Classic interview: The Black Crowes

interview by Bill Palmer

It’s 2008 and the Black Crowes are on top of the world. Their new album Warpaint has reached the top five on the iTunes and Billboard charts. Founding brothers Rich and Chris Robinson, famous for their feuding, are getting along. The band’s new members are gelling with the old. It’s a far cry from 2002, when everyone involved was “miserable” and the band broke up. So I ask Rich Robinson how it all went wrong back then for the Black Crowes. He quickly corrects me:

“I don’t think it went wrong, I think it went right, you know? I think the break is what we all needed and I think it was something that was really a positive that needed to happen,” Rich tells me of what would end up being a three year hiatus which, at the time, the band “sort of thought” was permanent. At the time of the split, Rich, Chris, and drummer Steve Gorman had been playing together for more than fifteen years. Do the math and that should seemingly make Rich older than his current age of thirty-eight, but he’s been at this since he was a teenager.


During the interview I flash back to reading the lines notes of the Crowes debut album Shake Your Money Maker back in the early nineties and seeing their rhythm guitarist listed as Young Rich Robinson. I ask Rich how long it’s been since anyone has referred to him by that moniker. “It’s been awhile,” he laughs, saying that sometimes feels too old to still be in his thirties but adds “I feel like I’m getting younger.”

The youthful start meant that prior to the hiatus, Rich and Chris had never spent any real time apart. Nor had there any been real degree of maturation in their relationship, even as the “kids from Cobb County, Georgia” traveled the world and toured with everyone from Aerosmith to the Rolling Stones. Even as the brothers entered their thirties, “we were still twenty-one, you know? We were still in the same pattern of being in our early twenties and fighting, because you just got in this time warp.”

“These are people that no one would have ever dreamed that Chris and I would be interacting with. And here we are, you know, playing with our heroes and the people that were the best at what they did. And to do that is a pretty amazing thing. And I think that that was, over those three years that we took off, you know, I think that was the biggest thing, for me at least, to really sit back and put what we did in perspective.”

When it came time to put the Black Crowes back together in 2005, the band started small with a run of shows at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, allowing things to progress in whatever fashion they were meant to, because “the worst thing you can do just force something to happen.” The shows went well so they booked some more, eventually discussing making a new record in 2006.

“Then we tripped,” Rich says of the departures of longtime keyboardist Ed Harsch and recently reunited lead guitarist and fan favorite Marc Ford. “Some people couldn’t get past the past, so we had to make some changes.” The band continued to tour with two “temporary” members, including Warpaint producer Paul Stacey on guitar. Eventually the band settled on new keyboardist Adam MacDougall as well as a surprise new member: Luther Dickinson, current lead singer and guitarist for North Mississippi Allstars.

“I called Luther when we were trying to find a permanent guitar player and I said ‘look, you know, obviously we would love to have you,’ and Luther and I had done those shows for fun in New York called Circle Sound where we just played a bunch of covers with a bunch of people and it was just fun, you know? And Luther and I really hit it off. So I just said obviously we would love for you to join but we know you have your own thing. Is there anyone that you could recommend?”

Dickinson decided he wanted it badly enough that he was willing to figure out how to continue with both the Crowes and his own band. He still tours in the Allstars when the Crowes aren’t on the road, but “when we’re on tour he’s here, he’s focused, and he’s just playing great.”

Partly because Dickinson couldn’t join the band on the road last summer, the new songs for Warpaint were kept under wraps rather than road-tested prior to their release. But there was another reason, as the band didn’t want the music pre-judged before it was time. “When things become easy to attain, then you lose the respect of it. And when you lose the respect of it, then you don’t have the appreciation of what it took to get that. And I think that’s what’s going on with music all around the world. And so we really held it close to our chest. We were like look, this has to come out and this has to be judged or listened to, or whatever you want to call it, in its entirety.”

Inviting the lead singer of an established band to become their new guitarist isn’t the only unconventional step the Black Crowes have taken with Warpaint. In a trend that’s become increasingly common with household names over the past year but still has to be considered a maverick move, the band decided to create and release their new album without the aid of a major record label, instead constructing their own label and becoming their own bosses.

“You don’t have to deal with bankers, you know, people who don’t give a shit,” Rich said of how making an album is different when there are no label execs around. “It’s just like these people have no idea what they’re talking about. All they talk about is, like, marketshare. This is what’s going on and you’ve got to do this, this, and this, you know, it’s just like politicians. It’s not about a creative endeavor.”

“And what they did was they turned the music industry into a service industry – and it’s not a service industry. They took the power out of the hands of the people creating the music and they put it in their own. These people who don’t even know how to play instruments, who don’t know what they’re doing, and having opinions based on their wrong assumptions. And the funny thing is as these labels, these huge ships are sinking, they’re holding onto their wrong assumptions even tighter than they ever were.”

Not being backed by “bankers” doesn’t appear to have hurt things any. Despite a bizarre fiasco in which Maxim magazine gave the album two and a half stars without first having listened to it, Warpaint has generally been well-received by critics. Rich refers to reaching number five on the Billboard charts as “ridiculous,” pointing out that “we haven’t done that since Southern Harmony. It really surprised all of us, but in such a great way. We had no idea, we just made our record, made the record we wanted to make, put it out there, and hoped for the best. But it blew us away.”

It’s fitting, then, that Warpaint most closely resembles The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, the band’s second album which dates all the way back to 1992. The new tunes are a mix of vintage southern rock, hippie jam music, and the blues. The musicians sound like they’ve been at this long enough to know how to stay out of each other’s way on the album, yet due to the time off or the infusion of new blood or both, the performances are their most inspired since Southern Harmony.

The lead track and first single, Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution, actually sounds more like it could have come from Shake Your Money Maker and might be the album’s only sufficiently mainstream-sounding song to receive significant airplay. But the song isn’t being played solely on the radio. In a rare occurrence for a band this well-known, Daughters has been getting airplay on podcasts since January – and for that matter, legally. Despite Rich’s admission that he’s not much into technology beyond “sending an email every once in awhile,” the band nonetheless submitted its first single to the Podsafe Music Network some two months before the album was released. Major labels typically won’t allow that kind of thing to happen, making it yet another instance of how finding new life as an indie band has allowed the Crowes to do things their way.

Their current success and harmony notwithstanding, the question has to be asked: how much longer does this last? It’s not so much a matter of whether Dickinson can make being a full-time member of two bands work. After all, he’s at least the Black Crowes’ fifth different lead guitarist (the sixth if you count Jimmy Page’s touring stint with the band). The future fortunes of the Crowes are likely going to come down to what they’ve always come down to, that being the ability of the brothers Robinson to continue to get along.


“I think no one in the band has any illusions anymore about this lasting forever,” Rich puts it matter of factly. “I think we just sort of take it day by day. Wow, this is great and if it ends, it ends. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I think there was a tendency for all of us, in 2001 and before, to really hold on to this, like this has gotta last forever, this has to last forever. And then you realize when this stops, it doesn’t have to last forever, it is impermanent. And if it did go away, it’s okay, and I think that that relieves some pressure. And that relieves the desire to sort of hold onto this thing and to put so much importance on it, in a sense.”

If things do go sour, the brothers could always try spending some time apart, as doing so seems to have worked this time around. “You get a break, you get out of it, you get out of the shit, and then you can sort of appreciate each other for who they are and what they are, and that’s sort of what’s happening now. We grew up a little bit more over these last three or four years. Both of us got divorced, I mean both of us have had to deal with our own sort of problems, and I think that brings people closer.”

Learn more about The Black Crowes at BlackCrowes.com.