This is another Indianapolis story.
I mentioned this yesterday, but it bears repeating today. Julie asked me after reading that post if me and my friends (and his brother) didn’t also meet Iggy Pop, which is a version of the story I foggily remember and have told before. I’m honestly not sure; time has bent my sense of it. I have met Iggy Pop and had an extended conversation, as another music friend of mine introduced me to him (under the premise that I was part of the band) and we hung out for a bit. I was starstruck, just like I was when a different friend of mine walked me into a room and said “Phill, this is Michael. Michael, this is my friend Phill,” and shoved me in the direction of Michael Stipe. But I don’t remember if we also met Iggy trolling the bad Indy poetry scene or if the memories of meeting him and of meeting his brother blended together. It all happened in a weird time in my life where I was going to a number of concerts and running on fascinatingly low levels of sleep. In fact a friend and I did a research project WHILE all this was happening. I stayed awake for almost 95 hours straight (not quite 4 days). On the third day my personality started to change. By the middle of the third day, my perception of reality went haywire and I was seeing things.
No, I didn’t take any drugs. And no, I didn’t drink. I’m into research going well. I didn’t want to mess up the data. Also, I was all CM Punk about that stuff back then.
But I want to share an earlier memory this time. When I first learned to drive, my mother was worried but was always trusting. The day I got my license I went out alone to the record store. That day, my friend who worked at the record store, the bassist in a local band, a college DJ, and arguably the coolest guy I knew, handed me a CD he’d been playing (he did this frequently; I’m not sure if he was supposed to give me or my friends the CDs they played in-house or if he just did it, but this was a semi-regular thing that started with this specific CD and would go on for years). The CD was August and Everything After by Counting Crows. I put it on when I got in the car (instead of the CD I’d purchased that day, which was an old Elvis Costello disc), and went for a drive in the country.
When Mr. Jones came on, I was so struck by the middle of the song that I had to pull the car over. I wept for a bit. And from that moment on I’ve always had a special bond with Counting Crows.
Several months later, Counting Crows played in Indianapolis. This was the pre-internet era, so you can imagine how difficult it was to get information on bands back then. I mean there was AOL if you could afford the hourly charge, but not the sort of rich music scene that would start to form just a few years later. I took two of my friends to the show (first concert I drove to). It was in a really horrible venue in Indy called the Eastwood Theatre, a movie cineplex they’d torn the chairs out of that was standing room only general admit.
We were standing outside the door in line, and my two friends were obsessed with this girl they were trying to get to talk to them.I was hanging back, like you do. If you’re a frequent visitor, these were the same two friends from the Peer Helper camp story (different girl, though). As I was walking the general admin line, I saw a guy who looked oddly familiar. He had a stocking cap on, but other than the lack of his trademark hair, it looked like Adam Duritz. I walked over and said hello.
We chatted for well over a half-an-hour, mostly about the things I guess you’d expect to talk to the lead singer of a band that was just making it big to talk about: did I like the album, which tracks were my favorite, who were cool local bands, are there good after-hours spots, etc. It was a nice conversation. I wasn’t absolutely certain he was who I thought he was: Adam is– or at least was then– very coy.
The promoter came out to open the doors for people to come in, telling us the opener would be on soon. My two friends walked back over to me. One of them asked “who was that dude?” I said “I think that’s Adam Duritz, the vocalist from Counting Crows.” He was still in earshot. My friend said “yeah, right, he was just out here talking to you before his own concert.” Adam took off his hat and shook his hair out as he walked through the door.
The show was amazing. They played all their hits (since they had one album, that’s not hard) and a few songs that would show up on other albums. They played one of their demo tracks, a song called “Shallow Days,” and they performed an amazing cover of “Aimee” by Pure Prairie League. It was a great set.
But the Eastwood sucked and was held together by duct tape and broken dreams, and it was raining outside by the time Counting Crows took the stage. At one point, the power went out. Adam sat down on the edge of the security barricade in front of the stage. In the dim emergency floods he saw me (I was, at the time, someone who stood in the front of concerts drifting in and out of mosh pits and chatting up security, something I realize people who know me now probably can’t really fathom was my style then). He called out, “Hey, Phill, come over here and sing with me.” We sat there and led the front few rows in rounds of “Oh, Susanna” while the various staff members attended to the power. When the show was almost over, Adam dedicated “Mr. Jones” to me, I assume because he remembered me telling him the story I told above outside the show a few hours before.
I want to say “and the next time we saw them, Adam remembered me,” but the next time I saw them, they were huge stars. I couldn’t even get close enough to find out that he didn’t remember me. And I doubt he did. How many rock stars remember chatting with a 16-year-old at one show in a year of shows at crappy standing room only venues? It was an amazing moment for me, though, because, like later when I’d meet Michael Stipe or the day that no one went to the third stage at Lollapalooza and Ben Folds let me sit under his piano and talked to me between songs because I was the only crowd to banter with, I had a chance to connect for a moment with someone whose music meant a great deal to me.
I also had a second awesome coincidence that day. There was this guy at my high school who was always an ass to me. He was a bit of a jerk, and he once threw a basketball pass at me too hard (which hit my nose) and caused me to have a massive nosebleed, so he claimed to have “kicked my ass.” He was a huge Counting Crows fan, too. He wrote “rain king” all over his notebook the way teenage girls in the early 90s wrote their first name and the last name of their crushes. He was at that show, and got to see me, sitting on the security barricade right next to his hero, got to hear the band he idolized dedicate their biggest (at the time only) hit to me.
So that was a fun night. And that one, unlike the murky Iggy Pop Siblings event is still a memory I can see like it was yesterday. I still even have the t-shirt from the show, which had a little pocket watch on it and said “A boy who looks like Elvis,” a line from “Round Here,” a song that at that time not everyone knew, a song I bet most of my readers here don’t know anymore. I loved it, though.