The Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson has shared his memories of his band's first decade in the spotlight, and admitted that, for all the group's success, it was a challenging, and sometimes damaging, period.
After five years together, the Atlanta, Georgia rock n' roll band released their debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, on February 12, 1990, on producer/music industry legend Rick Rubin's label Def American Recordings. The band proved an immediate with the record-buying public, with their first single, Jealous Again, breaching the Billboard Hot 100, and their second single, a cover of Otis Redding's Hard To Handle, reaching number 26. Further successes with Twice As Hard and She Talks To Angels helped propel the album to number 4 on the Billboard chart. The album went on to sell five million copies in the US alone, and also broke into the UK Top 40, peaking at number 36. The band's second album, 1992's The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, would fare even better, hitting number 1 in the US, and number 2 in the UK.
"The first six years of the Black Crowes were insane to process," Chris Robinson recalls in a new interview with Vulture. "1989 to 1996 wasn't a great expansive time, but we did a lot of living.
"You see a lot of kids and they're like, 'I canceled my shows because I'm having a mental-health issue.' And I’m like, Jesus, the whole ’90s was a mental-health issue for us. We just had no choice. Fucking get out. You got to go do the gig.
He continues: "Every band documentary you see, they always go, 'If we could just have taken six months off, we could have cooled off.' You didn't do that. You didn't get the chance. You're losing your mind or whatever. You just don't say anything. It's so different now. I told some younger musicians the other day that our first tour for Shake Your Money Maker was 350 shows in 18 months. And we did it... The future seems much more gentle."
By the end of the '90s, Robinson recalls that The Black Crowes were getting worn down by the music industry.
"It was a real turning point at the end of the ’90s when we made By Your Side," he admits to writer Devon Ivie. "We had signed with Columbia Records, and it wasn’t a good fit. I thought the people there were horrible... unimaginably boring. But we were put in a situation to make this record, and I’ll always remember it as being kind of heartbreaking."
During the making of the record, Robinson remembers superstar A&R man John Kalodner - who he calls "one the worst people in the music business" - taking issue with the album's title track, saying that he didn't like the chorus.
"The other guys in the band were like, 'Yeah, dude, redo it.' And I was like, Oh, okay. Really? You guys are so easily swayed by trying to please the corporate entities of these people who could give a rat's ass about what we do and what we are if they could just make a little bit of money.
"So I went home and rewrote the chorus," he says. "I had the verses and it was like, 'When all your friends are fake, it seems like it’s a song to bring us together. I’ll be by your side.' It’s completely cynical now. I did it as like a 'fuck you' to my partners in the band and my brother... To a normal person, what’s the big deal? But to me, it was crushing. The only people who benefited from me changing those lyrics was my coke dealer at the time."
Read the interview in full here.
