The Bitter Fall and Joyous Rise of The Black Crowes
Chris Robinson can’t tell you the worst fight he’s ever had with his brother, Rich. Not because he doesn’t want to, more because there have been so many worst ones.
There was the time the pair had to be pulled apart after getting into it on their tour bus before a show by their band, The Black Crowes, at Red Rocks Amphitheater. That was a big one, Chris says. It erupted after Rich knocked over a Fairport Convention box set his brother had bought, spilling CDs on the floor.
Then there was the time before another show when Chris, drunken and drug-fuelled, went for Rich with a broken bottle. That one was over a setlist. A set-list.
Or the time when the Crowes were on tour in the US with Oasis, and the Robinsons got into a bust-up so voluble and violent that the Gallagher brothers – hardly a paragon of filial harmony themselves – backed away from the dressing room door, muttering: “We’re bad, but we’re not that bad.” Nobody can recall what sparked them off. It’s maybe for the best.
“We’d argue over anything. Which restaurant to go to. How to get to the restaurant,” Chris Robinson says today. “Horrible, stupid shit.”
The weird thing is that it wasn’t a fight that finally did for the Black Crowes. It was something way less explosive: a slowly building snowball of rancour, depression, desperation and the kind of psychological warfare that only takes place between siblings.
The Black Crowes officially announced their split in 2015, although the band had effectively been over for a couple of years before that. The brothers embarked on separate careers well away from each other, but distance did nothing to dampen the animosity; each of them took turns to lob barbs at the other, their messed-up family contortions playing out in the public. They’d been here before, but this time the message was clear: the greatest American rock’n’roll band of the modern era was finally done. There was no coming back from this one.
Except there’s no ‘finally’ any more, and for once that’s not a bad thing. Chris and Rich announced in November 2019 that they were reuniting the Black Crowes for a 2020 tour on which they would be playing debut album Shake Your Money Maker in its entirety. We’ll get to the ‘why’s and ‘how’s in due course, along with everything else that comes with it: the internecine bickering, the rivers of venom that have streamed between them, the accusations of back-stabbing and money grabbing. More importantly, we’ll get to how two warring brothers have finally reached a place of peace with each other. Because that’s really what this is all about.
“Holy shit, there’s more going on here for me than getting a successful band back together,” says Chris. “This is so much more than just a tour. This is about me and my brother.”
“There’s more going on here for me than getting a successful band back together. This is about me and my brother.”
Chris Robinson
The resurrection of The Black Crowes was the worst-kept secret in rock’n’roll. Former friends and associates of the brothers had revealed halfway through 2019 that a comeback was on the cards. Posters appeared in major cities featuring an amusing update of the band’s original iconography – a pair of cartoon crows – now battered and bruised like
