Who is Mr. Jones, and why is he bothering Maria?
10 min read
It’s eleven-thirty on a Wednesday night. I’m huddled over a thermos of wine as The Psychedelic Furs catalog drones through my headphones. Mr. Jones can turn you on and turn you off again, Richard Butler bellows on the band’s 1981 sophomore release. Mr. Jones is all of you who live inside a plan. I pause, and glance at the track title. After a beat and a rapid Spotify query, my suspicion is confirmed: I’ve heard about this clown.
“What’s the deal?” I rapidly write to a fellow music enthusiast. “Who is Mr. Jones, and why are there so many songs written about this guy?” Less than a minute passes before I hear back. “I don’t know,” my friend admits. “All I think of is that terrible Counting Crows song.”
Pre-internet age theorists have been chasing this narrative smokescreen since the Beatnik era, when a cocktail of poetry and heroin encouraged a wave of coded rebellion. A generation stirred by cleverness and drug appreciation once referred to a backyard opiate addiction as a lifeline to “Mr. Jones”; this term later evolved to a general feeling of wanting something more.
Of the homage paid to this “Mr. Jones,” a hackneyed portrait was born and reproduced for mass broadcast. From the Bee Gees to Talking Heads, Bob Dylan to The Smashing Pumpkins, this wily character has been referenced over 50 times in popular music, in over twenty tracks. Without any obvious association with the illicit drug use that birthed the expression, many have wondered—who is Mr. Jones? A profound Amy Winehouse moment from her 2005 recording of “Me and Mr. Jones” re-phrases the question that many music enthusiasts have since shouted, alone and in their cars: what kind of fuckery is this?
***
Newport, Rhode Island - 1965. A journalist walks into a bar, and immediately notices an inscrutable figure sitting motionless in the corner. The minstrel’s aura spins in electric rotation as women hang on to his every word, pulling at elegant fingers and watching the man’s mouth as he speaks in hyperbole. The journalist balks in the presence of such a man, and is stopped cold when the voice greets him by name.
“Mr. Jones,” Bob Dylan calls out to the journalist. “Gettin’ it all down, Mr. Jones?”
When Dylan’s 6th studio album, Highway 61 Revisited, was released later that summer, the world was gifted a fresh caricature to dissect—one that would be sampled and analyzed for decades. “Ballad of a Thin Man” highlights the comings-and-goings of Mr. Jones, an anxious character who inadvertently presents himself as the prince of nothing charming. Narrated by an unimpressed raconteur, Mr. Jones is characterized as a simple-minded and desperate academic, unsuccessful in his attempts to enter a wildly creative counterculture as an outsider.
For the young journalist who had met Bob Dylan on that sweltering day in 1965, “Ballad of a Thin Man” was an exciting revelation. A 1975 confessional for Rolling Stone, and an obituary for Jeffrey Owen Jones in 2007 identified him as the former Time magazine intern who had met Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and who had likely been name-dropped by the folk legend. A Rhodes Scholar and eventual film professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Jones lived with this interpretation for forty years.
“Dylan didn’t paint a vignette of my brother that one would necessarily be proud of,” wrote his sister Pamela Cathlyn Jones in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. “But I think my brother was in the middle of history making.”
Conflictingly, Jeffrey Jones is not the only journalist that fits the lyrical description presented on the record. Even more likely is Max Jones of Melody Maker magazine, who interviewed Dylan regularly between 1964 and 1967, and who was featured in the unreleased 1966 tour documentary Eat the Document. This theory loses its legs if we assume that Mr. Jones was somebody that Dylan despised; according to music writer Clinton Heylin, the folk singer liked the British journalist.
If anything, it’s dangerous to assume formal possession over an idea. While never confirmed, Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones likely bathed in a Dylan-obsessed paranoia in the years preceding his questionable death in 1969. Since a Carnegie Hall performance connected “Ballad of a Thin Man” with “Like a Rolling Stone,” rumors swirled that the troubled musician had inspired the eerie track.
Though notorious for his evasive yarn spinning during his most circulated interviews, Bob Dylan eventually teased the supposed existence of a real-life Mr. Jones after his 1965 album release. A Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston interview noted that the folk singer had just faced a barrage of incessant heckling, and was hardly in the mood for a real dialogue with the press. The artist received their pestering with an exhausted side eye, and grinned.
“‘I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel,’ Dylan dryly expounded. ‘He proceeds to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, ‘that’s Mr. Jones.’ Then I asked this cat, ‘Doesn’t he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?’ And he told me, ‘He puts his nose on the ground.’”
Despite an obvious gift for deflection, Bob Dylan may have a point here. The disconnect between artist and non-artist, creative and critic, has been a creative through-line since the earliest rebel claimed to be misunderstood; any “square’s” attempt to trespass into spaces they were never equipped to grok would meet Dylan and his Greenwich Village community hissing traps of complex allegory. The subtext of his snarky response to Ephron and Edmiston assumes an undertone of caustic vitriol, as it is not the inherent responsibility of an artist to decode their product for the consumer. Characterizing Mr. Jones as a clueless, intrusive journalist—while on the record for a magazine feature—would be a little on the nose.
Dylan’s preference for a diversion is further illustrated by the explanation the folk singer provided to a crowd in March of 1966, wherein he saltily described Mr. Jones as a man who, “lives in Lincoln, Nebraska--he hangs around the bowling alley there. Also owns water mill rights, but we don’t talk about that when we’re in Nebraska.” The crowd was Canadian.
With eyes in his pocket and nose to the ground, Mr. Jones remains one of Bob Dylan’s longest-running cons. “I could tell you who Mr. Jones is in my life, but, like, everybody has got their Mr. Jones” Dylan told friend and biographer Robert Shelton during one late-night discussion.
Even as I write this, The Beatles are calling out to the character through my home stereo, claiming Mr. Jones is “suicidal” in the 1968 White Album composition, “Yer Blues.” I wouldn’t even call it a stretch, given their feelings about the press.
We see a kinder interpretation of Mr. Jones in the final Talking Heads album, Naked. Described as the “mambo revenge of Dylan’s Mr. Jones” in a 1988 interview with Rolling Stone, David Byrnes defends a traditional businessman who could be more interesting than we give him credit for. Mr. Jones!, Byrnes yowls after a Latin-inspired intro; Changing clothes, now he's got ventilated slacks / Bouncing off the walls, Mr. Jones is back! Suddenly, Mr. Jones is something close to sexy.
“He can cut loose in this house made of a business suit...He’s a traveling businessman, who’s usually depicted in songs by people of my generation as not knowing what’s going on,” Byrnes defended to Rolling Stone. “A lot of people would stare at Mr. Jones and declare him the ultimate square. I’m saying, ‘okay, now, this guy’s breakin’ out of that, and he’s havin’ a good time.’”
This is where we begin to see an interesting diversion from an underwhelming symbol of the insignificant to the makings of a man who creates his own destiny. If we pretend that “Me & Mr. Jones” by Amy Winehouse isn’t actually a nod to rapper Nasir Jones and Philadelphian soul singer Billy Paul, we might believe that he’s becoming a man that Winehouse would want to take home.
Intrigued by the investigative trail, I glance at the overwhelming pile of Jonesian references in pop music, and wonder how one folk singer’s moody prophecy could have transformed into such a wildfire.
***
Contrary to the homoerotic swordswallower in Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Adam Duritz wants the world to know his Mr. Jones is in no way a phallic setup. The Counting Crows frontman has been shielding his bayonet since 1993, when the wildly popular single “Mr. Jones” (August and Everything After) had critics begging for any amount of metaphor.
“I heard [people say] it’s about my dick, which is even more ridiculous,” Duritz complained while on the air with VH1 Storytellers. “Why do people go there, you know? I wanted to kill the guy [who said that] because I knew where that was going to end up, which is the first paragraph of the article in Rolling Stone.”
Ok, so, maybe it’s not all Freudian.
Though the storyline is that of a simple bar scene, fans were eager to find the subtext. In between longing stares toward Maria, the “suddenly beautiful” flamenco dancer, the narrator turns to Mr. Jones, asking the man for company and favors. Pass me a bottle Mr. Jones, our singer points. Believe in me—help me believe in anything. He later admits to wanting to “be Bob Dylan,” and commiserates with his companion on their lonely existence.
The direct reference to Bob Dylan indicates that Duritz understood the disconnect between the established artist and groveling wannabe. While nearly thirty years apart, both Joneses wanted so badly to know the influence and star quality that made an artist sexy, and successful. It’s the question on the tongue of every jester, feeling around for the key to the kingdom.
After decades of speculation, it was revealed the character was less of a metaphor, and more of a literal drinking buddy. According to a 2013 interview with HuffPost Live, the song featured Marty Jones, a friend of Duritz and bassist for The Himalayans. “It’s a song about two guys who are in a bar...Chris Isaak’s drummer was in the corner with three girls. We couldn’t even manage to talk to girls,” Duritz explained. “We were just thinking if we were rock stars, it would be easier. I went home and wrote the song.”
While the track may have been conceived under literal circumstances, the Counting Crows fanbase heard the poetry. In the months following the single’s release, a generation mourning the death of Kurt Cobain (who shared the Geffen roster with Counting Crows) pushed the single to the top of the Billboard charts. Suddenly, the simple ask to “believe” in something wasn’t confined to a grown man’s obsession for fame. Suddenly, the narrative became one that empathized with Icarus, and wondered aloud what could have been if it hadn’t been for his final, horrifying ride into the sun. You see, even Bob Dylan fell, eventually, and it was ultimately the continuous interpretation of his work that kept him relevant.
Scientists suggest that mimicry is actually a form of interpretive empathy. We see this most often in conversation, in the mirroring of facial expression and unconscious physical cues. Through the evolution of music genres, we see similar behavior in an auditory display of imitation, and iteration. While their fanbase may blend like oil and water, even new-wave bands like Talking Heads and The Psychedelic Furs empathized with artists like Bob Dylan, because they understood his human emotions and motivations; there was no use in performing a literal analysis of the lyrics.
It’s amazing how a little bit of influence mapping can prove that it is through the necessary cross-breeding of references and sounds that birth new genres and ideas. Whether one man, an everyman, or a Spaceboy (courtesy of The Smashing Pumpkins, circa 1993), this Mr. Jones remains the thin, ordinary would-be that wishes he could be somebody else. Perhaps this is the idea that sticks. In writing a character that could be anybody, with a surname that is short enough to insert into the most verbose narrative, we get to watch a distinct paper trail form of one artist influencing the other, a collection of wildly unique genres paying their respects to their most celebrated predecessors.
And like the Mr. Jones of the Bee Gees’ first international single, “New York Mining Disaster 1941”, the one true purpose of a trope is to sit solemnly and remember photographs, a device used solely for recognition, and nostalgia. And with Mrs. Jones up to her no-good nightly routine (à la Billy Paul, 1972), this becomes Mr. Jones’ purpose. It really doesn’t matter who he is. As a vessel for iteration, the man quietly renders the spirit of multiple generations, and establishes very clear intersections in the influences of our favorite bands without even realizing what is happening.
Do you, Mr. Jones?
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resources
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