In the years before Counting Crows became one of the biggest success stories of the mid-90s, frontman and chief songwriter Adam Duritz was a man of many bands. The Baltimore-born and California-raised singer was into all sorts of music, so he played all sorts of music. There was The Mod-L Society, who specialised in jangly power-pop, a psychedelic rock crew called The Himalayans, and the atmospheric new wave of Sordid Humor, for whom he provided backing vocals.
There were even a few different versions of Counting Crows before the one that he hit the jackpot via their 1993 debut album August And Everything After. An album that sounds like Automatic For The People-era R.E.M. in confession, its stirring mix of emotive ballads, contemplative alt.rock and hook after melodic hook sold more than seven million copies.
As he bounced from project to project, Duritz was writing and quietly stockpiling the collection of songs that would go on to be radio-conquering hits over the course of a few years in the early 90s – Round Here, Rain King, Omaha, and Mr. Jones, the song that would become Counting Crows’ debut single.
“Mr. Jones and Omaha were both songs I brought to other bands I was in, and we ended up not doing them cos they didn’t feel great in those bands,” he recalls. “Round Here was a Himalayans song originally.”
Mr. Jones was born of a wild night on the tiles in San Francisco’s Mission District with his friend and Himalayans bandmate the titular Marty Jones. The reason they were out, he explains, is that Jones’s father, David, who lived in Spain, was over in the US performing.
“He’d become one of the iconic flamenco guitar players in Madrid, and was playing with his old flamenco troupe who he’d played with many years before,” says Duritz. “There were singers, dancers, musicians, a whole bunch of people who were all part of the scene, and they played this show and it was fucking outrageous.”
After the show, Duritz and Marty moved through the gears, swaggering from bar to bar, revelling in the excitement.
“It was a crazy night. There’s flamenco dancers who are insanely hot. Marty was talking to one of them whose name was Maria, a really sexy woman, who knew his parents when he was born,” Duritz says, explaining the ‘black-haired flamenco dancer’ mentioned in the song.
The central theme of the song – that everything would be fixed for Duritz and his pal, and they could unlock their inner super-selves, if only they could make it in music – was cemented when Duritz spotted Chris Isaak’s drummer Kenny Dale Johnson cosied up in one of the bar’s booths with three women.
“I remember looking at him and thinking: ‘Man, if we were rock stars we’d be able to talk to women,’” he says, laughing. “The truth is it’s still hard!”
Instead, Duritz turned to what came a little more naturally: getting through the door in the early hours and documenting the night in song.
“I remember going home and needing to go to work [on it] right away,” he says of the song’s creation. “I’ve never been one of those people who wrote over chunks of time, I used to just sit down and do it and I’d stick with it until it was done.”
While that part came quickly, recording Mr. Jones was another matter – a “real struggle”, says Duritz. Chief among the issues was that drummer Steve Bowman hated it.
“He got it in his head that it was a country song,” says Duritz. “He was really up in arms about it, like: ‘I didn’t fucking sign up to play country music. I might as well wear a cowboy hat and stick a piece of straw in my mouth!’ He was really anti the song. It affected the way he played it. He’s a great drummer, but he just had this blind spot where Mr. Jones was.”
Producer T Bone Burnett brought in someone else to play drums, but there was also the problem that Duritz was struggling to nail a good vocal take. “I must have done it fifty or sixty times,” he remembers. It ended up being one of the last tracks to be completed.
After finally nailing a vocal take, Duritz had no idea the song might be a hit. Rain King and Round Here had been pencilled in for that status. Mr. Jones became the band’s introductory single only because they refused to edit the label’s first choice, the shuffling, epic grooves of A Murder Of One. While Duritz credits a performance of Round Here in early 1994 as key to Counting Crows’ breakthrough, a few months later he realised it was Mr. Jones that had become their calling card.
“After SNL [Saturday Night Live], it got pretty big on the radio,” he says. “By that summer, when we were playing, there was a lot of people who wanted to hear Mr. Jones. It seemed like the audience was there for Mr. Jones. But I noticed that more after the fact. I didn’t notice it blowing the record up, I just noticed that once the record blew up, Mr. Jones was really big. That was the song that radio could play over and over again, because it was shorter than Round Here.”
As August And Everything After became one of those albums that kept selling and selling, Mr. Jones became one of those songs you heard everywhere, as Duritz can attest: “I remember being in a strip club in New Orleans and Mr. Jones comes on, and I was like: ‘No, no, this is not the vibe. Not to this song!’ I don’t mind getting a dance every now and then, but not to my song. That is not okay.”
The success that Duritz had yearned for in that very track had finally arrived. His music was everywhere, whether he liked it or not.
Counting Crows play shows in New Zealand and Australia in March and April 2026.
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