Adam Duritz talks about Counting Crows' 25th anniversary, writing a memoir, the Golden State Warriors and more

As a Golden State Warriors diehard, Adam Duritz isn't too worried about LeBron James signing with the Lakers.

"The reason the Warriors are a super, super team is because they're not a superteam," the Counting Crows singer said by phone recently on a day off tour in Austin, Texas. "The culture there is so different from anything. You read it in the press, about this complaint and that complaint from people on every other team. You don't hear any of that with the Warriors. It's really wild to watch. As someone who's stayed in the same band for 25 years, I appreciate the value of staying when there's other offers out there."

You read that right: Counting Crows have been a band for a quarter century. Longer than that, actually, but this is the 25th anniversary of their multiplatinum debut album August and Everything After, featuring the hits Mr. Jones and Round Here.

The silver anniversary tour offers a nice opportunity for Duritz to look back on his career. He's long been a fairly open book about his life, from his music to his history of dating stars like Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox and Winona Ryder. This year he and music journalist James Campion started a podcast, Underwater Sunshine, giving him even more of a platform to gab.

Before Counting Crows play Al Lang Stadium on Tuesday, Duritz talked about writing a memoir, mixing up setlists and the bucket-list concerts he never got to see.

Would you ever write a memoir? Do you think you'd ever be able to be honest and truthful about your life in a book?

Eh. Rock 'n' roll is about mythmaking, in a way. I don't think it's necessary to be totally honest about everything all the time. You make the myth you want to make. One of the reasons I've hesitated about doing (a book) in the past is that some of the band stuff is private, and I'm not interested in exposing that. In songwriting and everything else, you share what you want to share. I don't think it's necessary to do a tell-all. Some people want all the hits every night, and we don't do that either. What you can depend on us for, always, is to be passionate and committed in what we're doing.

Why not do a tour of August and Everything After?

I don't really care about the record that way. I'm not going out and playing the same thing every night, and definitely not that record. It is kind of a career retrospective tour. It's about all the different stuff we've done throughout our careers, which I'm really, really proud of. Not so much that that album came out 25 years ago, but that we've been doing this 25 years, and all we've accomplished in 25 years.

When you played here in '94, you had to postpone the show due to a vocal issue. Apparently, there was a rumor that you postponed the show so you could go see Pink Floyd that night in Tampa instead. Do you remember that?

No. But I've never seen Pink Floyd.

So that's debunked?

Well, look: There's no way anybody in any band would ever postpone a gig to go see a concert. If you don't show up for a gig, you can ruin a town for yourself forever. It's one of 50 gigs you play that summer, but for those people, it's the only time they're going to see you. To cancel or postpone a gig where people show up and don't get the message, you can end your relationship with fans. You cannot afford to do things like that. I would love to have seen Pink Floyd, but then again, they wouldn't have been Pink Floyd by then, anyway.

You mentioned on the podcast that you never got to see Prince live. What other regrets do you have about not seeing somebody in concert?

Well, that's the big one. But a lot of the people I really wanted to see, I saw. I saw the Grateful Dead with Jerry Garcia a bunch of times. I saw the Jackson 5; that was my first concert when I was a kid. I saw Roxy Music. I didn't see Bowie. But I played gigs with the Stones and the Who, so that's cool. I'm not sure who I missed. I haven't missed a lot.

Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.