The Georgia band’s triumphant sophomore album, boxed up with rarities and live tracks.
ON “Remedy”, the biggest single o The Black Crowes’ second album, Chris Robinson slithers along to the band’s dgety Stones groove and sings, “If I had a remedy, I’d take enough to please me”. In the best way possible, it sounds like a confession he couldn’t possibly have written. It sounds more like a line in any number of blues songs written and sung and recorded and forgotten about long before this Atlanta band played their rst note together. That word “remedy” carries a lot of meaning in the American South, where it’s associated with medicine shows and snake oil, with Tom Sawyer and stumpwater (that’s rainwater steeped in an old tree trunk, said to be good for whatever ails you).
A remedy might be drugs to make a hard time bearable, or it might be whatever makes those drugs bearable. It might be sex, or it might be whatever makes you forget you’re not getting any. It might be a hoodoo or a mojo. A remedy is, essentially, the opposite of the blues. On
The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion, which is arguably their best album,
The Black Crowes write and perform with the knowledge that they’re participating in something larger than themselves. They’re digging deeper into Southern lore and Southern music. This new reissue, celebrating the album’s 30th anniversary, reveals a band stepping up and con dently putting their own stamp on a wide range of sounds and inuences. Not that they ever accepted the mantle of Southern rock. They weren’t rednecks, but hippies in ared corduroys and paisley vests. Chris and Rich Robinson, two brothers from the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, formed the band as high school students, and they fought hard and oen enough to make the Gallaghers look well-adjusted and chill. Originally they called themselves Mr Crowe’s Garden, aer a book by the English writer and illustrator Leonard Leslie Brooke, but wisely changed the name before signing with Rick Rubin’s label American Recordings. As teenagers, they saw themselves not as Southern rebels, but as part of the ’80s underground rock scene. Rather than the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd, they looked to British Invasion bands for inspiration and saw REM and The Replacements as peers.