Crowe Hand
By Charles M. Young
Guitar World Acoustic
February, 1997
 

Guitarist Rich Robinson, the Black Crowes' soft-spoken musical leader, considers the band's most recent roots rock opus, Three Snakes and One Charm. After a lifetime of assuming he couldn't possibly do it, Rich Robinson took up painting a few years ago. At first he smeared his oils on paper, rating himself unworthy of canvas. Although what he does (abstract expressionism) still doesn't measure up to what he would like to be doing (surrealism), he's gradually reached the point where a paint brush feels good in his hands. "When I got home from the road and I don't play guitar for a while, I just miss the feeling," Robinson says in his Atlanta home. "It's one of the most comfortable things in the world--just to hold a guitar and play. A security blanket, so to speak. And painting is like that now. The smell, and touching the paint to canvas--it's really calming." So it's fair to say that Rich's considerable emotional energy emerges mostly through his fingers manipulating steel strings or paint. His brother Chris expresses his equally considerable emotional energy through his mouth, spitting forth words like bullets bursting from an automatic weapon, often demonstrating in conversation an encyclopedic knowledge of music. Rich claims no such knowledge. He labels that which is good as either "amazing" or "cool," and that which is bad as "weird" or "shit." And that's pretty much his filing system. United and pulling in opposite directions, as only brothers can, as only introvert and extrovert joining into an uber personality can, Rich and Chris became legends very early for beating each other up, but have managed to run the Black Crowes for four albums now. Debuting in 1990 with "Shake Your Money Maker" (American), they astonished everyone, including their record company, with their quadruple-Platinum mixture of defiance and joy, becoming staples on MTV with "Jealous Again" and "Hard to Handle." In 1992 they make a grander, less commercial (just Platinum) statement about assimilating their many traditions--and ignoring alternative fashion--with "The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion." In 1994 they made their grandest, darkest and least commercial statement with "Amorica," an exercise in metallic mountain music that left some of their "Hard to Handle" fans wondering. And now they've returned with "Three Snakes and One Charm," on which they pay greater attention to the essence of the songs and less attention to statements. Three songs are primarily acoustic--"Bring On, Bring On," "How Much For Your Wings?" "Better When You're Not Alone"--and several others have strong acoustic elements which include dulcimer, banjo, harmonica and chimes, as well as an unusually wide array of guitars and tunings. It's their best album since the first, and their best-sounding ever. Often--make that too often--compared with Keith Richards for his rhythm playing in open G (D-G-D-G-B-D, low to high) tuning and Ron Wood for his slide work, Rich cites Nick Drake as the prime influence for drawing him into his trademark open tunings. Drake, who dies of an overdose of antidepressants at the age of 26 in 1974, played fingerstyle, pattern-picking in a powerfully hypnotic, soulful manner. Unlike the Crowes, he wasn't remotely raucous, but he did have an exquisite sense of drone, which lives on in his acolyte Rich Robinson, who will be playing three-hour concerts with his band for the rest of the year. GUITAR WORLD ACOUSTIC: I like the acoustic tone you have on this album. Quite often, acoustic guitars in a rock context have a thin, tinny, cheap sound. RICH ROBINSON: I don't think people are using the right guitars, or they don't mike them properly, or they go direct, like they do on MTV's Unplugged, which always sounds like shit. You have to make and acoustic sound like an acoustic. Miking the bridge--what's the point? It's counter-productive. You might as well have an electric. You get the sound out of the soundhole. That's where the richness and tone and everything you want comes from. GWA: I've always loved the sounds that [fingerstylists] John Fahey and Leo Kotke get all by themselves. You just don't hear that with contemporary acoustic-electrics. ROBINSON: Yeah. Or the acoustics with those big bridge pickups. They never sounded good to me. GWA: How do you handle the acoustic sound in concert? ROBINSON: Well, live I just mike it. And everyone else has to play a little quieter. Another thing you can try is this: I have this Gibson Dove with a bridge pickup, which sounds like shit, but which I use for volume on stage. And then our sound guy also mikes it, and uses just that for the half. So it doesn't feed back, because I'm not using the mic to hear myself. I'm using the pickup to hear myself and the mic is for out front. Even with that scenario, it's difficult getting a good acoustic sound in a theater or arena. GWA: How do you mike it for recording? ROBINSON: It just depends on how good your engineer is--where he places the mic. Also important is the type of mic, and what room you're in. We did this latest album in a house, and I recorded a lot of the acoustic stuff in the bathroom because it had a good ring to it. I also recorded some in the main living room where we did most of the basic tracks, and then downstairs where we kept the keyboards. We mixed in L.A., and I recorded a few things there, too. GWA: This was your house? ROBINSON: We rented the house, but we used my studio. I just brought my studio over there. GWA: You just went to some real estate broker and said, "Gimme a house to record my next album"? ROBINSON: Yeah, except we didn't tell him what we wanted to use it for. GWA: What makes a house good for recording? ROBINSON: This one was in Atlanta. It was on four acres, so we were isolated. It was big enough for everyone to hang out. And it sounded good. It wasn't stale like some houses. GWA: You had your own 24-track recording setup? ROBINSON: Yeah. That was in the living room, I guess you'd call it. There's like this big room, then a little room next to the big room, and across this foyer was the dining room. We put all the equipment in the dining room, let everyone hang out in the big room, and put the board and all the other shit in the smaller hang-out room. Chris sang I the living room sometimes, and sometimes in the foyer where you enter the house, 'cause it was a two-level foyer and it sounded kinda cool. I recorded the dobro in one of the bedrooms. When we had the horns, we put two horns in the guest bathroom and then put them all in the big room. Recording in a house is sort of limiting but in a sense it's not, because you have all this space and different areas. The only thing that's weird is separation. GWA: You and your brother sat down and decided at some point that you preferred houses to recording studios? ROBINSON: What happened was, I bought this API board two years ago from a broker in L.A.; it took forever to get working. It was shipped from the previous owner in Madrid, and when it got here some things needed to be fixed. All this happened while I was doing the last tour, and took a long time. When I got home, I had all these songs that I'd written on the road. So I'd record them and send them out to Chris in L.A., and he'd put some vocals on and send them back to me in Atlanta. When we set up a time to do the actual record, Chris suggested that rather than book a hotel for six months, it'd be cooler if we rented a house for everyone to stay in. So Chris moved into the house, and I brought my little board over to work on the demos. It sounded so cool that I brought my big board over, and the rest of my shit, and we rented a Neve sidecar for 10 extra channels. And we just did it. GWA: Three songs on "Three Snakes and One Charm" are predominantly acoustic, and you employ the acoustic to a lesser degree throughout the album. What equipment did you use? ROBINSON: I used a lot of Martins: a 1953 D-28 that my dad gave me, an early Sixties D-28, a D-21, a '58 D-18. I bought a really cool Guild 12-string. I also played two or three Gibson Doves and this amazing Hummingbird. I used two dobros: a 1929 National Steel Duolian and a 1933 wooden single-resonator dobro. And a Charlie Christian [Gibson ES-130] semi-hollow body guitar with a pickup in it, which I used more as an acoustic. That's on "Under a Mountain." GWA: I've been saving my nickels and dimes for a 12-string, ,myself. Would you recommend the Guild? ROBINSON: Yeah, it's amazing. I don't know what model it is. I've never had a Guild before, but it sounds great. I also had a couple of dulcimers--one, a bass which I bought, and a regular one which Chris bought at McCabe's in L.A. Supposedly, mine used to belong to Joni Mitchell. GWA: You took lessons on the dulcimer, or did you just start hammering away? ROBINSON: No, no lessons. I've been farting around with them a lot. For some reason, they just sort of fit with the way I play guitar in open G. It's easy for me to translate that onto the dulcimers, probably because I like drone instruments so much. Chris and I also just bought some hurdy-gurdies from some guy in London. The drone thing is sort of how I approach the guitar. I was really into Nick Drake, if you've ever listened to him; I thought the way he played the guitar, how he textured the sonics of an acoustic instrument, was just fucking amazing. He was the guy who got me into open tunings, because of how heavy and beautiful they are, and also that drone note. That's how I've always played. If you look at how Keith Richards uses open G, he mainly plays the top five strings. But I always use that bottom [low] D string to make chords or do different things. My dad used to be a folk singer, and he'd play in open D [D-A-D-F#-A-D, low to high] sometimes, which is similar to open G except for the A and F# strings. Those make a huge difference. I also listened to a lot of Irish folk music, the Chieftains and things like that. Plus Dylan. I always thought the way he played was cool, and it seemed like no one ever wrote about it. Everyone was so busy going, "Oh wow, his lyrics are amazing," that his melodies and playing got overlooked. His strumming was sorta like how my dad taught me to do it. My dad was one of those purists who got pissed when Dylan went electric. "That's not folk music," he said. GWA: What kind of stuff did your dad do? ROBINSON: He started out as a Bobby-Darin type. I just got a video from Dick Clark of my dad, Stan Robinson, singing his big hit song, "Boom-A-Dip-Dip," on American Bandstand in 1958. Later, when the folk revival happened, he played in a band called the Appalachians. GWA: You came from a childhood that, for a musician, was advantaged. ROBINSON: In that way I did. My mom also knew all these cool folk songs, and my dad would strum them all the time--songs that most people under the age of 45 don't have a clue about. GWA: Do you fingerpick as well as flatpick? ROBINSON: My dad taught me to fingerpick, as well as how to strum, but I never quite got the hang of fingerpicking. So I do it my own weird way. I can strum with a pick like my dad can fingerpick with two fingers--you know, doon-digga-doon-digga-doon. I don't have the patience to do it the right way, so I just use a pick. GWA: So you were writing in Atlanta and your brother was writing in Los Angeles. What happened if Chris wrote something you didn't like? ROBINSON: The long-distance writing was just something we did to get the process more concrete. I had a lot of bits and pieces that I'd written on tour and I needed to hear what Chris would do with them. For the real writing, he came to Atlanta where we wrote another 10 songs. I think we recorded a total of 26 songs. GWA: Do you write all of the music? ROBINSON: Yeah. That's just what I do in the band. Chris writes lyrics and al the melodies for what he sings. We usually hit it on the head with each other, but sometimes there might be something I don't like, and I'll tell him I'm not into it. And sometimes he'll say, "I like this part and not this part." So it's a give-and-take thing, not a set process. Anything I'm not happy with, I just say, "Fuck it. I'm not using that." And I won't be happy unless I'm completely happy. Sometimes it'll take us five minutes for a complete song; sometimes it'll take a long time. Like "Nonfiction," from the last album: I remember writing the verse on the "Shake Your Moneymaker" tour, but I never found a cool place for it until we went to record it, and then I was able to finish it, for some reason. But "Cursed Diamond," also from the last record, I wrote from start to finish in one sitting and it was done. On "Three Snakes and One Charm," "Under a Mountain" took me about five minutes to write, and that's one of my favorites. Also, "Better When You're Not Alone" came really naturally. Whereas "Halfway to Everywhere, (Only)" we really worked on. GWA: On "Girl from a Pawnshop," there's a long build that starts acoustic, then goes electric. Do you do a lot of guitar switching in the middle of songs during a concert? ROBINSON: Actually, that song is mostly electric. And we'll do it all electric, live. We don't try to recreate in concert what we do in the studio. We try to better it, if anything. I like to write songs that have the potential to go someplace when we start to play them live. GWA: You guys have always had a serious fund and r&b influence. On the new album I hear it on "Blackberry," "Halfway to Everywhere (Only)" and "Let Me Share the Ride." Where did those horns come from? ROBINSON: That was the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. They opened for us last year through the whole American leg of the tour. They used to get up and play "Hard to Handle" with us periodically, as well as other songs. Chris just said, "Fuck it. We've never had horns that we like. Let's go for it." I remember a long time ago we were out on tour, and George [Drakoulias, producer of the Crowes' first two albums] hired some people to put horns on "Hard to Handle" without us knowing about it, and we got pissed. We scrapped the whole idea, though that version did make it some radio stations. We didn't think it sounded right, and we didn't want to do it. Since it was our first record, they didn't give a shit what we thought. But we forced the issue, and they withdrew it. And no one has ever done shit like that again. So this time we wanted to do the horns right and it turned out pretty cool. GWA: I particularly like the horn parts on "Let Me Share the Ride." What's your philosophy of mixing something like that? I could have taken them even louder. ROBINSON: Yeah? Well, they're pretty loud. The whole point of that song is the acoustic slide. There's another song where I used the Charlie Christian. If the slide part is the song, why cover everything for the sake of having cool horns? The horns were just supposed to be ornamental. GWA: There's a lot of cool ornamental stuff on the album, what with the dulcimers and other things. Sometimes they're so low that it's subliminal. ROBINSON: But that's the point! Well, you get in to this gray area. A lot of people seem to think I play rhythm and Marc Ford plays lead. No, I play the song. I don't sit there and strum chords; I play specific parts that come in and out. A prime example is "One Mirror Too Many"--that's me playing a specific part. On past albums, people would hear these amazing solos and say, "Wow, there's Marc Ford, this great new guitar player." And that's fine, because he is a great guitar player. But that isn't the song. They were losing the essence of the song. On this record, what we tried to do was present the song and then add textural things, but not step on the song. GWA: What did you play electrically? ROBINSON: Chris and I have about 50 amps, Tremoluxes, Vibroverbs, Vibroluxes, Bassmans, some cool Marshalls. We used a Gretsch amp for the bass. Chris got a cool old Bassman 4x10 combo. And a Vox AC 30. I have a list somewhere, but I can't find it. It's sorta chaotic around here--I have a new baby. GWA: Speaking of the baby, do you ever wonder what it is we're born with that responds to good tone? What is it in our brains that likes the sound of tubes boiling in a Marshall head, or the ringing tone of an old Martin? ROBINSON: I don't know. I just go by what sounds good to me. And what sounds good on tape. You might have the best-sounding amp in the world, and it won't sound great on tape. It's basically how you feel. At the end of the day, tone matters a lot to us. But if you have the greatest song in the world and it's got shitty tones, it won't matter. The song will still be great. That happens a lot. But it's so much better with great tone. We didn't worry that much about tone on the first album--and it didn't sound worth a shit. We didn't have much equipment, and American wasn't willing to spend any money for us to get anything good. I had a few good guitars, like my Tele, but not like we have now. I have about 60 guitars and 50 amps, and Chris has a bunch of amps and 20 or 30 guitars. GWA: Are you playing mostly in open G on this album? ROBINSON: "Girl From a Pawnshop," "Good Friday" and "Better When You're Not Alone" are in regular tuning. Sometimes I play in open A or open B flat, just moving up the open G with a capo. The majority of songs are in open tunings. GWA: Do you find that shifting tunings opens up the writing process? ROBINSON: To me, open G just has more possibilities. I've been playing that way for so long that it's become my mind-set. So when I go back to regular tuning, I make up these weird chords and play differently. In that sense I have a different perspective. GWA: R.E.M. is another Southern band with a strong acoustic element. How much did they figure in your personal pantheon of stars when you were growing up? ROBINSON: I used to love R.E.M. They were huge in the South. When "Murmur" came out, they used to play "Radio Free Europe" on the radio all the time. It was so cool at the time. GWA: You love them less now? ROBINSON: I don't know. I don't listen to their records anymore. I just remember them always saying they would never lip sync in videos, and all of a sudden they started lip syncing. So I thought that was weird. But they did a lot of great things. "Murmur" was one of the great records of the Eighties. GWA: If you're not listening to R.E.M., what are you listening to? ROBINSON: The Jayhawks, even though they broke up. Son Volt. Wilco. Ben Harper. The new Neil Young record is good. The new Cure album is really manically depressing. And then some stuff you wouldn't expect: Herbie Hancock, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon. GWA: What's drawing you to jazz? ROBINSON: I don't know. It's just different, like when I first started listening to a ton of blues. I just get an amazing feeling when I listen to Les McCann. It's harder for me to listen to the blues right now because most of what I have is on vinyl and my dog ate the needle right off my turntable. GWA: What's the political dimension of the Crowes these days? Do you plan to do any more benefits for NORML [National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws--GWA Ed.]? ROBINSON: Well, we only did the one. We're not big proponents of anything. We're not saying everyone should get stoned. I just think that the government has no right to tell us how to live. People should get the benefit of the doubt in what they decide they want to do, so long as they don't hurt anyone else. But no one should get fucked up and drive a car. That's bullshit. But I don't think anyone should be penalized for getting fucked up in their own home. Who are these people to decide that it's okay to drink alcohol, to smoke tobacco, but not smoke pot? It's just ass-backwards. GWA: This being an election year and all, are you planning to vote? ROBINSON: No, I don't think voting matters. It's like having to choose between two plates of shit: dogshit or horseshit. Who cares? GWA: Ralph Nader is running on the Green Party ticket. He isn't shit. ROBINSON: Yeah, but no one is allowed in the debate except the two major parties, and it's because of money. Why doesn't MTV show that instead of being so snide about everything? GWA: So the Black Crowes won't be doing any choose-or-lose spots for MTV? ROBINSON: I'm not. It's a farce. GWA: Are you guys still adamantly opposed to corporate endorsements? ROBINSON: Oh yeah. Our record label is a big corporation, about as big as they get, so why would we want to deal with another one? Time-Warner has been pretty good about staying out of what we want to do, but as soon as you take somebody's money, they buy the right to tell you how to live, or how to play. That just doesn't sit well with me. I don't want the president of Miller Beer telling me that one of my songs might offend his customers. GWA: If the Crowes are planning to do three-hour shows, you and Chris must be getting along okay. ROBINSON: We get along great. Last year we weren't, but this year we are. GWA: What happened last year? ROBINSON: We just fucking hated each other. It's just a normal phase bands go through. There was a lot of emotional baggage, and everyone got on each other's nerves. We almost broke up a few times, but finally we all let go and moved on. GWA: As Conan the Barbarian used to say, "That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." ROBINSON: Exactly. It's always better when you can work it out.