How Adam Duritz Ended Up Bartending at the Viper Room

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 the Viper Room for years. Oh, did you really? Yeah. Well, that's how I ended up moving to LA. 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. 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 Coast? Yeah. You're Adam Dirts? Yeah. You guys are so lucky. 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. It happened like four or five days in a row. I mean, it 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? Is this Mark David Chapman? It seems such a weird obsession to walk up to a total stranger in the line for a bank and just say something like that. Yeah. And it was so weird. But we got really famous really quickly. The only people I knew in LA really were people at the Vyperim. I'd met a few of them playing across the street at the Whiskey on the first tours. And so I went home that day. I'd been home for I think seven days. And it happened like six of those seven days. And I got a phone call and it was Sal and Johnny. Sal Janka who ran the Vyperim. He was 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 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. I'm going to put you on hold. And I sat there on the phone and I know what was going on. They came back and they said, okay, 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 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 Vyprim 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, I did. I stayed at the Bellage for a few days. I moved to like a bungalow at the Sunset Marquis and then eventually I rented this house in the hills. One of the bartenders, Shannon McManus at the Vypr, her best friend was Christine Applegate. And she was my landlord. She ran 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 20s. And then it was David Niven's like in-town fuck pad. And he named it Rogue's Retreat. When there was a little sign up there after this TV show he was on called the Rogues in like the 60s. 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 Vyprim for a couple of years there, I bartended all the time because it was just less crowded on that side of the bar. My friends all worked there, so I would be there anyways hanging out with them. So you bartended while you were a rock star? Oh yeah, huge rock, at the height of it. Wow! Like, because when I was back there and I'd be hanging out with Shannon, smoking a cigarette, drinking beers behind the bar, you know, 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 gotta 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 had no qualms about berating people for tips. I'm a rock star and they're not my tips, so why not? So I made her like a few hundred dollars into like five minutes she was gone. And 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 talk to them if you want to. If you don't want to, you gotta get a beer for someone else. So, you know, and there was just so many people. It was like what I thought, like the Left Bank would have been like in Paris in the 20s. I mean, it was like Allen Ginsberg coming in and William Burroughs, the Hughes brothers, all these different filmmakers, you know, musicians. John Petty, it was just really wild. Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Servers, you know, we were all just hanging out there. Wow. It was like Johnny's Clubhouse and 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. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. 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