Counting Crows' Adam Duritz - Dissociation, Derealization, and Creative Drive
Counting Crows' Adam Duritz - Dissociation, Derealization, and Creative Drive
“If I have to choose between a day when my mental illness was making me feel terrible, and a day when my mental illness was making me feel terrible, but I wrote a song, I'd take the second one."
Counting Crows was one of the first bands I saw perform live, circa 1997, still a teenager, on the lawn with my friends at an Arena in Phoenix, Arizona. I was living with undiagnosed depression; it would be another decade before I understood it and longer than that before I properly treated it (and learned to treat myself well.) I didn’t know it, but lead singer Adam Duritz up there on stage was also living with undiagnosed / improperly diagnosed mental health conditions.
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Starting From Dark Side of the 90’s
My interest in learning more about Duritz’s mental health was piqued after I saw an episode of Dark Side of the 90’s about The Viper Room. The place made headlines when River Phoenix overdosed right outside of it which is much of what the episode is about but it’s a small mention about his own experience that made me curious to learn more about Duritz.
In short, Johnny Depp bought The Viper Room as a place for celebrities to go party and spend time together without the paparazzi (although of course they were always lined up right outside.) He and other actors that were also musicians would play there. Big music names would play there to this small intimate crowd of celebs. The Pussycat Dolls started as a burlesque show there and eventually grew to worldwide fame. They would have elaborate theme nights - Alice in Wonderland with Timothy Leary reading from the book, etc.
Duritz doesn't talk extensively about his mental health in this episode. However, he does mention it, without shying away from it. And he says that he believes that The Viper Room saved his life. It was a place that he could go during his darkest of days as far as his mental health was concerned. And he didn't have to focus on his image or anything else because he was among peers. Where can a celebrity struggling with their mental health go in Hollywood without being bombarded by paparazzi (or today's influencers)? This was a place, and that in and of itself was a much-needed relief.
Duritz also mentions briefly that The Viper Room was a place where he could begin to get creative again. He was well-known for Counting Crows. But sometimes the very problem with gaining success in your job is that you becoming locked into this specific thing, and it becomes challenging to find your way out of the tunnel of that thing back to your own creative truth. Combine that with mental health issues and its a complex situation. The Viper Room was a place where he regained his creativity.
Making music can help heal you. But the scene around the music can be challenging to mental health - substances, pressure, image, nightlife, etc. And that in turn can affect your ability to make music, thus limiting how it heals you. In this instance, Duritz both reiterates that and finds a way out of it. Perhaps the larger world of people eyeing him through the looking glass of fame was creating pressure and stressing his mental health ... but within the safety of a community of other famous people, he became free to be himself and let music resume its healing process.
Which says to me that community can be such a key component in the intersection between mental health and art. If you're just sitting alone in a room with your thoughts and your art ... you might make great art. But oftentimes this loneliness breeds challenges to mental health. (Not always, just thinking out loud here about my own experiences.) And having community to support your art AND your mental health makes a big difference.
Derealization and Dissociation
Taylor Waring of Inlander writes a great article about Duritz’s mental health and creativity referencing Duritz’s initial 2008 disclosure to the public about hisexperiences with dissociation/ derealization. Dissociation, usually but not always caused by trauma, means that you detach from reality in a variety of ways. Derealization is one of those ways; it basically describes feeling like the world isn’t real, like you’re living in a movie. It’s not hard to see, really, how that might happen to a creative in the midst of fame. An example that Waring gives in the article:
“Duritz recounts momentarily choosing to hop on the flight to his next gig instead of booking it back to the states to attend his grandmother's funeral. The reality of the "show" seemed more real than the reality of a loved one's death.”
Waring is referencing what Duritz had said in that 2008 Men’s Health interview. In it, Duritz explains that he was often away from key family events, that he did eventually realize that he needed to get to the funeral, landing there 15 minutes late even though he was a pallbearer. And it was at that funeral that:
“I'd decided that I had completely lost touch with reality—and that I needed help.
This was not depression. This was not workaholism. I have a fairly severe mental illness that makes it hard to do my job—in fact, makes me totally ill suited for my job. I have a form of dissociative disorder that makes the world seem like it's not real, as if things aren't taking place. It's hard to explain, but you feel untethered.
And because nothing seems real, it's hard to connect with the world or the people in it because they're not there. You're not there. That's why I rarely saw my family back then: It's hard to care when everything feels as if it's taking place in your imagination. And if you're distant with people, especially women you're romantically involved with, they eventually leave.
What makes my case even worse is that every night I go out on stage and have this incredible emotional connection between me, the band, and the audience. Then, just like that, it's over. I go backstage, back to the bus, back to my hotel room, and sit there all by myself. That deep connection is yanked away in an instant. It's like breaking up with your girlfriend over and over again, every night.”
This article provides the most comprehensive description I’ve found about what living with the condition is really like for Duritz. He describes the challenging effects that taking medication had on his body, he describes making music while trying to deal with those ramifications, and he poignantly expresses this challenge:
“The thing for me was to make a real mark in life—to matter, to be here, to exist—and dissociation makes you feel like you don't exist. How do you make your mark if you're not even there? If you're invisible?”
Note: The article is great but after it came out, the magazine attributed the writing to Duritz, and he was upset because he wasn’t the writer. “I'm a writer myself, and I don't want credit for something that I didn't write. I was appalled at what they'd done.” - SoundDiego, 2018
The most succinct description I’ve seen Duritz give about what it’s like to live with the condition is this:
“You’re sitting in the back of your head looking out through two holes in your skull. It can often feel like the life in front of you — instead of just being a room in front of you — is a movie of the room being projected on your eyes.” - Inside Hook, 2021
In the most recent article I found about Duritz’s mental health, from earlier this year, he shares some information about his childhood. Described here, it doesn’t sound like it was a childhood of intense trauma that caused some kind of break with reality. Instead, it sounds more like the conditions of his personal mind met the conditions of the world around him … which is often how mental health challenges manifest. He discusses how his family moved around a lot, affording him the opportunity to see a lot of different places but the shadow side of not having connection to any people over a persistent period of time.
“I didn’t have the sense of belonging anywhere.
By the time I got into adulthood, I didn’t really have a sense of myself outside of the here and now. Like, this is where we are, and the future seems very uncertain; the past seems like a blur that has no permanence. And I really think that informs a lot of the ways I relate to people even now. It’s taken a long time in my life to let someone in and stay. It’s really the first time I can think of doing that now, five decades in.”
On Creative Drive …
In an interview with Under the Radar, Duritz explains how making art and music is hard but he’s been driven to do it because it’s not nearly as hard as living with mental health challenges, a condition which makes all other challenges seem to pale in comparison.
“I think getting through that made a lot of other things just not seem as hard. That was horrible and a real fucking handicap. You know, focusing to do other kinds of work during my life has often seemed doable, I think, because that impossible sick thing made some things in life so horrible that—I don’t know, it took such acts of will to climb up from being a vegetable back in those moments that when I found things I really wanted to do, I think I had the will do them. It doesn’t work for everything, but I think it certainly made me want to push in certain areas very, very hard.”
I think this is such an interesting perspective about the complex relationship between art and mental health. So often we hear about the ways in which our challenging symptoms block/ limit/ prevent our ability to create. But here he describes it as two different things - mental health is one and creativity is another and if he can survive his mental health challenges then working on creative things is easy in comparison.
It reminds me a little of my double spectrum idea:
Put a different way, from a Stuff magazine interview:
“Mental illness sucks,” says Duritz now. Music does not fix it, but he’d rather face hard times and play music, than simply face hard times.
“If I have to choose between a day when my mental illness was making me feel terrible, and a day when my mental illness was making me feel terrible, but I wrote a song, I'd take the second one. At least it’s a functional life,” he says.
Over on Medium, Tom Rankin has an interesting essay in which he muses on the question of how Duritz managed to write so many great albums while dealing wth the challenges of living with his condition. Rankin notes that Duritz wasn’t properly diagnosed until age 40 and that five of the bands’ top albums came out of that time. He posits that a combination of stick-to-it-iveness and treatment likely helped and can’t be underestimated but that most likely being able to live the creative life he’s meant to live is really at the heart of it.
“When one is doing what they ought to be doing, meaning the thing they are gifted at and, dare I say, the thing that they are meant to do, they feel less bound by troubling, everyday, earthly things — job stress, financial issues, relationship problems, and seemingly derealization.”
“I don’t know Adam Duritz, but I think it is quite clear that he is gifted at writing songs and making music. And when is engaged in doing it, he is experiencing freedom from the pains and horrors of his day-to-day. He has even said so in interviews over the years.”
On Mental Health Challenges as a Lifelong Condition
Danny Clinch and Corey Levitan interviewed Duritz in 2014 for Men’s Health when the artist was age 50. It’s not my favorite article but it includes a few critical insights.
"It's like the world doesn't seem very real, I don't know," Duritz said. "I really hoped it would go away, or that I would find the right medication so it didn't affect me anymore, or that I would just go to therapy and could think my way around it. But none of that has happened."
The writers incorrectly describe Duritz’s flat affect as depression. They quote him as saying that his mental health has ruined his relationships and left him a lonely person. And then they comment that the upside of the condition is that it allows him to write amazing music … It is this very stereotype of the “tortured artist” and art coming out of suffering that I aim to dispel (it can be true, it’s often not, and there are so many other truths!) and Duritz does the same, responding about his mental illness:
"There's nothing, and I mean nothing, positive about it," Duritz said. "That's, like, a romantic notion. There's nothing about it that's good, as far as I'm concerned."
In fact, the condition has symptoms that make it unusually hard for him to do his creative work at times. In an interview with Mike Hilleary for Inside Hook in 2021, we learn:
“One of the unfortunate artifacts of the dissociation is that Duritz can’t always retain things very well. “I forget how to play piano,” he confesses. “I’ve never become a great piano player at all, and part of that is because I have to teach myself all over again every time I start up again because I cannot play at all. I can’t remember how to do it. There’s no facility there.”
In the interview with Stuff magazine, he expresses that this is a lifelong condition and sometimes it feels like it’s going to be the death of you but if you can wrap your head around the idea that it’s not going to, then you can try to find some way forward. He puts it another way in a 2018 interview iwth Rutger Rosenborg:
"The main thing that changed for me was I had stopped sliding down a hole. I put the brakes on that, but mental illness doesn't ever really go away. As hard as it was, it wasn't killing me unless I let it. I wasn't necessarily doomed -- there's a difference between being doomed and experiencing life as if you are doomed.”
What would life with dissociation be like if it weren’t for music?
Duritz expresses that rather than the illness causing him to make great music, being creative as an artist/musician has allowed him to thrive in spite of the illness.
“It would have been hard to fit into someone’s square peg, or round hole, considering how weird I am. But music gave me a place I could function in relative freedom and be what passes for okay,” he says.
He admits he used to worry about how he would manage to take care of himself in the real world.
“This changed all that.”
This, seemingly, is the success Counting Crows has had. He describes in almost every article how talent and hard work and creativity don’t necessarily lead to success, that success is often independent of that for varied market reasons, and it sounds like despite the challenges that might come with the pressure of fame, he’s grateful for the success. Because it has allowed him to keep creating full time and that’s what makes the difficulty of living with mental health struggles bearable. From the Inside Hook article, Duritz says:
“For me, music has been the central thing of my entire life from me being a small child being obsessed with it, loving it, playing it, seeking refuge in it, comfort from it, solace, joy — all the things that I got out of life I got from music, you know? More than from people, really. And then there came a point in my life where I became music.”
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Thanks for this! I've always loved Duritz' songs. When the first album was released, the first time I heard it in its entirety, felt like church to me. I greatly appreciate your approach to the "suffering artist" trope here. People are driven to create for so many different reasons, and suffering happens in so many different ways and contexts, that it seems ridiculous to me to try to pin either of those rivers to its banks, and dictate how they must influence each other.
Reading Duritz' quotes reminded me of the Beatles' terribly sad, lonely, confused song, "Strawberry Fields Forever", whose chorus is "Nothing is real". I'm glad that music provides a temporary solace for him.