photo: Ross Halfin
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“We’ve changed the dynamic,” Rich Robinson says of teaming up with his brother Chris in The Black Crowes. “When we came back in 2019, we made a concerted effort to say, ‘We need to put our relationship first, instead of last.’ So because of that, this was definitely one of the happiest records to make and one of the coolest records, too. We were both so excited to be there.”
Given that backdrop, it is altogether fitting that the first new Black Crowes studio record in 15 years is titled Happiness Bastards. The name may be slightly tongue-in-cheek and somewhat of a throwback to another era, but ultimately, it is an accurate characterization, as well.
In November 2019, nearly six years after they had last taken the stage together as The Black Crowes, the Robinsons announced a summer 2020 tour to mark the 30th anniversary of their debut album. These dates were postponed a year due to the pandemic, but when the group finally returned to the road in 2021, Rich told Relix: “I just remember missing Chris, my brother, as a person and as a songwriting partner… That’s when I said to a mutual friend, ‘Man, I have some songs, and I would love to hear Chris sing on them.’ I meant it more as a fan, like, ‘Wow, I’d love to hear what he could do on these.’ And our friend goes, ‘Wow, Chris just said the same thing to me last week.’ And that opened up a dialogue, which led to something else.”
Initially, it led to a world tour in which the band visited 20 countries, performing the material on Shake Your Money Maker from start to finish (followed by some additional deep tracks and fan favorites). Subsequently, it resulted in a new studio album, produced by Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Brothers Osborne, Derek Trucks Band), which offers another definitive, signature statement by the group.
From the crunching opener “Bedside Manners,” through the pulsing strut of first single “Waiting and Wanting” and the steady burn of “Wilted Rose,” which features a complementary guest turn on vocals by Lainey Wilson, this is choice Black Crowes.
Happiness Bastards revisits the band’s classic sound, which it is worth noting was neither staid nor standard when the group first gained renown in late-‘80s Atlanta as Mr. Crowe’s Garden.
Chris Robinson remembers, “When Shake Your Money Maker came out, things had gotten one way, and some people were like, ‘Cool, there’s a band and it’s not that way.’”
The Crowes have always been idiosyncratic and elastic; although at their heart they’ve remained a kick-ass rock band. Chris notes, “I think this is something that some people are hip to, which is that The Black Crowes look like one thing on paper, but then in a three-dimensional reality of whatever actually goes on, it’s something very different. It’s not really what you think it is until you’re in it—I don’t mean in the band, I mean at the show, in the thing. That’s part of the narrative and certainly the reality of the situation. That’s definitely kept it interesting, sometimes really frustrating, sometimes amazingly triumphant and sometimes feeling left on the side of the road in a heap.
“Music still contains great magic and mystery, but right now, we’re also driven and focused,” he adds. “Rich and I feel a certain power in our chemistry because of where we are in our relationship and our creative relationship. So let’s take advantage of that. That’s the fire. And that fire makes us feel alive.”
What impact did your extended time on the road performing Shake Your Money Maker have on Happiness Bastards?
Chris Robinson: At first, I had some trepidation about doing it. Over the years, when everyone was going to the right, we’ve been like, “Well, what’s over here on the left?” Or vice versa.
Other bands have been doing tours where they were playing their albums or their most famous stuff, so initially, I was like, “I don’t know about that.” But then I started thinking about what Rich and I were trying to achieve—getting together, moving past the things that had happened, and being in a place where we can love each other, love this band, love our careers and love the music. That’s when I realized that this was exactly where we wanted to be.
When we started doing it, I loved embracing the frontman that I am. The frontman that I am is far closer to the frontman I was when we started than the frontman that was onstage with The Black Crowes when we got back together in 2005.
One thing that performing Shake Your Money Maker represented is that we still have a very vibrant relationship with the music. We’re not neglecting any of the energy. We haven’t really slowed down in that department. I think that’s the catalyst we brought to Happiness Bastards.
Rich Robinson: There was something to be said for playing those songs every night. They were highly established and kind of concrete in the way they exist. It gave me a cool perspective.
We were kind of running away from Shake Your Money Maker from day one in a sense. Back then, every time we wrote a new song, we would play it. We also found new cover tunes or we would do medleys. I remember we would do a Sly & the Family Stone medley into a version of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Shake ‘em on Down.” But we were just having fun because we love music.
On the first night of our initial Aerosmith tour [in 1990], we opened with some weird, slow, dirge-y new song called “You’re Such a Pity.” People that worked for us were like, “What the fuck are you doing? You should be using this opportunity to promote yourself.” We’re like, “Well, we just wanted to play this song. We thought it was cool.”
That’s just how we’ve always been. So for our whole career—every iteration of the band and every solo band and whatever other band we were in—I constantly jammed, constantly expanded, constantly changed and just kept that going. I know Chris did too.
So the Shake Your Money Maker tour was a challenge in a sense, but once we got into it, it brought a focus to us. There was something cool about it because it was different from what we previously had done. It also helped us recognize that there is something cool about a three-minute song that is in a specific sort of package. There’s no need to stretch it out or disintegrate it or take it somewhere else. There was something kind of cool about getting up there and playing Shake Your Money Maker every night—the focus and discipline of that—then using that to go into the studio and make these songs and this record.
Do you think that you could you have written the material on Happiness Bastards at the outset of your career?
RR: My ability as a guitar player has changed. I’m much better and I know a lot more tunings. I was 17 years old when I started writing Shake Your Money Maker. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was like 14 or 15, so I hadn’t really been playing that long. I had just graduated from high school and I was living with my parents, making Shake Your Money Maker a year or two later.
So tack on almost 40 years of playing and life experience. However, the seed of how I write is the same. I write 95% of the stuff on acoustic guitars because if the song works acoustically, then it’s going to work. If the song is cool in its most basic form, that’s what matters the most to me, and then you can build on top of the foundation.
Ultimately, I just stay out of the way and it comes through me. I’m more of a conduit and I try not to question it, block it, hassle it or ask any questions. That spark of creation is what genuinely brings me joy. I only pick up the guitar when I really want to, so that it never becomes a slog or some sort of necessary thing. I don’t believe in forcing any of it. I think that joy and wonderment and lack of cynicism have always made music important for me. It brings me the inspiration I’ve had in the most profound moments of life.
Chris, when it comes to writing lyrics, do you find that the music Rich passes along draws something out of you that differs from when you were writing lyrics for CRB?
CR: It was completely different in the CRB, because besides a handful of middle eights, I wrote everything. I was lucky to have my partner Neal Casal, who if I didn’t have a bridge, would say, “What about this?” But for the majority of that, I was writing all that music. The storytelling was different. Especially at the end of the CRB, I was writing so many overtly tender, and hopefully passionately deep love songs for my wife, Camille. There were all sorts of different stories in there—folky things and dreamy things.
This is the first Black Crowes record in a long time, and the type of things Rich plays me instantly evoke an emotional response, and that emotional response starts to drive the image or vision in my head. I think that my work in CRB was more of a storyteller, and I think with these type of songs, I feel I’m writing scenes in a movie. The narrative can be more abstract or even obtuse in a way.
“Bedside Manners” is a great example. The first line of the song—the opening shot on the script—goes, “Do not disturb on the door.” In a movie, you could hear that something’s going on in there.
The sort of rock-and-roll excess and the decadent imagery in the song plays with things like toe tags and thumb prints. The hospital ideas, criminal ideas and chemical ideas all revolve around a chorus about surviving that stuff. I guess all businesses have their pitfalls, but the music business can be a very ugly place. Thirty years later, we’ve navigated a lot of dark waters, and that’s kind of what it’s about.
But I’m not getting that unless Rich does it. Something about what Rich plays sets it in motion.
Thinking back to the outset of your career, can you talk about the process of finding your own voice and musical mindset?
RR: Growing up, our father had pretty broad tastes. One of my earliest memories is listening to “Carry On” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on dad’s console stereo. It was one of those old pieces of furniture that had everything in it.
I remember the effect it had on me, even as a kid—those voices, the guitars, the feeling that was coming off of that vinyl at the time. The amount of records he had between that and Mose Allison, Joe Cocker, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Sly & the Family Stone—he liked so much and that was a foundation. He loved music and he always had it on. But as you get older, you start to seek out your own identity.
I remember Prince, AC/DC, and then, by the time we got to our early teens, Chris was the expeditionary one. He would go out, find these records and bring them back. Then I would take his records out of his room and obsess over every instrument that was played on every song that really grabbed me. I would listen to it over and over again.
Then when it came time for us to start, we just started playing. I used to play on my dad’s guitar and he didn’t like that because it was a nice guitar. So he bought us some guitars for Christmas one time, and right away, we decided to start a band with our cousin because he got drums. Instantly, that was the idea, even though none of us knew how to play. We just kind of knew how to hack around. My dad taught me, “Here’s three chords, you figure the rest out.” So we started writing songs. I was like, “OK, a song has three chords, let’s do it.”
That same thing just took us forward. I love the craft of songwriting, the gift of it. It’s magical. You can have a great vocal performance, you can have a great guitar solo, but if they’re on shitty songs, no one really cares. But you can have an average guitar solo and a guy who maybe can’t sing and with a great, simple melody, that can still be one of the biggest songs in the world.
So we immediately wanted to write songs and our attitude about that has always remained the same. We would get in a room together and we would create. It was always safe from fighting or having any other issues when we sat down to write.
CR: I left home in 1987 and moved into this East Atlanta band house with our current bass player, Sven Pipien, who was in a band called Mary My Hope. They were a cool fucking indie-rock band, very ahead of their time. So I lived there, and then our bands lived in this house.
There’s some really hilarious things on YouTube of Mr. Crowe’s Garden that show where my voice was around that time.
I was probably staying away from the funk and soul that I was massively into when I growing up. I was really feeling Sly & the Family Stone, especially Freddie Stone’s voice. In the early ‘80s, funk music was really big. “Atomic Dog” was coming out. We were in Atlanta, so there was S.O.S. Band. Then Prince was coming around, Roger Troutman was making records. I was listening to Cameo, Lakeside, The Bar-Kays, The Gap Band, the great Charlie Wilson and lots of singers like that. P-Funk was really important to me with Garry Shider’s voice, Glenn Goins and Fuzzy Haskins and all those people. But I also felt, “Man, I can’t really fuck with that.” I didn’t know if I could access something like that and be true to a lot of things.
We dipped our toes into that 1983-era hardcore scene. We had a great hardcore band in Atlanta called Neon Christ, and we were really into that.
I was also listening to lots of blues music—Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, all of them. We were deep into country blues especially, but we were also into MC5, T. Rex, New York Dolls and that shit too.
Then R.E.M. comes along. We already love The Byrds, Bob Dylan and Buffalo Springfield, and there’s Peter Buck, and he’s kind of arpeggiating jangly things on a Rickenbacker. It just seemed like there was more to say, and we could add the influences of the older music that we got not from my adventuring in record stores, but from mom and dad’s record collection.
So that made a little connection. Then what really brought it home was we met George Drakoulias. We love AC/DC, we love Aerosmith, but that didn’t seem like what we would sound like. Then one day, George Drakoulias came over to this place I was living and he brought the Faces’ A Nod Is as Good as a Wink. He put on “Miss Judy’s Farm” and it was like an explosion in my head. I was like, “What the fuck? This has all the things that I like. The singing is great. There’s so much fucking attitude. And the guitar sound is funky.” So I was like, “Oh, wow, this is rock music that’s funky, but with a singer who could sing these kind of weirdly weird lyrics.” Also, Miss Judy’s Farm is close to Miss Maggie’s Farm. So a lot of things came together, kind of like Exile on Main St., but with the singing.
Before then, to me, Rod Stewart was “Young Turks” and things like that in the ‘80s. In Atlanta, on 96 Rock, they never played the Faces. They were playing “Radar Love” and REO Speedwagon and shit like that which didn’t really interest us. I’m not saying those people are bad or anything, we just didn’t listen to that.
Then people would sometimes say, “You sound like Steve Marriott” and I’d be like, “I don’t even know who that is. Humble Pie? Oh, I know the Small Faces.” I was into the Small Faces, and Humble Pie to me was “30 Days in the Hole.” People look down on boogie bands but Humble Pie is so much more than a boogie band. Then people would go, “Oh, you sound like Terry Reid.” I didn’t know who Terry Reid was back in 1989. Now, subsequently, I know Terry Reid, and I’ve listened to his records thousands of times—or Paul Rodgers, Frankie Miller and all of these other white soul singers, rock-and-soul singers.
While we’re talking about it, though, one of the other singers that really influenced me was “Baby Jean” Kennedy from an Atlanta band called Mother’s Finest. Mother’s Finest was a multiracial rock band from Atlanta—a rock-funk band with an incredible string of records in the ‘70s. It’s funny because on their live album, when they used to come out, the MC would say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, from Funk Rock, Georgia… Mother’s Finest!” And I used to be like, “Yeah, I’m from Funk Rock, Georgia!” Man, I thought that was cool.
Doc Murdock is also in the band?
CR: Yes, but also you’re missing some of them. Moses Mo on guitar, great rock name. B.B. Queen on drums, another incredible one. Then on bass is Wyzard with a Y. Incredible.
Your first arena tour was with Aerosmith and you were on board to open their final tour until it was postponed after only a few dates due to Steven Tyler’s vocal cord injury. Although you only played three shows, what did that bring back for you?
RR: We toured with Aerosmith in 1990. Then we did a European run with them in ‘99. It was when we did the thing with Jimmy Page. Aerosmith came down and they were part of it too, because we were playing Wembley Stadium with those guys.
So it feels like we’ve always crossed paths with them, and there’s a lot of feelings there. They gave us our first taste of this bigger world pretty quickly. We did two small club tours and then it kind of never stopped.
So to go back out there with those guys, it was really cool to see them off in a weird way because we’d shared a lot of time with them throughout the world.
CR: It’s funny, when George Drakoulias first came to see us—while we were still called Mr. Crowe’s Garden—we played at a place in New York that later turned into the strip bar Scores. But in the late ‘80s, it was a music venue called Drums. We were on the bill with four other bands. We were the second or something and in our set that night, we played “No More No More” by Aerosmith, and we played “Down on the Street” by The Stooges. Those were our two cover tunes. George saw us and he was like, “I really liked your choice of cover tunes. Maybe we could work on your songs.” [Laughs.]
I’ve seen Steven a couple times over the years. In fact, I just saw him, he’s doing great. I also sang on Joe Perry’s last solo record, and it was a thrill to write a song with Joe. They’ve launched bands and they know that we love their music and they know that there are lots of rock bands who think those records are important.
My personal taste happens to be everything from the first record up to Night in the Ruts, but they’re an iconic American rock band. They had the big hits in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and they’re a big part of the fabric of American music. They’ve always been supportive. Every time I saw Joe Perry, he’d heard our latest record and had something to say about it, which was amazing.
You were both big R.E.M. fans growing up. When they covered “Toys in the Attic” on Dead Letter Office, some people were taken aback, although that wouldn’t cause a stir these days. There’s been a shift, facilitated by a number of bands, including The Black Crowes.
CR: By the time we were little R.E.M. devotees, it seemed like the world of being able to love Aerosmith wasn’t available in our fucking indie-rock reality in Atlanta. I remember, I had a denim jacket—we pretty much looked like The Replacements when they were on Saturday Night Live. Or I would still dress like Pete Buck—a big button shirt with a vest and some Chelsea boots.
In Atlanta, there was a place in Little Five Points, which was the more bohemian section of town, where all the musicians hung out. Fellini’s was the center. Everyone who worked there was in a band. All the bands hung out there. We DJ’ed records in the back. That would be where you’d meet before you’d go out to see bands.
By 1989, the hippest thing was Jane’s Addiction—for good reason, they were the amazing Jane’s Addiction—and a lot of people had that look. But I walked into Fellini’s one day, and the girl I was living with had sewed an AC/DC patch on the back of my jacket. I almost got in a fight with two people over it. Nothing was more uncool at that time for that scene, but I really wore it as a badge of pride. Like, “Isn’t this what we’re all supposed to be doing? Shaking things up?”
You can put an Aerosmith record on after the fucking Tones on Tail if you want. But back then, those things didn’t exist together. Now we can listen to everything without anyone saying, “What the fuck?”
RR: Chris and I have talked extensively about R.E.M. and how much R.E.M. meant to us growing up. I remember hearing “Radio Free Europe” for the first time, and it just kind of caught me.
We used to go see R.E.M. at the Fox all the time, and they would play a Velvet Underground song and then go into a Big Star song, and then they’d play “Toys in the Attic.” The band that wrote a song like “Green Grow the Rushes” would then bust into Aerosmith, and it always made sense. It never seemed weird. I was like, “Hey, that’s cool.”
There’s no reason not to do that, it’s all rock-and-roll music. We landed on that as our sort of stepping stone to how we were going to express ourselves. It’s the broadest of all genres. Joni Mitchell was rock-and-roll music just as much as Zeppelin, Dylan, Sly Stone, Joe Cocker and anyone in between. So that’s kind of where we came from and a band like Big Star fit perfectly well with a band like The Velvet Underground or any cover we’ve ever done.
We’ve always gravitated toward the music that moved us, which was music that was more sincere. It’s always kind of kept us as an island unto ourselves but there was also an authenticity. It wasn’t contrived.
That’s also when hair metal was popular and then it kind of got silly with people writing “Cherry Pie” and different songs like that. It became kind of kitschy and gimmicky—other than bands like Guns N’ Roses, who everyone knew were more serious. But in certain respects, it’s not unlike the Disco Sucks era where there was a change that followed. In this instance, we were kind of the first wedge that helped kick open the door a little bit for grunge to come in after us and take it to a whole other place.
Looking at the album art, it reads, “Happiness Bastards, as performed by The Black Crowes.” There’s a cool nuance there in that level of abstraction, which touches on art and artifice.
CR: The whole concept of the art for this record is an integral part of the presentation and symbolic of where we are and what we’re doing. When we were working on the project, I read this novel by a more obscure Beat writer named Kirby Doyle. He has a novel called Happiness Bastard, and it’s an interesting read if you’re interested in Beat literature and the adjacent writers to the main characters in the story of what the Beat Movement was. I was like, “What if we could call this record Happiness Bastards? That would be amazing.”
For years, I’ve worked the same way. I write down tons of ideas, poems, drawings and collages, and I put all these things in small moleskin notebooks. I have mountains of them. Then when it gets to be time to work on a record—when Rich brings me ideas and we start working on songs—I will get all my notebooks together, start finding things that I like and begin formulating ideas.
When we have the songs and we’re ready to go to record them, I take a giant sketchbook, and when the song is ready for me to sing on the track, those lyrics end up in that big notebook in the final form.
So before I left to go to make the record, I said to my wife Camille, who’s a very talented artist on many levels and was also a graffiti writer: “Will you paint Happiness Bastards on here?” She gave me the notebook and when we were rehearsing, my manager took a picture of it. Then when I looked at the picture on my little phone, I thought the way she spelled it out to make it fit with that beautiful, simple graphic looked amazing.
I’ve done the majority of the art direction in The Black Crowes and all of it in the CRB, and I was like, “Oh, let’s do this.”
Then the next step when people get the album in their hands is they’ll see that she painted all of the artwork over old Black Crowes album covers. So you can see through the paint, “Oh, that’s Southern Harmony, that’s the back of Shake Your Money Maker…” I loved her idea of repurposing the old records because you’re paying homage to them, but you’re also defacing them, and it’s also something new. It works on all these cool levels. We’re into that kind of stuff. Then you open the record, and on one side it says, “Trust us” in these beautiful dripping letters. Then on the other side it says, “Don’t trust us.” I like that too. So it just started working from there.
I don’t think we’ve ever had a record where all of it comes together like that. It hits all the perfect notes with what I like about design. It’s nice when the art for your record, your stage design, your laminates and your guitar picks all comes together and helps create the world that we’re living in as The Black Crowes.
That Kirby Doyle book was written on a giant scroll, just like Kerouac’s On the Road.
CR: I understand Kerouac is a more maligned figure now with people. I get it. But it’s funny, one of the things as a kid that interested me just as much as his prose was the fact that that’s how he wrote that book.
My dyslexia has always determined my outsider perspective of things. Did it coincide with my esoteric taste, my philosophical taste, my artistic taste? Yes, of course, it all fits into a belief system I have, and that metamorphosizes and changes as you get older.
In the same way, there’s a correlation between Jack Kerouac writing on a scroll instead of papers and the way that in the year 2024, The Black Crowes still go onstage and we have amps and monitors— we don’t use in-ear monitors.
I’m not saying this is what other bands should do—do whatever you have to do to do your thing—I’m just saying, this is what we do and it makes us different. I’m just pointing out that we’re loud and there are monitors onstage. There’s air and music pumping with the volume and rhythmic things. Again, that makes us feel alive.
It’s more than just, “Wow, they’re one of the last bands that do that.” Another reason why our presentation feels the way it does is Rich and I are driven by visceral realities. There’s a cerebral element in the imagination, the work, the poetry and being able to put things together musically. But after that, we have crawled across this dark cave floor just by our feelings.
How would you describe your dynamic working with Jay Joyce on Happiness Bastards?
RR: It was helpful for Chris and I to give up our control and bring in Jay as the producer. He came in without any baggage—baggage being the perfect word. There’s nothing there for us to be like, “I remember that moment 20 years ago when you were a dick.” [Laughs.] Of course, Jay was not only someone new, he also was able to come in and push us where we needed pushing, and pull back where we didn’t.
I sent Chris about 40 songs. He chose the ones that moved him and elicited his emotions. Then we worked on them together in order to write the songs and get them to where they needed to be. Chris is singing better than ever, in my opinion, so it was kind of cool. Everything he sent back was great and it led to the next thing.
Once we had all those together, we threw them out on a table, like a jigsaw puzzle, to figure which group worked together. Jay had a say in that as well. He was someone who could look at everything from 10,000 feet and tell us, “This is what this is, and I think this is what it needs.” So it was a great process.
CR: Jay has produced a lot of cool records, and now he’s Jay Joyce, super producer. Number one, he’s a very cool guy. Number two, he’s a very talented guitar player. He knows music.
Rich and I were lucky enough to have some meetings with super talented people, and there was something about Jay. Rich and I are very kinetic and we like the energy. We work fast. We have a psychic thing when we’re working and we can just look at each other’s eyes and know which direction to go—up, down, green, purple, fuzzy, sleek, whatever. Jay jumped in on that as well.
I’ve never had a more pleasant, productive and overall enjoyable experience in the studio. I can’t say enough great things about Jay Joyce. All I really need to say is “Thank you.”
The post The Black Crowes: Pursuit of Happiness appeared first on Relix Media.
