[6] Jones was born February 16, 1957, in Louisiana and spent early childhood in Gulf Coast oil-industry trailer parks there and in East Texas behind Galveston.
His family graduated to a yard and hand-built trailer addition, made from Hurricane Carla dump salvage,[7] before moving to a tiny fruit-farming town on Lake Ontario, Wilson, N.Y., on March 4, 1966, within range of his father's engineering work in the chemical hive surrounding Niagara Falls.
In his first years in the East Village he was a central figure at Club 57, and he created the two animated rock videos for which he is best known, "Soul City" and "Go-Go Girl," immediately before MTV's start in 1981.
[14] In 1983 he was hired by the Globus brothers to be the technical assistant to Marquis André Roger Lannes de Montebello, who was perfecting CrystalChrome, a form of 3D photography.
The show was an embroidered compendium of Smith's films shown in the manner intended by Smith—as performances—using stroboscopic effects, multiple projections, and magic lanterns.
Following these major projects, Jones devoted himself exclusively to the development of SnakeMonkey Fly's Eye 3D photography until his untimely death on June 16, 2022, at the age of 65, from cancer discovered late during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Soul City" was circulated in the United States and Europe in the 1980s in short-film compilations assembled by Serious Business Company and by the American Federation of Arts.