Adam Duritz reveals he still has “acid flashbacks” after spending a year hallucinating
Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz has opened up about his mental health in a new interview and has revealed he still has “acid flashbacks” from his drug misuse over four decades ago.
Talking to Rolling Stone, the singer first detailed how he consumed lots of drugs as a kid, while also having “a pretty severe mental illness.” He confessed: “At a certain point did not mix well with drugs. And it was horrifying. Like, really scary dissociation, mixed with hallucinations, is not good.”
As a result, Duritz spent “a year between the age of 21 and 22 in a halfway hallucinatory state, feeling like I was on acid without taking acid.” Because of this, he had to stop taking drugs, as they all resulted in this extreme dissociation.
He did note a positive spin on this, as he considers himself “saved” from the inevitability of rockstar hedonism, where he could consume whatever substance he wanted. He pointed to Kurt Cobain as an example, who “just seemed like a really sweet guy.”
Duritz finally detailed how he still experiences the effects of his addiction, four decades later. The 60-year-old continued: “This dissociation and the acid flashback thing. It still happens a lot of the time. I’m used to it now to the point where I can breathe through it, but it was really scary. You don’t want to be on a drug for a year — not acid, not for a year.”
Counting Crows have just released their latest album, Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!. Far Out said of the record: “Distant yet insistently garish, this unfortunate throwback of an album lands in an awkward no-man’s land of not being retro but being a million miles from fresh.”
He continued: “So, sadly, unless you’re swept up in the nostalgia that a band like Counting Crows can offer, you’ll be cringing at the dated dolefulness of an album whose most interesting facet is how sometimes you can’t quite put your finger on what’s going wrong.”
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