Why Counting Crows Really Count

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 of 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 disk 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 teh 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 neverthelless 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 wierdly 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 coutnry to death? Why aren't they plaing the hit? It's not as if anyone thinks this is going to be a hit, it it? I think I watched the performance all the way through, thinking that by the end othe 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 ever 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 tastes, 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 moement 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, Durtiz 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 tricky 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 its 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?" - one of Duritz's now-I'm-a-star-and-I-hate-it tunes from Recovering the Satellites - appears in this "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-bebe, not just because they're hit makers, not just because their instruments include an accordian and a wah-wah peddle, but because Duritz seems to bleed self-pity from every pore. ("That Counting Crows dork," as one Rolling Stones 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 hasn't 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.

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