On "Cowboys" by Counting Crows (from 2006)

When i have to pick a favorite Bob Dylan song, I tend to go with "Changing of the Guards." It's majestic, heroic, mysterious, and dashing - all things that I like. Other than that, though, the song really doesn't make even the foggiest bit of sense, and I don't expect that I'll ever really understand what Dylan is on about in that song. But I understand the sort of emotion and feeling he's trying to convey in the song - it makes sense on that level.

At first, I thought "Cowboys," the best song on the new Counting Crows album (or on any of their albums in ten years, for my money), worked in the same way. With the help of the handy track-by-track interview I've started to make more sense of it now. I still don't exactly know what the Circle K has to do with anything (or why having a gas station in the song makes it more effective, thought it does), but I have a pretty good line on what's going on in the song, overall, and I see why it ends the Saturday Nights half of the album, and why "1492" had to be in the beginning.


In "1492," Adam Duritz presents himself (in a way) as Columbus - someone who set out to do something great. He didn't do what he intended to do, and history ended up considering him a jerk who couldn't navigate his way out of an outhouse, but, hey, how many people have a Columbus Street in their town? In any case, history aside, in 1492, Adam is Columbus, out to change the world by discovering that fresh green breast of a new world. And by "Cowboys," he's set out to be Columbus and ended up as John Wilkes Booth.

The desire to do something great - something earth-shattering and world changing - is something most artists and performers have in common. And if you can't do it by singing songs...well, wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to make the world take notice of you as a murderer? John Wilkes Booth started his career as a performer - and a good one, at that. He was a big hit in the early 1860s; most people said he wasn't quite as talented as his brother, Edwin, but he was better looking and more popular with the ladies. But his radical (for their time) interpretations of the great Shakespeare roles didn't change the world. He entered history another way.

An interesting thing about Cowboys to begin with is that the speaker in the song, according to the track-by-track interview, is a character, not Adam himself. This isn't something that happens much in Counting Crows songs; off hand, the only song I can think of from an album where Adam himself doesn't seem to appear as the narrator is "Another Horsedreamer's Blues" (though it happens in a few unreleased ones, like "Good Luck," and probably "Forty Years.") But, as in those songs, we're certainly intended to draw parallels to Adam (the "another" in the title of horsedreamer implies that Adam is one, too).

So the song becomes sort of a Plan B. Being a rock star turned out to be harder than Adam imagined, and changing the world through being a rock star is even harder than that. After fifteen years in the spotlight, all he's got is a list of things he should have seen by now, but isn't seeing. A list of things he tried to be but didn't become. And, in the madness at the end of Saturday Nights (the whole point of which seems to be trying to keep the madness away), we see a sort of alternate version of reality.

But, as with Horsedreamer, the song functions perfectly well if you take Adam out of the equation altogether. What you're left with then is a song that wouldn't have been out of place on Springsteen's "Nebraska" (or, for that matter, a Stiffs Incorporated record).

Cowboys aren't as common a theme in Counting Crows songs as, say, water and circuses, but they come up quite a bit, as in "we couldn't all be cowboys, so some of us our clowns" in "Goodnight Elisabeth."  And, in "1492," "what I want to be is an indian (what Columbus thought he found) / I'm gonna be a cowboy (fiction-wise, the opposite of an indian) in the end...." I suppose we can make some parallels to cowboys and rock stars - cowboys lived a dirty life, travelling from town to town to town. It's a bit more popular to compare rock stars to pirates these days, but pirates and cowboys are really pretty similar when you get right down to it - they're both archetypal nomads who live by their own code and they're both types of characters who have no real basis in fact.


I still have a lot of questions about what's going on in the song. Are the satellites watching through the window just a sign for paranoia, or does it have anything to do with that brief period a decade or so back when "satellites" was a term given to hardcore counting crows fans? But I get the basic idea of the song: the desire to change the world and do something to make your mark on the world driving you to madness and going horribly awry.

The song itself (getting away from all of my ramblings and pickings and pretension) is, quite simply, a knockout. The lyrics, particular the first verse and the last one, about the "dashing gentlemen of summer" (great, great line, great, great vocal delivery, like he just swooped in off a moving freight train wearing a cape) are Duritz at his best; these are verses that would stand pretty comfortably and hold their own against any verse of any song in the Counting Crows canon - or just about anyone else's, for that matter. The Nebraska-esque first verse is damned intriguing; it sets up the song to look like a little black and white movie. "A hungry man with a gun in his hand and some promises to keep" - what an opener! And, now that we've got a character with limitless possibilities, we get "What's as easy as murder?" the kind of line they would stick on the cover of an agatha christie book to make it all the more irressistable, and then "headlights, and and vapor trails and circle K killers," so we know that the cinematography of this little black and white movie is going to be top-notch, too.

And those vocals towards the end! The song is as perfect a representation of a descent into madness as has ever been recorded, and manages to walk a serious tight-rope line - as it is, it's a sort of a Springsteen number. One false move and it would have gone over the top and into the realm of being more like a Meat Loaf song - entertaining and great driving music, but not the sort of thing you're expected to take seriously. More like a comic book song.

See, when Meat Loaf sings a song about murder or something like that, you can see him winking between the lines. You can hear the smile behind the whole thing. But when Duritz sings "Oh, I will make you look at me," there's no wink. It's all in character, of course, but it's 100% serious.