all a lot of oysters
the (not-quite) success of counting crows

Toward the end of August and Everything After, the somber recording that propelled them to stardom, Counting Crows describes the act that gives them their name. "I dreamt I saw you walking up a hillside in the snow," Adam Duritz sings in "A Murder of One," "Casting shadows on the winter sky / As you stood there counting crows." Our amateur ornithologist counts as follows:

One for sorrow, two for joy
Three for girls, and four for boys
Five for silver, six for gold
Seven for a secret never to be told.

A fun game, to be sure, and one that always makes me wonder what might have come next.

Eight for toast and nine for jam,
I will not eat green eggs and ham.

Or:

Ten for day and twelve for night,
Eleven's gone, but that's all right.

Enough counting — what's Duritz talking about? It's a question I ask myself constantly when listening to the Crows, but here I ask with more urgency than usual. For never is the band more self-referential than in these lines, which seem to offer an explanation of the name they've chosen for themselves — of who they are, what they want with us. And the lines do frame Duritz's most frequently written-about themes: the search for happiness; the battle of the sexes; the pursuit of wealth and fame; the somber mysteries of existence.

None of which prevents me, whenever I hear the song, from picturing Duritz's lady friend stomping all over the hillside, clipboard in hand, barking out orders to the indifferent birds. By the time she's rounding up the secrets never to be told ("Deep Throat's Identity, you're in back, with the Location of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq"), my finger has long since entreated the CD player to STOP.

But if I can't bear listening to "A Murder of One," I can easily skip to "Mr. Jones," or "Round Here," or "Time and Time Again." And so it goes throughout the Crows' canon: Recovering the Satellites gives us the ruinous "Children in Bloom" but finds redemption in "A Long December"; on This Desert Life, the pointless single "Hanginaround" segues into the glorious epic "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby." The Crows have released four studio albums and one double-live set, and on these discs their talents are widely evident. But so, too, are their failings, and so when playing their records I am a listener divided against himself. The Crows' brilliance and their suckitude have an odd habit of cozying up next to one another, often on the same song, and leave me breathless trying to reconcile the two.

It's unfair to dismiss them, as have so many critics, as cloying roots-rock retreads or mindless AOR zombies of the matchbox20 variety. Duritz may never be Bob Dylan, but I'm also confident he will never write a song as insufferably stupid as "3 a.m." True, this is the man who wrote "Her kindness bangs a gong, it's moving me along," a lyrical low point from "Anna Begins." But just a few lines earlier is the perfect "Every time she sneezes I believe it's love," a line so ridiculous it could only be true. In "Anna Begins," as in "A Murder of One," I find the band's oeuvre writ small: the good, the bad and the ugly, all transmuted into pop. This is Counting Crows, the first band I have ever loved, loved, entirely in spite of myself.

• • •

In 1989 Adam Duritz met David Bryson in San Francisco, and together the duo began performing acoustic music in local coffeehouses. They called themselves Counting Crows, after an old English nursery rhyme, and soon added Matt Malley on bass, Charlie Gillingham on keyboards and Steve Bowman on drums. In 1993 the Crows recorded the aforementioned August; upon its release, the ubiquitous single "Mr. Jones" sent the record to No. 4. It remained in the Top 200 for 93 weeks, selling more than six million copies. And the dreadlocked white boy who bounced all over MTV shouting "We all want to be big stars" was suddenly just that.

But before everything after there was August itself, a dark and moody record with those lines on "A Murder of One" that puzzle me me still. One for sorrow? Try eleven. Each song on the record wallows in sublime, adolescent self-pity; this was the soundtrack to Dawson's Creek before there ever was a Dawson's Creek. "Love is a ghost train rumbling through the darkness," Duritz croons at one point, a sentiment that, nearly 10 years after it was written, still has yet to grace a Hallmark card.

The record isn't all sorrow and rumbling, though — there's also the inclement weather. Anyone listening to August for the first time is advised to dress warmly, and bring an umbrella. Snow falls in "Ghost Train" and "A Murder of One;" rain begins during "Round Here." The downpour continues on "Omaha," which may or may not be explained by the presence, five tracks later, of the "Rain King," who is also being held as a suspect in "Raining in Baltimore."

In fact, when Duritz mentions, during "Anna Begins," "the time that kindness falls like rain," I often wonder what he's getting at. Does he find Anna's kindness bountiful and refreshing? Is he unhappily drenched with her adoration? Or has he simply let too much time pass — two songs — without mentioning precipitation of some sort? Whatever the case, the line strikes me as an excellent recap of Duritz's emotional weather: cloudy, with a chance of benevolence.

But for all the criticisms we might make of August — did I mention it rains a lot? — there remains this: It sold six million copies. To this day, more people own the record, and regularly play it, than will ever admit it. They realize August is a bit juvenile, and some of them have even read enough reviews to know it it's all been stolen from the Byrds, or Van Morrison, or Tom Petty, or something. But however much of it was cribbed — less, I suspect, than is often said — it remains one of the pre-eminent sad-sack albums of my generation.

Most rock critics are loath to admit that pop has a certain utility; it debases the form, in their eyes, to view it strictly in terms of its function. But who among us has not, on a dark night of the soul, reached for a record that shares our mood? Misery loves company, and in that regard August has always functioned as a sort of audio Prozac. It's music to mope to, and we've been moping to it now for a decade. Once I knew a girl who asserted that "Anna Begins" described a failed relationship of hers so perfectly that she was certain the song had, in fact, been written about her. The next time she sees her man, every time he sneezes she'll believe it's love. Such is the fallout of August's success.

There's another reason people love the Crows' first record, and his name is Mr. Jones. One of the few tracks on August in which meteorology takes a backseat to emotion, "Mr. Jones" was also its biggest hit. The song is elegant in its simplicity: Duritz was down at the New Amsterdam staring at this yellow-haired girl, Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation, you know the rest. In the video, which played in constant rotation on MTV during 1994, the moon-faced, paunchy Duritz emerged as the rock-star wannabe he was. Hopping up and down, his signature dreads flapping half a beat behind him, Duritz leaned into the microphone and sang as if his life depended on it. The tune was catchy as hell, and the message — "When I look at the television, I want to see me staring right back at me" — resonated with the anonymous masses.

To wit: In June of 1994, as an eighth grader, I hosted my middle school's annual lip-synch competition. Late in the show I introduced a girl named Jennifer, whose "Mr. Jones"-based act consisted entirely of mouthing the words to the song while bouncing around the stage like Duritz does in the video. Others felt compelled to vary their acts a bit — splicing multiple songs together, say, or donning an amusing costume. Not Jennifer. She just stood on the concrete steps of the amphitheatre, hopping and mouthing, for what seemed like twenty years. The performance was a disaster; she was nearly booed off the stage. But it tells you something about the song's popularity that such unadorned replication of Duritz's video persona could be attempted, and considered potentially entertaining, by a self-conscious seventh-grader risking lifetime banishment from the upper caste of Washington Middle School.

The Crows reaped many benefits from the success of their first album, but I fear they may have taken the wrong lesson from it. Its most successful song ("Mr. Jones") had also been its most nakedly autobiographical; it must have been tempting, then, as the Crows crafted their follow-up, to give their fans more of the same — more Duritz, in other words. But when Recovering the Satellites came out three years later, it featured a different Duritz than the lovelorn fame hunter with whom we had so happily commiserated. The sadness was still evident, but the wide-eyed earnestness that redeemed August's loopier moments seemed lost. Instead the Crows boasted a frontman who was grouchy, bitter and shrill. Looking back now, it seems inevitable. For three long years, when Adam Duritz looked at the television, he had seen himself staring right back at him. And he was never going to forgive us.

Coming: Satellite rides.

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