At the Mercer Hotel in New York City, Chris Robinson is eager to talk about his newfound career as a solo artist. The frontman of the Black Crowes has taken a solo flight into his own musical orbit, one that includes stripped-down sounds the likes of Neil Young and Bobby Womack.

Since 1990, the music of the Black Crowes has brought to mind various descriptions of rock, such as stoner, contemplative, slacker, soulful, and grunge. But you'll be surprised, both by the new album and by what Chris has to say.

Intelligent, opinionated and aware, Chris talks about fame, his wife (actress Kate Hudson), marijuana laws, the future of the Black Crowes and, of course, his new effort New Earth Mud.

NYROCK:
What's the new album New Earth Mud about? Is it a departure from the Black Crowes?

CHRIS:
Yes and no. I was a big part of that band so obviously I left my stamp on music I made with my brother. But it's my music now, so it's going to be fairly different. A band like the Black Crowes is a dynamic collaboration. This is different because it is born from one place, one vision, and it's not grabbing so many pieces and putting them together.

NYROCK:
Will you be touring to support the record?

CHRIS:
I did a bunch of dates in Europe and just finished the East Coast and the Mid-West and West Coast, doing just acoustic stuff. The electric tour starts on Halloween. I'm not sure how much we'll be touring this year, but we'll get back to it next year. I hope to be touring quite a bit.

NYROCK:
How did the album come about? You wrote and recorded it all over the place, from Malibu to England to France.

CHRIS:
My wife and I live in Malibu, but I made the record in Paris, in a funky little place. We were living there while she was working. My partner Paul [Stacey, on guitars, keys, bass] lives in London and the other guys who played on the record are from there too. [Paris and London are] just a train ride away, instead of flying all around, so that was awesome. Paris is in a great place right now. All the great cities have something to offer, but sometimes they go through phases. We mixed the record and finished it up in Toronto, where I was living while my wife was finishing another movie.

The geography made that a bit easier. If I hadn't told people where I was, you could never have found [me]. If you're working in a studio in LA, someone can eventually find you.

NYROCK:
Did you like being incognito?

CHRIS:
For this, it was more of the vibe. I wanted the privacy to make the record that I wanted to make. That was really it. I would have achieved that anywhere, but it's much easier when you're not in an industry-oriented place. We made the whole thing in about four-and-a-half weeks, which is pretty quick. It was really organic, spontaneous, the whole thing.

NYROCK:
Did being away from the United States affect your sound, since your music is very roots based?

CHRIS:
Aesthetically, it affected it because if I made the record with American musicians, it would have been more Americana, definitely. Making it with English musicians brings in an entirely different aesthetic. The guys I worked with are immersed in jazz and blues and rock music, which are American music forms, but like anything else, the English have a different way of approaching it and looking at it. The record was mastered in England. That part of it I really liked. I've always had somewhat of an English aesthetic without ever really knowing it, I guess, from some of the records that I like.

NYROCK:
Records such as?

CHRIS:
Anything from John Martyn's Solid Air, the Incredible String Band, to Echo and the Bunnymen, to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Yes, or whatever.

NYROCK:
How was the process of making this record different from the Black Crowes as far as a collaborative effort?

CHRIS:
Part of what the Black Crowes was about was the drama involved. There was a lack of drama in this project, which is good for me. It just comes from a singular place. If it's a melancholy sound, it's going to be melancholy because of me, not because I'm trying to translate somebody else's piece. In that sense, it's just easier to tie down what each song is about thematically.

NYROCK:
What's the thematic tie on New Earth Mud?

CHRIS:

The theme is the timeless nature of love and the experience of love – the good and bad parts of that. Without going through some of the things I've gone through and the choices that I've made, I wouldn't be here. I think the underlying theme is fearlessness and the courage to be intimate and to talk about certain things and to be independent in a world that you're only validated by how much money you make other people, and how wide ranging your celebrity is.

That's part of a machine that you have to bow down to. You sort of have to lie down with the dogs in that sense in terms of corporate entities and that's nothing I'm really interested in.

NYROCK:
How does it feel to be part of that entertainment machine, the cult-of-personality type of thing that you and your wife sort of have?

CHRIS:
Obviously, what my wife does is much different than what I do, but she also conducts her life and makes her decisions based on her soul.... If people take our picture when we're walking down the street – whereas some people see a movie star and a rock star, I don't look at things like that.

NYROCK:
Does it bother you? Do you feel like it's an invasion of your privacy?

CHRIS:
You run into people who are like, "that's part of it, if you want to be famous." But that's kind of a stupid thing to say, because when you break it down to a man and a woman and when your wife is in a car by herself and two cars are following her, that's scary. I don't care if you know they want your picture or not. That's something that people shouldn't have to feel. I don't care what they do. It's tender enough just to be out there and to have people judging you all the time on every little thing. She deals with those things much better than I ever did when I was on MTV all the time.

NYROCK:
Who came up with the "Brotherly Love" name for the tour you did with Oasis last year? And is there really a lot of fighting going on between you and your brother?

CHRIS:
There used to be when we were in a band together! I think the Crowes manager came up with the name of that tour.

NYROCK:
How did your collaboration with Jimmy Page in 2000 come about?

CHRIS:
We knew Jimmy; he sat in with us in Paris many years ago when a benefit came up and we played four or five songs together. It went really well and they were like, let's do some more dates. It just kind of happened like that. People started to say, "we can sell this." So they did. It was all right.

NYROCK:
It must have been unbelievable playing with Page.

CHRIS:
It was probably more fun for the other people. I didn't really have that much fun doing it. I mean it was all right and Jimmy's a phenomenal guitarist, but to me it was just a job. I'm not a big fan of Robert Plant's lyrics or his singing, so that part of it was a little boring for me.

NYROCK:
You guys like to flex your musical talents onstage.

CHRIS:
Every night, why limit yourself? You never know how you're going to feel and it all really dictates to the audience. If the audience wants to go to these places with you, that's the thing that takes you. If they don't, that's a let down and you have to try harder or vice versa. But the whole trick is to find those times and those spaces where it really happens.

NYROCK:
So your shows are like collaborative experiments between you and the audience. Your fans smoke pot at your shows, and the band advocates pot use. Have you been following the attempted decriminalization of marijuana in Nevada, England and Canada?

CHRIS:
Yeah... At the end of the day, I hated seeing people in the music biz not tell the truth about the way they lived, just so that they could make more money, or fit in, or whatever. I could care less about marijuana laws. I have no desire at all to rally behind something like people that want to smoke herb. We all know the reasons why it's illegal and I don't think that any government in charge is going to change that, not in America.

NYROCK:
Do you smoke?

CHRIS:
Yeah.

NYROCK:
Should it be legalized?

CHRIS:
It doesn't really affect me either way. It's illegal and I treat it as such.

NYROCK:
You're indifferent and not really into taking a stance?

CHRIS:
My whole thing was that I was sick of hypocrites and people in bands that lied about their lifestyle, and at the time that was a big part of our lifestyle.

There are a lot of innocent people whose lives are ruined, not because they take drugs, but because some of those substances are illegal. They're not criminals; they're not bad people, and they have families. Locking them up doesn't change anything, nor does it help anything. It just keeps us paying more taxes and it keeps people down. That's what control is.

NYROCK:
What do you think about the new garage music scene that's going on now with bands like the Strokes, the Vines, White Stripes, etc. Is it reminiscent of the early Black Crowes?

CHRIS:
It's like the old garage scene. Like anything else, these corporations have to sell something new and they find these bands. Just because people in offices haven't heard this music, doesn't mean that other people haven't. It's a little insulting to the bands and to the kids. They'll probably miss a lot in the translation, because all they want to do is sell, sell, sell. They don't really care about anything else. They'll keep finding subgenres and keep trying to name things. At the end of the day, it's rock-and-roll music. It's been here before; it was here in the fifties, the sixties and the seventies and it was there in the eighties and the nineties. There's always something happening like that. It's when the media and the record companies start throwing some money around that it becomes something. But it doesn't last very long usually, as far as I can see.

NYROCK:
Any ideas on the state of rock and roll and its corporatisation. Your new record is on a small label. Is there any reason you're working with a small label versus a big one?

CHRIS:
I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial. It's not the people that are to blame, because people want to buy music and take it home and be a part of it and connect with artists and feel a part of something.

The danger in that is, it's an easy thing to manipulate. It's a wide-open space there. That's not going to change. People buy what they are told to buy at a certain level, especially since about 1973 onwards when people realized how much money there is to be made. It all becomes a big equation. A plus B equals C. I'm not interested in any of that. I was happy that the Black Crowes managed for as long as we did to stay away from that and still have a career. There were a lot of bands that came and went – and many more bands who came and went and didn't even go out their own way. They went out trying to be something they're not.

People think being famous and making a lot of money is the end all. At the end of the day, people get tired of that. It's even easier to fool kids, because kids just want to be cool. But the time for being so cool and pretentious will run its course and you'll see the machinery starting to crack. The money is not there like it used to be, so they've sub-genred everything out and they've crammed everything down your throats. There's no music really on any of the music channels. It's all their shows like "The Hundred Most Ridiculous This..."

NYROCK:
Everything is turning into that "Behind the Scenes, Hard Luck Story" show, like the "Behind the Music" show that's on VH1.... Do you think the movie Almost Famous [about a young music journalist, and starring Chris's wife, Kate Hudson] was realistic?

CHRIS:
I thought it was realistic, for what it was. It was a movie about a fifteen-year-old boy and the way he saw music and the world. If people thought that the film was supposed to be about something else, then they were wrong. That movie's about how that boy saw things.

It hit all the right chords for me, because if life isn't like that when you're fifteen, then that's sad. If all you want is the gratuitous tabloid part of it, then you're missing out on the real joy of it. Why do you love this band so much? Why do you put those posters up on your wall? Why do you want to dress like them or whatever? Why is that music the soundtrack to your life? I think that's what that movie is about.

NYROCK:
There's a song on the new album for your wife, called "Katie Dear."

CHRIS:
The title is a hat's off to an old Louvin Brothers track and I think it's only relevant in terms of people in love. That's the way they feel when they wake up after they've gone to sleep with the person that means so much to them. I don't think the song means any more than it does or anything should be read into it because my wife's famous. The title alone is one of my favorite old songs. It's kind of like a Romeo and Juliet mountain ballad. Just to be able to bring a touch of that into something modern and intimate.

NYROCK:
Do you find it difficult to work your career, have a lifestyle, and make music around your wife's film work?

CHRIS:
Not really. She took a year and a half off to be with me on tour and when I'm not working I'll go be with her. We're the luckiest people in the world, because as long as there's a studio somewhere I can work, and I can always drag a guitar along. We have both traveled all of our lives, so it's not too straining.

NYROCK:
What do you say to purists and critics who say that the Black Crowes are Rolling Stones clones?

CHRIS:
I heard that question a lot about ten years ago, but I don't think it's been very relevant since. If that was the case, I probably wouldn't be here making records in the year 2002. I don't think that people who write about music are purists anyway. What do you do? You write about other people's work.

NYROCK:
Rock and roll, it's almost all been said before.

CHRIS:
It depends on how you want to look at it. People have criticisms about those things because it makes them feel better about themselves. It has nothing to do with what is being translated or communicated through the music.

NYROCK:
What is your musical future like? And the future of the Black Crowes?

CHRIS:
I don't know. I'm going to start gigging and I'm about nine songs into the next record, so hopefully we can tour and make records. I want to stay away from making a record and touring and making a record and touring. I want to live my life the way I want to live it. Tour when I want, and make records when I want. And if people dig it, cool.

NYROCK:
I love the attitude that the Crowes had. Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, you guys have to get the music out. It's part of your soul. The money and the fame are a byproduct. You guys stayed true to your feelings.

CHRIS:
That's the thing. You have to look at it. I make decisions based on my work, not based on meetings with my business managers, who I don't like to meet.

NYROCK:
Any New York City gigs coming up?

CHRIS:
In November probably.

NYROCK:
Great, thanks Chris.
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