For Duritz, being in Baltimore isn’t exactly like coming home. Though he was born here — as was his mother, Linda — Duritz’s immediate family moved away when he was 3. As a boy, Duritz came back to Baltimore during the summer to stay with his grandmother. Feldman belonged to a duckpin bowling league, and used to take Duritz bowling often.
“I remember doing it all the time,” he said. “I loved it.”
In the ’70s, Feldman and Duritz would sit up at night watching TV together. Duritz’s second cousin, Royal Parker, hosted the bowling game show “Bowling for Dollars,” which they both loved seeing.
As Duritz grew up and got involved with camp, sports and other summertime activities, he visited Baltimore less and less. But when the Counting Crows first toured through Baltimore in the early ’90s, he made sure the band stopped at local seafood staple Obrycki’s Crab House.
“I told the guys, ‘We’ve got to go to this place,’” he said.
Baltimore doesn’t weigh heavily in Duritz’s music, but it does make one prominent appearance: the song “Raining in Baltimore.” The 10th track on the seminal 1993 album “August and Everything After,” “Raining in Baltimore” name-checks Charm City in one of the first lines: “It’s raining in Baltimore/50 miles east/of where you should be/no one’s around.” Since Duritz moved around so much as a kid, he doesn’t have much of a sense of being from any place in particular — except maybe Berkley, Calif., where he lived for a while growing up.
“When I’m 50 miles east of Baltimore, it’s is like 50 miles east of where I come from, which is blank to me,” Duritz said. “I don’t know where that is. It’s a way of being lost. Somehow, in all these years of traveling around the world, I’ve only managed to be 50 miles east of the place I was born, and I don’t even know what it means to be there.”
Anyway… can’t wait, can’t wait.
