Mojo Magazine Interview

  August 1996
  Mojo Magazine Interview
  England

    Submitted by:
	Steve Witty


Hi All,
    Picked up my copy of Mojo Magazine today and guess what,another
positive review of the new album.Under the heading "CRAWLING KING
SNAKES" comes a review by Sylvie Simmons.
 
  DAMN,IT'S GOOD,FROM THE beautifully-crafted Hammond and slide guitar
that layer opening track Under A Mountain,to the West
Coast-via-Mersey-with-a-stopover-in-the-deep-South close Evil Eye this
is a mature,profound and highly musical album - as good as most
anything by the '70's bands they shamelessly saluted in their 1990
debut Shake Your Money Maker.That album established them as an
energetic band with a stellar record collection and some nifty
songwriting skills - which proved a solid grounding for the later,more
free-form explorations of their musicality.Three Snakes And One Charm
fuses their three previous releases and displays a band that has truly
come of age.

  Their roots are still showing - Allmans,Otis,Little Feat,plus
Rod,Stones,Beatles,that little bit of the Confederate flag that is for
ever England - but they've been synthesized into a tremendous
musicianship,be it on the swaggering Good Friday and (Only) Halfway To
Everywhere,the mellow melancholy of Girl From A Pawnshop,or the Sly
Stone/Trafficof One Mirror Too Many.While their contemporaries
struggle to find a niche after the changes in rock these last five
years,the Crowes stay firmly grounded.And do those acoustic guitars
sound fine.

INTERVIEW

Q.Your last album,amorica,was a textbook case of the difficult third
album,to the point where you scrapped a perfectly good record and made
a new one from scratch.Was this album less traumatic?


C.amorica wasn't hard to make because it was our third album - it was
hard to make because we were depresse and in an angry,confused
place.Most of it was personal shit.Me and Rich have been brothers a
long time,in the next stage of our lives we've been songwriters,but
we've never been friends.Now we're friends.We can laugh and have a
good time.amorica is so serious.I like that we could be more
light-hearted on this record.


Q.What brought about the change?


C.That last tour,we went through some really heavy,weird things.It got
to the point of almost breaking the band up,like whoah - when you
really think about not being in The Black Crowes,what you're gonna
do,how you're gonna live.This band is my life;it's my skin ,my
blood,my teeth.Rich and i  had one 10 minute conversation which was
basically;"Ilove you","Me too","I'm ready to leave my excess baggage
at the last train stop".It was like,i'll be in this band 'til the day
i die,but it's gonna be all six of us or nothing.
   I came back home to Atlanta to make this album.We rented a house
and built the studio there - a plain little house,kind of like Music
>From The Big Pink.It was very communal.


Q.Did any of the lost amorica tracks resurface?


C.Evil Eye was one,but with a different chorus.We'd been playing that
song live more and more.


Q.What does the album title mean?


C.It's something everyone else'll be able to tell us for the rest of
time.It'slike amorica didn't mean anything - they kept going,"It's
about Utopia right?Aplace where you can smoke pot?"Yeah,my whole life
and concerns for humanity revolve around marijuana!It's just a symbol
- a page from my notebook that just happens to equal four,and it's the
fourth record.Snakes come with a lot of symbolism,people love them or
fear them.You need yin and yang.That's the energy.

(end)