Rich Robinson on why the Black Crowes channeled the spirit of “20-year-olds showing the f**k off” on their new album
It used to be that the quickest thing about the Black Crowes was their tempers. Well, perhaps not anymore. Everything about A Pound of Feathers suggests a sense of speed and urgency – it’s the second record from the reunited brothers Robinson in under two years, and it was recorded in fewer than 10 days.
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Its first song, the rollicking Profane Prophecy, slams out of the gate with spitting riffs and swagger to spare – it’s loose and freewheeling in a manner that felt beyond them as their initial run collapsed into acrimony and extended genre exercises. “We were winging it,” guitarist Rich Robinson says over Zoom. “That is what makes rock ’n’ roll rock ‘n’ roll, because it could go off the rails at any time.”
If 2024’s Happiness Bastards had enough about it to suggest that the Crowes had kicked free of the nostalgia circuit they briefly joined with reunion tours celebrating the 30th birthday of their 1990 star-making debut Shake Your Money Maker, then its successor punches everything up a few notches.
Image: Press
Returning to the studio with producer Jay Joyce in Nashville, A Pound of Feathers pointedly rejects the hermetically-sealed sound of many late-career rock records, which are seemingly intent on papering over any cracks left by the passage of time.
Instead, it is a gritty, grimy thing driven by a desire to capture the sound of people interacting with one another in real time, the mess and mayhem driving things on. “There’s a human element to writing and recording in that way,” Rich elaborates. “Humans are imperfect, humans speed up going into the chorus, because the chorus is exciting. It’s like, you breathe in, you breathe out, you know? Sometimes you walk, sometimes you run.”
Running Lean
After Happiness Bastards was captured alongside an all-new band comprising guitarist Nico Bereciartúa, keyboard player Erik Deutsch, drummer Brian Griffin and long-time bassist Sven Pipien, A Pound of Feathers underlines its zero-fat genesis by being the product of a bare-bones, three-piece version of the band, with Cully Symington on drums and Rich handling guitar and bass. Rich sees it as there being more than one way to skin a cat. “Chris and I move quickly,” he says. “We’ve been doing this for so long, the two of us, that we can read each other’s minds.”
“Jay was like, ‘I want you guys to come down for a week to 10 days, and let’s suss everything out.’ The idea was to bring the band in after that,” he adds. “But we were finishing songs. At the end of five days, we had nine that we were really happy with. Changing the dynamic, by bringing the band in, is going to alter the flow. You’re going to have to stop, reset and then try to recapture what everyone loves about these songs. So we just said, ‘Fuck it. Let’s keep going.’”
Image: Press
In the past, this decision-making process might not have worked out. Or, at least, it would have unearthed some of the interpersonal strife and insecurity that ran in parallel to the band’s imperial phase, when the Black Crowes were as well known for infighting as they were for the undeniable chemistry between the Robinsons – who were warring brothers before people knew who the Gallaghers were – drummer Steve Gorman, guitarist Marc Ford et al.
“I was 19 when I made Shake Your Money Maker,” Rich says. “We sold over seven million albums. One of the first shows we played was to 12 people in Atlanta. A year later, we’re playing in Moscow in front of a million people with AC/DC and Metallica. No one can really sit you down and explain how to deal with that.”
Throw a hellish touring schedule – 20 months or so on Shake Your Money Maker, straight into something in the same ballpark for its double platinum 1992 follow up The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion – plus drugs and ego collapse fuelled by exhaustion and you’ve got a potent mix that Rich describes as “dumping tons of gasoline on a fire”. In this environment, would anyone have been able to duck into a studio and make an album like A Pound of Feathers? “It would have been impossible,” Rich says. “Just to have the space to flush out our songs. Now, it’s different.”
“When we split up, it was years and years of toxicity: toxic family dynamic, toxic bullshit, backstabbing,” he continues. “People would go in the back lounge – Chris would be there and they’d say, ‘Your brother said you’re a dick.’ And then they’d come up to me and say, ‘Chris said you suck,’ or whatever bullshit that was. After we split up, we got offered tours every year for those six or seven years. We never took them. And when we decided maybe it’s time to get back, we randomly ran into each other and we talked about it. We decided this was a good idea, but we had to start from scratch. We decided to put our relationship first.”
Sibling Harmony
That relationship is front and centre on the record itself, which is musically pugilistic instead of literally pugilistic. Chris sounds great, all louche drawl and rat-a-tat phrasing, and Rich matches his energy with lean, mean garage-rock riffs on songs such as Do The Parasite! and It’s Like That. The first of his firecracker leads arrives only six seconds into the opening track.
“It’s youthful,” he says. “Some sessions that I’ve done with people producing, when you deal with older bands, their first thing is, ‘don’t overplay.’ Let’s leave space for the vocalist, and if you’re the bass player, just play the root note on the kick, you know? I’m like, ‘Bullshit!’ Our favourite records were made by 20-year-olds showing the fuck off. Listen to John Paul Jones on Ramble On. Listen to Jimmy Page. Listen to the Rolling Stones – no one is conserving energy on those records. They’re psyched to be there and they’re going to show you what they can do.”
Image: Press
Leaning further into the fast and furious nature of things, Rich cycled through guitars at a clip in order to create variety as a single player laying down two or three tracks per song. “I brought, like, 40 guitars into the studio, and about 30 amps,” he says. In heavy rotation were his trio of 335s – a ‘61, a ‘62 and a ‘68 – plus roughly 10 Telecasters and a ‘64 Rose Morris Rickenbacker. For solos, he often turned to his ‘68 Les Paul Goldtop, while his signature Gretsch G6136T-RR Magpie underpins the rumbling, sinister blues of the closer Doomsday Doggerel.
For Rich, tone-chasing begins and (almost) ends with an amp, to the extent that a couple of years ago he started Muswell Amplification with his guitar tech Roland McKay, building on the sound of his 1968 Marshall Bluesbreaker. “I believe that an amp sound is paramount,” he says. “Some people like to get their tones out of pedals, which is really weird to me. If you get a great amp sound, then any pedal is going to sound markedly better. I did use pedals, some fuzz on stuff, but the amp is king.”
“I had my ‘68 Bluesbreaker, a ‘66 Bluesreaker, my Vox AC30, Twins, tweed Princetons, my Vibrolux, and my Muswell amps – we like to explore,” he adds. “I think the difference in the tones this time around is that a lot of the amps I have are combos, and they’re open-backed. Jay had bought this old greenback Marshall 4×12 and this thing sounds fucking amazing. It was literally one of the best cabinets I’ve ever heard. He has it dialled in. I wound up plugging all my different amps through that, and it is a nastier tone.”
Unplugged Gems
But, while A Pound of Feathers is in its element as a flat-out rock record, its acoustic songs are equally important in driving home the philosophy behind its construction. On Pharmacy Chronicles, for example, you can get a sense of the space and atmosphere in the room itself, and almost feel the percussive nature of the guitar. To return to a phrase Rich uses multiple times during the course of our chat, the way the situation is mic’d makes it sound human. “That was a J-200, which I’ve never recorded with before,” Rich says. “I bought one, and I got two more because they’re so cool.”
“They’re two 1964 J-200s – one had a nickel bridge, and then one had, I guess it was a vinyl bridge or something like that, a plasticky kind of thing,” he continues. “Jimmy Page told me that Donovan had one like that. Everyone loved it because it was darker, and it resonated, so everyone would borrow Donovan’s guitar. The nickel projects a little better, it’s a lot brighter. I’ve always loved Martins. I have a signature Martin and I’ve always loved dreadnought guitars – I’ve stayed away from jumbos because it’s been hard to find some that I really gel with. But, man, these three are really amazing.”
More than four decades on from the Crowes’ formation as a high school band, Chris and Rich Robinson are still finding out new things about themselves, still figuring stuff out on the fly. For now, too, it’s all in service of having fun. “I think that is missing when people record 20 verses, take the best one, and then they grid it out,” Rich observes. “It’s called playing music. It’s not called working music.”
The Black Crowes’ A Pound of Feathers is out March 13 via Silver Arrow Records.
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