August and Everything After

Counting Crows, 1993

My first CD—bought at the local Best Buy store. The excitement walking from the car in that neverending asphalt parking lot into air conditioning past the automatic sliding doors. I bought “August and Everything After” so that I had a CD to play on my new Sony Discman.

For my fourteenth birthday, I got a black Sony Discman—no anti-skip protection, but did include headphones. They were the kind that had the round foam covers and the thin metal adjustment band. The Discman ran on double-A batteries, replaced more often than thought possible. It also included a 9-volt adapter that plugged into an outlet. And when the batteries ran out, you plugged it in, wired to the wall and wired to the Discman by the headphones. Lots of wires in the Nineties.

Later I added some small Sony speakers that sounded decent on a nightstand. The volume doubled after adding batteries. Lots of batteries in the Nineties. They had some type of preamp in them to play music louder after you flipped a small switch and a red dot lit up on the baseball-sized speakers. Over time, the speakers’ wires wore down and the music started crackling if you didn’t turn the input jack just right, like a scientist fine tuning a chemical drip.

In 1994 “Mr. Jones” played about every hour on VH1, so you had a pretty good chance of seeing Adam Duritz and the band (and his brown suede fringed coat). That was the only place I saw the Counting Crows play music: on a 20-inch projection TV with faux woodgrain sides, showing the number 40 in green alarm clock numbers, so you always knew what channel you were watching.

My dad liked the Counting Crows because they sounded like an older band, one from the Sixties. I think it helped that Adam Duritz also said that he wanted to be Bob Dylan (and to be a lion and to pass as a cat). Don’t think those last two wishes had any impact on my dad’s liking the band.

It’s funny now because my wife doesn’t like the Counting Crows at all. And it’s weird because the Counting Crows annoy me as well sometimes, but I’ll always have the fondest memories of listening to that CD on the way home from Best Buy, thinking how did they get the sound so clear on this recording? The things I take for granted now and don’t notice. I noticed the magic of that moment when I was a kid, hearing the different instruments like never before, staring out of the backseat car window waiting at a stoplight, amazed at music.