ONE of the more recent dramatic rock concert incidents was four years ago when Adam Duritz ripped his knee apart on stage. On Dec. 2, 1996, the opening night of the Counting Crows’ four-night stand at the Beacon Theater, he was singing “Angel of the Silences,” standing atop the baby grand piano.

Duritz was hunched over, passionately wailing into the mike, his face covered by his dreadlocks. Toward the song’s climax, he leaped off the piano and came to a painful crash landing.

“[When] I landed, my whole weight went straight down to my knee and below the knee my leg bent 45 degrees to the right,” Duritz recalls. “And there was this snapping sound that was so loud, the band started looking around to find where it came from.”

Duritz lay crumpled at the foot of the piano. The hall was silent, until a murmur of disbelief sounded.

The pop, as it turns out, was the sound of his cartilage and ligaments snapping.

“As I lay there, I thought, ‘My knee is broken.’ I was in shock.” But having postponed the series start the night before, because of a cold, he felt he had to do the rest of the concert.

A couple of burly roadies carried Duritz off stage and 15 minutes later, he hobbled back on stage – with their help and a heavily taped knee – and performed the full concert from a stool center stage.

“I should have canceled the rest of the show, but I was singing all right, so I went on,” he recalls. “After the show, I went to the emergency room and found out my knee was gone.”

Now full of plastic, his knee has “never fully recovered,” Duritz says.