The Joneses

The Joneses were a hard rock band from Boston in the tradition of that city's leading lights of the '70s, Aerosmith and the J. Geils Band. Indeed, the band even featured lead guitarist Billy Loosigian, a local legend who had spent a good chunk of the '70s as an integral part of the Boston scene's premier bar band Willie Loco Alexander and the Boom Boom Band. Unfortunately, in 1990 when the group's sole full-length release Hard came out, their brand of good-timey bar band rock was hopelessly out of fashion and disappeared from view almost immediately. The Joneses' roots were in a local bar band called the Jackals (occasionally David Finnerty and the Jackals, in deference to the group's lead singer and primary songwriter), who released a power-poppy single, "'Hold On,'" on the local Deli Platters label in 1980 and advanced in the legendary local battle of the bands the Rock and Roll Rumble in 1982, but didn't manage to build on those starts the way that contemporaries like Til Tuesday, Salem 66, and the Neats did. By the mid-'80s, Finnerty and Loosigian had teamed up with bassist Brad Hallen, a local journeyman who'd played with a number of minor bands including 1980 Rock and Roll Rumble winners Pastiche, and drummer John Sands to form the Joneses. The new group's sets at local bars started gaining a larger following than the Jackals had managed, so much so that the group was able to release an EP, Everything Changes, on their own Jonesin label by the summer of 1988. The EP sold well enough that Atlantic Records signed the group in 1989 and released their major-label debut, Hard, in 1990. Unfortunately, producer Frank Aversa (who later produced the Spin Doctors' much more successful Pocket Full of Kryptonite) chose to play up the hard rock side of the group's personality...