A quick explanation:
The idea here is to make a compilation album charting the course of a particular month—September, in this case. Part of the idea is having a good arc to it—this is why it’s an album and not a playlist; there’s a Side A and a Side B—and part of it is trying to capture the different emotions of a month in music. The biggest part, though, is that songs are a good jumping off place for writing about things that aren’t songs, at least for me. Consider this the on-site creative writing gym for The Barking Crow.
This month’s tracklist is as follows, and if you use Spotify, you can listen to it in playlist form here.
Side A
1. “Shotgun” – George Ezra
2. “Goodmorning” – Bleachers
3. “Fluorescent Adolescent” – Arctic Monkeys
4. “Sweet Pea” – Amos Lee
5. “Rain King” – Counting Crows
6. “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” – Bruce Springsteen
Side B
7. “All the Debts I Owe” – Caamp
8. “Lovers in Japan – Osaka Sun Mix” – Coldplay
9. “I Got You, Honey” – Ocie Elliott
10. “Tyson vs. Douglas” – The Killers
11. “Mt. Joy” – Mt. Joy
12. “Parachute” – Guster
Now. Track 6:
***
It was like the first raindrops of a hurricane.
I’d dropped a passenger off at a bike shop, having picked him up on the sidewalk with a flat tire. While I was standing there, flipping the seats up again in the back, an SUV pulled up. The old silver color. Not the crisp, new silver. The old one. A little glossier. Tired. The driver had a thick, gruff voice. It came from a booming smile. His family had gotten turned around (we were deep on the East Side) and needed help finding their way to a hotel downtown. He wore a purple t-shirt. It was Thursday. Sometime between afternoon and evening.
I think part of our national fascination with football stems from the arc of a game. The rise. The fall. The rally. That sensation that something’s building. The anticipation before a crucial snap. The wholeheartedness the game affords. In three or four quick hours, you can live a complete emotional journey. A rout? Exaltation, embodied. A rout, the other way? The sinking, and the acceptance of demise. But in so many games, something compelling happens. I think of a state playoff game at my high school back on Halloween in 2008. Our guys went down two scores in the closing minutes. The stands began to filter out. Our guys took the kick back for a touchdown, setting up an onside attempt. The stands filled the hell back up.
With college football, the whole experience is more existential. Especially for a big game. There’s the tribalism. There’s the pressure of a sport that affords you just one loss a season, and perhaps not even that. There are giants to be slayed. There are urchins to slay them.
LSU’s trip to Austin in September of 2019 was unlike anything I have ever seen and perhaps anything I will ever see. I’d been in Austin for Notre Dame’s visit in 2016. I’d been in South Bend for many a game with playoff stakes. I attended a BCS National Championship once, and a College Football Playoff semifinal once, and I was in Ann Arbor the night the ball bounced off Jaylon Smith’s hands and they played The Chicken Dance. I experienced Enter Sandman in Blacksburg in 2018. Nothing compared to what LSU did to the city of Austin.
Austin is big enough that the University of Texas is always a subplot. Sometimes—graduation weekend, a big football weekend—it surges into the city, but even then, it’s diluted. And to be sure, that weekend there was dilution. An hour of my Friday night was spent not concerned with Texas or LSU in the slightest, but instead on the phone with police after encountering a concerning rideshare customer. I didn’t set out to make money again the next day until near gametime. There were things to be done. Life went on in a way it doesn’t in other college towns. But every hour or so, every little bit there or here, the spectacle roped you back in. It was inescapable. LSU was around.
Late Thursday night, I drove a pack of them home from their bar to their hotel. It was a short drive. They stuffed four people into the backseat, and rather than subduing themselves, rather than calling no attention to the situation, they rolled down the windows to heckle every face we passed. On Friday, I drove a smaller platoon to dinner. Three young men. Nervous. Nervously laughing. Making uncomfortable jokes. Making uncomfortable jokes about having made uncomfortable jokes. Saturday night, long after the game had finished, it was a regiment from a Baton Rouge sorority, heading from West Campus to a parent’s house to freshen up before leaving again to float through fraternities. They were everywhere, and Texas fans were too, but LSU fans were particularly everywhere. Sand after the beach.
A significant element of college football is the possibility of being good. Few programs know they’re good. Even those sometimes have cause to doubt. Look at Ohio State right now. Look at Clemson. Backs against walls. More programs think they might be good. Being a Notre Dame person, I’m of course intimately familiar with this phenomenon. Living in Austin, I’ve learned it is not unique at all. Looking at USC this week, I’m reminded anew it is not unique at all. Texas was coming off the Sugar Bowl victory over Georgia, where Sam Ehlinger infamously cried, “we’re baaaaack,” from the stage after the game. LSU was coming off of stamping out UCF’s rebellion in the Peach Bowl, and was newly led by an Ohio State castoff with a somehow gaunt baby face. Each had played and comfortably won a tune-up game the week before. Each was ranked in the top ten. There was a possibility neither would turn out to be much good. But there was a possibility they might be good. There was a possibility, one that ended up true for one of the teams, that they might be great.
The end of the first side on an album is the best place for an epic. It’s Side A, so by definition, the song’s not a B-side. It’s a finale, but it goes into an intermission of sorts, so closure isn’t necessary and doesn’t have to hamper the dramatic effort. The paragon here, probably, is a showstopping number at the end of the first act of a musical. Ironically, Rosalita doesn’t fit this role on its own album. It’s buried in the middle of the back. It was never released as a single. But you can’t hold back a song like this.
One of the things I’m most impressed with, thinking strategically about Rosalita, is that the song never gets old. The thing goes on for seven minutes, doesn’t have a shitload of bridges or anything, and nonetheless never gets old. There’s a wholeheartedness within it. A tenacity with which Springsteen attacks that third verse.
There was a similar tenacity that night in the way Craig Way said “Nnnnnacogdoches, TEXAS” while introducing the LSU and Texas starting lineups on the radio. There was an electricity to it. There was an electricity to everything that night.
One of my many favorite things about Austin is that you can see into the stadium from the interstate. Driving north, especially, you have this great view out your driver’s side window of the colonnade beneath the lights and the stands beneath the colonnade, that evening rolling and rollicking like the most vicious of seas. Purple and white-flecked orange. Purple and white-flecked burnt orange. Again and again, like Springsteen coming back to the chorus, I drove past the stadium that night. Again and again, the radio hummed me context to the roars and groans from inside. Again and again, as the sun’s departure sent us into the glorious late-summer-Texas gloaming, the stadium drew me back to it, through the chance of a Silicon Valley algorithm or the hand of soulful orbit. There was a war going on inside that stadium. Something supernatural in nature.
Sam Ehlinger, you should understand, was something of a Solomon here in Texas to Colt McCoy’s David. He was perfect and imperfect, but in a different way from his cultural ancestor. A hometown kid, pedigreed but lacking some of the physical gifts, tragedy always surrounding him even then, even his junior year, even years after his father’s untimely death and years before his brother’s untimely death. If you were casting a Texas quarterback in a Disney movie, it’d be McCoy. If you were casting a Texas quarterback in a novel, it would be Sam Ehlinger.
He was tough. He was so damn tough behind those cheeks. And in the first half, he and the Horns gave that toughness to what turned out, months later, to be the meanest, most capable team in the country. Ehlinger and the Longhorns were a battering ram against the most fortified of doors.
There were two goal line stands, early. LSU had driven down the field after a Texas punt, but the Tigers had to settle for a field goal. Texas drove down the field themselves, got inside the 3-yard line, and got stuffed. Three plays later, they picked off Joe Burrow. For four straight plays after that, they got stuffed again, Sam Ehlinger ending up on his back with LSU pinned inside its own five and the score still somehow just 3-0. Nine plays in a row inside the most crowded of places in sport. No points.
Texas actually took the lead, then, a trade of possessions later. Texas broke through, and given they’d missed the opportunities, it looked like perhaps they were the better team. It looked like perhaps they were, as Ehlinger had said, back.
It was not to be.
By halftime, it was 20-7 LSU.
It was around halftime that I got put on a ride that took me down to New Braunfels. I’d driven two sons and their father to the Salty Sow, there a few blocks from campus across the highway. The next ride was two drunk Longhorn alumnae. Old college girlfriends. They’d been at Haymaker. One lived in Houston and was staying at the New Braunfels one’s apartment. They were probably in their thirties. The New Braunfels one was sad and single. She said, from the dark back seat, that I looked like I might be cute. I told her I was engaged.
As we left Austin and entered billboard country, insects swarming above each advertisement-illuminating white light, the radio started fading. It warped in and out, and scan as I could, I couldn’t find the San Marcos affiliate. I was left feeding off brief grasps of Way’s voice.
I’d been questioning, on and off that week, who I wanted to win the game. I was still rather new to Austin—I hadn’t been there a full year—and my wife was a University of Texas grad student, but when she said “Hook ‘em!” it was often with a giggle. LSU was so likable. LSU was such a party. I knew LSU wanted it. But hell. Texas wanted it too. And probably no one wanted it more than Sam Ehlinger.
The game turned nasty. The war was on. Texas had forced an LSU three-and-out to start the second half, but from there, it was touchdowns back and forth save one field goal apiece. LSU held the lead, and each time after they scored, it was a two-score lead. Until Texas scored. Then, it was a one-score lead again. Each time Texas scored, the Longhorns became just one stop away. They just couldn’t break serve.
LSU players started cramping. LSU players started cramping late in Texas drives. It didn’t matter, really. Texas kept scoring. But the game had transitioned from sport to war. Human bodies and human brains in the stands of a 100-degree Texas night were coming down from a day of drinking. They were swimming into an ocean of adrenaline. There were cramps. There were delays. There was rage from the masses.
I took a leak behind an HEB in New Braunfels and got myself back to 35, where the radio quickly regained some clarity as I raced up the left lane. Texas was driving. Texas was pulling within a score. LSU was striking back. Again, and again, and again.
Often, when listening to Rosalita, I get emotional at the end of the bridge. It’s that exaltation, I guess, that accompanies the shout about the record company. There’s such a triumph to that moment. The protagonist has done it. He’s made it. He’s won. And all that’s left is the celebrating. I jump around, often, listening to it alone in my apartment. I envision that breakthrough. I envision hanging up on that call from the record company, or the publisher, or the advertiser, or some other Sam Wainwright resourced liberator.
That was not to be the case for Texas that evening. But Lord oh Lord, did they come close.
With the clock under three minutes and LSU leading by six points, Brandon Jones tackled Joe Burrow in the backfield on the LSU 39-yard line, setting up a third down play with seventeen yards to get. Tom Herman took a timeout. The ball was snapped.
Texas brought six, and the six did their job. The pocket collapsed, with an additional safety stepping up as the running back stayed in to protect. Burrow was forced to throw fast. Burrow was forced to throw with his shoulders turned ninety degrees. Burrow was forced to throw leaping, being tackled, ball wobbling its way over those twenty yards to its target.
Justin Jefferson caught it.
Justin Jefferson turned upfield.
Justin Jefferson ran into the endzone.
The Longhorns did score again, and scored with time left to attempt an onside kick. But LSU corralled it. And I, having declined rides that would’ve pulled me into the Square in San Marcos but having picked up a couple at a highway-exit hotel in Buda, clicked the radio off as I dropped them somewhere down by Manchaca while the demand map on my app exploded with LSU fans trying to get to Dirty Sixth.
The night ended in the P. Terry’s drive-through. Or it almost did. The line was long and stationary, and the laughing, well-liquored grad student in the back who kept calling me “Mr. Lyft Driver” and her laughing, chagrined, sober friend told me to take them to that Baker Street bar further on South Lamar instead. Bar close was soon upon the city, and I didn’t know what bar close might mean for my floormats, so I logged off and took quiet, empty roads home. LSU people reveled. Texas people reveled right there with them. But it was a loser’s revelry. It was a revelry in the wilderness.
Winners use the door.
