Interview: Rich Robinson on The Black Crowes and Happiness Bastards

If you’re lucky, the right band comes along at the right time. The somewhat unlikely emergence of The Black Crowes out of Atlanta, Georgia in 1990 was, for those of us obsessed with The Stones, The Faces, and all manner of rock that didn’t forget to roll, heaven sent. I saw The Crowes in the National Stadium a few weeks after my twentieth birthday in 1991 and I remember it like it was last night.

Strangely enough, so does Rich Robinson, the guitar player who, along with slightly older singing brother Chris, formed Mr Crowe’s Garden in high school in 1984.

“I remember that show in particular,” he claims, down the phone across the Atlantic. “It was at the end of eighteen months of touring. We headlined in the UK, then played Belfast, then Dublin. I remember that being a really cool gig the way it was set up, and the crowd was amazing.”

I also recall a later Crowes gig in the Olympia, or at least I think I do for several Chardonnays had been taken, where the band strayed into Lizzy’s ‘Sarah’. Rich isn’t sure about that one but does acknowledge the Irish influence on his music and playing.

“I’m friends with Paul Brady, who’s brilliant. The Irish approach to music is one of my favourites. My Dad and Chris went to see Paul and Andy Irvine play in Atlanta when we were kids and brought that record [1975’s phenomenal Andy Irvine/Paul Brady] home. The guitar playing and the songs were unbelievable,” he quite rightly says before adding that his wife is half Irish too. The good half, probably.

Robinson senior was a serious influence on his son’s career choice, something Rich got to pay tribute to when Martin recently created a Rich Robinson series guitar ($6,999 if you’re interested) based on his Dad’s old D-28, which Rich nicknamed The Appalachian in his honour.

“He got started as a kind of Bobby Darin pop singer and then got into Dylan and formed a folk duo called The Appalachians, even played The Grand Old Opry. When I was born that guitar was there. He gave it to me after we got going and I wanted to do something for him. Martin did a stellar job and took great care to follow through with what I wanted, which was to show respect to my Dad, to this instrument, and to his legacy.”

“His musical taste was really inspirational. He loved Déjà Vu, you know, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and ‘Carry On’. I remember hearing that and the sonics of it struck me even back then.”

This Is Hip

When the band hit big, renamed as The Black Crowes, in 1990 with their debut Shake Your Money Maker, it was, to put it mildly, against the grain. Releasing a cover of Otis Redding’s ‘Hard To Handle’ and naming your album after an Elmore James song were far from hip manoeuvres.

“It was quite out of place,” Rich agrees. “Atlanta had its own music scene but it was indie, alternative, and punk. We started out as a kind of punk rock band – Dead Kennedys, The Pistols, The Clash – and then R.E.M. came out. I remember hearing ‘Radio Free Europe’ for the first time in my parent’s basement and it just hit me in the spine. There was something far out about their attitude, we’d see them play a Velvet Underground cover, a Big Star cover, and an Aerosmith cover, and it all made sense. They had a southern thing but it wasn’t southern rock, there was an art to it. It was more of the kind of south we grew up in and, to this day, we’re not a southern rock band. We’re from the south, we play rock n’ roll but our idols are from the UK.”

The story goes that George Drakoulias, who sat in the producer’s chair for their first two records, turned them on to bands like The Faces.

“We met George when I was like 16 or 17. He was looking for a rock n’ roll band to produce and that’s what we were becoming. Rock n’ roll music is as much Joni Mitchell as Jimi Hendrix as Led Zeppelin, The Stones, Bob Marley, Dylan. There were no rules. Growing up in Atlanta we were never subjected to the industry telling us, ‘This is really popular right now, Guns N’ Roses, or Poison, or this, or that.’ We just made the record we wanted to make. George played us stuff like ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’ which is a fucking amazing song.”

And number one on both sides of the Atlantic the night I was born so it was written in the stars that I’d fall for them. Their second album, 1992’s The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion was even better again, assimilating all those influences into something truly their own.

“When I started writing Shake Your Money Maker I was 17. Chris’s lyrics, and the music, were sincere but you don’t have life experience, you gotta rely on your influences. By the time we get to Southern Harmony we’d been around the world. We started out playing to 12 people in Atlanta and one of our last shows on that tour was playing with AC/DC and Metallica in front of 800,000 Russians. The trajectory was astonishing. We came home different people. We wrote probably two or three albums of material between those records and like you said we were playing ‘Thorn In My Pride’ when we came to Dublin. We made that record in eight days.”

Boogie Chillen’

At this point Rich is interrupted by children bursting into the room. Robinson has five kids under the age of thirteen. I resist the temptation to suggest that must be ‘Hard To Handle’, something I deeply regret. He continues after I ask if he fancies Southern Harmony as their best record.

“It had focus and flow. After that we went off into expeditionary land where we weren’t interested in being commercial. We made a concerted effort at a studio sounding record with Amorica [1994] and it took a year. There’s not a lot of choruses but there’s a lot of brilliant moments. There’s also amazing shit on Three Snakes And One Charm [1996] which is one of my favourites. Southern Harmony kinda had everything, it encapsulates us as a band.”

1999’s By Your Side sounded like an attempt, and a successful one in artistic terms at least, to win back some of the ground that may have been lost.

“We wanted to make a great rock n’ roll record. It’s a lot more commercial and focused, then Lions [2001, after a period touring with Jimmy Page] was a left turn but I loved it. Some hardcore fans shit on it but they’re really good songs.”

A Murder Of Crowes

Rollin’ & Tumblin’

The band went on hiatus between 2002 and 2005 but reformed and 2008’s Warpaint hit the US top five. The marvellous double, Before The Frost…Until The Freeze, recorded over five days at Levon Helm’s place in Woodstock, arrived a year later. I put it to Rich that it sounds like a beautiful atmosphere but I’m way off.

“It was definitely not a good atmosphere. There was a tremendous amount of fighting between me and Chris.”

This brings up the fraternal fracas between the two top Crowes. They even made Oasis stop and take note.

“I love Oasis, that was one of the most fun tours we ever had [2001’s appropriately named Tour Of Brotherly Love]. At the time we had people lining us up against each other – tour managers, band members, etc. We were doing something, Chris showed up late, we got into it. Our tour manager said Noel and Liam were outside listening and snickering because we were fucking going at it. We got through it, finished the tour, and split up like fifteen times after that.”

Rich put out a press release in 2015 saying the band had finally broken up, allegedly over demands from Chris about shares in the band including a request that long time drummer Steve Gorman relinquish his stake and become “a salaried employee”.

“There was a lot of negative influence,” says Rich. “People in Chris’s ear. There was some greed. It was time to be done. I was the one who said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not waiting around.”

Fast forward to 2019 and all Crowe fanciers were surprised, and delighted, by a reunion announcement. A mutual and neutral friend helped out.

“My other band Magpie became really toxic and I didn’t want to fucking deal with that. I’ve always written with Chris’s vocals in mind, I’m a fan of what he does, and I said to Greg that I’d love to hear Chris on these songs I had. Greg told me Chris had said the same thing. Also, kids are kids and mine were asking why they never saw their Uncle Chris and his were saying the same thing. We ran into each other in New York, started talking, and things started happening.”

“We were offered tours each year since we split by promoters, we could have grabbed some money but we weren’t ready. If we were going to do this, we wanted to put our relationship first. We can’t be responsible for someone who’s hell bent on creating chaos and issues between us so we hired new management, new band members where necessary, and a new agent. It’s the most adult and pleasant it’s ever been.”

Got My Mojo Working

The band toured the anniversary of Shake Your Money Maker, including, after a pandemic delay, a truly rockin’ stop at Dublin’s 3Arena, covers EP, 1972, was released in 2022 and then, finally, a new single in January of this year. ‘Wanting And Waiting’ has the big Rich riff, the backing singers going ‘Oooh’ and Chris almost audibly twirling the mic stand, and it’s not even the best thing on glorious new album Happiness Bastards.

“COVID hit. ‘Fuck, I gotta do something’ so I wrote songs which I sent to Chris. When we got in the studio we wanted a producer as Chris and I have very strong feelings about how we want our music to sound. We met a bunch of people and really liked Jay [Joyce who’s worked with everyone from Eric Church to Emmylou Harris].”

Chris has described it as a love letter to rock n’ roll, and on this at least, the brothers are in agreement. Barnstorming opener ‘Bedside Manner’ was written in about five minutes, according to the man himself.

“Some songs do that. ‘Sometimes Salvation’ took five minutes to write. ‘Wiser Time’ flowed. Others, like ‘Nonfiction’, took a long time. ‘Bedside Manner’ just fucking came out.”

‘Rats And Clowns’ rocks like a rowboat in a typhoon and sounds like a nod to the immortal ‘DC.

“When I was a kid, I was like ‘Fucking ‘Riff Raff’, you know?”

Indeed and I do know.

“The first record I bought was If You Want Blood You Got It, that cover with the SG sticking through Angus’s body. What child wouldn’t think that was the coolest shit in the world? That band powering along? There’s nothing better on earth than that. If the record is a love letter to rock n’ roll then ‘Rats And Clowns’ is a love letter to AC/DC.”

Country star Lainey Wilson adds a beautiful vocal to the ballad ‘Wilted Rose’.

“We did the CMT Awards last year, a lot of country bands like our records like ‘She Talks To Angels’. Lainey was there and she’s just a lovely person with a really authentic voice. Jay had produced her record so we thought it would be cool to have her sing with Chris. Their voices work really well together.”

‘Flesh Wound’ is a throwback to the kind of thing Mr Crowe’s Garden might have played.

“It’s like X [80’s Californian punks]. I was going for a full Billy Zoom [X Guitarist] thing. It has a great chorus and it’s something I don’t think you’d expect us to put out.”

‘Follow The Moon’, my own favourite, is rifftastic.

“There’s a lot of riffage on that one. It reminds me of The Grease Band [Joe Coker’s old backing group], the interplay between those two guitar players. Then you add those counter riffs and that’s kinda Zeppelin.”

Manna. The album closes with another lovely slow one, ‘Kindred Friend’ which, with lyrics like “let’s stop pretending and write our own ending”, is surely about the two brothers.

“My contribution is always in the subconscious. Chris hears what I do and he’s inspired to write something else. It could be about that but that’s more of a Chris question,” Rich reckons, covering his arse.

The PR, whose been very generous, calls time so one last thing. There’s a tour but no Irish date. What’s the story?

“It’s getting in and out before we come back and do a proper tour.”

We’ll see The Crowes in the future so?

“Of course.”

If you give even half a damn about rock n roll, don’t miss that, or this record.

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The Black Crowes' new album Happiness Bastards is out now on Silver Arrow Records.