The Magpie Salute
Sharing not just real DNA with the Black Crowes, Rich Robinson’s band The Magpie Salute are determined not to let the things that brought down the Crowes clip their wings too.
Former Black Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson’s band are determined not to let the things that brought down the Crowes clip their wings too.
When Rich Robinson headed out on the road again this summer, as he has done for so much of his life, he had a new member of his family with him. As his band The Magpie Salute embarked on a series of dates on the East Coast of America, the guitarist travelled with his wife and their month-old daughter. And in these shows, as with every other that this band have played since they came together in 2016, another family member was never far from his mind.
Rich Robinson formed The Magpie Salute following the demise of The Black Crowes, the band that he had led with his elder brother singer Chris. Alongside Rich in The Magpie Salute are two other former members of the Crowes – guitarist Marc Ford and bassist Sven Pipien – and a singer, London-born John Hogg, whose former group Moke opened for the Crowes on a US tour in the late 90s. The sound of TMS’s new album, High Water I – described by Rich simply as “rock’n’roll music” – has echoes of the great records that his old band made in the past. And when Rich’s new band play live, they dig deep into the Crowes catalogue, playing old songs that Chris used to sing.
There are moments, Rich says, when they are playing these songs and he remembers the good times with his brother – the days before drugs, and then money, pulled them apart. Those days are long gone. “When my brother and I are in a band together it’s very toxic,” Rich says. “It’s not good for either of us. I just feel that it’s better that we’re not in each other’s lives. I haven’t spoken to him in four years.”
The former singer with The Black Crowes now leads cosmic rock group the Chris Robinson Brotherhood. The irony is not lost on Rich, who chose a symbolic name for his band. “The magpie is the cousin of the crow,” he says. “And a lot of people from the Crowes are in this band, so why ignore it? The difference is that the magpie has the light and the dark. It’s more balanced.”
T“When my brother and I are in a band together it’s very toxic. I just feel that it’s better that we’re not in each other’s lives.”
Rich Robinson
he Magpie Salute began as a 10-piece ensemble, with three guitarists and three backing singers – a little like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rich concedes, although he prefers to think of it as similar to the revue-style band that Joe Cocker had on his 1970 live album Mad Dogs & Englishmen. In addition to Ford and Pipien, the original line-up included ex-Crowes keyboard player
Eddie Harsch and a drummer, Joe Magistro, who played percussion on a Crowes tour in 2010. Singer John Hogg had remained tight with Rich ever since they first toured together in 1999. “My band Moke did six weeks on the road with the Crowes and we saw how it’s really done,” Hogg recalls. What he also saw, right from the opening date in Milwaukee, was the dynamic between the Robinson brothers. “There was chaos backstage,” he says. “Chris was bouncing around and screaming at people, and Rich just seemed to waft through that.”
When The Black Crowes’ debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, was released in 1990, Rich was just 20. Hogg, two years younger, heard that album soon after it came out. His parents (his father Swedish, his mother Nigerian) had turned him on to The Beatles and Hendrix. The first time he heard the Crowes, a young band that rocked and rolled like the legends of a bygone era – the Stones, Faces, Humble Pie – he was hooked.
“I remember the exact moment,” he says. “I was in my mate’s bedroom, listening to Iron Maiden. Then his sister came in and said: ‘Turn that shit off and listen to this!’ She put on Jealous Again, and I thought: ‘That’s pretty cool…’”
Rich had a similar feeling when he heard John singing in Moke. “I thought he had such a brilliant voice and such a huge range,” he says.
In 2005, when The Black Crowes broke up for the first time and after Moke had also fizzled out, Rich called John and suggested they start a band. They named it Hookah Brown. “It was a four-piece, and it was all about big riffs,” says Rich. The band ended abruptly, before an album was made, when Rich returned to the Crowes. Even so, Rich says he “knew that one day it would work out with John and I”.
In the early days of The Magpie Salute, there was a devastating blow with the death of Eddie Harsch on November 4, 2016 at the age of 59. His last performances were featured on the band’s self-titled debut album,
recorded live in Woodstock, New York and released in 2017. Its opening track, Omission, was a leftover from Hookah Brown. Also included, alongside covers of the Faces’ Glad And Sorry and Pink Floyd’s Fearless, was a version of the Crowes’ Wiser Time, lit up by Hogg’s soulful voice.
With a new keyboard player, Matt Slocum, who had previously backed Rich on a solo tour, The Magpie Salute continued gigging. But in the runup to making their first studio album, Rich decided to streamline the operation. “I felt we had to focus on the core band,” he says. “So we made the record with the six of us – me, John, Marc, Sven, Joe and Matt.”
It was recorded close to where Rich lives, in a suburb of Nashville, at a remote studio. The new songs were written by Rich, Marc and John, either separately or together. And with Rich as producer, the whole record was recorded inside three weeks. “The songs were not finished before we went in,” he explains. “I didn’t want anything to be too structured. It was very organic.” As Hogg puts it: “Rich doesn’t labour over things. He likes first instincts. He throws a riff in there and feels the response in the moment.”
Rich Robinson has always been a man out of time. When grunge happened, The Black Crowes sounded, and looked, like a band straight out of ’72, not ’92. In that respect he hasn’t changed. He doesn’t use social media, and he still complains, as he did in the 90s, that “modern music has had the soul sucked out of it”.
High Water I, all grit and grease, is the kind of old-fashioned rock’n’roll record that the Crowes, and so many great acts before them, used to make. “With technology, everything sounds the same,” Rich complains. “Dumbed down. But you go back to The Beatles and the Stones, Joni Mitchell and Gram Parsons, it was all so creative and so unique. You hear Neil Young’s voice and how he played guitar, how Bob Dylan wrote and sang, or the way John Bonham’s kick drum squeaked on some of those Led Zeppelin tracks. It’s that uniqueness that I’m drawn to.”
High Water I is also the kind of record on which the aroma of dope smoke is almost palpable. “There’s certainly that relaxed feeling about it,” Hogg says, laughing. “Let’s just say that a little of that stuff didn’t have any negative effects on the music.”
In the 90s, when The Black Crowes emerged from Atlanta, Georgia to become one of America’s greatest rock’n’roll bands, Chris Robinson was the poster boy for soft drugs, walking on stage barefoot and loudly professing his love for the Grateful Dead. The Crowes flew high, their 1992 album The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion becoming a US No.1. According to Rich, it was a combination of drugs, arrogance and money that brought the band to its end, and he admits his own part in all of that.
“There was ego and horseshit from everyone, me included,” he says. “We were young and unprepared to deal with success. And then you dump a shitload of drugs on that. I smoked a little, but I never did anything to the excess that the others did. I saw how it shifted my brother and it scared me. I didn’t want to go near it. I didn’t like who he became. And it got increasingly that way over the years. I could not stand to see what happened to him.”
For The Black Crowes, the bitter end came in 2014 as the Robinson brothers planned a tour for which the band line-up would be completed by drummer Steve Gorman, another co-founding member, Sven Pipien, keyboard player Adam MacDougall and guitarist Jackie Greene. Rich claims that his brother’s demands made his own position untenable.
“Chris wanted seventy-five per cent,” he alleges. “I would get twenty-five, and Steve Gorman would be reduced to a salaried player. I said no. I was not going to turn over my percentage or leave Steve as an employee.” With an exasperated laugh, he adds: “If you’re going to pretend you’re a hippie, that you’re all about peace and love and equality, you can’t ask for everyone’s money.”
Rich is left with mixed emotions. “The Black Crowes was like a tornado,” he says. “People got spit out left and right. It was a great band and we accomplished a lot, but ultimately it just fizzled out in such a pathetic way. So clichéd.”
On a deeper level, there is sibling rivalry, and the sense, in what Rich says, that he has lived in his brother’s shadow for so much of his 49 years. “Chris didn’t want to share the spotlight,” he sighs. “Not that I took much of it. And he spent the last few years trying to diminish my contribution to that band. I wrote the music and Chris wrote the lyrics. But in Chris’s mind, I only wrote parts of songs and he had to finish them for me. Man, you didn’t even pick up a guitar until 2001, don’t kid yourself. He’s rewriting history. It’s delusional, psychotic.”
In the past, many other famous bands have reunited following years of acrimony – the Eagles, with the wryly titled comeback album Hell Freezes Over, and most recently Guns N’ Roses, with their jokingly named Not In This Lifetime tour. As Rich sees it, there is no way back for the Black Crowes.
“I don’t know where I’ll be in five years, ten years,” he says, “and I don’t know where Chris will be, but I can’t imagine doing that again. To me it’s just too negative, too hurtful, and it’s not something I want to be a part of. I wish him well, and I wish he would not be such a hypocrite. But that’s his deal, it’s his life.”
There’s sadness is his voice, and weary resignation. “I used to feel really bummed about it, like, ‘Man, I really miss my brother.’ But as time goes on, that feeling goes away.”
The Magpie Salute, for all its connections to his past, feels for Rich Robinson like a new beginning. As he says simply: “I’m far happier doing this.”
“I didn’t want anything to be too structured. It was very organic.”
Rich Robinson on High Water I