CROWES CONTROL

Rip It Up, Issue 179, 1 June 1992, Page 2

CROWES CONTROL

Who would have thought, in this over-digital, genre-splicing era that a band of boys bent on making one hundred per cent proof vintage rock 'n' roll would end up selling four million copies of their first album? Enter the Black Crowes with 1990's Shake Your Moneymaker, on which brothers Chris and Rich Robinson from Atlanta, Georgia, deomonstrated that some 20-year-olds were still in love with the sound of the late 60s/ early 70s as purveyed by the Rolling Stones, the Faces, Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd as well as Otis Redding, who provided the Black Crowes with their first hit single.

Now the Robinson brothers are strutting their stuff on a new album, The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion and are on a world tour which brings them to New Zealand early next month, along with the rest of their band, of course. Chris sings and Rich plays guitar, between them they write and arrange all the material, but as bass player Johnny Colt pointed out in a recent phone interview with RIU, he and Marc Ford (guitar) and Steve Gorman (drums) are not mere session players. This is one group which worships the somewhat beleagured notion of the good old fashioned rock 'n' roll band. "Old fashioned — I think we're just a good rock 'n' roll band," replies Johnny excitedly over the line from an American hotel room. "Just because we don't make records with computers, just because we really sing on the record and everyone really plays their instruments and nobody's processed, it doesn't make it old fashioned, it just makes us honest. There's way too many lines already drawn, you know what I'm

sayin', too many people putting us in a cateogory." Okay. The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (Chris stole the title from a hymn book) is a stonking follow-up album. Recorded in eight days in Georgia at a studio with "lots of knobs, dials, speakers, instruments, rolling papers — all the things you need in a studio." All the tracks were recorded live on analog gear, "so you still get things like tape hiss and sounds that are real." You also get stereo-panned intros and lotsa real woozy, crunchy lead guitar. This time

round Chris sounds less like Exile On Mainstreet era Jagger and more like Faces era Rod Stewart and they cover a song by Bob Marley ( Time Will Tell} instead of Otis Redding. Southern Harmony is bone-rattlingly good rock 'n' roll with plenty of R&B, a southern raunchiness and an overall big uplifting, soul-like sweep. Are the Black Crowes consciously upholding the idea of the real live rock band? "We certainly don't use any tapes, we sing and if one of us sings off key then that does happen. There are

mistakes, yeah, but there are also moments that are almost spiritual that you can't get if you did the same thing every night. We change songs, we jam — no-one does that anymore. We take a song and just take off, we'll go for 10 minutes or something if we feel like it that night." What about charges of being retrogressive? Johnny gets real worked up over this one. Obviously this is the sort of meaningless accusation that cuts to the group's core. "We're not going back to anything, we're going forward. The sounds may sound old, but some of them, they're just good sounds. It's just like this, it's like saying if you paint an oil painting and you put a flower in it and you use blue paint—you're going back to Picasso's blue period? No, blue is a beautiful colour and it's for everyone to use." It does seem pointless analysing rock music in terms of originality at a point where everything has been done. "Okay, there are 12 notes on a chromatic scale on a guitar, 12 selections, everything's been done, but not just in rock 'n' roll. Again, paintings, poetry—there's only so many words, there's only so many chords, there's only so many blocks and you arrange them in your way. Is every architect retro just because he uses the same materials that the man before him used? I don't think so. I mean, that's the point, really." If the Black Crowes appreciate the way things sounded back then in the golden age of rock, it's obvious they also appreciate the way people looked. "Think how cool everybody looked," says Johnny when I ask him if he romanticises the past. He's only too happy to tell me he's wearing tailor-made black velvet bell-bottoms as we speak. But the real sartorial leader of the band is skinny Chris Robinson, whose khol-rimmed eyes peer out from under a floppy-brimmed hat on the cover of Southern Harmony. Wearing ragged bell-bottomed jeans with a long scarf knotted at his

neck, he looks like a cross between Keith Richards circa 1972 and Alice Cooper. Of course, Chris, along with brother Rich, is also the musical leader of the Black Crowes. They grew up listening to their parents' eclectic record collection which encompassed Joe Cocker, Sly Stone and the Modem Jazz Quartet. You could say music is in their blood. Their father Stan Robinson (who is now a manufacturer's rep) scored a minor pop hit in 1959 with 'Boom-a-Dip-Dip' and once opened for Bill Haley and the Comets. In a Rolling Stone interview last year, Chris Robinson affirmed that he is "head-over-boot-heels" in love with the "bash 'n'sass" of the Stones, the Faces, Aerosmith and Humble Pie, but he complained that reviewers don't also hear echoes of, among others, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bob Marley, Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. He also said he was sick of hearing about his debt to Rod Stewart. As far as Chris is concerned, Steve Marriott is the guy, along with Gregg Allman. Meanwhile on the other end of the phone, Johnny is telling me how he doesn't try to imitate anything ('You mean like drugs and alcohol and things like that? I have a lifestyle. Sex, I have that too. I don't have sex because I read in a book that Keith Richards has sex, I have sex because it's fun, like drugs") and how the Black Crowes are honest about what they do and why ("I'm

not acting out a part and I'm not selling out either. We wanted to be rock stars in a great rock 'n' roll band"). Do you think rock is dying? "I think some parts of it are. As long as there are people like us around — there are other bands — I don't think it will. I just think people need a kick up the ass. Too many people are killing music with sponsorship and tape to play to." That's a reference to the fracas Chris 'Hard To Handle' Robinson caused last year when the Crowes were supporting ZZ Top on their national tour, sponsored by Miller Lite. Chris would take the opportunity, during their set, to tell the crowd that this wasn't MTV they were watching and there weren't going to be any commercials. Which was read as an anti-sponsorship rap by the powers-that-be and the unrepentent Crowes were thrown off the tour. The Black Crowes live, says Johnny, do not play "the same shit" every night. They want to give you a one-off show. "You didn't pay to go and see the album, you already paid to hear that, we want to give you something you can't get, a moment that only you and us will have. There's no danger in having the song list planned out with back-up tapes," he hollers down the line, "that's not rock 'n' roll now, is it?" DONNA YUZWALK