Counting Crows
Adam Duritz's dreadlocked, wordy, openly wounded alt-rock band — one of the definitive sounds of 90s radio. Their 1993 debut sold over seven million copies, and Duritz spent years dismantling the very song that made them famous, recanting "Mr. Jones" and its hunger for stardom after getting exactly what he wished for.
Counting Crows formed in 1991 in San Francisco when Adam Duritz and guitarist David Bryson began playing as an acoustic duo around Berkeley and San Francisco venues. Duritz had previously played in a band called The Himalayans, and that connection would echo through the band's early work — the debut album's opener started life as a Himalayans song.
That debut, August and Everything After, arrived September 14, 1993, produced by T Bone Burnett for DGC/Geffen. The record was massive: it peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and went on to sell over seven million copies in the US, earning a 7× platinum certification. The lead single, "Mr. Jones," dropped December 1, 1993, and became the band's breakthrough. Then came the January 15, 1994 Saturday Night Live appearance — Duritz himself credited that one TV performance with opening the band up from a radio audience to a much broader one. The debut cycle brought two nominations at the 1995 Grammy Awards: Best New Artist, and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for "Round Here."
The momentum held. Their second album, Recovering the Satellites, released October 15, 1996, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. This Desert Life followed in 1999, keeping the band at the center of 90s rock radio. Into the 2000s they aged gracefully into adult-alternative staples: a cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" in 2002 (with Vanessa Carlton on backing vocals for the single version) and "Accidentally in Love" from Shrek 2 in 2004, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.
Duritz's voluminous dreadlocks became part of the band's visual DNA, and his celebrity briefly extended into tabloid territory — he briefly dated Jennifer Aniston in 1995 and was linked to Courteney Cox — the kind of fame he'd once daydreamed about in song. The arc of his own lyrics proved prescient: he spent years recanting "Mr. Jones" and its naked hunger for stardom, sometimes performing it as a subdued acoustic number and, on the live album Across a Wire, rewriting its central boast to disavow it — the decade's great be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, told in real time on stage.
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August and Everything After
Counting Crows' 1993 debut—rootsy, literate, and aching, with "Mr. Jones" inescapable on every radio and Adam Duritz's dreads on every MTV block. The album that lived in car CD players for the rest of the decade.
Counting Crows — "Mr. Jones"
The breakthrough single that launched Counting Crows from small-club acoustics into MTV ubiquity — two struggling musicians daydreaming that being rock stars would make everything easier. Its central confession, "when everybody loves me, I will never be lonely," became the 90s' great be-careful-what-you-wish-for lyric: Duritz got the fame and spent years walking the song back.
Counting Crows — "Round Here"
The haunting album opener and second single, with the unforgettable first line — "step out the front door like a ghost" — and a chorus of hollow childhood mantras. A slow folk-rock rethinking of a song from Duritz's earlier band The Himalayans, it became the live centerpiece that never played the same way twice.
Dave Matthews Band
The jam band that proved you didn't need guitar-on-guitar riffage—saxophone and violin could carry the whole load. College kids traded their live tapes like sacred relics, passing cassettes through dorm networks long before the internet caught up, and the band turned that devotion into an amphitheater-tour institution that defined summer for a generation.