Adam Duritz, songwriter, vocals
Our first four records had been mostly made in houses in the hills above Los Angeles. August and Everything After was our first major label album, so it was a pretty big deal. Our advance was $3,000 each; I bought a 1971 cherry red VW Karmann Ghia convertible and drove it to LA.
I would get up every morning and listen to Pickin’ Up the Pieces by Poco, which is like the Beatles doing country music. I also had this Benny Goodman album that I was listening to a lot – my dad had picked it up as a free giveaway at a Texaco station when I was a kid.
Mr Jones was on a demo we sent to all the record companies, but it was a very difficult song to finish. We didn’t have a great handle on it. It’s not a slow song, but it’s not a straight ahead, fast song either. It gallops along, so you have to get a real feel for it. It’s soul music – closer to Stax Records than it is to country.
We looked at a few different producers but when I talked to T Bone Burnett about where the band was at, I felt like he really got it. We had a lot of potential, but I didn’t like the way we sounded – we hadn’t learned to be a band yet. We took away all of the synths and guitar effects. Our drummer Steve Bowman couldn’t hear the song how the rest of us did and so T Bone brought in one of Steve’s heroes, Denny Fongheiser to play on it. It’s a funny story now, but it was rough on Steve.
Marty Jones was my best friend and we played in bands together before Counting Crows. His father, David Serva, had made it as a flamenco musician in Spain and he was back in the Bay Area doing a bunch of shows. We went to see him play and hung out with the flamenco troupe from bar to bar, all night. The next morning, I went home and wrote Mr Jones. It’s about me and Marty out that night, wishing we were cool musicians so we could talk to the girls a little better.
I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. We played Round Here on Saturday Night Live in 1994 and the record jumped 40 spots a week for five or six weeks. After that, Mr Jones became a big deal.
David Immerglück, multi-instrumentalist
Adam, David Bryson [guitarist] and I were living together in this warehouse complex in Berkeley in the late 1980s. I had been playing with Camper Van Beethoven, and had this offshoot band called Monks of Doom.
I came home one evening and Adam had a new demo that he’d just done with Bryson. He played me this song called Mr Jones. It was done with this Dr Rhythm pocket drum machine that sounded like a video game or some popcorn popping, but his vocals were on another kind of level.
Once T Bone got a hold of the band, it was like a complete reinvention of the Counting Crows. It was getting back to the basics of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and the Band.
Adam called me and said: “Hey, man, can you come down and play on this record?” By the time I got there, T Bone had moved us to the studio in Encino, Los Angeles – Tito Jackson’s from the Jackson 5. There were the guitars in there that Dylan had just recorded on.
T Bone cued me in to play my guitar behind the tempo of the drums. He said: “If you rush ahead of the drums you sound like an adolescent jacking off too quickly.” He’s got the southern accent because he’s from Texas and his advice was just to imagine that you’ve put your feet up on the mixing board and chewing gum while you’re playing.
Counting Crows was in some ways a reaction to grunge. Kurt Cobain killing himself was like its final act. Everyone was on heroin. The object was obliteration, not mind expansion. The nihilism had gone too far, the pendulum swung to something more human and more emotional. Counting Crows was folk and rock with a heavy dose of Van Morrison soul.
The song never gets old. Sometimes on stage when I am rocking out with Adam, I will remember that moment when he played me the demo of the song. It’s insane.
