First, there's the song title. As every regular Bobcat knows, Mr. Jones is the main character in the Bob Dylan song "Ballad of A Thin Man". In this song, Dylan is said to be writing about a journalist who critized him during his 1965-1966 switch from a folkie to rock artist.
So, are we talking about the same Mr. Jones here?
My belief is that this is a misunderstanding. The song actually just talks about two friends remembering the good times, their lives completely ahead of them. This theory is supported by the fact that a good friend of the Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz is actually called Marty Jones. They played together in the band "The Himalayans" and Adam himself said the song was about Marty Jones in an interview on VH1 Storytellers:
"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, 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 and we got completely drunk. And Marty and I sat at the bar staring at these two girls, wishing there was some way we could go talk to them, but we were too shy. We kept joking with each other that if we were big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians, this would be easy. I went home that night and I wrote a song about it. I joke about what it's about, that story. But it's really a song about all the dreams and all the things that make you want to go into doing whatever it is that seizes your heart, whether it's being a rock star or being a doctor or whatever. Those things run from 'all this stuff I have pent up inside of me' to 'I want to meet girls because I'm tired of not being able to.' It is a lot of those things, it's about all those dreams, but it's also kind of cautionary because it's about how misguided you may be about some of those things and how hollow they may be too. Like the character in the song keeps saying, 'When everybody loves me I will never be lonely,' and you're supposed to know that that's not the way it's gonna be. I knew that even then. And this is a song about my dreams."
So,
with this sorted out, why am i writing about this?
Well, there's another very clear reference to Bob Dylan. Near the end of the song, Adam Dury sings:
I want to be Bob Dylan
Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky
There you have it. Can a reference be more clear?
So, after hearing this, it's up to you to decide of the story of Marty Jones is correct.
