Black Crowes- Shake Your Money Maker- Chris & Rich Robinson
“With Shake Your Money Maker we thought we would make our one album, you know, and then talk about it the rest of our lives”, says Black Crowes singer/songwriter Chris Robinson sardonically. The never-reticent frontman was joking about the unheralded January 1990 debut Shake Your Moneymaker which, for fifty-four consecutive weeks, punched way above its weight class until peaking in the Top Five best-sellers in America a full year after release. At the time, the Eighties pop-metal hair bands were starting to wane due to mousse abuse, and the Grunge guys were in the on-deck circle. The Black Crowes sounded as if the late Small Faces/Humble Pie dynamo Steve Marriott had gone on holiday to Paris and dropped in on the Rolling Stones sessions while recording Exile on Main Street .
It is easy to recall that throughout the year 1990 I relished Shake Your Money Maker, this new Atlanta-based band The Black Crowe’s debut album, as a personal guilty pleasure amidst the detritus of a third wave of pop metal hair bands by then. Apparently a whole lotta folks felt similarly, as Shake Your Money Maker would march up the Billboard Album Sales chart over the course of fifty-four weeks, eventually cresting at #4 and selling over a million copies initially. The impressive nine originals co-written by Chris and Black Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson put much-needed soul back into rock’n’roll, including”Twice As Hard”,”Jealous Again”,”Thick and Thin”,”She Talks to Angels”, the gospel-tinged”Seeing Things”, and the impeccable cover of fellow Georgian Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle”. Starved for such sounds made by passionate musicians playing far beyond their years (guitarist/songwriter Rich Robinson was 21!), the audiences resonated like a tuning fork, with over five million copies sold eventually of Shake Your Money Maker. 
Chris, the older singing Robinson, leaves us in my classic rock interview with this observation:”Our regional identities are being stripped away by technology. That is horrible. I did get to grow up in the (American) South. In Atlanta Georgia you were twenty minutes away from the best bluegrass music in the world, or the best blues you’d ever heard. Same music, just different neighborhoods. You know?”
And don’t miss the Black Crowes’ equally impressive followup The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion released two years later, all here. -Redbeard
