The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Why Counting Crows Really Count
November 1998
There's a startling, explosive feeling you get when you hear a band at the very moment that it finds everything one of its songs has to give. Right there, the three or four or six of them know this song as well as they ever will. Their familiarity with the material turns the song into a map both the musicians and the audience can read with their feet as they walk across it, finally ready to discover all the secrets of the territory they thought they'd already used up. This is what I hear all over Counting Crows' third album, Across a Wire: Live in New York City (Geffen)—one disc cut in a studio with an audience for the VH1 Storytellers show, a second taped at Hammerstein Ballroom with a crowd that sometimes seems ready to come right out of its skin—and I hear it most in the two performances of "Round Here."
The original version of this long, slow, lugubrious song has been on the radio since 1994, when following Counting Crows' breakthrough "Mr. Jones" it sneaked onto the air (never released as a single, it nevertheless remains a true hit). I've never forgotten when I first heard it, or anyway noticed it. It had gone right past me when I played August and Everything After, the band's debut album: All I heard was "Mr. Jones," that jumping beat, the funny we're-all-bozos-on-this-bus-but-we-want-to-be-big-stars lyrics. I liked hearing that in the car, not imagining that for the next five years its first chord would shoot my hand to pump up the volume as if something in the song had wired me to the dial. As a "Mr. Jones" fan I thus turned on David Letterman to see the band. Singer Adam Duritz began "Round Here," this weirdly proud, self-pitying, miserablist tale, and the fan in me that wanted to be pleased turned into the market analyst our present-day media have trained all fans to be. I can't believe this, I thought. They're coming onto national television for the first time and they're going to bore the country to death? Why aren't they playing the hit? It's not as if anyone thinks this is going to be a hit, is it? I think I watched the performance all the way though, thinking that by the end the song might speed up or something.
The first two or three dozen times I heard "Round Here" on the radio—often confusing it, later, with "A Long December," which is even slower and more lugubrious, and often turning it off—I still heard it with the same sense of baffled wonder. What is this doing on the radio? But then I began to notice that I wasn't turning it off—or "A Long December" either. I couldn't figure out why; by any measure of my own taste, these were ridiculous songs.
It could be that Duritz and the band can now look back from a greater distance at the lumpy failed suburban bohemian life "Round Here" describes; it could be that they now hear it as one of the magic carpets that's given them such a great ride. Regardless, Duritz steps into the first "Round Here" on Across a Wire as if he's reading from a novel both he and his audience were forced to memorize in their second year of high school: this corny Dickens book, or maybe it was by Maya Angelou, that they all finally had to admit broke their hearts. It's just Duritz and guitarist David Bryson, strumming an acoustic. When Duritz goes as high into his register as he can, you want to reach into the record and shake him, but he knows what he's doing. Every seemingly excessive moment sets up another where Bryson will pick a small folk pattern, bringing the song all the way down to earth, where the very idea of turning your life into a song is as necessary as it is pretentious. Pulling the chorus down, out of the air or off the airwaves, Duritz puts a burr into the title words, letting them unwind as if watching them go—for an instant, he sounds like a mountain singer from North Carolina, then again like a guy whose father is a doctor in Berkeley, then like a guy who got out of town.
Maybe Duritz can now lose himself so completely in the song, can sound so free as he moves through its trick streets—its commonplace situations that are nevertheless matters of life and death situations that will give life to some and take it from others—because he knows now that nothing in it has to be explained, if it ever did. So he will talk to the song, as he does all over Across a Wire as if a tune written and performed to give up answers about life and to be a hit really could talk back to him, not merely he through it.
At the Hammerstein, "Round Here" is an epic, a rave-up. It expands from it first notes, until within seconds it can contain other songs, and does. "I was out on the radio… somewhere out in America," from "Have You Seen Me Lately?"—or of Duritz's now-I'm-a-star-and-I-hate-it tunes from Recovering the Satellites—appears in this "Round Here": The lines seem to cross-examine the naive narrator of "Round Here" as he wonders how it is he ever got from around there, where nobody was looking no matter what you did, to out here in the middle of everywhere, where everything you do is public and exposed.
Across a Wire, which I like better than any other record released this year, will get no respect from critics. Counting Crows are loathed by writers—not just because they're a white-boy band that sounds like Van Morrison or the Band, that apparently wouldn't know avant-garde from garde-bébé, not just because they're hit-makers, not just because the instruments include an accordion and a wah-wah pedal, but because Duritz seems to bleed self-pity from every pore. ("That Counting Crows dork," one Rolling Stone writer put it, knowing he wouldn’t have to justify such a dismissal.) But the thing about Duritz that's so interesting is that he has actually made a career out of self-pity, hasn't aestheticized it or polished it until it gleams like the most expensive fake pearl, as with Lucinda Williams on her hilariously overpraised Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, where suffering is just another form of preening. Duritz actually has the ability to sound truly lost, and as scared that you might hear him as he is that you might not.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, November 1998
On point with Duritz; misery is a brand. “Overpraised Car Wheels” almost as funny as your Idiot Wind tornado analogy. Bravo.
Worse take: Counting Crows over Lucinda Williams or Ugly Kid Joe over Nirvana?
Actually, I'd admire the bravery tacking against the contemporary critical consensus. Still, these particular comparisons seem over-the-top funny in retrospect.