The Black Crowes Have Stopped Pretending

Bell-bottom clad and strapped with a save rock ‘n’ roll bravado, the Black Crowes knew what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it back in 1990. That summer was a brief moment of convergence between warring factions of music. Warrant’s Cherry Pie, Poison’s Flesh and Blood and Queensryche’s Empire came interspersed with the release of Alice in Chain’s debut LP Facelift, Soundgarden’s Screaming Life EP and Mother Love Bone’s Apple. Sure, hair metal’s reign on the rock world was beginning to encroach on its own demise, but grunge hadn’t yet laid the last nail in its coffin; that would come almost exactly a year later. It’s hard to tell who triumphed over this first summer of the 1990s, and truthfully, I wasn’t around to have established an opinion of my own. All I know is that the Black Crowes were doing something different and, in 2024, they’re returned to remind us.

The Black Crowes released their debut album months before all this, in February of 1990. Rolling Stone opened their 1990 review of Shake Your Money Maker simply: “Blame it on the Stones.” While everyone else was scrambling to redefine rock ‘n’ roll against the decadence of the 1980s, the Black Crowes went back to their roots. Sure, they tangled those roots up and steeped them in whiskey and grime, but they were infatuated with the classics. The band—led by brothers Rich and Chris Robinson—was written off by some as mere imitators at best, cheap copies at worst. They knew this, but they didn’t care. They looked cliché right in the eyes and challenged it to prove them wrong.

“We have a song called ‘Wiser Time’ from the Amorica record and the lyric says ‘Ask me why another road song, funny but I bet you never left home,’” Chris tells me on a Zoom call separate from his brother, as per their personal preference. “I mean, there are all these clichés of people writing songs about their travels, yeah, but you never went anywhere. It’s my fucking life, I have to be able to express myself through the lens of what’s happening to me. I read On the Road. It didn’t make me think oh wow, it made me want to go on the road.” For all the criticisms levied at the Black Crowes, claims of inauthenticity seem to have missed the point most egregiously. Sure, you could hear some Rod Stewart in the early stuff, see some Mick Jagger in Chris’ early performances, but what the band was doing came entirely from within. Maybe this is why there was always something so charming about Chris Robinson’s drawl and Rich Robinson’s tight, expressive riffs. They were rock ‘n’ rollers—take it or leave it.

People opted to take it. Shake Your Money Maker reached #4 on the Billboard charts and has since been certified as 5x Platinum. Multiple generations have grown up on the sounds of “Twice as Hard,” “She Talks To Angels” and their smoldering cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard To Handle.” I know I certainly have. When I was 15, I found Shake Your Money Maker at the bottom of a big black contractor bag filled with my mother’s old CDs, mixed in with Pearl Jam’s Ten and Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood. Of all the voices contained in that bag, I can’t think of a single one more memorable than Chris Robinson’s.

“Within a year, that record sold 3 million albums,” Rich tells me, in a call almost a month later. “I was still living in my parents’ house. We made this record and then, all of a sudden, we’re all over the world. We’re playing in stadiums with AC/DC and Metallica and playing in arenas with Aerosmith and Robert Plant and ZZ Top. Within a matter of months, the whole world had shifted. And the instinctual thing that Chris and I did was we just held on for dear life.”

1990 was nearly 35 years ago, though, and it’s an understatement to say that the Black Crowes have been through a lot since then. They continued to push through the ‘90s with their Southern Rock-inspired groove, following Shake Your Money Maker up with 1992’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion and 1994’s Amorica. Their sound continued to expand and explode, incorporating elements of psychedelic and soul music on their next three LPs. Following the release of Lions in 2001, they went on a hiatus from 2002 until 2005, underwent some lineup changes in 2006 and released Warpaint in 2008 and the more country-inspired Before the Frost…Until the Freeze in 2009. Croweology, their all-acoustic-double-LP-extravaganza, came in 2010. What followed was one of their most ambitious and, frankly, absurd tours to date (in Chris’ words: The “Contractual Obligation Tour”), where they played two 90-minute sets each night—one electric and one acoustic.

In 2015, the Crowes were done for good. Chris and Rich’s relationship became so volatile that they couldn’t possibly continue. That was the end—of both the Black Crowes and the Robinson Brothers. Chris and Rich didn’t speak to each other for years and both recorded music with assorted solo projects—but the Black Crowes were, for both brothers, a thing of the past. Four years later, they did the impossible. After a near-half-decade of no contact, Chris and Rich announced that the Black Crowes were getting back together and touring their debut Shake Your Money Maker in its entirety. COVID-19 came along and disrupted their plans for a bit, but when they got back out on the road together, it was like second nature. The Black Crowes were back.

“I can’t say enough of the way life works,” Chris says about reconnecting with Rich. “I found Camille, my wife, and it’s the only real fulfilling love and relationship I’ve ever had. As that moves on, I start to see things differently. She’s a strong woman in the world, and she pushes me to be better. And so, finally, it was like, “What’s the fucking deal with the brother? What is it? Let’s talk about it. Let’s think about it.” And then, in the way things happen, all these things started to come together.”

“I think for 10 or 12 years—or longer than that—Chris and I always put everything else first above the two of us and our relationship,” Rich adds. “That always came last. And, you know, you have your own new set of intelligence and new set of experiences and that perspective kind of allows you to see back and say ‘I would have done that differently. I would have done this differently.’ Looking at Chris and I’s relationship as brothers first, that family element was the impetus to get us back together.”

And now, in 2024, they are gearing up to release Happiness Bastards, their first full-length studio album in 15 years—a record that is as out of place in 2024 as Shake Your Money Maker was in 1990. But if you ask them, it’s coming just in time. The Black Crowes still see themselves as vanguards of a certain sensibility—not of a sound or a genre or a process, but of the sheer feeling of rock-and-roll. “When we were younger, I think we felt even more like we were protectors of the grail—or some bullshit,” Chris admits. “But, we’re one of the last bands with fucking amps on stage. People put their guitars through computers that just go out through the PA and everyone’s in in-ear monitors, and there’s great bands that do that—I’m hardly saying one is better than the other, I’m just saying we’re the last fucking woolly mammoth of that shit.”

Sure, you can’t measure a band’s quality based on the number of amps they have up on stage, but I’d argue that the Black Crowes have earned every right to protect what it is they do—and then some. Chris would certainly agree. “I will say that was also our right as artists,” he says. “We’re the ones who made the music: we’re the ones who made the records, we’re the ones who did the tours. And then the music business wants to dictate to you what that means, or what that looks like, or where that’s not going right for them.” And Happiness Bastards is, in many ways, a document of everything the Black Crowes have to offer. Behind its walls of blazing riffs, it’s a deeply emotional record.

“I start to find how I think the song should feel before the character or the scene or whatever,” Chris continues, speaking to his lyric-writing process. “When you write your first couple of records, you’re like, ‘Fuck, we wrote 30 songs. Now I’ve written over 400 songs or whatever it is?’ I don’t think it’s hard in the imagination, and I definitely don’t think it’s hard in the experience and the emotional part of the experience. It’s harder just to make sure you leave no stone unturned.”

The emotional undercurrent of Happiness Bastards was captured during the recording process, where they decamped to Jay Joyce’s studio in East Nashville—a converted old church building—with bassist Sven Pipien. “I am not a Christian person, but you do pick up on the reverberations of people’s intentions and the energy put into something like worship,” Chris says. “And I think Joyce has taken that space and turned it, hopefully in our case, back from the church to the devil’s music.” He laughs and quickly offers a caveat: “But no, the sound is good in there and everything goes up. In that space, sound continues to go upwards.” “Everyone really felt comfortable there and felt comfortable with Jay,” Rich adds.

With all the reverberations it picked up, from God or the devil or anyone in between, Happiness Bastards comes out of the gates roaring. The album’s opening song, “Bedside Manners,” is a reminder for fans and critics alike of all there is to love about the Black Crowes as a band. The song rips, roars, jingles and soars. When Rich slides his fingers all the way down the neck of the guitar, you can hear the joy he’s putting into the thing. You can almost see the smirk creeping onto his face before he resets to play the riff again. “It’s that, it’s just a classic Rich Robinson slack riff,” Chris says. “No one else would ever play it that way.”

By the time the record draws to a close, the band has settled into something deeply comfortable with the gentle, peaceful finale “Kindred Friend”—a song that sounds like a homecoming for the brothers, and one that has been a long time coming. “What we have left, let’s make it last,” Chris croons, to the sound of his brother’s guitar—all supported by twinkling keyboard fills and rolling harmonica interludes. “It’s kind of cool using that song almost like a tie,” Rich tells me. “It ends in a question mark. I like [‘Kindred Friend’] because it’s not a stamp. It’s not something that’s finite. It’s just this gentle thing.” Chris may sing “Let’s stop pretending and write our own ending,” but “Kindred Friend” is a different kind of authorship. The band doesn’t use the album’s last song to write themselves into oblivion, just to say “Look, we did the reunion thing!” They use it to revel in the joy that comes when they play together.

And Happiness Bastards is certainly not an ending for the band, nor a reunion simply to prove a point. “When we came back together, I think we were in far more informed and mature positions to look at this and be like, ‘Okay, we don’t want this to be some sort of money grab, like one tour, get some money and go away. If we’re going to do this, this has to be done properly.’” Coming down from the excitement of that Shake Your Money Maker tour in 2022, the Black Crowes do look forward to getting back out on the road later this year. And over three decades later, they still can’t get over the sheer joy that playing their music live brings

“I think, maybe, the part of Shake Your Money Maker that was most important for me was to reconnect with enjoying being the frontman,” Chris says. “l don’t like in-ear monitors. I like the monitor in my face. I like the air that the amps are moving when it makes the drums loud. It makes me alive. And if it’s alive, then there’s the prospects for real interaction and real freedom. Even though we’ve been doing it a long time I think those things are still there.”

The interaction between sound and movement, sonic and physical energy pushes the Crowes to keep moving—even when they are standing on the stage with their instruments. “I dance a lot on stage, and that was one of the things that made me different in 1990,” Chris laughs. “It’s funny, it’s still the thing that probably makes me different today. I’m in a place where I feel like doing this again and I want to get on stage and I want to look a certain way and I want to move a certain way and I want to sound a certain way.”

And at the end of the day, that is what sets the Black Crowes apart—they do rock ‘n’ roll the way they want to. When Chris opens his mouth or when Rich runs his fingers along the fretboard, magic comes out. It’s natural, ageless and worth defending forever. “I don’t believe in forcing things.” Rich says. “I just write the songs that I like and what comes sounds like me, and what comes out of Chris’s mouth sounds like him. It’s cool—no matter what you do, you will always sound like yourself.” It’s as simple as that.