With members not much older than the trends they revived, the Black Crowes had the look (long hair, velvet flares, fur-trimmed vests, impossibly skinny physiques) and the bluesy, boozy, two-guitar rock sound of the early-'70s Rolling Stones and Faces. The Robinson brothers’ father, Stan, was a onetime singer who had a pop hit in 1959 with "Boom-a-Dip-Dip." He discouraged his sons from becoming professional musicians, but by 1984 they had formed the band Mr. Crowe's Garden (named for a favorite childhood fairy tale). This group evolved into the Black Crowes, with Chris dropping out of college along the way. Their debut album, Shake Your Money Maker (#4, 1990), sold a million copies and won them Best New American Band in the ROLLING STONE readers and critics polls. In true album-rock throwback fashion, its singles were only minor hits: “Jealous Again” (#75, 1990), “She Talks to Angels” (#30, 1991), and a cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” (#26, 1991).
In March 1991 the Black Crowes were fired from their opening-act slot on ZZ Top’s Miller Beer–sponsored tour after Chris Robinson, onstage in Atlanta, made sarcastic remarks about commercialism. That May the Crowes launched their own tour and three shows into it fired opening act Maggie’s Dream, after hearing that band in a Miller Beer radio ad. Also in May, Chris Robinson was arrested for assault and disturbing the peace after a postshow argument with a female customer at a Denver convenience store. Before pleading no contest three months later (he got six months’ probation and a $53 fine), he collapsed of malnutrition and exhaustion during a British tour. Upon his recovery, the Crowes played Moscow on the Monsters of Rock Tour of the Soviet Union.
With new guitarist Marc Ford (from L.A. band Burning Tree), the Crowes acted on their pro-marijuana rhetoric by playing the April 1992 Great Atlanta Pot Festival, staged by the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML). Two months later the band’s second album (named for an antebellum hymnal) entered the Billboard pop albums chart at #1; again its singles were only minor hits: “Remedy” (#48, 1992) and “Thorn in My Pride” (#80, 1992). In February 1993 the band played a free show in Houston, with its own handpicked security, to make up for a show the previous October, at which, the band felt, security guards had roughed up fans. The next month the band ended a Louisville, Kentucky, show after one song, ostensibly because of a backstage fracas between its road crew and plainclothes narcotics officers. The band’s security chief and merchandising supervisor were charged with assault and resisting arrest. The band’s 1994 album, Amorica, reached #11, but again yielded no hit singles. Amorica’s original cover, depicting a closeup of a woman’s bikini underwear with pubic hair showing, was changed after some chains refused to carry the album.
The making of the band’s 1996 release, Three Snakes and One Charm (#15), was fraught with tension. The group returned to Atlanta to record the effort but was distracted by a lawsuit brought by a former manager (the case was later thrown out of court). During the next year, guitarist Ford was fired and original bassist Johnny Colt quit (he was replaced by Sven Pipien, a friend of the band’s from Atlanta). A career-spanning box set, Sho’ Nuff, came out in 1998. And in 1999, the group resurfaced on a new label, Columbia, and an album, By Your Side (#26), that was greeted as a return to rollicking form. The single “Kicking My Heart Around” reached #3. Later that year, the band joined former Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page for concerts at L.A.’s Greek Theatre, which were documented on the 2000 release Live at the Greek. The artists also toured to support the recording. On New Year’s Eve 2001, Chris Robinson was in the news again, when he wed 21-year-old actress Kate Hudson, the daughter of actress Goldie Hawn and singer/songwriter Bill Hudson, who had starred as the groupie Penny Lane in director Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical ’70s rock saga, Almost Famous. The band’s 2001 album, Lions, debuted in the Top 20.
Black Crowes tickets
from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)
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