Hard To Handle
By Steve Hochman
Rolling Stone
August 25, 1994
| IN the time-honored rock & roll
tradition of Don and Phil Everly and the Kink's Ray and Dave Davies, the Black Crowes' Chris and Rich Robinson weren't speaking to each other as their band worked to complete Amorica, its third album. "We could sit in the same room, but all you'd get out of Rich would be 'Fuck you'- not to you but to me," says the bell-bottomed Chris, sitting in a beanbag chair in a San Fernando Valley, CA studio. "Brotherly love, you know?" he says, shrugging between tokes of a dark hash from a 3-foot-high bong. When asked about the rift, Rich- in another room- refuses to elaborate on the nature of their feud. So it's not all Southern harmony for the Atlanta group, though it's hard to say whether that tension has anything to do with the toughened sound of the new recordings. Where 1990's Shake Your Money Maker and 1992's The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion were marked by the Stones, Faces and Allman Brothers influences, the Crowes' October release has added hints of Santana, Sly Stone and others in a harder, more complex mix. "High Head Blues" and "A Conspiracy" reveal a taught sound but one with sudden, precise shifts of rhythm and texture. The dark, hazy "Feathers" offers another new mood for the band, while a version of "Chevrolet" (which the Crowes learned from a Taj Mahal album) goes back to folk-blues influences, the way soul covers exposed those roots on the band's first two albums. Some of the new directions may come from the presence of co-producer Jack Joseph Puig, but mostly they seem to come from growth. "It's the first time that the sound meets the way the guys in the band play," says Chris. "And lyrically, it's the first time I really could sit down and say, 'This is how I feel.'" The brothers' rift hasn't impeded the creative flow of the Crowes either- in two sessions the band recorded more than two dozen songs. The overflow may come out as a double CD; there's even talk of holding some for a follow-up album that would be released during the band's 1995 world tour. There are also plans for a home video of performance footage and scenes from a recent, psychedelics-fueled Beyond The Valley of the Dolls-like studio party. One thing the brothers are definitely united on is their feelings about people who dismiss the band as retrorockers. "We get really defensive, because this isn't something we fabricated to make music," says Chris, pointing to R. Crumb's KEEP ON TRUCKIN' poster. "This is where we live every day. I have Grateful Dead posters at my house." Says Rich: "I hate the '60s and '70s. I hate hearing about it." Adds Chris, with anything but a '60s love vibe: "This record to us in a big way is 'Fuck you. If you don't like it, well, we're gonna make the biggest rock record we've made yet.' It's sort of the thing where the people who hate us, we hate you more." |