Name: How Adam Duritz Ended Up Bartending at the Viper Room
Uploaded: 2021-05-21T17:15:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Adam Duritz Ended Up Bartending at the Viper Room' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Adam Duritz Ended Up Bartending at the Viper Room' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-21. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
There's nothing like that for us, for music. You know, like, he took me there-
Is there a place where you guys hang?
Not really. I mean, there was at one point, you know, I bartended at the Viper
Room for years.
Oh, did you really?
Yeah, well, that's how I ended up moving to LA. I was, uh, I was home. It was
getting really miserable in Berkeley.
I'd been home for about a week from the end of touring. Everywhere I went, it
was an issue. Not,
you know, mostly positive, but still, it's like, you feel like everybody's
looking at you.
There are kids camped out on my lawn. A couple days, a bunch of days in a row,
at least one-
like a hundred people come up to me a day, but one of them was like, "Hey, are
you that guy from County Coors?"
"Yeah." "You're Adam Duritz?" "Yeah." "You guys are so lucky." I'm like, "Thank
you." I mean, because you suck."
And there's so many good bands in the Bay Area, it's wild that a band as shitty
as you would be so successful.
To your face.
Yeah. And I was just like, it happened like four or five days in a row.
I mean, it was dwarfed by the amount of people that were coming up just loving
the band, but still
it was like, it started to feel like, if there's going to be one of these every
day, is one of them
going to have a gun? You know, is like, is this Mark David Chapman? It seems
such a weird obsession
to walk up to a total stranger in the line for a bank, you know, and just say
something like that.
Yeah. Like, and it was so weird. But we got really famous really quickly. And I
was, the only people I
knew in LA really were people at the Viper Room. I'd met a few of them playing
across the street
at the Whiskey on the first tours. And so I was, went home that day. I'd been
home for, I think,
seven days and it happened like six of those seven days. And, uh, I got a phone
call and it was,
it was Sal and Johnny, Sal Jenko, who ran the Viper Room. He's Johnny Depp's
partner. And they called
me up and they're like, Hey, we want to invite you to this party tonight. And I
was like kind of
half in half out. I wasn't really listening. And, and finally they're like,
wait, what's going on,
man? And I told them what was happening and they're like, hang on a second, put
you on hold.
I sat there on the phone and know what was going on. They came back and they
said, okay, it's,
it's Kate Moss's 21st birthday tonight. And we're throwing a party here. The
club's closed.
We're just throwing a party for friends. We want to invite you. We got you a
room at the Bellage and
you have a reservation on the flight at six o'clock, Oakland to Burbank. Just
get on it. Someone will
pick you up at the airport. You've got a room at the Bellage. Get the fuck out
of there. So I like
grabbed my stuff, went to the airport, went to this party at the Viper Room
with just like
interesting people. And I was like, I didn't go home again. That was it. I
moved to LA after that.
It was, uh, I did. I stayed at the Bellage for a few days. I moved to like a
bungalow at the
Sunset Marquis. And then eventually, uh, I rented this house in the Hills. One
of the bartenders,
Shannon McManus at the Viper, her best friend was Christine Applegate. And she
was my landlord.
She rented me this old, like she had this fucking place. It was like a little
cottage in Laurel Canyon.
And it turned out it was built by the cowboy star, Tom Mix in the twenties.
And then it was David Diven's like in town fuck pad. And he named it rogues
retreat when there was a
little sign up there after this TV show he was on called the rogues and like
the sixties.
Uh, and then, I don't know, I think it was the, I don't know what it was after
that,
but she owned it. And I stayed there. I wrote most of our second record in that
place before I bought
a place. But yeah, man, the Viper room for a couple of years there, I, I bartended
all the time
because it was just less crowded on that side of the bar. So I, um, I, my
friends all worked there.
So I was be there anyways, hanging out with them. And after a while,
bartended while you were a rock star? Oh yeah. Huge rock. At the height of it.
Wow. Like, uh, cause I, well, I was back there and I'd be hanging out with
Shannon, smoking a cigarette,
drinking beers behind the bar, you know, in the, in the downstairs bar there,
the little one.
And I don't know, at one point I'd help her out with stuff. And at one point
she's like,
I go to the bathroom. There's nobody else. Will you just, you know, mind the
bar? And I was like,
yeah, sure. So I did it. And I, you know, I had no qualms about berating people
for tips. I'm,
I'm a rock star and they're not my tips. So why not? So I made her, so I made
her like a few
hundred dollars in the like five minutes she was gone. And, uh, she's like, you
gotta do this all
the time. So I just started going there. I mean, that's where I lived anyways.
I was kind of there
every day. The only people I knew. So I just started bartending every night and
it was like my home,
you know, it was like, I felt, it was like the cheers thing. I felt like, okay
there.
It's kind of a cool way to interact with people too, because there is a barrier
and it is less
crowded over there and it's probably kind of fun. Yeah. And you know, you, uh,
talk to them if you
want to, if you don't want to, you got to get a beer for someone else. So, you
know, and there was
just so many people, it was like what I thought like, uh, the left bank would
have been like in
Paris in the twenties. I mean, it was like Allen Ginsberg coming in and William
Burroughs,
the Hughes brothers, all these different filmmakers, you know, musicians, Tom
Petty.
It was just really wild. Gibby Haynes from the butthole surfers. You know,
we're all, all just hanging out there. Wow. And John, it was like Johnny's clubhouse.
And we all,
we had barbecues on sunset on Sundays, you know, and we just sort of, for a few
years,
it was this really cool, like club kind of. Wow. Like a clubhouse. It was very
much like that.
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