Monday Music..."Mr Jones" by Counting Crows

I know it is Thursday, but it has been hectic at work, we have all been working all kinds of strange hours.  My company made the news...and not in  a good way.  Nothing like having 8 years of building up a stellar reputation to have it all crashing down.  It brings me to mind the old phrase "1000 attaboys are wiped out by one "aw crap". Now we will have to rebuild the brand, we will bounce back but the events from early this week will hurt.
    I decided to roll with "Counting Crows", I remembered when they hit the scene in 1993, I really liked the sound they had, it was different than the grunge that had taken over the musical airways.  Counting Crows has a reputation for caring for their fans and I remember one time they refused to perform at a venue becuase it would be too expensive for their fans.   A unique outlook for them and this policies and others have built a dedicated fan base that has stood by the band from the highs and lows.

Counting Crows is an American rock band from Berkeley, California, formed in 1991. The band consists of Adam Duritz (lead vocals, piano), David Bryson (guitar), Charlie Gillingham (keyboards, accordion), Dan Vickrey (lead guitar), David Immerglück (guitar, banjo, mandolin), Jim Bogios (drums, percussion) and Millard Powers (bass guitar).
Counting Crows gained popularity following the release of its debut album, August and Everything After (1993), which featured the hit single "Mr. Jones." They have sold more than 20 million albums worldwide and received a 2004 Academy Award nomination for their song "Accidentally in Love," which was included in the film Shrek 2.
The band's influences include Van Morrison, Jellyfish, R.E.M., Mike + The Mechanics, Bob Dylan, and The Band.

Singer Adam Duritz and guitarist David Bryson began playing San Francisco coffeehouses together, performing under the name Counting Crows. The name was taken from One for Sorrow, a British divination nursery rhyme about the superstitious counting of magpies, a member of the crow family. Duritz heard the rhyme in the film Signs of Life, which starred his close friend, actress Mary-Louise Parker. Developing a following in the Bay Area and deciding to expand the band, Duritz and Bryson kept the name as they added members.

Mr. Jones" is a song by American alternative rock band Counting Crows. It was released in December 1993 as the lead single and third track from their debut album, August and Everything After (1993). It was the band's first radio hit and one of their most popular singles.

"Mr. Jones" entered the American Top 40 on February 19, 1994, and entered the Top 10 five weeks later. On April 23, "Mr. Jones" passed R. Kelly's "Bump n' Grind", taking the number-one position (which it surrendered, the following week, to Prince's "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World").
The band's surprise success happened to coincide with Kurt Cobain's death. These events took a significant toll on Adam Duritz, the lead vocalist and principal songwriter. Duritz said in an interview, "We heard that, that [Kurt] had shot himself. And it really scared the hell out of me because I thought, these things in my life are getting so out of control...". These events and feelings were the basis for "Catapult", the first track of Recovering the Satellites.
According to Duritz (who was born in 1964), the song title had a hand in the naming by Jonathan Pontell of "Generation Jones", the group of people born between 1954 and 1965. "I feel honored that my song Mr. Jones was part of the inspiration for the name 'Generation Jones'."

Some believe the song is a veiled reference to the protagonist of Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man", based on the lyric "I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky." According to Adam Duritz on VH1 Story Tellers "It's really a song about my friend Marty and I. We went out one night to watch his dad play, his dad was a Flamenco guitar player who lived in Spain (David Serva), and he was in San Francisco in the mission playing with his old Flamenco troupe. And after the gig we all went to this bar called the New Amsterdam in San Francisco on Columbus."
In a 2013 interview, Duritz explained that the song is named for his friend Marty Jones, but that it is about Duritz himself. "I wrote a song about me, I just happened to be out with him that night," Duritz said. The inspiration for the song came as Duritz and Jones were drunk at a bar after watching Jones' father perform, when they saw Kenney Dale Johnson, longtime drummer for the musician Chris Isaak, sitting with three women. "It just seemed like, you know, we couldn't even manage to talk to girls, ... we were just thinking if we were rock stars, it'd be easier. I went home and wrote the song," Duritz said.