As we prepare to honor Southern Rock pioneers Lynyrd Skynyrd on the fiftieth anniversary of Nuthin’ Fancy next week, here is an example of their long shadow cast two decades later with an uncanny cover of that album’s “On the Hunt” by Carolina band Cry of Love. This was performed in SONY Studio in New York City in August 1993 by Cry of Love while promoting their excellent Brother debut album, totally live with no overdubs, and to my knowledge was never released. –Redbeard
“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”, sardonically says Black Crowes singer/songwriter Chris Robinson. The never-reticent frontman was joking about the unheralded January 1990 debut which, for fifty-four consecutive weeks, punched way above its weight class until peaking in the Top Five best-sellers in America. 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
After having flown the coop almost five years earlier, the press announcement that the Black Crowes’ fraternal core of singer Chris Robinson and guitarist Rich Robinson had arrived at a “Wiser Time” in order to mount a major 30th anniversary tour playing Shake Your Moneymaker in 2020, was greeted with great anticipation.
Here is a musical reminder of earlier colorful and somewhat notorious times, such as when the band got thrown off the 1990 ZZ TOP tour for lead singer Chris Robinson dissing the Texas trio’s corporate beer sponsor. Or (staying with the beer theme) when Chris got popped for after-hours consumption in a Denver area convenience store. And the Black Crowes’ concert in Houston which got stopped completely and cancelled mid-show when the PA speakers toppled into the audience. You know, the good ol’ days. –Redbeard
With a band named after a Jimi Hendrix album, and their debut album Brother in 1993 sounding like Free meets Lynyrd Skynyrd, how could I not love this Carolina band? Great guys too in Cry of Love , including the trueheart guitarist Audley Freed who grew up idolizing Southern Rock icons Allen Collins and Duane Allman as well as lesser known blues rock Englishman Paul Kossoff, whose distinctive style is perfectly emulated here on “Peace Pipe”.– Redbeard
We are so thrilled to be able to share this white-hot performance in Houston of the Black Crowes, newly headlining arenas by 1993 and clearly up for the task, mighty tight and hittin’ the note on “My Morning Song”. Thankfully, this time no idiot in the crowd pulled the P.A. stack down on top of audience members near the stage wings. –Redbeard
One of the strongest combination punches of rockn’roll ever delivered came in the first two years of the Nineties, courtesy of the Robinson Brothers from Atlanta GA, Chris & Rich and the Black Crowes. Recorded in the flickering, sickening light of the riot flames as East Los Angeles burned after the Rodney King police beating and first kangaroo trial in Simi Valley CA, it is the haymaker #2, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, whose pages are filled with songs including “Sting Me”, “Remedy”, “Thorn in My Pride”, “Hotel Illness”, “My Morning Song”, and “Sometimes Salvation”. Never one to pull his punches, the colorful quotable Chris Robinson joined me In the Studio along with guitarist/songwriter Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes. Upon release of Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, we shared their uncanny insights.
Preparing this interview with Black Crowes co-founders singer Chris Robinson and his younger guitar-playing brother Rich Robinson to mark their second release, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, the deja vu was uncanny and not a little bit unsettling. Constantly I had to remind myself that the trends these Atlanta natives were seeing in the early 1990s, and the predictions they made then, sound eerily like today’s headlines. Peering now into their spyglass in reverse, it is both remarkable in its accuracy but, I must admit, troubling in its sense of creeping inevitability. “Some people make a living digging graves, and some people make a living robbing them,” pronounced Black Crowes lead singer and co-writer Chris Robinson, his way of explaining how, though the actions of certain people may look quite similar, their motives and ultimate goals can be deceiving.
When Black Crowes lead singer Chris Robinson visited me In The Studio in May 1992, it was our second time to talk about the Atlanta-based band he fronted with his guitar-playing younger brother, Rich. The first meeting was midway through the year-long ascent to Top 5 sales by the Black Crowes’ debut, Shake Your Moneymaker, and in the 18 month interim the intrepid group had played a 350-show marathon in support of that impressive initial effort, leaving the elder Robinson’s witty neo-hippy observations now seasoned with a worldliness that certainly belied his tender twenty-five years at the time. The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion‘s songs ” Sting Me”,”Remedy”,”Thorn in My Pride”,”Sometimes Salvation”,”Hotel Illness”, and “My Morning Song” were all recorded in Los Angeles against the backdrop of the first trial of several white L.A. police officers accused of beating African-American motorist Rodney King. When the all-white jury acquitted the white policemen, the visiting Black Crowes got a front row seat to the violent rioting and the bitter taste of what it means to become a target simply for the color of your skin.
“I got to grow up in Atlanta GA twenty minutes from the best bluegrass music in the world AND the best blues. Same music, different neighborhoods is all,”observed singer Chris Robinson.
The Black Crowes called it a career in 2015 (or so we thought), and we were very sad to report the passing of Black Crowes keyboardist Eddie Harsch the following year. But in spite of COVID-19 crashing their thirtieth anniversary tour plans, The Black Crowes were one of the first major tours back out in 2021.– Redbeard
In a colorful career which has spanned over thirty-five years now, and no strangers to controversy because of the outspoken opinions of lead singer Chris Robinson, the Black Crowes’ finest hour may have been their benefit performance for the shell-shocked innocent citizens of Oklahoma City following the worst terrorist attack in the US (prior to 9/11) there on April 19, 1995 . Even in the shock and grief of the deaths of 168 American men, women, and children, and the maiming or injury of an additional 600+ there, Robinson showed more wisdom in his introduction of the Black Crowes song “Remedy” than many current hysterical politicians when he said, “A little less judgement and a little more tolerance: that alone is the only remedy…”.
Just think if our current crop of fearmongers were in charge then. Their solution? Apparently it would be to deport all American-born white male veterans of the US Army… which is precisely who OKC terrorist bomber mass murderer Timothy McVeigh was. –Redbeard
From all indications, Black Crowes lead singer/co-songwriter Chris Robinson was hard to handle from birth, and with him and guitar playing younger brother Rich Robinson sharing Georgia roots with the late soul singer non-pareil Otis Redding, it was no stretch for the Black Crowes to cover Redding’s “Hard to Handle” on their 1990 debut album, Shake Your Moneymaker. Here is an absolutely sizzling hot Black Crowes live version from a Houston performance February 6, 1993. – Redbeard
One of the reasons I could forgive Black Crowes lead singer Chris Robinson his “always on” opinions on everyone and everything was because he had a great live band, and here is another example straight off the Air London studio floor, no overdubs, in front of a live audience with this rocker from Amorica‘s “A Conspiracy”. In the twenty-five years since, apparently little has changed in our country except maybe personal grooming…-Redbeard
The Black Crowes always sounded deliciously rip-snorting loose whether live in concert or In the Studio, and it belied the fact that the band was impeccably rehearsed throughout all of their twenty-five years. Here is exhibit “A” in my case, a visit to the late George Martin‘s Air London Studios in Fall 1994 performing “Remedy” originally from the Southern Harmony & Musical Companion album. Chris Robinson and guitar-slinger Rich Robinson return here to explore the Southern Harmony… story with me. –Redbeard