Adam Duritz of Counting Crows wrote a song about wanting to be famous — and it came true
In 1993, Michael Jordan retired from basketball for the first time, Jurassic Park was making a killing at the box office, and Counting Crows released their debut single, Mr. Jones.
That song became an inescapable radio hit that catapulted Counting Crows into the cultural zeitgeist. For lead singer Adam Duritz, the success of Mr. Jones came as a total surprise, but there was also something prophetic about the song, seeing as he wrote it about his desire to be famous. "We all wanna be big stars," he sings on the track. "But we don't know why and we don't know how."
In a new interview with Q 's Tom Power, Duritz looks back on his breakout hit and shares why overnight fame maybe wasn't a dream come true for him after all.
WATCH | Adam Duritz's full interview with Tom Power:
It all started when Duritz spent a fun night out in San Francisco with his friend Marty Jones, whom he'd played with in his old band, The Himalayans. Jones's dad, a flamenco guitarist, was in town, so they went to check out his gig before eventually heading to a bar called New Amsterdam.
"We went to a lot of bars that night, trailing around after this flamenco troupe and getting hammered," Duritz recalls. "Just feeling like this is really cool: basking in someone else's spotlight and kind of wishing it was me in the spotlight."
Duritz says a lot of the lyrical details in Mr. Jones are based on things that actually happened that night, like when his friend started flirting with an older woman named Maria — a beautiful "black-haired flamenco dancer" who "dances while his father plays guitar," as the song goes.
WATCH | Official video for Mr. Jones:
The Counting Crows frontman penned Mr. Jones when he got home later that night, but he didn't expect it to be a hit. By the time the band released the song in December of 1993, they had already been hustling as musicians for years.
"I was 27 before anyone from any record company came to see any band I was in, and it wasn't Counting Crows," Duritz tells Power. "I was 28 when we got signed and I was 29 when that record came out. And we had been on the road for about three or four months as an opening band, opening for Midnight Oil, opening for Suede, opening for Cracker. And after two or three months, some TV shows started calling us — Letterman first and then SNL."
When Counting Crows performed on Saturday Night Live, the band wasn't even in the top 200. After appearing on the show, Duritz says their debut album, August and Everything After, "jumped 40 spots a week for five or six weeks."
Then, in April of 1994, there was a major turning point when Counting Crows returned back to the U.S. from a European tour.
"We flew into New Orleans, and we'd been out of the country for a while, so whatever had happened back here, we weren't here to experience it," Duritz says. "The first morning after we got there, I went out to the [Tipitina's Jazz Festival], as I always did, and got mobbed. And that's when I realized, 'Oh, what the hell happened?'"
With hundreds of thousands of people mobbing him at festivals, fans hounding him everywhere he went and his privacy being invaded by tabloids, Duritz learned the hard way that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. These days, he rarely plays Mr. Jones.
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