August, Track 1: August and Everything After

The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings will be more focused on the songs than others, and this is all vague enough in general that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. We’re finding out. Starting today, with Track 1.

Side A

1. “August and Everything After” – Counting Crows
2. “Untitled (Love Song)” – Counting Crows
3. “Goodnight L.A.” – Counting Crows
4. “Wildest Dreams” – Taylor Swift
5. “Coming Home” – Diddy – Dirty Money, Skylar Grey

Side B

6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale

***

I tried writing about this song last August. I’ve tried writing about it before. Those were left unpublished. It’s an important song in my life, but I’m not sure I fully understand why, and I’m not sure I fully understand the song itself. On that last front, I don’t even understand how much there is to be understood.

A little background information is probably necessary, since this is the song that isn’t going to show up on Apple Music or Spotify. Let’s start with that.

For a long time, this song didn’t exist. It was a “lost song,” a buried treasure kind of thing. People knew of it, but it had never been played live, never been released publicly, never even been finished, as it turned out. Its relics existed—its title was saved and its lyrics were saved, the first going to the debut album for which it was considered and the second going to that album’s cover. But the song was gone, a tossed-aside recording from the studio sessions that yielded August and Everything After, the record, Counting Crows’s entry into the world.

The song didn’t exist for a reason, namely that it, due to fit or quality, didn’t make the cut. Plenty of songs don’t make the cut. But this one was different. The title was out there. The lyrics were out there. Or rather, part of the lyrics were out there. That album cover only has slices of the first verse and a half. But that first verse and a half includes the refrain, and the refrain is the album title, and people love that album, and people love that title. The song came to exist again for a reason. People love treasure maps.

And so it was that after years of late-90’s internet message board speculation, the song stepped out, briefly, into the light. In 2003, the band played it at a show in San Francisco. In 2005, they played it again with composer Vince Mendoza at the Hollywood Bowl. There are recordings of the 2003 version out there on YouTube, bootlegged but now apparently, in at least one case, licensed. I’d assume there are ones from ’05 as well. The lost song, scrappy and unpolished, but now available to be found. If you were to look.

Finally, a little less than three years ago, the song was actually recorded, in an orchestral arrangement by Mendoza as an Amazon Music exclusive. I’ll link to it below. I’ll link to the 2003 bootleg below, too. I’ll link to a Rolling Stone article summing this up right here. One thing from that article, from Duritz, on the title of the song, and of the debut album:

“I was born in August. The record was about everything that happened after that.”

***

Rock bottom, in my experience, can be a comforting place. You need to know you’re there, though.

It was late in July in 2011, or early in August, ten years ago now. Ten years ago right about now. I’d come home from the outdatedly named Around the Clock diner after an awkward evening with friends. Senior year of high school was approaching, I was leaving in the morning for a few days on a pair of college visits out East, and a pursued fling had recently notched its name on a weighty list of adolescent romantic rejections (which had contributed to the awkwardness at the diner). We still lived at the old house, then, the one on Lake Avenue, the one with the fence in front, the one with Santa on the roof at Christmastime and my bedroom on the first floor, where it was easy to stay up late at night in first grade reading Magic Tree House books and late at night in fifth grade reading Calvin and Hobbes books and late at night, by junior year of high school, reading mostly song lyrics and the comment section on songmeanings.net, which got a big makeover recently, and I laugh a little as I say recently because it’s probably been more than half a decade now, and if I’m this nostalgic at 26 what kind of weight awaits me at 55?

Summer had been kind and cruel, as summers tend to be. There was the flutter of the fling. There was implosion on the club baseball circuit. There was summer running for the upcoming cross country season, and it was exalting at times, full of ambition and laughter and the satisfaction of really spending your body on some cause for which you care, but I couldn’t meet the miles because of baseball and I didn’t know how many miles it was reasonable to meet, leaving a sense of underachievement and unpreparedness that was unproductive and probably compulsion, in hindsight. A friend of mine was in a tailspin, and I didn’t really know the extent, and one night I woke up to my phone buzzing loudly three times and falling on the floor, a carpet-deadened thunk punctuating the last vibration, and when I read the texts in the morning they were incoherent, and when I texted my friend I received no response, and when I called my friend I received no response, and this went on until finally that afternoon I rode my bike over there and pounded on his door and he came out and said he’d taken too many sleeping pills, and we were both a good bit shook up, and I went home and he, eventually, rose back to being fine for a while. That was a couple weeks before the night I came home from the diner. He was there at the diner. We had fun at the diner.

I came home from the diner, and I went upstairs and fulfilled my obligations regarding reporting my adherence to the family curfew, and I went downstairs into my room, and I was tired but not ready to sleep. I was tired from the summer, which was now ending. I was tired from the disappointment, which had many fronts—the romantic one; the cross country summer training one; and the baseball one, which had fossilized on a late-night drive back from Bloomington with my mom from the last tournament, the culmination of a hitless summer, the culmination of a summer spent making one and two-inning relief appearances and not blowing anyone away because I wasn’t twelve or thirteen anymore, and I didn’t have the Division-I talent it had once appeared I’d have, and I could throw a good seven-inning ballgame but scouts weren’t taking the time to watch a not-quite-six-foot kid throw not-that-close-to-85 (nor should they have been). It was far from the lowest low of high school. I was excited about the college visits. I had friends, which was still somewhat new. But it was a turning point, and I was crashing, and I knew it. It was rock bottom. For that parabola, anyway.

The path to August and Everything After that night isn’t perfectly clear in memory, but I think I’d intended to listen to it. I think I wanted it to be something of a ritual, and that I’d listened to it or at least read the lyrics for one or two Augusts prior to that one. The line, “In August and everything after, I’m after everything,” felt like a statement of ambition at the time, rather than a statement of late arrival or inconsequence or any other more reasonable interpretation of the text. This might have been what drew me in to the ritual. I think I posted that line as my Facebook status once or twice, as the culmination of the ritual—a ritual in which I wanted to find that low point. I wanted to feel rock bottom. I wanted to touch something firm, to know where bottom was, to plant my foot and push off from it and start swimming upwards again, towards all the fall could hold, towards all senior year could hold, towards all the rest of my life could hold.

Whatever the level of premeditation, I listened to it, and I got that feeling of firmness that I craved. August was underway. I was after everything.

It’s a better poem than a song, probably. I love the song, but I approach the song with almost a decade and a half of relying on its writer’s work for emotional solace and psychological support, and its lost song status puts it in a category where it doesn’t need to be defended. It was once more myth than music. The shroud of myth still cloaks it. It was buried. It was resurrected. It didn’t make the album. It was not made to fit an album.

The song is long. It’s dense. It meanders. It’s full of allusions, like Eliot’s Waste Land but solely of and for and from the Counting Crows catalog, and not just past-looking but future-looking in its references somehow. There are plenty of possible routes for exegesis: Is there one speaker? Four? Is the narrative chronological? Is the end of the second verse a dream? Is the beginning of the third verse a dream? How does Maria’s appearance fit with the rest of her presence in the oeuvre?

The song has a buffet of “rock bottom” sentiments. It begins with a goodbye. It ends with a goodbye, or possibly two, depending how you read it. There’s guilt. There’s regret. There’s lamentation. There’s despair. There’s pain. There’s the feeling of falling short, or having the world fall short at your feet. That’s just the first verse. In the second, you get hope for a savior, and that sense of out-of-placeness within time, and that expression of, “What am I doing?” and that potential riff on fatherhood that doesn’t match Duritz’s own story and is probably more a reference to growing up, or a reference to seeing someone else grow up and become the person they could be while you, yourself, are not that person within your own life. In the third you get sin and defiance and repentance and prayers for absolution but prayers more for an abdication of responsibility, for someone else to just make things ok, since you can’t. And in the fourth, it’s disgust, and then, well, the Dalmatian part.

Last weekend, our air conditioner broke. For the third time in five months, we were without working AC, and this time, it wasn’t just falling short. It was flat-out broke. On the last night of July, we fled.

It had been a hard July. I was reeling already. We’d strung together a few smooth days in a row at the end of it, one of our longest streaks in six months in which everything did not go to hell. That Saturday night, everything went to hell again. In a hot, visceral way.

There are, thankfully, plenty of places we could go, and we ended up at my wife’s old roommate’s apartment, clean and comfortable and, crucially, cool. The puppy, who must have diverged from whatever track we and horses took before she evolved the capacity to sweat, could finally stop the frantic panting. It was a comfortable sort of crisis, relative to the crises of so many, but it was a crisis, nonetheless, and it took three days for our landlords to get someone out to look at the AC, and in the meantime, I waffled between adrenaline-fueled calm and utter internal mayhem.

When you haven’t felt stability for more than a week at a time in six months, well, maybe I shouldn’t say “you.” When I haven’t, it turns out I don’t have much buffer left with which to catch these things. “Hopeless” was the word. Because if it wasn’t the air conditioning, it was going to be something else. Because it has kept being something else for six months now, ever since we, a big we, were caught unprepared for a week of freezing temperatures and snow and ice and so seven hundred people died in Texas and we, a small we, had it so good but “so good” in this case meant waking up every hour and a half to flush every toilet to make sure no pipes had frozen, and my poor in-laws, who’d visited for my wife’s birthday, were stuck with us in this crowded duplex, and grocery lines were an hour long and you had to walk half an hour to get there, because the roads were an ice rink atop inches of thickly packed snow. After that, we got the puppy, and the puppy got sick immediately, spending two nights in the doggy hospital and a couple weeks afterward under house arrest while we bleached the yard every time she took a dump because the vet told us other dogs could die up to a year later if we didn’t. After that, it was the air conditioning again, and the dog getting sick again, and more standard new-puppy stuff, magnified by being the work-from-home one with the “flexible” job, and then the air conditioning another time and the puppy getting sick again and me getting sick and more of the standard new-puppy stuff, magnified by my job displaying that at some point it has to become inflexible or I, for all intents and purposes, lose that job. There were more things, too, then, the interpersonal and intrapersonal wounds of mental tumult. Wounds that multiply, somehow. Firecracker strings of psychological destruction.

On the first night of August, I wanted rock bottom. I wanted that stability. I wanted something from which to push off. I wanted a floor, to know that things weren’t going to immediately get worse. I wanted this song to help me find it. So, again and again through the week that followed, I put the song on. Different versions. Different speakers. I tried playing it and singing it myself a few times. I went for a walk on Tuesday in the early evening, a walk by the river, a walk planned with the help of my therapist because I needed to do something purely for the sake of release, and I thought through every line of the song in my head.

Rock bottom can’t be a comforting place if you don’t know you’re there.

Midway through the fourth verse, the song talks about Dalmatians:

So I’m going to New York City,
‘Cause it got a little sleazy here for me.
And when I find myself alone,
You know I’m never going home.
You make the changes,
The changes that you need.
But I no longer know how to pray.
I live in a dog town and it’s a Dalmatian parade.
I change my spots over and over,
But they never seem to fade away.

I am the last remaining Indian,
Looking for the place where the buffalo roam.
In August and everything after,
Man, them buffalo ain’t never coming home.

Rock bottom, in hindsight, came Monday night, when fury with the landlords boiled over and I needed to leave the still-not-air-conditioned-but-thankfully-cooled-by-unusual-for-the-season-rain house, to storm around the neighborhood, to find something to quell the distress or at the very least to stop it from hurting anybody else. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go. I ended up at this little closed-up old-fashioned grocery a mile away. I’ve never seen it open since moving to this neighborhood right after the pandemic began. But it’s quaint, and it’s cheerful, and it’s given me some rest before to see it.

The Dalmatian part, as I’m calling it, is a sobering accompaniment to rock bottom. You can change things. You can push off from the bottom. But the spots are still there, and you still don’t float. You can’t take away the spots. You can’t get out of the water. There are things that cannot be changed, not really changed, things that can’t be taken away, the biggest one of which is, of course, what’s past. The buffalo aren’t coming home.

I stood in front of the grocery, across the street, for maybe thirty seconds. It wasn’t going to calm me. But I did, in the standing there, at least change some emotional course, flipping from desperate rage to broken sadness, which is at least a safer place to be. I went home. I wanted to hug my dog.

Standing there, tears not coming but I wished they’d come, that buffalo line just rung on through my head. Nothing good was coming back. The buffalo were gone. The spots would remain.

I never got the rock bottom, in the moment, this year. I never got that firmness, that stability. Not all at once. Conveniently, therapy was already scheduled for Tuesday, the morning after the fury walk. Conveniently, the air conditioning repairman didn’t come in the middle of the session. Conveniently, he was able to fix the thing within half an hour, swapping out an old, spent capacitor for a new one (those things are big in air conditioners). Therapy’s up to once a week now. It used to be every other week. The spots aren’t going to fade, but you live with them, right? You deal with them. What other choice do you have?

It’s August again.

The buffalo aren’t coming home.

***

For those of you who didn’t have a terrible summer, hopefully Track 2 on Wednesday’s a little more in touch with your August. Here are the two recordings of this song—the professional one up top, the bootleg from fifteen years earlier underneath.