The Robinson brothers

The Black Crowes were something of platinum-record selling anomaly during the grunge-pop ’90s with a Stonesy swagger and the Southerned flavored bluesy rock that was more traditionally rock n’ roll than the punk-inspired fare from Seattle. But after talking to Crowes drummer Steve Gorman earlier this week, I’m more convinced than ever that the Crowes were a key band of the ’90s and not so different from the underground acts of the same era, at least in attitude. Tonight, Atlanta’s Black Crowes take the stage the Riviera.

Here are some of the highlights from my rather lengthy conversation with Gorman. Thanks Steve.

On recording Before the Frost… Until the Freeze live with an audience at Levon Helm’s studio in Woodstock, New York…
It was very inspiring, but it wasn’t an intentional Let’s go try to capture something The Band was into. The more we plan, the less we get done. How we get from A to Z is anyone’s guess. We were picturing a conventional studio and inviting 20 or 30 of our fans in. What would that do? Chris went to see one of Levon’s Midnight Rambles. And he went This is it. And we thought What if we get a live record out of it? As it turned out, we got a full live album out of it because we thought it was good enough.

On being on an independent label vs. working with a major…
The thing is, when we were dealing with record companies which tend to be full of strongly opinionated people, we never cared what they thought anyway. I’m not saying that with bravado or isn’t that funny, it kind of hurt us in a lot of ways. I wish we had been more amenable to working with people, looking back. We were stubborn just to be stubborn. We’re cutting off our nose to spite our face. We can say we will get in line to work with people, but we haven’t found people we trust enough so let’s quit kidding ourselves, we’re not a part of that machine and when that machine still existed and helped us greatly—we didn’t get it, faked it and tried and ended up pissing people off. We felt, as young guys, Who are you to tell us what to do with our band? And okay, that makes sense to a point, but everyone is just trying to do their job.

This time around, labels were saying Let me hear some songs and we were like You know what, we don’t what to play demos for somebody and get an approval. Let’s just do this one ourselves. I wasn’t offended by that at all. If I started a record label, I wouldn’t be signing anybody I didn’t have demos on. I get it.

On the band getting to a wiser place…
Truth be told, not wise enough. Within the band, we’re better at realizing This is just what we are. As much as you hear about the brothers, its everybody, everyone is a strong willed character. Anytime anyone says they’re the third Robinson brother, I just want to punch ‘em, I’m like What the fuck are you talking about? I’m me, and they’re not the same, those guys can’t stand to be lumped together. The hardest part about being in a band is being in a band. Ask any group of four, five or six men… you just want to have a little space. There’s a big difference between what you are doing on stage and what you are doing backstage.

On stretching out stylistically…
We tried a lot of things in the ’90s, they didn’t end up on the albums. The difference with Warpaint, is we felt more confident. Other than By Your Side, every album was pretty sprawling. If you go back and look at the b-sides, the elements are all there. We’ve always done country covers and straight-blues covers, but we never felt the songs we were writing in that vein were real enough. All the stuff we wrote on the last two albums were written completely organically. There’s no conversation about where’s this going, its just going. Whatever inertia we create, we don’t try to corral it.

On the band’s original sound…
When I was 25, I told people just put the ’70s and the ’80s together. It came from mostly Southern independent bands that we could see all the time, with a few exceptions, like Midwestern bands. The Replacements were huge to us and the Violent Femmes. Any of those band that came out and were allowed to make the records they wanted. If they were on I.R.S., I just assumed they were really cool, so I bought it.