Band Of Gypsys
By Stanley Booth
Guitar World
March, 1996
| "What is it about the South?" I once
asked Dan Penn, a songwriter/record producer and Alabama native. "People in the South won't let nobody tell them what to do." "But how does it happen that they know what to do?" "It ain't no explanation for it." Penn was right, as the Catholics say, it's a mystery. But that doesn't mean it isn't real: the South has spawned too many incorrigible heroes to name. All of them, while on their way to immortality, offended people. Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes are no exception. "Retro," critics have called them. That's code for "Who do they think they are? How dare they apply for admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?" The answer is audacity. Advised that there were Yankees on his troops' right and left flanks, legendary Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest said, "Charge both ways." I missed seeing the Crowes open for ZZ Top in Savannah, Georgia, in the spring of 1991 because Chris had talked his way off that tour, having more to say about the sponsor, a beer company, and Top's use of recorded effects than the headliners wanted to hear. I first saw the Black Crowes at a rally for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) at Atlanta's Piedmont Park, in April, 1992. It was, as you might imagine, a laid-back affair. The Crowes seemed perfectly at ease, as if they were playing a backyard barbecue for 60,000 homeys. Chris wore a long Isadora Duncan scarf like Mick Jagger used to wear and pranced around a lot, playing with the mic stand. I was impressed that they had the nerve to perform on behalf of such a cause in the Just Say No era, and I liked their music. They had released two albums that were, to my mind, better than anything the Rolling Stones had done in a long time. That day, the Black Crowes seemed to have a lot of heart, a lot of genuine feeling for rock and roll--whatever that is. I wanted to get to know them, because of something I sensed about them: it's called an attitude problem. The next morning I came out of a local radio station and there, in a red Cadillac convertible with a beautiful, mean-looking girl was Chris Robinson. He'd heard the broadcast I'd just done and, being in the neighborhood. stopped by to say hello. We talked about the South, Otis Redding, Gram Parsons, and my CSA (Confederate States of America) belt buckle. He talked about his father. I didn't know he had been a folk and bluegrass musician who'd had a small hit on Atco, and opened shows for people like Sam Cooke and Bill Haley. I didn't know a lot of things about the Black Crowes that are now part of the legend, like how Def American producer George Drakoulias wandered into an Atlanta Kentucky Fried Chicken and heard about the Robinson's band. I didn't even know that Chris was supposed to hate music writers. I didn't see Chris again for three years, until last April when I went to a Crowes concert in Gainesville, Florida. The band was playing the University of Florida's O'Connell Center, a basketball gym with a capacity well under 10,000. Richard and I had seen the Rolling Stones up the street at Florida Field, the football stadium, the previous November. That concert had suffered from the Stones' elephantiasis, a near-chronic condition with them these days. The Crowes' show, by the way of contrast, was the best I'd seen in a basketball gym since the Stones played Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1969. The Black Crowes are Southern, but they're from Atlanta--a singularly characterless city. Though much good music has been recorded there, never to my knowledge has anyone suggested the existence of an "Atlanta sound." The Crowes have, as they've said, worn their diverse influences on their sleeves, and it's partly Atlanta's lack of focus that has enabled the Crowes to be so eclectic. They have spoken of Atlanta in the late Eighties, the time of their development, as an alternative mecca, but they're quick to acknowledge that most of the bands represented not much beyond an inability to play well. If Nashville is the home of commercial country and Memphis the home of the blues, Atlanta's the home of nothing in particular. New Orleans is the home of parades and street parties; it's just the right atmosphere for the Crowes, or anybody else who likes to jump up and down and go crazy in public. I think it was A. J. Liebling who said that New Orleans is not one of the southernmost cities in America but one of the northernmost cities in Guatemala. The Crowes added a conga player since the NORML show; when I went with them to New Orleans, the extra percussion threw them right into the tropical polyrhythms that had seduced Cole Porter, Dizzy Gillespie and many another voodooed child. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. I was waiting for the band at the venue in Gainesville, and when Chris got off the bus, he was barefoot. "People look at me funny 'cause I don't wear shoes when it's hot," he said. "In Atlanta we never used to wear shoes except in the wintertime." He's just a barefoot boogie-woogie boy. That night, the Crowes played "She," the Gram Parsons-Chris Etheridge classic. They did it beautifully, and also did wonderful renditions of Willie Dixon's "Mellow Down Easy," Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle," plus a bunch of their own songs. I'd say nobody who was there has forgotten it. It wasn't as intense as that Stones show at Fort Collins, but that tour would end with a murder at Altamont. I was hopeful that the Crowes could avoid such an extreme conclusion, for everybody's good. I'd gotten this far as a friend and fan of the Black Crowes; now I got the bug to write about them, got myself an assignment and soon found myself on a rainy afternoon last August sitting in the band's dressing room in Raleigh, North Carolina. The band was playing on the H.O.R.D.E. tour, which also featured Blues Traveler, Ziggy Marley, Wilco and others. We sat around eating and drinking, listening to [blues harmonica great] Little Walter doing "Key to the Highway" on the sound system. The Black Crowes didn't have the Mortal Kombat II video machine that they'd entertained me with in Gainesville, but they had Johnny Wong's Tiki Hut (a clever, collapsible camp bar and sideboard), lighted candles, and the tie-dyed panels they put up to make the concrete-block environments look homier, to an unreconstructed hippie, at least. Guitarist Marc Ford told me about some recent European Stones shows they'd opened. In Montpellier, France, Ford met Pierre, Keith Richards' French guitar-tech. He invited the Crowes to the Stones' tune-up room, where the groups met and got along famously. So famously, in fact, that the Stones invited the Crowes to watch from behind their stage, an honor seldom bestowed these days. After that they were mates and hung out together. "Ronnie's suite is the place," Marc says. "The rule is, everybody has to be out by eight A.M." Chris starts bounding around the dressing room in Raleigh, dropping quotes: "Bohemians have always been our only hope. If anyone's gonna save us, it's the creative people." He says these things as if he'd just discovered them: maybe he has. The effect is endearingly fervent. Steve Balcom, an old friend of the Crowes who runs Mammoth Records, drops by to say hello. He remembered when the band was Mr. Crowes' Garden and would come to his house after gigs. What stood out, Balcom recalls, were the fights between the brothers Robinson. Rich: "We're goin' home" Chris: "No, we're not." Whap! Bam! Sock! Oof! And so on. "Chris and I have one unwritten rule," Rich says, "we can't hit each other in the face." There are still some brotherly annoyances. Rich tells me how he sent one of his oil paintings to Chris as a moving present, "a huge canvas that took me three months to paint. It's still on the floor." Since growing his goatee, Chris has lost a bit of his waiflike quality, though he's still as skinny as ever. It gives him a bit of the Merlin persona, which seems appropriate. The night before the Gainesville show, the Black Crowes opened for the Grateful Dead. If Chris learned anything from Jerry Garcia's death, it didn't have anything to do with controlled substances. At Raleigh the Crowes were scheduled to go on at 8 o'clock. Earlier, I'd tested the limits of Robinson's radicalism. He'd been talking about Garcia and drug prohibition laws: "How can you say to a genius, 'You can't take this, you can't use that to further your artistic vision?'" "Do you think all drugs should be legalized?" I asked. "No, I'm just sayin' we ought to take another look at the problem." The Black Crowes have nearly 90 songs in their repertoire. The sets change every night, and even the performances of the songs themselves change. It's all a kind of high-powered jazz. Moreover, the Crowes can't stop themselves from getting involved with the musicians around them. During the Raleigh set, for example, a female singer from Ziggy Marley's Melody Makers sat in. "I think music knows when you leave the bases unwatched," Chris explains, "when you start going over here and the God of money or whatever becomes bigger than the music itself. The music knows when fame and fortune become more important than coppin' a bad jam and havin' everyone jump out of their seat at the same time." Even with Chris staring 30 in the face, and Rich becoming a father, they still sound like children at times; good children who have learned some valuable lessons. "If you do something over and over you get better at it," says Rich. There are seven Crowes now: Chris, Rich, Marc, bassist Johnny Colt, drummer Steve Gorman, conga drummer Chris Trujillo and keyboardist Eddie Harsch. I have the feeling that the Black Crowes will never be as good a story as the Stones, because they will never sacrifice any band members (after guitarist Jeff Cease, whom Marc Ford replaced matter-of-factly). The thing that came to mind, seeing Chris over the months, was how much he's refined his approach. People may compare the Crowes to the Stones, but they have little in common besides open-G tuning. What Mick used to do was sex; what Chris does is passion, but not sexual passion. Chris' passion is his idealism, which is why he is so often offended. He has standards, and he's prepared to defend them. To the death. "I want to blow everyone's mind in the band every night," he once said. "If that kills you, it kills you. If it makes you go crazy, you go crazy. If your teeth fall out, you smell of urine and go bald, so be it." The Crowes' shows really are thrilling and exhilarating. The band tries to surpass itself every night. and you can tell the audience senses it. Chris is dead serious about the responsibility he's accepted for passing on something bigger than the Black Crowes or the Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley. But he's not solemn about it. "Sometimes I feel like we're carrying the flag," Chris told Rolling Stone, an outfit for which he has scant respect. The Crowes are not a band of virtuosos. They are a great rock and roll band in the tradition of the Stones and the Allmans, creating multiple layers of rhythm, melody and harmony, proceeding not by schoolbook rules but by feeling. A certain amount of boldness, if not arrogance, is required. When everybody's worked up a sweat and the Black Crowe dances, it's a good feeling. And when the music's over, they grab their things and head for the tour bus. The Crowes are still young enough to enjoy racing through a rainy night in the biggest bus money can buy, a great big space capsule. But even on the biggest bus there's no extra room. There are two couches up front by the driver, a small table, sink and fridge and sleeping bunks. You get a sense of us-against-the-world on a tour bus, and on this particular bus you know you're with people who don't sell credit cards, like the Rolling Stones do. Driving through the night, Chris, Eddie, Marc and I sat around the table and talked. It was loads of fun. Eddie told me about playing with Albert Collins and giving up his chair to Memphis player Charlie Hodges. We listened to Ann Peebles, drank beer, had a light snack, stopped at a truck stop and went in and loomed about. The place was full of characters from Fellini movies, video games and junky things to buy. We didn't stay long. Rich put on a videotape of Dazed and Confused, and the next thing I knew it was morning and we were at Atlanta's Hotel Nikko. Time for a nap, then get up and back on the bus. The Crowes have done this for months at a time, year in and year out for five years. Backstage at the Atlanta show you get the families, girlfriends, babies, dogs. I met Johnny Colt's fiancee, Rosie; they got married in October in Atlanta. Chris and his fiancee Lala got hitched in November, in New Orleans. Marc wandered around the Lakewood Amphitheatre, talking to people, having drinks. The show was outstanding, highlighted by the encore: Keith Richards's "Happy." Back on the bus, Chris and Rich talked about their roots and their future. [Bluesmen] Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell and Furry Lewis were the first names that came to Rich's mind when I asked about his inspirations. "My dad was way into bluegrass and different kinds of music, and he would bring home all these records. He introduced us to Andy Irvin and Paul Brady, two Irish folk musicians. They played dulcimers and different instruments too, which was really cool." Chris' list of essential artists ranges wide: Little Walter, the Louvin Brothers, Coltrane, Flatt and Scruggs, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams and Furry Lewis. He hastened to add the Stones and the Dead, Booker T. and the MG's, Sly and the Family Stone ("the ultimate rock and roll experience"), the JB's, Otis Spann, Bob Dylan and beyond. "Somebody was surprised the other day that I like bluegrass. I said, 'Man, my dad played the Opry.' Dad said Lester Flatt came up to him one day and said, 'Y'know, boy, you sing real nice.'" After ending his music career, Stan Robinson went into business with the Robinson boys' grandparents. "My grandfather was a Polish Jew," Chris says. "He'd come down from the East Coast. He and my grandmother were in the garment trade. They were sales reps. After my dad got out of the singin' thing, he started the Atlanta Renegades football club. While he was singin', he was playin' semi-pro football and stuff, too. He's a pretty weird dude. They're still in garments; they have a showroom at the Apparel Mart. They're sales reps for the clothing manufacturers." "I'm not the big music reference point that Chris is," Rich says, "When we were growing up, Chris would go into record stores and buy hundreds of records, I never had to, 'cause I would just go in his collection and steal 'em. I was into Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, people I got into through listening to Stones records, the Allman Brothers and things like that. R.E.M. were kind of cool, in the beginning, tryin' to talk to you about groups like the Velvet Underground and the Byrds. Chris also got me into [English fingerstylist] Nick Drake, who's one of my favorite guitar players. But I'm not a big guitar-player guy. I don't love guitar players. I like what they've done, or what songs have been written. I liked Drake because I thought he wrote beautiful songs and he played amazing and had an amazing voice." "You have to realize," Chris jumps in, "you're just a tributary that runs to this bigger thing, a bigger river, for lack of a good metaphor. That one's pretty well used, but it's true. It comes from somewhere, and it's here right now, and it's going somewhere. We're not scared of our traditions. We're not frightened by having to live up to genres that add up to American music." But that river hasn't been without its share of turbulent moments for the brothers Robinson. "By the end of the last tour, Rich had his own bus, and no one was really happy," Chris admits. "I'm sure there's a lot of different reasons. But you get to a point where you go, 'Holy shit, we're losing our band to bullshit things.' When you realize that, you realize how special it is and how privileged you are that people have given you this opportunity to express yourself and that they listen. And hopefully you can create that real weird atmosphere that is what going to see a live band is all about. It only lasts for a little bit, but it's so powerful it keeps you going back for more. "Everyone goes through changes," he continues. "The trick is trying to remember that and keep it together, and having respect for everyone and not judging people because you're all goin' through changes. Perseverance is the thing. You have to get your ego in place. The only time I'm any different from anybody else in this human experiment is when I'm in a creative space and performing place, which is to me a giving place. All the other times of the day you just realize, 'Oh, shit, I'm lucky and I'm happy 'cause I'm making a living being a musician, which is the thing I love more than anything.'" When the tour ends, the Crowes will go back into the studio to try their luck on a fourth album, tentatively titled, Three Snakes and One Charm. "When we get home, we'll work on songs," Chris explains. "Rich sends me an ADAT. He'll mix it down to two tracks and leave me six tracks. Then I can get my lyrics together and do vocals, do some harmony parts, put on a little percussion, and then I send it back to him. Rich and I have a different relationship now. I think we both realize that working together means compromising here and there. We show each other respect. We have a lot more creative power and positive energy in the way we're able to communicate now as opposed to six months ago, certainly since we made Amorica. It's just a lot more positive." And he delineates the Robinson process: "I'll go down and work for 10 days, just me and Rich at his home studio; getting the basic arrangements, which is how we've always done it. We come up with rough arrangements, then we play all the instruments to get the intros and outros and then the whole band comes over, and when you start hearing all the pieces, you start changing things. We work till it's done. We never take a day off in the studio." Chris, clearly the inheritor of his grandfather's garment-business work ethic, relates a telling anecdote: "It's like a story my dad told me about when he played football. They would play this team in Alabama that had this gimmick--the kicker's wife was on the team. She would hold the ball while he kicked. And this big defensive end on my dad's team just barreled through the line and fuckin' took her out. It really upset everyone, and later, after the game, people were goin', 'What the fuck's wrong with you?' He said, 'Hey, man, she put on the suit, she came to play.' That's the way I feel about bein' a musician. |