OH, BROTHERS!
Chris and Rich Robinson have been going at each other for a long time
It is Rich Robinson who provides the words as I try to find a way of describing his and his brother Chris’s relationship.
“Warring siblings,” he says, matter-of-factly. “That should have been the band name,” Chris chimes in cheerfully.
The name that the Robinson brothers actually picked for their band was The Black Crowes. That was back in the mid-1980s when they were teenagers in Atlanta. Their first album as the Crowes, Shake Your Money Maker, came out in 1990 and sold five million copies. It was a good-time rock ’n’ roll record cast in the classic mould of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie, a cheerful strut through the past in which Rich cranked out riffs and Chris hollered about being “loose lipped and laughing/singing songs, ain’t got no regrets.”
Seven more albums followed, all U.S. chart hits. But success was laced with fraternal aggro. At their first professional photo session, a fist-fight broke out between the siblings over some slight or other. “It was shocking even to me,” their then manager told Rolling Stone magazine in 2008. “How could something escalate to that level in such a small amount of time?”
In the London hotel suite where I meet them (earlier in the year, before the shutdown), the pair exhibits a wary kind of amity; call it familiarity. Chris, 53, with shoulder-length hair and tattoos on his hands and arms, is the more animated, sitting on the edge of a sofa, gesticulating as he speaks. Rich, 51, also with long hair, wearing a hippyish beaded necklace, sits leaning back on a different sofa, hand cupping his head. He is drier and less demonstrative.
They have reunited as The Black Crowes following a chance encounter in a New York hotel last year. It ended an estrangement that had lasted since a previous reunion collapsed into acrimony in 2014. They had a new tour planned, marking Shake Your Money Maker’s 30th anniversary. The North American leg — Toronto was the only Canadian spot on the schedule — should have started this month but has been postponed until next year. The European leg, due to start in Ireland in October, is still scheduled to go ahead.
When I see them in London, they are about to play a small acoustic gig the following night as a duo. “Baby steps before the big thing starts,” in Chris’s words. No other band members from previous Crowes lineups will be with them for the tour. They will be joined by new musicians. “It was necessary to do this in a proper way for us because of the negativity, the ingrained family dynamic that a band can create, the patterns that people bring when they come around each other,” Rich says, in the style of someone carefully handling a defused bomb.
The duo join a long line of warring brothers in rock music, like Cain and Abel squaring off about whether the vocals or the guitar should be louder. Chris was a “dyslexic dreamer” — as he puts it — stuck in a “big public school.”
Meanwhile, Rich moved between different schools. Their parents bought them guitars and an amp as Christmas presents (bass for Chris, electric for Rich) in the hope of giving them something to concentrate on.
Their father Stanley was a parttime musician who had a minor chart hit in 1959 with a rockabilly novelty song, Boom-a-dip-dip. Traditional music was his passion, especially Appalachian and British folk. His elder son developed an obsession for the noisier pleasures of rock and its attendant countercultural lifestyle, which ultimately led to an invitation to leave the family home.
“I was kicked out,” Chris says. “Rich was at home and the storyline was I was f-----g crazy. And I was. Like a lot of young people I had a lot of energy. I had a lot of angst and anger and creativity, and rock ’n’ roll was my place.”
He was Rich’s bridgehead into music.
“Chris was the expeditionary,” Rich says. “He found the records and I would take what I liked. Certain things would hit me in a very different way. I would obsess over the musicality.”
The Black Crowes cut their teeth gigging in Atlanta’s rock scene in the 1980s, which Chris romantically recalls as a bohemian enclave of “junkies, painters, troubled people, schizo people, beautiful souls, sensitive people.” They got their break after a New York gig, where they met mentor George Drakoulias, who got them a record deal and produced their first album. Rick Rubin was their label boss.
The Black Crowes made charismatically sloppy music, like a reboot of the Stones in their Exile on Main Street phase or The Faces in full flight. The long-haired, snake-hipped, marijuana-promoting Chris, according to a Musician magazine interview in 1993, “seemed to be put on Earth for no good reason other than rocking.” He got the band booted off a support slot with ZZ Top when he delivered an onstage tirade against the tour’s sponsor, Miller beer. The cover of their 1994 album Amorica consisted of a close-up photo of a woman’s crotch in a Stars and Stripes-emblazoned thong taken from a 1970s pornographic magazine.
“We were free to roam wildly and step into whatever pile of s--t you accidentally step in,” Chris says, with a certain degree of pride. “The ride we were on — it’s like the first time we came to England, we have to drink in every pub and meet every person and do all the drugs, because guess what? They’re not letting us back here. You’ve seen it. Throughout pop music and rock ’n’ roll, one minute you’re the best thing in the world, the next no one gives a rat’s ass about you. We knew that too. You have to have an ego but we were never ...”
“Entitled,” says Rich, finishing his brother’s sentence. “Never!” cries Chris. “This s--t can go any minute,” Rich says, sagely. “We need to do what we can.”
The Financial Times Ltd. 2020.
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