Crawling King Snakes
By Sylvie Simmons
Mojo Magazine
August, 1996
| DAMN, IT'S GOOD, FROM THE
beautifully-crafted Hammond and slide guitar that layer opening track Under A Mountain, to the West Coast-via-Mersey-with-a-stopover-in-the-deep-South close Evil Eye this is a mature, profound and highly musical album - as good as most anything by the '70's bands they shamelessly saluted in their 1990 debut Shake Your Money Maker. That album established them as an energetic band with a stellar record collection and some nifty songwriting skills - which proved a solid grounding for the later, more free-form explorations of their musicality. Three Snakes And One Charm fuses their three previous releases and displays a band that has truly come of age. Their roots are still showing - Allmans, Otis, Little Feat, plus Rod, Stones, Beatles, that little bit of the Confederate flag that is for ever England - but they've been synthesized into a tremendous musicianship, be it on the swaggering Good Friday and (Only) Halfway To Everywhere, the mellow melancholy of Girl From A Pawnshop, or the Sly Stone/Trafficof One Mirror Too Many. While their contemporaries struggle to find a niche after the changes in rock these last five years, the Crowes stay firmly grounded. And do those acoustic guitars sound fine. INTERVIEW Q. Your last album, amorica, was a textbook case of the difficult third album, to the point where you scrapped a perfectly good record and made a new one from scratch. Was this album less traumatic? C. amorica wasn't hard to make because it was our third album - it was hard to make because we were depresse and in an angry, confused place. Most of it was personal shit. Me and Rich have been brothers a long time, in the next stage of our lives we've been songwriters, but we've never been friends. Now we're friends. We can laugh and have a good time. amorica is so serious. I like that we could be more light-hearted on this record. Q. What brought about the change? C. That last tour, we went through some really heavy, weird things. It got to the point of almost breaking the band up, like whoah - when you really think about not being in The Black Crowes, what you're gonna do, how you're gonna live. This band is my life;it's my skin , my blood, my teeth. Rich and i had one 10 minute conversation which was basically;"Ilove you", "Me too", "I'm ready to leave my excess baggage at the last train stop". It was like, i'll be in this band 'til the day i die, but it's gonna be all six of us or nothing. I came back home to Atlanta to make this album. We rented a house and built the studio there - a plain little house, kind of like Music From The Big Pink. It was very communal. Q. Did any of the lost amorica tracks resurface? C. Evil Eye was one, but with a different chorus. We'd been playing that song live more and more. Q. What does the album title mean? C. It's something everyone else'll be able to tell us for the rest of time. It'slike amorica didn't mean anything - they kept going, "It's about Utopia right? Aplace where you can smoke pot? "Yeah, my whole life and concerns for humanity revolve around marijuana! It's just a symbol - a page from my notebook that just happens to equal four, and it's the fourth record. Snakes come with a lot of symbolism, people love them or fear them. You need yin and yang. That's the energy. |