Twice As Hard: Reckoning With The Return Of The Black Crowes

Hard To Handle, the new memoir from Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman, suggests that the band could have a rough road ahead of them on their reunion.

The billboards began popping up sometime in the last week. They appeared on the outskirts of New Jersey and Milwaukee—not off markets, but not major ones either, markets where classic rock never has faded. Markets ripe for the return of the Black Crowes, in other words.

The Black Crowes have only been gone for five years but it's been much longer since they've generated this much chatter. Set aside their comeback from a decade ago. It may have produced two of their best albums and got them back to the top of the charts but that success was merely a reflection of the endurance of their cult. It's been roughly 25 years since the Black Crowes came close to the epicenter of rock and those billboards -- decked out with the band's old logo containing a pair of zonked-out birds, the likes of which would be excised from Disney+'s airing of Dumbo -- are intended to stir up memories of Shake Your Money Maker, the Black Crowes debut that's staring down its thirtieth anniversary. 

Even in 1990, Shake Your Money Maker didn't sound of its time. With the assistance of producer George Drakoulias, the Georgian quintet styled themselves as the second coming of the Faces, playing greasy rockers that could slide onto classic rock radio while simultaneously feeling at home on MTV. The group hit a sweet spot existing squarely between the Rolling Stones and Guns N Roses, garnering approval from their idols -- Robert Plant was an early fan, Jimmy Page later toured with them -- while still seeming youthful. By sales and acclimation, they were generally anointed as the heirs to real rock & roll, but their heyday was short. By the time their second album The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion appeared in May 1992, they were already a band out of time, their retro rock seeming vaguely fusty when heard alongside legions of grungy bands from Seattle. 

Despite the decline of their commercial fortunes, the Black Crowes not only persisted but carved out a niche existing just to the left of the jam bands who amounted to a counter-counter culture in the 1990s. Part of this due to a musical shift instigated by singer Chris Robinson's latter-day love of the Grateful Dead, part of it was survival: there was a home for the group's shaggy Southern Rock on HORDE, not Lollapalooza. There's no shame in being a working band but at the dawn of the 1990s, the Black Crowes seemed poised to be enduring stars. Or in the words of their manager Pete Angelus, the kind of band that has a thirty-year plan.

Drummer Steve Gorman reveals this anecdote in Hard To Handle, the new memoir he wrote in conjunction with Steven Hyden. Hard To Handle hits like a cut off of Southern Harmony: it starts in a rush, then gains its footing but never stops to catch its breath. Its swiftness reflects the speed of Gorman's ascent to rock stardom. He moved to Atlanta in hopes of starting a band with an old friend from Kentucky only to fall into the circles of Mr. Crowe's Garden, the band led by Chris Robinson and his guitarist brother Rich. Like most Southern rock bands of the late '80s, Mr. Crowe's Garden was besotted with R.E.M., but once they popped up on the radar of Drakoulias, he encouraged them to study the Stones, pushing them toward the southern-fried classicism that became their calling card. With Angelus on board, providing sound business sense and performing advice to the fledgling frontman Chris Robinson, the group changed their name to the Black Crowes and experienced a series of lucky breaks that brought them to the top of the charts. 

Gorman recounts this rise with bemusement as if he can't quite believe he's in the position to not only rub shoulders with Aerosmith but to give them shit. The good humor never wanes in Hard To Handle and it's balanced with self-reflection that the Robinson brothers seem to lack, at least according to their old bandmate's telling of the tale. Chris gets carried away with his stardom, forcing the band to record in a studio bedecked with hippie accouterments, only to wind up with an album that sounds wooden. Rich--who pointedly never partakes in the rock & roll excess the rest of the band celebrates--gets irritated with the rest of the band and undercuts good opportunities, either out of pride or spite. Initially funny, the stories of the battling brothers grow sad and then exhausting as it becomes clear that being in a band with the Robinsons is a goddamn impossible way of life. 

Gorman is the only member who managed to survive each iteration of the Black Crowes, holding a literal stake in the business but also protecting the group's musical legacy. By all accounts, he likely won't participate in the 2020 reunion. He's mentioned in interviews that he hasn't been called, plus he's busy hosting a sports radio show and drumming with Trigger Hippy, who just released a good little record called Full Circle And Then Some. It's the third Crowes-related album to hit the stores this year, appearing around the same time as the second album by Magpie Salute, the combo fronted by Rich Robinson, and a few months after Chris Robinson Brotherhood's Servants Of The Sun. Trigger Hippy occupies the area separating the plodding retro-rock of Magpie Salute and the blissfully stoned vibes of CRB, which is an effective illustration of what Gorman brought to the Black Crowes: he bonded the brothers by grooving as well as he could rock. That sense of swing is sorely missing from Magpie Salute, whose records quickly curdle into bluesy downers, but it is replicated within the CRB. Maybe the very name the Chris Robinson Brotherhood is a dig at the singer's sibling but it's the place where the singer's Deadhead dreams come true: on Servants Of The Sun and its predecessors, the group truly made cosmic American music.

Chris Robinson Brotherhood managed to sustain an audience but they never could fill the venues that the Crowes did, and if Hard To Handle is to be believed, the vocalist does keep a close eye on the bottom line. It's also true that CRB took a heavy blow earlier this year when guitarist Neal Casal died of suicide, so perhaps Chris is seeking refuge in the familiar environs of the Black Crowes. Saving Gorman, many of the band's old surviving members were already playing in Magpie Salute, so it won't take much for a new version to get up and running. Also, reunions remain big business, an essential element of the festival season, and there aren't many big draws who have yet to reunite, particularly with Rage Against The Machine poised to dominate next year. The Black Crowes have a better chance than many of their peers to be a festival anchor.

Nevertheless, it's hard to tell whether a reunited Black Crowes could capture the imagination of the public at large. Only the dedicated--the kind who charted the band's many lineup changes--will be bothered by the revelations of Hard To Handle, so it's not that the book will tarnish their legacy. Rather, it's that their legacy is so misshapen in the first place. By design, the Black Crowes never quite belonged to their time, which means as the years fade into the history books their catalog sounds even older than it is. There are some exceptions -- the melange of Allmans and the Dead on 1994's Amorica still seems visionary; the overblown Don Was collaboration Lions could've only been made in the money-drenched 2001 -- but the bulk of their music exists just out of time, belonging to the classic rock era without being part of it. On a purely musical level, that's not bad at all but splashy comebacks--the kind teased on strategically-placed billboards scattered throughout America--are never judged on a purely musical level; they need to capture a zeitgeist of some sort or appeal to an audience thirsty for their heroes to return. The Black Crowes haven't been gone long enough for their fans to miss them and the self-sabotage detailed in Hard To Handle explains why only the hardcore stuck with them through the years.