The Black Crowes Have Stopped Pretending
Rich and Chris Robinson have always been vanguards of their craft.
Photo by Ross Halfin/Rogers & Cowan PMK
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.”