Counting Crows’ Recovering The Satellites

In We’re No. 1, A.V. Club music editor Steven Hyden examines an album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be “popular” in pop music, and how that concept has changed over the years. In this installment, he covers Counting Crows’ Recovering The Satellites, which went to No. 1 on Nov. 2, 1996, where it stayed for one week.
So far we’ve discussed five blockbuster albums in We’re No. 1, three of which are records that, like this column, grapple directly with what it really means to be a popular musical artist in the specific time and place they were released: Bad is about Michael Jackson’s megalomania and paranoia in the wake of Thriller, The Wall is about Roger Waters hating Pink Floyd and its audience and hating himself for hating those things, and Born This Way is about Born This Way adding extra capital to Lady Gaga’s overall net pop-culture worth.
I haven’t done this intentionally, but I have a feeling that “fame and what it all means” is going to be a recurring theme with many of the albums I end up writing about here. This is an interesting trend for two reasons:
- Like most people who aren’t famous, I make a point of being vocal about my annoyance whenever famous people create art that comments on their own celebrity. I accuse them of being self-pitying and self-absorbed. I criticize them for not removing the blinders of their elevated status and expressing something normal people can relate to. And I think I’m sort of full of it. Deep down, I’m fascinated by this kind of art, because I find objects of mass popularity compelling—hence this column—and I think I’m actually able to relate to albums like this more than I care to admit. (More on this in a moment.)
- Critic Chris Molanphy of the Village Voice recently observed that most of the records that have sold one million copies in one week during the SoundScan era—there are 17 of them—are not considered the most important or beloved works in that artist’s career. He dubbed it “the AC/DC rule,” after the Australian hard-rockers who scored their first No. 1 with 1981’s For Those About To Rock We Salute You, which was the follow-up to Back In Black, which peaked at No. 4 but has never stopped selling. Today, only hardcore fans would even mention For Those About To Rock in the same sentence as Back In Black; it’s an album that shined brightly only for a time, like rays of light from a distant, dying star, but now is just another AC/DC record that’s in the long shadow of Back In Black. Which is why it makes sense that disillusionment with stardom is a common thread with so many of these records. No. 1 albums often aren’t the apex of an artist’s career; they may in fact be the beginning of a decline.
Counting Crows’ Recovering The Satellites—which was No. 1 for only one week in November 1996—definitely falls in line with the albums I’ve been writing about lately. It’s not as successful or fondly remembered as Counting Crows’ 1993 debut August And Everything After, which went to No. 4 on the Billboard chart and sold 7 million copies on the strength of enduringly popular songs like “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here.” August was a record fans were able to discover own their own, over the course of several months, before it finally became one of the biggest alt-rock records of its time. By the time Recovering The Satellites was released, Counting Crows had amassed enough fans to ensure that whatever it put out next would go to No. 1, but nobody thinks that this makes Recovering The Satellites more significant in the arc of Counting Crows’ career than August And Everything After. When Adam Duritz dies, the first paragraph of his obituary will talk about how he once wished he was Bob Dylan while quoting the chorus of an annoying Van Morrison oldie. Recovering The Satellites might get mentioned toward the end, after his dalliances with the foxiest cast members of Friends and that horrible Oscar-nominated Shrek song—if there’s still space.
And yet Recovering The Satellites is easily my favorite Counting Crows album, precisely because it’s the record where Duritz went from wanting to be a big star (or so he sang in “Mr. Jones”) to equating his celebrity with slow-motion drowning. This was not an uncommon sentiment for ’90s rock bands, though by 1996 the music press was no longer sympathetic to guys like Duritz being so angsty all the time. While August was generally warmly received by critics, the backlash kicked in hard with Satellites, and this had a lot to do with Counting Crows being among the last of the big-selling grunge-influenced bands. The guitars on Satellites are appreciably heavier and screechier than the clean-sounding Americana of August—though today Satellites just sounds a lot like Wildflowers-era Tom Petty—and Duritz was obviously cut from the Eddie Vedder/Michael Stipe mold of brooding, sensitive frontmen that was just about to go out of style as the droogs of rap-rock waited in the wings.
Rock magazines that had worshipped at the altar of Vedder and Kurt Cobain were now hungry for something different, and they pounced on Satellites, which was widely pilloried for being a self-pitying and self-absorbed record. And Duritz was specifically singled out for not removing the blinders of his elevated status and expressing something normal people could relate to.
The result: Counting Crows is now a band that cool people are supposed to hate. The best throwaway example of this that I can think of is a Spin story from several years ago that casually compared Counting Crows with Dishwalla, a band whose greatest accomplishments are recording the kind-of popular song “Counting Blue Cars”—the one where the guy sings “tell me all your thoughts on God,” ’cause he’s on his way to see her— and coming up with the most ’90s-sounding one-hit-wonder band name ever. I’m guessing this comparison was meant to denigrate Counting Crows, and not praise Dishwalla, but I’m dorky enough to still like Counting Crows, so I’m not qualified to determine this.
I loved Counting Crows throughout my teen years, but I was shamed by the cool-kid brigade into disowning them in my early 20s. That changed when “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues” from Satellites came up on a mixtape made by my friend Rebecca while we were driving around the Wisconsin countryside. After I instinctively made a snide remark, she rightly smacked me down for being a degenerate poser. What was I doing? Of course “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues” is a great song, and it comes from an album that meant a lot to me during an important period of my life, back when I didn’t have the wherewithal to pretend to be hipper than I was.