This Is A Song About My Dreams...

It was in San Francisco, California, back in 1991.  Marty and his friend Adam went out to hear Marty's dad play with his band.  Afterwards they were sitting at a bar, too shy to talk to any of the pretty girls there.  So instead they joked about how it'd be easier if they were big rock stars, instead of guys with dead-end jobs who played gigs in local bars.  And nobody would know about this one night if Adam hadn't gone home and written a song about it.

I was down at the New Amsterdam staring at this yellow-haired girl
Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation with this black-haired flamenco dancer
She dances while his father plays guitar
She's suddenly beautiful
We all want something beautiful
I wish I was beautiful
So come dance this silence down through the morning
Cut up Maria!
Show me some of them Spanish dances
Pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones
Believe in me
Help me believe in anything
I want to be someone who believes

Mr. Jones and me tell each other fairy tales
Stare at the beautiful women
"She's looking at you.       Ah, no, no, she's looking at me."
Smiling in the bright lights
Coming through in stereo
When everybody loves you, you can never be lonely

I will paint my picture
Paint myself in blue and red and black and gray
All of the beautiful colors are very very meaningful
Gray is my favorite color
I felt so symbolic yesterday
If I knew Picasso
I would buy myself a gray guitar and play

Mr. Jones and me look into the future
Stare at the beautiful women
"She's looking at you.
Uh, I don't think so. She's looking at me."
Standing in the spotlight
I bought myself a gray guitar
When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely

I want to be a lion
Everybody wants to pass as cats
We all want to be big big stars, but we got different reasons for that
Believe in me because I don't believe in anything
and I want to be someone to believe

Mr. Jones and me stumbling through the barrio
Yeah we stare at the beautiful women
"She's perfect for you, Man, there's got to be somebody for me."
I want to be Bob Dylan
Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky
When everybody loves you, son, that's just about as funky as you can be

Mr. Jones and me staring at the video
When I look at the television, I want to see me staring right back at me
We all want to be big stars, but we don't know why and we don't know how
But when everybody loves me, I'm going to be just about as happy as can be
Mr. Jones and me, we're gonna be big stars....

A few years later Adam and the other guys in Counting Crows would become "big big stars" almost overnight, thanks to this song.  I didn't know what to do with Mr. Jones the first time I heard it.  I couldn't even decide if I liked the guy's voice or not, but I just could not turn the song off.  It was 1994, and I had a brand new driver's license.  I would drive around, and this became the perfect roll-the-windows-down song for me.  It was fun and hopeful, but it was also melancholy and honest.  When asked about the story behind the song, Adam said,

"And I joke about what's it about, that story. But it's really a song about all the dreams and all the things that make you want to go in to, you know, doing whatever it is that like seizes your heart, whether it's being a rock star or being a doctor or whatever it is, you know. And I mean, those things run from like 'all this stuff I have pent up inside of me' to , 'I want to meet girls' you know, because I'm tired of not being able to. And 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, probably. I knew that even then. And this is a song about my dreams."

And so those are the things that cross my mind, eleven years later, every time I hear that song.  For me, it's one of a handful of perfect songs for thinking on dreams, or girls, or just dancing around my living room in an ugly brown jacket.

Comments

[bd]

simon is cute