The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, August 2nd. It is the third of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On a Grandma, a Saint, and the Names We Carry With Us
***
“Ok, I just want to make sure I know how this fucking thing goes.”
I don’t know what year it was, or what time of year it was. The recording I’m seeing on YouTube was posted in 2011, but I’m fairly confident I found it before then. The note says the guy who posted it found the recording on a CD, and there’s a site that says the band played it live in December 2003—the tenth anniversary of the album’s release—but that ’03 transcription has a lead-in monologue that doesn’t match this particular recording. There’s another site that says it was played both in December of ’03 in San Francisco, and in October of ’05 in Los Angeles. I suppose I probably found the ’03 one first, and I was listening to the ’05 one today. I transcribed the ’05 one into this essay.
I think I found the ’03 one back in 2008 or 2009 or 2010 on the computer in the basement, on one of those days or nights—more nights than days—of listening to music and reading the lyrics and feeling. I was listening to songs from the album and started zooming in on the album cover, noticing the name Maria, and wondering which piece of her this was. When I didn’t recognize the words, I googled them, found out they were the lyrics to a song, and then found this—Duritz singing that song, recorded, live, in some unidentified corner of time and space. My soul rang.
“I’ve only played this song, literally, like three times in my entire life, so…”
The story is this: When Counting Crows recorded August and Everything After, some songs, of course, didn’t make the cut. One was the titular track. It was not on the album. I don’t know if it was even recorded during those sessions, but no studio track of it was available until January 2019, when Amazon Music put it together with the band and a small orchestra. It’s a beautiful version—full and polished. But it’s not quite the same as a YouTube bootleg. A bootleg just fits it better when it’s been hidden this long, and it especially fits when it’s just Adam Duritz, a piano, and an artifact of a song that’s long been seen only through a scrap of its lyrics that ended up on the cover of the album that made its musicians famous.
“They’re waking up Maria ‘cause everybody else has got some place to go.
She makes a little motion with her head, rolls over, and says she’s gonna sleep for a couple minutes more.
I’ve said I’m sorry to Maria for the coldhearted things that I have done.
I’ve said I’m sorry by now, at least once, to just about everyone.
She says, ‘I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to do today,’
and it slips my mind what I’m supposed to say.
We’re getting older and older and older and always a little further out of the way.
You look into her eyes and it’s more than your heart will allow.
In August and everything after, you get a little less than you expected somehow.”
Regardless of which year it was, I found the song at some point in high school. Counting Crows had been my favorite band for a few years by then, almost entirely by chance. I think Michael got me Films About Ghosts for Christmas in fifth grade—my most contemporary CD to date, taking the throne from the Beach Boys greatest hits CD’s I listened to ad nauseum in fourth grade, which in turn had taken the throne from some CD of military marches my family had given me as a gift back in second grade when I was in the phase where I’d put on the wig from Will’s colonial costume (purposed into a Marquis de Lafayette costume for South Elementary’s 2000 biography day) and pretend to fight every battle of the American Revolution I saw listed in the encyclopedia set we had on the basement shelves.
I listened to Films About Ghosts regularly through the remainder of fifth grade. This became ceaseless in sixth grade. It was before the knockoff iHome, so it was a full-on boombox I was carrying back and forth to the bathroom, but every day, I’d listen to some span of the same seventeen songs in an unshuffled loop, occasionally skipping Recovering the Satellites (track eight) or listening to Einstein on the Beach track thirteen) four or five extra times.
Over the next few years, as I started simultaneously getting more into English class and more into song-meanings-dot-net (it’s a dot-com now), I not coincidentally got more into Counting Crows, gradually picking up every album we didn’t have with iTunes gift cards and spending hours reading and re-reading the words, feeling the solemn comfort of music resonating cords of the heart I didn’t know could ring. The dances between hope and hopelessness. The numb acceptance of dissatisfaction. And always, always, the omnipresent Duritz reality of being lonely in a crowd.
“Well I stumbled into Washington Square just as the sun began to rise,
and I laid down on the lawn of the cathedral—right there—in the shadow of St. Mary’s in the sky.
And I’m just one of these late-model children waiting for the King,
yeah, but there—there ain’t no sign of Elvis in San Francisco. It’s just me. And I’m playing this rock and roll thing.
Yeah, she wants to be just like me.
And I want every damn thing I can see.
And one day…you’re Daddy’s little angel, the next day you’re everything he wanted you to be.
They dress you up in white satin and they give you your very own pair of wings.
In August and everything after, I’m after everything.”
*riffs*
So, on that day (or more likely that night) when I found the song, it was more than just a curiosity. It was a Rosetta Stone of sorts, or more aptly an overture to all the music that came afterwards. If I remember right, it was around the time I was realizing Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings made some allusions back to prior albums, like how Come Around seemed to pull Long December and St. Robinson into one tight sentence at the beginning of the second verse. There was some sense of finality in the album, or at least the possibility of it, and as the last track, Come Around felt like an epilogue, seeming to promise that even if things were different (and they have been different these last twelve years), the band would still come by now and then.
This—August and Everything After, the song—was the opposite end of the story. This felt like the prologue—the overture, from 1993, to all that was to come, and with Washington Square and a Hanging Tree both mentioned in the song, it seemed Duritz may have not just alluded to the hits in the ’08 album: He may have alluded to a never-released song he’d only played live twice. As though he was leaving clues.
The song itself was so simple—especially played on just a piano—and so long—over seven minutes of music—that it wasn’t anything to share with someone without a religious fascination with Counting Crows. But for someone with that religious fascination, well.
The song doesn’t contain every theme from every album, but it feels like it, from the disappointment of love in the first verse to the hopeless hope in the second to the battle with success and flaws in the third (see: Mr. Jones, live versions) to that numb acceptance again in the fourth. I wholly doubt this is how it happened, but to my teenage self, the truth seemed to be that Duritz had laid down this map, merely hinted at on the album cover, and then followed it for the next fifteen years.
“Well now, I got my reservations, and I got my seven-million dollar home.
Yeah, and I got—I got the number of some girl in New York City who’s always wide awake, so I never have to spend the night alone.
I got this nasty little habit of peeking down the shirts of all the little girls as they pass me by,
and I wonder—when it all catches up to me, do you think they’ll take me down? Do you think I’m gonna cry?
Yeah, well, I already got my disease.
So take your fucking filthy hands off of me.
Well I hope you weren’t expecting me to be crucified. The best that they can do is just to hang me from the nearest tree.
It’s midnight in San Francisco, and I am waiting here for Jesus on my knees.
In August and everything after, I want somebody else to bleed for me.”
*riffs*
I’m not sure what would have happened between the song and my life had the second verse not ended the way it did, but that line was there, and in August of those years, looking ahead to everything after, it really did feel like I was after everything.
I was in that time of life where people still tell you that you can do anything, and where anything is close enough that you can see what it means. I was also in that time of life where I’d felt a few doses of failure and pain and heartbreak. I knew hopeless hope. I knew numb acceptance. I knew loneliness in a crowd. And so for whatever reason, in what I believe was 2010, on some afternoon in August when summer was ending and school was approaching and there was a moment for one more breath before the time of doing resumed, I sought out the song on YouTube. I listened to it. I read along to every word in the lyrics. It was some kind of prayer, I think. Some kind of rite. Some exercise in acknowledgment, or maybe just resonance in the heart. The summer had come up short. I was disappointed in myself. Now, things were beginning again, and there were state championships to pursue, and battles to be fought, and lovesickness begging for a cure. It was August. Everything After was approaching. And I was after everything.
I’m fairly sure I repeated the ritual in 2011, and again in 2012, and I’d guess yet again in 2013—maybe after the last day at the Public Works job, where we treated the four ponds for algae and I got all sorts of turned around and the familiar looked suddenly foreign. After that, I’m less sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone ran the tape and found I listen to it every August, and that every August I’ve felt it all once more.
“Well I came down from North Dakota ‘cause I had confidence in the military mind.
But now everyone I—everyone I know is turning showgirl and just dancing with their shirt off in some Las Vegas hotel line.
So I’m—I’m going to New York City ‘cause it got a little sleazy here for me,
and when I find myself alone, I know I’m never going home. I make the changes—the changes that I need.
But I no longer know how to pray.
Man, I live in dogtown and it’s a dalmatian parade.
I change my spots—shit.
I change my spots over and over but they never seem to fade away.
Now 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.
I said, in August and everything after, man, them buffalo ain’t never coming home.
*riffs*
I listened to it again today. In the quiet afternoon. And that feeling is still there. It’s August once again, and once again, I’m after everything.
It’s funny, though, I guess, what happens when you turn a song or a book or a movie into a ritual. It means something different each time you pull it out. A different part grabs you. A different part clicks.
This year, it was the buffalo.
Much of the listening was the same. There’s still disappointment, though not quite the kind there used to be—I suppose I’ve gotten some of the everything. There’s still ambition, but it’s more specific and real—and therefore harder, and scarier, and less proud. There’s still repentance, and the pleading kind of hope that accompanies it—the hope that the world is not fair and I will not get what I deserve, but will rather receive my portion of the promised bloody grace and get away with all the shit I’d love to leave behind. But after all three of those—in the last verse, when Duritz is talking about buffalo, there’s an acceptance beyond just the acceptance of present reality. It’s an acceptance of the buffalo. An acceptance that they aren’t coming home.
I could say that there’s something in this about the virus—that the buffalo are the way things used to be, and that we aren’t going back there anytime soon. But that’s not what I mean, and I’m not even sure that’s how I feel about that matter. I think it’s more about the buffalo in my own life. Them and the regret they call to mind—the regret that someone much smarter than me once called “nostalgia for what might have been.” There were buffalo once. They aren’t here anymore. And they ain’t never coming home.
But that’s just this year. That’s just today’s new piece of it.
***
In 2012, I heard new Counting Crows music again. But it was not entirely their own. It was a cover, the lead track of Underwater Sunshine, an album of covers, coming through my radio from XRT as I drove up Dole towards Route 14.
In 2014, in the library off at school, I watched the little movie for Palisades Park and got ready for Somewhere Under Wonderland—another new album, but one the pieces of which I was later told, by way of podcast, didn’t come from Duritz directly in those perfect one-sitting bursts, instead coming together through more collaboration and experimentation. Wonderful, but not the same as those first five LP’s.
I do wonder if Come Around was the end of those bursts for Duritz. If Come Around was the last song. And I wonder if August and Everything After was the first song. The first of so many. For me, I suppose, it is. Everything since ’08, then, just being a beautiful afterword.
For Duritz? Who knows. Artists have their own meanings. We don’t decide for them. They don’t always decide for us.
Whatever it is for him, God willing, it’s something good. God willing, he’s gotten his everything.
It’s August again. Perhaps this year, I’ll get mine.
***
Next week’s essay: On Lying on Your Back and Looking at the Sky
