, probably within about three years record sales had dropped by 50%.
Now they don't exist.
You know, like, but that's because now we have Spotify.
But for a while it dropped so much, the industry had been making all this money, and then it was gone.
I mean, it wasn't necessarily stealing as much as it was an introduction to a completely new way of distributing music and the fact that it was digital.
They had to find new ways in order to profit because this thing of like buying physical copies It's not valid anymore.
Like, some people still do it because they love vinyl, and some people do it because they're nostalgic and they like to have CDs.
But the reality is, most people are just getting digital.
It's the same thing that caused the problem in the beginning, was the record companies, who were being so greedy, made it very easy to feel like it was okay to take it.
Because I don't disagree with that, because you were getting ripped off as a consumer.
If you want to tell me that something is the same amount of money when it doesn't exist as when it does, fuck you.
But also, what happened eventually was when they came up with Spotify, the record companies went to Spotify and said, pay us a lump sum, and we'll give you all of our music.
That's not trickling down to us in any way like it used to with record sales.
Do you remember that Courtney Love article that she wrote, I think it was in Spin Magazine, where she sort of laid out all the financial problems with record deals?
Well, it was just kind of like, let me get this straight.
You are going to give me a piece of...
Of the part of our industry that is completely disappearing and worthless now, and in exchange, you'd like me to give you several pieces of the only things that still make money.
But there were a lot of things, when the internet came along and changed all that, a lot of things got crazy in the record companies, because they panicked at the fact that the internet all of a sudden, instead of being this really wild thing that connected everyone in the world for free, basically, which is what it really does, you should be able to make a positive use of something that does that.
I mean, it really is quite the tool, as we've realized in years since then.
But all they could see was that it was like this drain that was slowly sucking all their money away.
So they saw Napster and what Napster was doing and they associated the whole internet with that.
I remember a year or two after that it all happened, we were doing a record It might have been Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.
I don't think it was Hard Candy.
So it was a few years later, and ABC comes along, and they want us to be on Good Morning America.
They love the record, and they want to feature our singles playing on the front page of ABC.com, which was a big website then, for a week and a half leading up to the release.
They're going to basically put our videos and everything on the front page of ABC.com playing for anybody...
What an advertisement!
That's like way better than, it's great, you know?
Universal's response was, okay, well how much are you gonna pay us to let us use the video?
They're like nothing and they said well, then you can't use it So we lost all that promo it happened like just just about like this is a few years ago when we released Some wonder wonderland our last record.
So it's like 2014 We were playing festivals in Europe.
We're touring we're playing pink pop in Holland's the biggest festival in Holland It's one of the oldest festivals in Europe and it's the sixth time we've played it we've at that point us and Pearl Jam have played that festival more than any other band at that point so They come to us before the show, like early that afternoon, and they told us that the national radio station, whatever, like the BBC in Holland, and the national TV station would like to broadcast our entire set live.
So, national TV, you're set on radio and television when you play.
Well, don't forget this about streaming, is that a lot of people on their way to work and stuff, it doesn't have to be terrestrial radio, it could be satellite radio.
But think about this.
Here's the problem with, look, you want Spotify, you can get anything you want.
You can hear anything you want to hear, right?
The only bad thing about getting anything you want is there's no way to know you want something you haven't heard yet.
You know what I mean?
There's no way.
It's the problem with it.
You have to be introduced to new stuff.
And so, like, I can go on Spotify today and listen to any record I want, and I do, but I can't use it.
It's not gonna necessarily show me new music.
So I can't get anything new.
So if I got a new song and I'm a new band, somebody's got to play me somewhere.
Record company can get you on playlists probably.
I don't know if it's worth a trade-off.
And they can get you on the radio, help you promote that.
That might get people to go to you on Spotify and get you streams because if you're new...
You can't get people to request you until they know you exist.
You need to break that ground somehow.
That's hard to do.
I can see some value in that.
I don't know that it balances out against the deals they're offering most people.
We don't have those same deals because you're not getting my record.
With all that crap, you're not getting Butter Miracle by offering me, by wanting a piece of my touring and my merch.
You're never getting it for a million years.
And you're also not getting it if you want to keep my record in perpetuity, because fuck you.
I'll put it out myself.
And you're not getting it, you know, if you want, like, to give me a 20% or 15% royalty anymore.
Not a chance.
You can have 20%, maybe.
You know what I mean?
I'll take 80 now.
But I don't know that every band can force them to make that deal.
It seems like a radio show or a podcast has far more promotional power.
If there was a podcast that's dedicated to breaking music, Like a podcast on a streaming service like Spotify that has deals to distribute stuff and says, you know, we're just gonna play the coolest shit.
Like, you decide, hey, it's me, Adam, I got a fucking great show, and I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna break great songs, and like, that would be so much more valuable than any other form of promotion.
And if you could attach it to an internet entity, Like some sort of Instagram page that they had set up with a lot of followers or people new.
They'd go there and cool music would be broke there.
I mean, you'd cut them completely out of this food chain.
Because I don't understand the position where they could get a 360 degree deal.
The 360 deal is like so bonkers to me that you would get live touring?
Since we've been independent, Working with record companies is pretty much a pleasure because we get the right situation where we can get them to do what we want them to do without getting ripped off and they do some great work.
My experiences since becoming independent with record companies have been nothing but positive.
They've done great jobs for us, but the other in the old days, but don't forget like music for me as a fan, okay, is way better than it's ever been before because it's so easy for bands to make music.
And so inexpensive that they can all do it.
And that means there's way more bands making way more great music.
Bands can stay together for longer so they actually get really, really good.
As a fan, it's an amazing time.
But you still have way more music than you ever have before.
And if I'm one of those individual bands, I've got to find a way to rise up out of the masses and get anyone to notice me.
Now the question is how do you do that?
How do you get anyone to notice that you exist?
You want to go on tour?
It's expensive to go on tour.
You're not going to break even necessarily even until you get up to...
Breaking even just on the money you're spending and the money you're making.
You can sell merch and make money too.
But like...
It could be a couple thousand people before you break even.
So how do you tour for a while when you can't possibly draw that kind of people?
All that stuff that had been pent up inside me all those years, that finally got released when I was making, writing songs, still, no one was hearing those songs, and, like, the knowledge that people would, that I'd at least get a shot, I was on Geffen, my label mates.
Geffen was different from any place else, for sure, but it was a little bit like the Viper Room.
I knew all those guys, the Posies.
Maria McKee, Nirvana, Sonic Youth.
I met them all right in the beginning.
We got to know everybody and it was cool.
It was really an incredible feeling.
The deal itself was probably shitty in some other ways.
Good in some ways because we argued for it.
But in order to get those royalties, we gave up a lot of money.
More than most people thought was smart.
We had a lot of money on the table, and if we'd never been successful, maybe we would have regretted never keeping any of that.
The record came out in the fall of 93, and we blew up in the spring of 94. We didn't feel it yet, but we played Saturday Night Live in January of 94. We weren't even in the top 200. I'm not sure why they put us on.
They liked the band.
But the record jumped 40 spots a week for five or six weeks.
After we played around here on Saturday Night Live, the record literally jumped 40-plus spots every week for five weeks and landed us at Lake.
13 for a couple weeks, then six for three weeks, and then we were two for two years.
And then we were like, We had a really good week with something, and it seemed like it was going to go up again, and then The Lion King came out, and it was just like, man, we're never going to see number one.
I had a lot of friends who I thought were really good and I just didn't think they had good...
I thought record companies were really bad situations and I thought they pushed them to do things that weren't really great for their band musically and I thought I could make really cool records with these guys.
Have you ever thought about doing that again now, like the way we were talking about?
If you promoted something like that, you did it through a podcast and you had a social media page, like a Facebook page or an Instagram page or both, that seems like now that's a viable strategy to introduce people to bands and those bands could actually probably take off.
If they're really great bands, you could actually get eyes on them.
That's what I feel like I do do now, because without the record company part of it, we run an independent festival.
We spend a year, or six or eight months each time, talking about every band that's going to play the festival, all 30 bands or whatever it is, and we...
For each band, when we release the announcement, we do a whole page about them.
We write essays.
We put the videos up and put the music on there.
We introduce you to each of them week by week.
We make the festivals entirely free so anyone can come and you never have to pay.
We make it as easy as possible to introduce you to all these bands.
We play them on our podcast.
We talk about it.
We film at my house every band.
The festival might be that weekend, but starting Tuesday of that week, we film acoustic sessions at my house in the living room with every band and put them up on our page on the Underwater Sunshine website.
And so, I mean, I do all that, and I don't feel like I fail anybody.
Like, the bands we're taking out on this tour, Frank Turner's coming for the end of the tour, but I'm taking two of the Underwater Sunshine bands out, two of the guys, Matt Susich and Sean Barna, both of whose records I sung on, too.
I do a lot of that.
I sing on a lot of records, but mostly just with my friends.
It's almost like an amusement park, because there's three stages going at once with staggered start times, and you can just run to the ones you want to see.
Meet a bunch of different people, go between the clubs.
They're free, so you don't have to worry about paying each time, and it's just...
We also do...
The only thing we...
The only way...
The bands we don't pay either because they're free shows.
What we do do is we buy...
I think we did $400.
We bought $400 worth of merch from every band.
So it enables us to give them $400.
And then we set the merch up.
It stands at the show and we give it away free to the fans.
So people can get their music, their CDs, their t-shirts for free.
And it enables us to pay the band's money.
And it's just like make it as easy as possible to like...
You know, we wanted to sort of like expand because we've been doing all this music stuff for a while and the last time we did it, which is now like October two years ago, I guess it was 2019, Last time we did the festival.
And we had expanded to a place with three stages instead of two.
It was really successful.
But Kate Quigley came, and she was hanging out for the whole thing, and she was like, man, you should add some comedy to this.
Because we went out one night and watched an open mic with her, and she got up at it.
When you were telling about the open mic earlier, I was really thinking about that.
It's funny.
Kate and I, we met because we matched on a dating site years ago, but never met each other, but we sort of corresponded a little bit.
I hadn't talked to her in a long time, and I guess she wrote to me again later, and I was like, I'm just going to introduce her to my girlfriend.
I introduced her to my girlfriend, and my girlfriend and her are the best.
It's the best way to be safe about things.
Just any hot girl, introduce them to your girlfriend.
So they become best friends with your girlfriend.
You never make a mistake ever.
And your girlfriend has cool friends.
And you get to hang out with people.
I always liked Kate.
I thought she was funny.
Now I get to be her friend because there's nothing to worry about.
She's best friends with my girlfriend.
So I can be her friend from now on.
It's awesome.
But yeah, she was talking about how cool it would be to bring comedy into it, too.
That whole thing is, by the way, just for people who've never spent much time in Austin, that whole Moon Tower thing, the whole concept behind putting these towers around town that light up the town at night and that all look like different little moons, that's a crazy fucking thing to do.
You know, when you get those towns that support music, it's usually a pretty Temporary and then it cycles out of it because if you have that area where musicians can live and play There's usually some warehouses and they can get rehearsal spaces,
you know, San Francisco used to be that way Yeah, you know, but then they become cool places to live and then people move into those areas and they want to live in those kind of warehouses and then it gets upscale and eventually Bands can't afford it and then someplace else becomes that area, you know, but Austin's managed to stay Keep Austin weird.
It's managed to stay nice and weird for a long time now.
Yeah, people are worried now because of Google and tech companies and Apple's putting a campus here and Oracle, and they're like, oh my god, we're going to bring in the Silicon people.
Barbecue is a weird thing because it moves around the United States.
You know, almost all came from the South.
But, you know, depending on the area, what was going on, like Oakland, where I grew up, is big barbecue because everyone came out to the shipyards to work from the South in World War II. And so all this whole community of black people from the South ended up also because the South can be not a great place to live at times if you're black in the 50s and 40s.
You know, came out to California and ended up in Oakland.
Smoking and then they sort of adapted it to like brisket and ribs and Texas barbecue and it all became like the Central Texas barbecue became like a scene.
You look at the signs, like the fucking graffitis on the billboards and everything, and that's the inside, like right there, scroll back up where you were, right there, bam, that's what it looks like inside.
I mean, it's just so unpretentious, just booths and wood paneling, and look at that stupid fucking rodeo sign.
We're not going to go on sale for a few weeks, but I think the dates will be up today on the website, and this is the first I've told anybody about it.