Rich Robinson interview Sept. 1996


GUITAR WORLD ACOUSTIC    No. 19

CROWE HAND

BLACK CROWES songwriter/guitarist RICH ROBINSON discusses the
instruments, techniques and tunings that make THREE SNAKES AND ONE CHARM
the band's most acoustic album to date.

BY CHARLES M. YOUNG


After a lifetime of assuming he couldn't possibly do it, Rich Robinson
took up painting a few years ago.  At first he smeared his oils on
paper, rating himself unworthy of canvas.  Although what he does
(abstract expressionism) still doesn't measure up to what he would like
to be doing (surrealism), he's gradually reached the point where a paint
brush feels good in his hands.

"When I got home from the road and I don't play guitar for a while, I
just miss the feeling," Robinson says in his Atlanta home.  "It's one of
the most comfortable things in the world--just to hold a guitar and play.
 A security blanket, so to speak.  And painting is like that now.  The
smell, and touching the paint to canvas--it's really calming."

So it's fair to say that Rich's considerable emotional energy emerges
mostly through his fingers manipulating steel strings or paint.  His brother
Chris expresses his equally considerable emotional energy through his
mouth, spitting forth words like bullets bursting from an automatic
weapon, often demonstrating in conversation an encyclopedic knowledge of
music.  Rich claims no such knowledge.  He labels that which is good as
either "amazing" or "cool," and that which is bad as "weird" or "shit." 
And that's pretty much his filing system.

United and pulling in opposite directions, as only brothers can, as only
introvert and extrovert joining into an uber personality can, Rich and
Chris became legends very early for beating each other up, but have
managed to run the Black Crowes for four albums now.  Debuting in 1990
with "Shake Your Money Maker" (American), they astonished everyone,
including their record company, with their quadruple-Platinum mixture of
defiance and joy, becoming staples on MTV with "Jealous Again" and "Hard
to Handle."  In 1992 they make a grander, less commercial (just
Platinum) statement about assimilating their many traditions--and
ignoring alternative fashion--with "The Southern Harmony and Musical
Companion."  In 1994 they made their grandest, darkest and least commercial
statement with "Amorica," an exercise in metallic mountain music that
left some of their "Hard to Handle" fans wondering.  And now they've
returned with "Three Snakes and One Charm," on which they pay greater
attention to the essence of the songs and less attention to statements. 
Three songs are primarily acoustic--"Bring On, Bring On," "How Much For
Your Wings?" "Better When You're Not Alone"--and several others have
strong acoustic elements which include dulcimer, banjo, harmonica and
chimes, as well as an unusually wide array of guitars and tunings.  It's
their best album since the first, and their best-sounding ever.

Often--make that too often--compared with Keith Richards for his rhythm
playing in open G (D-G-D-G-B-D, low to high) tuning and Ron Wood for his
slide work, Rich cites Nick Drake as the prime influence for drawing him
into his trademark open tunings.  Drake, who dies of an overdose of
antidepressants at the age of 26 in 1974, played fingerstyle,
pattern-picking in a powerfully hypnotic, soulful manner.  Unlike the
Crowes, he wasn't remotely raucous, but he did have an exquisite sense
of drone, which lives on in his acolyte Rich Robinson, who will be playing
three-hour concerts with his band for the rest of the year.

GUITAR WORLD ACOUSTIC:  I like the acoustic tone you have on this album. 
Quite often, acoustic guitars in a rock context have a thin, tinny, cheap
sound.

RICH ROBINSON:  I don't think people are using the right guitars, or they
don't mike them properly, or they go direct, like they do on MTV's
Unplugged, which always sounds like shit.  You have to make and acoustic
sound like an acoustic.  Miking the bridge--what's the point?  It's
counter-productive.  You might as well have an electric.  You get the
sound out of the soundhole.  That's where the richness and tone and
everything you want comes from.

GWA:  I've always loved the sounds that [fingerstylists] John Fahey and
Leo Kotke get all by themselves.  You just don't hear that with
contemporary acoustic-electrics.

ROBINSON:  Yeah.  Or the acoustics with those big bridge pickups.  They
never sounded good to me.

GWA:  How do you handle the acoustic sound in concert?  

ROBINSON:  Well, live I just mike it.  And everyone else has to play a
little quieter.  Another thing you can try is this:  I have this Gibson
Dove with a bridge pickup, which sounds like shit, but which I use for
volume on stage.  And then our sound guy also mikes it, and uses just that
for the half.  So it doesn't feed back, because I'm not using the mic
to hear myself.  I'm using the pickup to hear myself and the mic is for
out front.  Even with that scenario, it's difficult getting a good
acoustic sound in a theater or arena.

GWA:  How do you mike it for recording?

ROBINSON:  It just depends on how good your engineer is--where he places
the mic.  Also important is the type of mic, and what room you're in. 
We did this latest album in a house, and I recorded a lot of the
acoustic stuff in the bathroom because it had a good ring to it.  I also
recorded some in the main living room where we did most of the basic tracks,
and then downstairs where we kept the keyboards.  We mixed in L.A.,
and I recorded a few things there, too.

GWA:  This was your house?

ROBINSON:  We rented the house, but we used my studio.  I just brought my
studio over there.

GWA:  You just went to some real estate broker and said, "Gimme a house
to record my next album"?

ROBINSON:  Yeah, except we didn't tell him what we wanted to use it for.

GWA:  What makes a house good for recording?

ROBINSON:  This one was in Atlanta.  It was on four acres, so we were
isolated.  It was big enough for everyone to hang out.  And it sounded
good.  It wasn't stale like some houses.

GWA:  You had your own 24-track recording setup?

ROBINSON:  Yeah.  That was in the living room, I guess you'd call it. 
There's like this big room, then a little room next to the big room, and
across this foyer was the dining room.  We put all the equipment in the
dining room, let everyone hang out in the big room, and put the board
and all the other shit in the smaller hang-out room.  Chris sang I the
living room sometimes, and sometimes in the foyer where you enter the
house, 'cause it was a two-level foyer and it sounded kinda cool.  I
recorded the dobro in one of the bedrooms.  When we had the horns, we
put two horns in the guest bathroom and then put them all in the big
room.  Recording in a house is sort of limiting but in a sense it's not,
because you have all this space and different areas.  The only thing
that's weird is separation.

GWA:  You and your brother sat down and decided at some point that you
preferred houses to recording studios?

ROBINSON:  What happened was, I bought this API board two years ago from
a broker in L.A.; it took forever to get working.  It was shipped from
the previous owner in Madrid, and when it got here some things needed to
be fixed.  All this happened while I was doing the last tour, and took a
long time.  When I got home, I had all these songs that I'd written on
the road.  So I'd record them and send them out to Chris in L.A., and
he'd put some vocals on and send them back to me in Atlanta.  When we set
up a time to do the actual record, Chris suggested that rather than
book a hotel for six months, it'd be cooler if we rented a house for
everyone to stay in.  So Chris moved into the house, and I brought my
little board over to work on the demos.  It sounded so cool that I brought
my big board over, and the rest of my shit, and we rented a Neve sidecar
for 10 extra channels.  And we just did it.

GWA:  Three songs on "Three Snakes and One Charm" are predominantly
acoustic, and you employ the acoustic to a lesser degree throughout the
album.  What equipment did you use?

ROBINSON:  I used a lot of Martins:  a 1953 D-28 that my dad gave me, an
early Sixties D-28, a D-21, a '58 D-18.  I bought a really cool Guild
12-string.  I also played two or three Gibson Doves and this amazing
Hummingbird.  I used two dobros:  a 1929 National Steel Duolian and a
1933 wooden single-resonator dobro.  And a Charlie Christian [Gibson
ES-130] semi-hollow body guitar with a pickup in it, which I used more
as an acoustic.  That's on "Under a Mountain."

GWA:  I've been saving my nickels and dimes for a 12-string, ,myself. 
Would you recommend the Guild?

ROBINSON:  Yeah, it's amazing.  I don't know what model it is.  I've
never had a Guild before, but it sounds great.  I also had a couple of
dulcimers--one, a bass which I bought, and a regular one which Chris bought
at McCabe's in L.A.  Supposedly, mine used to belong to Joni Mitchell.

GWA:  You took lessons on the dulcimer, or did you just start hammering
away?

ROBINSON:  No, no lessons.  I've been farting around with them a lot. 
For some reason, they just sort of fit with the way I play guitar in
open G.  It's easy for me to translate that onto the dulcimers, probably
because I like drone instruments so much.  Chris and I also just bought
some hurdy-gurdies from some guy in London.  The drone thing is sort of
how I approach the guitar.  I was really into Nick Drake, if you've ever
listened to him; I thought the way he played the guitar, how he textured
the sonics of an acoustic instrument, was just fucking amazing.  He was
the guy who got me into open tunings, because of how heavy and beautiful
they are, and also that drone note.  That's how I've always played.  If
you look at how Keith Richards uses open G, he mainly plays the top five
strings.  But I always use that bottom [low] D string to make chords or
do different things.  My dad used to be a folk singer, and he'd play in
open D [D-A-D-F#-A-D, low to high] sometimes, which is similar to open G
except for the A and F# strings.  Those make a huge difference.

I also listened to a lot of Irish folk music, the Chieftains and things
like that.  Plus Dylan.  I always thought the way he played was cool,
and it seemed like no one ever wrote about it.  Everyone was so busy
going, "Oh wow, his lyrics are amazing," that his melodies and playing
got overlooked.  His strumming was sorta like how my dad taught me to do
it.  My dad was one of those purists who got pissed when Dylan went
electric.  "That's not folk music," he said.

GWA:  What kind of stuff did your dad do?

ROBINSON:  He started out as a Bobby-Darin type.  I just got a video from
Dick Clark of my dad, Stan Robinson, singing his big hit song,
"Boom-A-Dip-Dip," on American Bandstand in 1958.  Later, when the folk
revival happened, he played in a band called the Appalachians.

GWA:  You came from a childhood that, for a musician, was advantaged.

ROBINSON:  In that way I did.  My mom also knew all these cool folk
songs, and my dad would strum them all the time--songs that most people
under the age of 45 don't have a clue about.

GWA:  Do you fingerpick as well as flatpick?

ROBINSON:  My dad taught me to fingerpick, as well as how to strum, but I
never quite got the hang of fingerpicking.  So I do it my own weird way. 
I can strum with a pick like my dad can fingerpick with two fingers--you
know, doon-digga-doon-digga-doon.  I don't have the patience to do it
the right way, so I just use a pick.

GWA:  So you were writing in Atlanta and your brother was writing in Los
Angeles.  What happened if Chris wrote something you didn't like?

ROBINSON:  The long-distance writing was just something we did to get the
process more concrete.  I had a lot of bits and pieces that I'd written
on tour and I needed to hear what Chris would do with them.  For the
real writing, he came to Atlanta where we wrote another 10 songs.  I
think we recorded a total of 26 songs.

GWA:  Do you write all of the music?

ROBINSON:  Yeah.  That's just what I do in the band.  Chris writes lyrics
and al the melodies for what he sings.  We usually hit it on the head
with each other, but sometimes there might be something I don't like,
and I'll tell him I'm not into it.  And sometimes he'll say, "I like this
part and not this part."  So it's a give-and-take thing, not a set
process.  Anything I'm not happy with, I just say, "Fuck it.  I'm not
using that."  And I won't be happy unless I'm completely happy. 
Sometimes it'll take us five minutes for a complete song; sometimes
it'll take a long time.  Like "Nonfiction," from the last album:  I remember
writing the verse on the "Shake Your Moneymaker" tour, but I never
found a cool place for it until we went to record it, and then I was
able to finish it, for some reason.  But "Cursed Diamond," also from the
last record, I wrote from start to finish in one sitting and it was done.
 On "Three Snakes and One Charm," "Under a Mountain" took me about five
minutes to write, and that's one of my favorites.  Also, "Better When
You're Not Alone" came really naturally.  Whereas "Halfway to Everywhere,
(Only)" we really worked on.

GWA:  On "Girl from a Pawnshop," there's a long build that starts
acoustic, then goes electric.  Do you do a lot of guitar switching in
the middle of songs during a concert?

ROBINSON:  Actually, that song is mostly electric.  And we'll do it all
electric, live.  We don't try to recreate in concert what we do in the
studio.  We try to better it, if anything.  I like to write songs that
have the potential to go someplace when we start to play them live.

GWA:  You guys have always had a serious fund and r&b influence.  On the
new album I hear it on "Blackberry," "Halfway to Everywhere (Only)" and
"Let Me Share the Ride."  Where did those horns come from?

ROBINSON:  That was the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.  They opened for us last
year through the whole American leg of the tour.  They used to get up and
play "Hard to Handle" with us periodically, as well as other songs. 
Chris just said, "Fuck it. We've never had horns that we like.  Let's go
for it."  I remember a long time ago we were out on tour, and George
[Drakoulias, producer of the Crowes' first two albums] hired some people to
put horns on "Hard to Handle" without us knowing about it, and we got
pissed.  We scrapped the whole idea, though that version did make it
some radio stations.  We didn't think it sounded right, and we didn't want
to do it.  Since it was our first record, they didn't give a shit what
we thought.  But we forced the issue, and they withdrew it.  And no one
has ever done shit like that again.  So this time we wanted to do the
horns right and it turned out pretty cool.

GWA:  I particularly like the horn parts on "Let Me Share the Ride." 
What's your philosophy of mixing something like that?  I could have
taken them even louder.

ROBINSON:  Yeah?  Well, they're pretty loud.  The whole point of that
song is the acoustic slide.  There's another song where I used the
Charlie Christian.  If the slide part is the song, why cover everything
for the sake of having cool horns?  The horns were just supposed to be
ornamental.

GWA:  There's a lot of cool ornamental stuff on the album, what with the
dulcimers and other things.  Sometimes they're so low that it's
subliminal.

ROBINSON:  But that's the point!  Well, you get in to this gray area.  A
lot of people seem to think I play rhythm and Marc Ford plays lead.  No,
I play the song.  I don't sit there and strum chords; I play specific
parts that come in and out.  A prime example is "One Mirror Too
Many"--that's me playing a specific part.  On past albums, people would
hear these amazing solos and say, "Wow, there's Marc Ford, this great new
guitar player."  And that's fine, because he is a great guitar player. 
But that isn't the song.  They were losing the essence of the song.
On this record, what we tried to do was present the song and then add
textural things, but not step on the song.

GWA:  What did you play electrically?

ROBINSON:  Chris and I have about 50 amps, Tremoluxes, Vibroverbs,
Vibroluxes, Bassmans, some cool Marshalls.  We used a Gretsch amp for
the bass.  Chris got a cool old Bassman 4x10 combo.  And a Vox AC 30.  I
have a list somewhere, but I can't find it.  It's sorta chaotic around
here--I have a new baby.

GWA:  Speaking of the baby, do you ever wonder what it is we're born with
that responds to good tone?  What is it in our brains that likes the
sound of tubes boiling in a Marshall head, or the ringing tone of an old
Martin?

ROBINSON:  I don't know.  I just go by what sounds good to me.  And what
sounds good on tape.  You might have the best-sounding amp in the world,
and it won't sound great on tape.  It's basically how you feel.  At the
end of the day, tone matters a lot to us.  But if you have the greatest
song in the world and it's got shitty tones, it won't matter.  The song
will still be great.  That happens a lot.  But it's so much better with
great tone.  We didn't worry that much about tone on the first
album--and it didn't sound worth a shit.  We didn't have much equipment,
and American wasn't willing to spend any money for us to get anything
good.  I had a few good guitars, like my Tele, but not like we have now.
 I have about 60 guitars and 50 amps, and Chris has a bunch of amps and
20 or 30 guitars.

GWA:  Are you playing mostly in open G on this album?

ROBINSON:  "Girl From a Pawnshop," "Good Friday" and "Better When You're
Not Alone" are in regular tuning.  Sometimes I play in open A or open B
flat, just moving up the open G with a capo.  The majority of songs are
in open tunings.

GWA:  Do you find that shifting tunings opens up the writing process?

ROBINSON:  To me, open G just has more possibilities.  I've been playing
that way for so long that it's become my mind-set.  So when I go back to
regular tuning, I make up these weird chords and play differently.  In
that sense I have a different perspective.

GWA:  R.E.M. is another Southern band with a strong acoustic element. 
How much did they figure in your personal pantheon of stars when you
were growing up?

ROBINSON:  I used to love R.E.M.  They were huge in the South.  When
"Murmur" came out, they used to play "Radio Free Europe" on the radio
all the time.  It was so cool at the time.

GWA:  You love them less now?

ROBINSON:  I don't know.  I don't listen to their records anymore.
I just remember them always saying they would never lip sync in videos, and
all of a sudden they started lip syncing.  So I thought that was weird. 
But they did a lot of great things.  "Murmur" was one of the great
records of the Eighties.

GWA:  If you're not listening to R.E.M., what are you listening to?

ROBINSON:  The Jayhawks, even though they broke up.  Son Volt.  Wilco. 
Ben Harper.  The new Neil Young record is good.  The new Cure album is
really manically depressing.  And then some stuff you wouldn't expect: 
Herbie Hancock, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon.

GWA:  What's drawing you to jazz?

ROBINSON:  I don't know.  It's just different, like when I first started
listening to a ton of blues.  I just get an amazing feeling when I listen
to Les McCann.  It's harder for me to listen to the blues right now because
most of what I have is on vinyl and my dog ate the needle right off
my turntable.

GWA:  What's the political dimension of the Crowes these days?  Do you
plan to do any more benefits for NORML [National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws--GWA Ed.]?

ROBINSON:  Well, we only did the one.  We're not big proponents of
anything.  We're not saying everyone should get stoned.  I just think
that the government has no right to tell us how to live.  People should
get the benefit of the doubt in what they decide they want to do, so
long as they don't hurt anyone else.  But no one should get fucked up
and drive a car.  That's bullshit.  But I don't think anyone should be
penalized for getting fucked up in their own home.  Who are these people
to decide that it's okay to drink alcohol, to smoke tobacco, but not
smoke pot?  It's just ass-backwards.

GWA:  This being an election year and all, are you planning to vote?

ROBINSON:  No, I don't think voting matters.  It's like having to choose
between two plates of shit:  dogshit or horseshit.  Who cares?

GWA:  Ralph Nader is running on the Green Party ticket.  He isn't shit.

ROBINSON:  Yeah, but no one is allowed in the debate except the two major
parties, and it's because of money.  Why doesn't MTV show that instead of
being so snide about everything?

GWA:  So the Black Crowes won't be doing any choose-or-lose spots for MTV?

ROBINSON:  I'm not.  It's a farce.

GWA:  Are you guys still adamantly opposed to corporate endorsements?

ROBINSON:  Oh yeah.  Our record label is a big corporation, about as big
as they get, so why would we want to deal with another one?  Time-Warner
has been pretty good about staying out of what we want to do, but as soon
as you take somebody's money, they buy the right to tell you how to live,
or how to play.  That just doesn't sit well with me.  I don't want the
president of Miller Beer telling me that one of my songs might offend
his customers.

GWA:  If the Crowes are planning to do three-hour shows, you and Chris
must be getting along okay.

ROBINSON:  We get along great.  Last year we weren't, but this year we
are.

GWA:  What happened last year?

ROBINSON:  We just fucking hated each other.  It's just a normal phase
bands go through.  There was a lot of emotional baggage, and everyone
got on each other's nerves.  We almost broke up a few times, but finally
we all let go and moved on.

GWA:  As Conan the Barbarian used to say, "That which doesn't kill you
makes you stronger."

ROBINSON:  Exactly.  It's always better when you can work it out.