Considering the $42 ticket price, a sterile and unintimate concert venue and Coke commercials, the Counting Crows' current tour will prove to be a pivotal moment for the band. It can decide to either sell out into the extreme mainstream full of groupie fans and corporate endorsements or remain in the less popular realm that its fans love it for.
The band will perform Tuesday Oct. 22, at the Kohl Center, in support of their fourth CD, Hard Candy.
It was disappointing for a band that usually hawks underground environmental causes to take a spot in a cheesy Coca-Cola commercial in which a beach goer opens a Coke bottle and magically the Counting Crows appear.
\I sat around the beach surrounded by bikini-clad women' that's why I did it,""guitarist David Immergluck said in an interview with The Daily Cardinal.
Another unsettling move on the band's part was when it performed during the All-Star game in Milwaukee this summer to a crowd whose knowledge of the band probably did not extend past Courteney Cox's appearance in the video for ""A Long December.""
But despite a string of pop-culture decisions, the new album proves the band has not completely sold out. Characteristic of lead singer Adam Duritz, who authored or co-authored every track of the album, the poetic lyrics combine with a wide range of instrumentals to create gorgeous sounds. The band recorded the album in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills'they always record in a rented home since they bought a studio's worth of recording gear after the first album. The atmosphere that would be expected in a house in that location'romantic and haunting' recurs throughout Hard Candy.
The album keeps from being too dark by including songs about phone sex and booty calls and other reflections of Duritz's love life and relationship issues.
The album's musical influences include Elvis Costello-inspired trumpet solos and funk music from the early '70s.
""Butterfly In Reverse,"" a song more reminiscent of a music box than anything else, was a joint effort between Duritz and Ryan Adams. Duritz reportedly began writing the song about a friend, Mary Louis, who he refers to as ""Marianne."" Struggling with the lyrics for the song, Duritz said he was hanging out with Adams and bouncing lyrics off of him when a misunderstanding actually served as the push to finish off the song.
According to Internet reflections, Duritz said a line of the song ""Had a lot of girlfriends, I should've known then"" to which Ryan responded that he loved it, even though he thought Duritz had said ""Had a lot of girlfriends, I should have known them."" After that, the rest of the song supposedly took 15 minutes to write. The title is one of Ryan's lyrics, ""butterfly in reverse again,"" a lyric that he had not yet found a way to incorporate.
Even though the song has received more negative feedback from fans than any other song on the album, its airiness and speed are necessary to counter the more somber songs.
The Duritz-Adams duo is also present on Adams' record and Immergluck said an Australian and Japanese tour with Adams is a possibility.
So go and decide for yourself whether the band is selling out. Their self-marketing choices have not been the best, but the sound is the same with improvements. Just hope your seat is close enough to hear Duritz, because he declined comment due to a sore voice for the past two weeks.
