Rolling Stone- May 1991


  Rolling Stone
  May 30th, 1991
  #605

  THE BLACK CROWES

  Good old rock & roll returns to the top of the charts

  by David Fricke


  
  That's amazing, Man!" howls Chris Robinson, staring incredulously
  at the front page of today's paper.  "I never thought I'd be on
  the cover of the Atlanta Journal unless I killed someone."

  In fact all he did was shoot his mouth off onstage.  But it was
  enough to get his band a banner headline in the hometown newspaper:
  ATLANTA'S BLACK CROWES KICKED OFF ZZ TOP TOUR.

  "Man, I never thought we'd pop along and start causing so much
  trouble," says Robinson excitedly, waving the paper in the air
  triumphantly.  "It's cool, though.  Someone needs to do it, and
  we do it with our own little bit of finesse."

  What Robinson, the Black Crowes' singer and resident superyap,
  actually said during their opening set last night at the 16,000
  seat Omni Coliseum, in Atlanta, was innocent enough.  Indeed,
  he'd been saying the same thing every night on the ZZ Top tour
  for the past three months.  "There's one point of the show where
  we break it down, and I'd point out to people that this is real,
  in the flesh," says Robinson.  "It's rock & roll, they're not 
  watching TV, and there's not going to be any commercials."

  It was, he claims, "more of a comment toward those bands who look
  at what they do as commercials: 'Here's my three-minute commercial
  for my album.'"

  Bill Ham, ZZ Top's manager and director of the group's Lone Wolf
  Productions, and Miller Lite, which is sponsoring the tour, didn't
  see it that way.  Robinson says he was periodically warned by Lone
  Wolf emmisaries to drop the rap.  Pete Angelus, the Black Crowes'
  manager, says he received a call from Ham, who strongly suggested
  that he restrain Robinson from saying "anything about commercialization,
  commercials, sponsorship or endorsements."

  "Basically, the sponsorship and the management tried to censor
  what to me was just a statement about what we are, the Black Crowes
  are," Robinson contends.  "Doing the best we can, being free to be 
  what we are.  And that music is really the only thing we have control
  over in our lives.

  "I said, 'Don't tell me what to say.  Kick us off.'  And they did."

  Ham abruptly fired the Crowes after the second show of what was supposed
  to be a three-night homecoming stand at the Omni; tour promoter Don
  Fox relayed the bad news just minutes after the band came off-stage.
  The Atlanta media, of course, had a field day.  Later that evening,
  Chris and his brother, guitarist Rich Robinson, announced their
  unceremonious dismissal to the rest of the nation on the live,
  syndicated phone-in radio show Rockline.

  Lone Wolf issued a curt press release the next day citing "philosophical
  differences between the two bands" and claiming that the decision
  to dump the Crowes was "arrived at entirely within this organization."
  Angelus says he has seen evidence to the contrary: "I don't think 
  Miller Beer intended for me to see it, but I got a fax from someone
  at Miller Beer to Bill Ham saying they thought this was an unfortunate
  situation and maybe something should be done about it."

  Miller Lite spokesman Dave Fogelson says he is unaware of any such
  fax and maintains that contractually all decisions regarding opening
  acts on ZZ Top's Recycler tour are the sole prerogative of Lone Wolf.
  Ham did not return phone calls from Rolling Stone.

  Meanwhile, up in his hotel room with the curtains drawn, two sticks
  of incense smoldering in an ashtray and the new Bob Dylan box set
  blaring away on the CD player, Chris Robinson just shakes his head
  in disbelief.  "It was like I was in high school," he moans.  "I
  got into this because I didn't think anyone would ever do that.
  Certainly not guys who worked for other bands.  It's getting stiff
  out there.

  "Sometimes I feel like we're carrying the flag," Chris Robinson
  declares as Dylan whines "No More Auction Block," aptly enough,
  in the backround.

  "One part of it is, we were in the right place at the right time 
  for our thing.  But here's a band that people check out on MTV
  or in Rolling Stone and realize: 'Yeah, they say what they really 
  wanna say and play what they really wanna.  What a novel concept!
  That rock & roll can be interesting and feel good and be a real
  living, breathing animal.  And young people, too!  With some new kicks.'

  "Then again," says the twenty-four-year-old Chris Robinson, "maybe
  it's just that we play some songs and people like 'em."

  That part is true enough.  After a year when no rock bands hit
  Number One on Billboard's album chart and a moribund season of
  subsequent Is-rock-dead? essays, the Black Crowes- the Robinson
  brothers, guitarist Jeff Cease, bassist Johnny Colt and drummer
  Steve Gorman- are satisfying an obvious public hunger for electric
  grit 'n' grind.  Their double-platinum debut, Shake Your Moneymaker-
  a guitar-party cracker that marries white Southern R&B crunch and 
  Anglo cock-strutting attitude in the beloved early-Seventies manner
  of the Faces and the Rolling Stones- went Top Five and is flying
  out of stores on the strength of the hit single "She Talks To Angels,"
  heavy videoplay on MTV and fourteen months' touring.  The album
  recently sold 108,000 copies in a single day.

  But twenty-one-year-old Rich Robinson, whose robust, open-tuning
  style of six-string slash and slippery country-funk grease belies
  his quiet, sometimes stony demeanor, figures the Crowes' success
  is the result not of rising Seventies nostalgia but simply of good
  songs played hard- and of rock's periodic need to purge itself of
  accumulated bullshit.  "I think we serve the same purpose the
  Stones did twenty years ago or Aerosmith did fifteen years ago,"
  Rich says.  "Just to slap you in the face and say, 'Shut the fuck
  up and listen.'"

  "How many new rock stars have come around that have anything to
  say at all?"  rails Chris.  "Guys where you even want to know
  know what they're thinking?  Are they thinking?  Where did it
  go astray?"

  Chris pauses, casting another glance at that headline on the front
  page of the Journal.  "Greed, probably," he says sadly.

  
  "I used to come down here years ago, when I was a teenager,"
  says Chris as he and Rich sit on a small knoll overlooking the 
  side-by-side graves of Duane Allman and Berry Oakley of the 
  Allman Brothers Band.  "I'd come down here from Atlanta with
  my friends, and we'd just sit here and hang out- drink beer,
  smoke pot and talk.  It's so beautiful."

  He's not exaggerating.  On a balmy, late-March afternoon, the 
  meditative serenity of this secluded, leafy patch of Rose Hill
  Cemetery in Macon, Georgia, is enchanting.  The dogwoods are in
  bloom, and visitors to the grave site have left a few empty
  beer bottles filled with fresh wildflowers in from of the headstones.
  There is, fortunately, no graffiti.

  "I knew who they were when I was growin' up," Chris says of the
  Allmans.  "But I wasn't into it.  They represented something
  I didn't like."

  "Yeah, rednecks," Rich interjects with a disapproving snort.

  "But later on, I did get it," Chris continues.  "I heard what they
  were doing musically, something nobody's done since.  People try.
  Hey, we try.  We played 'Dreams' in sound check the other night.

  "What Southern rock became is not what the Allmans started out
  to be.  They were creating a new Southern sound.  And what we do
  now is what I'd like Southern rock to become.  Although," he adds,
  laughing, "I know Peter Buck wouldn't agree with me."

  "But there is a lot of the South in us.  I don't know exactly what
  it is.  Maybe it's just that we're a little closer to the ground.
  We have no pretensions about what we do.  We're just a little
  earthier.  We do things a little slower, more casual."

  You wouldn't know it to look at them.  Chris is a hyperactive
  beanpole with a floppy mop of stringy brown hair, a stick-figure
  physique bordering on anorexia and a mouth that, like the rest of
  his body, is in perpetual motion.  He externalizes every thought,
  no matter how marginal, at machine-gun speed but yaps mostly about
  music, his No. 1 obsession.  And the chatter doesn't stop, not even
  when he's bouncing around the room striking rock-star poses to his
  favorite records.

  "Chris is just exhausting to be around," says Steve Gorman, who
  found out while sharing an apartment with Chris during the band's
  early days.  "He puts on a Humble Pie record he's heard 8000 times,
  and he still acts like it's the first time he's heard it- 'Listen
  to this beat!'  He's a marvel.'"

  Rich is the strong, stoic type, almost to the point of invisibility
  when he's standing next to Chris.  He has long, wiry blond hair and
  ruggedly handsome features that light up on those infrequent occasions
  when he cracks a smile. Rich, too, is obsessed- with his guitar
  playing, his songwriting and the Crowes's business affairs.  Despite
  his age, he was the Crowes' manager until Pete Angelus (who also
  handles David Lee Roth) took over shortly before the release of
  Shake Your Money Maker last year.  He still acts as the band's point
  man in all meetings and negotiations.

  Yet at the heart of this extraordinary chalk-and-cheese act is a shared
  faith in the enduring power and glory of rock & roll and a mutual
  desire to taste it firsthand, without compromise.  "Chris and I didn't
  decide to be in a band," Rich says.  "We just assumed it."  Rich got
  a guitar for Christmas when he was fifteen; he immediately started 
  writing songs with Chris, who was all too keen to be a singer and
  lyricist, since "I didn't have the motor skills to pick up the guitar."
  Also, Chris confesses, "I didn't want to carry all that shit."  Six
  months later, in the summer of 1984, the brothers played their first
  gig as Mr. Crowe's Garden, at a bar in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
  (The name came from a children's story.)  They would have made
  fifty bucks, except the check bounced.

  The Robinson's ambition was, in part, genetic.  Their father,
  Stan Robinson, flirted with pop stardom in 1959, when he scored
  a minor chart hit with the doo-wopish "Boom-a-Dip-Dip."  The elder
  Robinson opened for Bill Haley and the Comets, shared a bottle of
  wine with Jimmy Reed and appeared on American Bandstand (According
  to Chris, "We still have the TV Guide that says, 'Dick's guest
  tonight: Stan Robinson.'")  As a folk musician in the early Sixties,
  Stan also toured with Phil Ochs and got a pat on the back from
  Earl Scruggs at the Grand Ole Opry.

  Rich says hid dad- who also did some off-Broadway drama, played 
  semipro football and is now a manufacturer's representative-
  never counseled his sons on the pitfalls of their chosen vocation.
  "He totally stayed out of it," says Rich.  "Our parents were big
  on letting us do what we wanted to do."  But Stan and his wife,
  Nancy, presented the boys with plenty of source material to draw
  from.  "Very eclectic tastes my parents had," says Chris.  "From
  Joe Cocker to Sly Stone to the Modern Jazz Quartet."  Rich remembers
  hearing a lot of Irish folk and traditional blues; he clams that,
  Keith Richards comparisons to the contrary, he actually started 
  playing guitar in open tuning because of repeated exposure to
  Muddy Waters.

  Chris does not deny being influenced by- and head-over-boot-heels
  in love with- the Seventies bash 'n' sass of the Stones, the Faces,
  Aerosmith and Humble Pie.  What he can't understand is why so many 
  reviewers think it's a crime and why they can't hear everything else-
  the echoes of, among others, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bob Marley,
  Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes- in the mix on Shake Your
  Moneymaker.  Actually, if the Black Crowes are guilty of anything,
  it's of tapping the same roots as their mentors, reaching many of
  the same musical conclusions and then, in songs like "Jealous
  Again" and "Twice As Hard," blazing a parallel trail to power-chord
  and bent-note nirvana.

  "What is original?"  Chris asks with evident frustration.  "I'm
  not going to bang two badger carcasses together and recite poetry
  and say, 'Hey, here's the new thing.'  We sing a traditional type
  of music in a very untraditional way.  It's country music, and blues,
  and R&B, and other things.  It's ethnic music.  That's what we do."

  "He's also sick of hearing about his great debt of influence to Rod
  Stewart.  "Hey, the Replacements could have been the Faces," Chris
  cackles, "but Paul Westerberg was chickenshit.  Westerberg didn't have
  the haircut, but Tommy Stinson did.  To me it's so obvious I'm a 
  Steve Marriott rip-off that I never think about Rod.  I admit it.
  Steve Marriott is the guy, him and Paul Rogers and Gregg Allman.
  The thing I do with the mike stand, I picked that up from Steven
  Tyler.  When I was a kid, I'd see films of Aerosmith on The Midnight
  Special, and the next day I'd have Toys In The Attic on in my room,
  running around like Steven."

  Still, Chris argues: "I know deep down that regardless of what
  anyone thinks- whether it be the musicians flipping pizzas here who
  said we sold out or people who think I owe Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart
  something- you can't deny that the Crowes are a living, breathing
  band.  If we could, we'd make two records a year.  Because that's
  what you do, man.  You're a band.  You grow.  Okay, now I have a
  credit card, and I can go to Tower Records and the bookstore and go 
  buy a couch or whatever.  But if I couldn't do that, do you think
  I wouldn't be trying as hard as I could to be here anyway?

  "I knew, if given a chance to get in the game, we were going to
  show up with a big bat and a fucking big glove, and I was gonna
  swing for the fence.  You go around once, man, and you gotta do what
  feels best."

  When the Black Crowes' producer George Drakoulias first saw Chris
  and Rich play as Mr. Crowe's Garden in New York in 1988, he thought
  they "kind of sucked."  The sound was stiff, punkish college-radio
  jangle, the songwriting was nothing to rave about and as a guitarist
  Rich "was definitely holding back," says Drakoulias.  "He was the
  only guitar player, so he just kept his right hand going.  It was
  a lot of constant noise."

  But Drakoulias, then an A&R rep for A&M Records, was impressed with
  Chris's singing and irrepressible stage presence.  "Even though
  there were only twenty people in the place," he says, "he was very
  entertaining, and he obviously enjoyed what he was doing."  Drakoulias
  also dug the band's taste in covers: the Stooges' "Down on the Street"
  and, at the end of the set, Aerosmith's "No More, No More."

  "While the rest of their music wasn't like that, they really seemed
  to like playing that song," Drakoulias recalls.  "They said they
  liked the Rolling Stones and they had some other songs more like that,
  but in Atlanta, if they played that stuff, nobody would come to see
  them.  They had always listened to stuff like that, but they hadn't
  made a commitment to it."

  Little over a year later, the commitment was made and the transformation
  complete.  The Robinsons had a new sound, two new band members in
  Jeff Cease and Johnny Colt, and a new name, The Black Crowes.  "Everyone
  just called us the Crowes when we hung out," Chris explains.  "And we
  came up with Black Crowes- blackbirds.  That was it."  Thanks to
  Drakoulias, by then on staff at Rick Rubin's Def American label, the
  band also had a record contract.  Not much of a contract, as it turns
  out; the group got a paltry $5000 advance and a so-so royalty rate.
  The Crowes have since renegotiated that deal in the wake of the album's
  success.

  More important, the Crowes had material they deemed worthy of their 
  renewed allegiance to late-Sixties and Seventies rock classicism.
  Some of the songs were old, like "She Talks To Angels," which Rich
  wrote when he was seventeen, and "Could I've Been So Blind," left 
  over from the Mr. Crowe's Garden songbook.  One was borrowed, Otis
  Redding's "Hard To Handle."  But they were all steeped in the blues-
  based verities of established predigital rock station and charged by
  the brothers' determination to make music equal to that tradition
  in every detail, right down to the analog sound of Steve Gorman ramming
  his Dodge Dart into a trash dumpster in the studio parking lot for the
  car-crash intro to "Thick n' Thin."

  "We wanted to do so good," Chris says now of Shake Your Moneymaker.
  "And I think we were playing a little over our heads.  We set our
  aspirations above what we were really supposed to be doing.  We 
  wanted to make a record as good as Exile On Main Street.

  "There's one really arrogant part of me that says there hasn't been
  a rock album besides [Guns n' Roses] Appetite For Destruction that 
  has caused as much reaction as we have," Chris adds.  "Definitely 
  not Night Ranger and fucking Loverboy and all those bands that ruined
  Rock & Roll.  Maybe it's the same kind of thing as when R.E.M. popped
  up in the early Eighties.  I think my record's much better than
  Murmur.  We kick ass over that.  We jam.  It's a different thing, but..

  "Then there's another side of me that says, 'Man, we're just lucky
  we got a record deal.'"

  The Crowes' rise was anything but meteoric.  The Robinsons went
  through three drummers and half a dozen bass players between their
  '84 Chattanooga debut and the summer '89 sessions for Shake Your
  Moneymaker.  (Colt got the bass gig a week before the band went 
  into the studio.)  They spent the intervening years touring from
  New Orleans to New York, making a princely twenty-four dollars
  when they played CBGB one night.  "People say, 'Oh, they didn't
  pay their dues' - oh, yes we did," snaps Rich, who was still in
  high school and too young to get into a lot of the bars where the
  Crowes played in their formative years.  many was the evening
  Rich had to hide out in the car until it was time to go onstage.

  Cease, who emigrated from Nashville to join the band in late 1988,
  remembers one particularly ignoble show at the Cotton Club in Atlanta.
  "We were looking for management, and we wanted someone to come see
  us," Cease says.  "The show was free, and when you came in the door,
  you got a ticket and your first drink was free.  And twenty-five people,
  maybe, showed up."

  "I used to have a really bad chip on my shoulder," Chris confesses.
  "Because I wanted to do something with my music.  I wanted people to
  hear my songs.  And that was the energy, the fuel.  I had to fight
  against the world.  Now I'm at a point where I don't have to fight
  so much.  I can see more of the horizon than just the angry red right
  in front of me.  I've grown up a lot in a year."

  Yet for all of his damn-the-nostalgia-full-speed-ahead talk, Chris
  can't help feeling a little cheated that he hit the big time in a
  less-than-golden decade.  "I'm no one of those guys who dresses up
  and goes out to the Civil War battlefield and wants to relive Antietam,"
  Chris says.  "I know what year it is.  But look at Humble Pie,
  Rockin' The Fillmore.  That was a long show, that audience hung on to
  every note.  You feel it.  That's how rock audiences are.  You went
  to the gig, and it was full of pot smoke, people danced through the
  whole show.  It was a celebration, a huge block party."

  "For the most part rock & roll has become such a staid thing," Chris
  continues.  "The security guard tells you to sit down, so you do it?
  Goddamn!"

  Chris also admits he was "a little naive about the greed thing.
  I really hoped that when things started happening for us we'd get
  into a different level of the business.  'Wow, maybe there are some
  people who just do it because they love it.'  Professor Longhair,
  man, he just had to sing and play.  And I just have to sing, I have to
  write lyrics.  That's how I deal with things.  And I was hoping 
  there would be a couple of people like me when I got there."

  Like, say, Axl Rose?

  You know, it's funny.  Nobody's asked me about W. Axl Rose.  Hmmm, I
  don't know if I'm in a diplomatic mood or not," Chris says, pausing
  as if to check whether he's got enough rope to hang himself.

  "You know what, man?" he finally says.  "I love Guns n' Roses because
  they were some guys who came around and slapped everyone in the face.
  'Fuck you, we will do drugs, we will piss on airplanes, we will play 
  loud and sing whatever the fuck we please.'  I love that sentiment.

  "But all right, what are you gonna do next?"  Chris continues.
  "Are you gonna keep putting off this album?  Are you gonna take
  it somewhere?  If I was in Axl Rose's position, I would realize how
  much shit there is you can change when you're that big.  Because
  it's not about the musicians, it's not about the people who get it.
  It's about the people that don't get it.  And it's called the music 
  industry.  It's about people who call records 'product.'

  "To be given that position, man, I'd use it to my fullest advantage,"
  Chris proclaims fiercely and, it seems, with a tinge of envy.

  "Given that kind of thing," he adds with an evangelical glint in
  his eye, "you could change anything."


  Everyone who's every worked with or gigged with Chris and Rich
  Robinson for any length of time has at least one good story about
  their brotherly brawling.  When Pete Angelus flew to Atlanta to
  see the Crowes perform for the first time and to discuss possible
  management, Chris and Rich picked him up at the airport.  Angelus
  wasn't in the car thirty seconds before they were at each other's
  throats in the front seat.  "They were arguing about which route
  to take to the club," Angelus says.  "And there was an argument in
  the dressing room after the show about whether or not it was a good
  show."

  Johnny vividly remembers his first Robinson rhubarb.  It was during
  his first week on the job, right in the middle of a Crowes rehearsal.
  One minute, the band was hitting a good groove.  The next minute,
  as Colt tells it, "Chris is making faces, Rich is making hand gestures,
  Chris's mike stand goes up, Rich goes at Chris, and they're both
  falling down.  They hit the ground and roll around.  I just keep on
  playing, and when I look at Steve and Jeff, they're still playing,
  looking at each other smiling.

  "The right wen we go to a new part of the song, they stop fighting
  and Chris goes: 'That's it!  That's what we need!'  They jump up
  and start playing again.  They fight, we get to the change, and
  suddenly their minds are back on the song."

  "Those guys are closer than anyone you'd ever meet," according to
  Gorman, who because of his size and strength, has been called upon
  more than once to pull them apart.  "They're always together, always
  going in the same direction.  They don't always know it, though."

  Actually, the Robinsons only fight about two things.  One is, in
  Rich's words, "just bullshit.  Chris will be yapping away, and I'll
  just tell him to shut up.  It's a brother thing.  Anyone who has
  brothers would know this."

  The other is their songwriting, which is such a frequent source of
  friction it's amazing they get anything written at all.  "Rich sees
  writing songs like building a house," Chris explains.  "And I look
  at songs as taking buckets of paint, throwing them on a canvas and 
  then jumping on it.  There's no rules.  So what you get after all
  this screaming and yelling is a well-built house with a whole lot
  of shit on it.

  "Or," Chris continues, chuckling to himself, "you can look at it
  as a really beautiful paint job."

  If the Robinsons agree on anything, it's that neither brother can
  imagine doing this rock & roll thing without the other at his side.
  And for all of their bickering and battling, they are in genuine awe
  of each other.  Rich is amazed by Chris's daily superhuman diet of
  music and literature and claims that Chris, in a sense, was his most
  significant musical influence.  "As my older brother he would go
  through the phases before I did," Rich says.  "I'd take those records
  he was tired of and get into them myself.  Because he would change 
  phases every five minutes."

  Rich also rushes to Chris's defense when asked about the latter's
  predilection for putting his foot in his mouth during interviews.
  "You ask Chris his opinion, and he'll tell you," Rich says.  "And
  he knows sometimes he doesn't come off saying it right.  Like the
  whole taping issue.  All Chris said is, he's disappointed because
  great bands he's loved all his life were made to resort to using
  tapes in concert, and it bums him out because he feels they're better 
  than that.  It didn't come off sounding that way, but it disappointed
  him and made him look at the world and think, 'Man, things are fucked
  up, the music industry is just for shit.'"

  Chris in turn, is humbled by Rich's guitar prowess and astounded-
  a little worried, too- about the way his brother bottles up his 
  feelings until he's ready to spit them out in song form.  "He can
  be on the phone, twenty-one years old, discussing business deals
  and contracts that I have no idea what they're talking about,"
  says Chris.  "And the next second he can turn around and play me 
  something new that makes me so excited I can't sleep for two days.
  
  "I get worried when he gets stressed," Chris continues.  "He doesn't
  relax like everyone else.  He doesn't drink.  He does no drugs.
  But he loves ice cream.  That's his big thing.  He'll get into a
  hotel, and he'll order up some ice cream from room service."

  The fighting has eased off a bit in recent months- not because of
  success per se but because, Gorman says, "they're realizing that other
  people are paying attention- they're looking over their shoulders
  more."  Just for the record, however, you should know that the
  Robinsons have two basic rules for combat: They never hit each other
  in the face, and unlike other legendary warring siblings Ray and
  Dave Davies of the Kinks, Chris and Rich never fight onstage.

  "I think that's unprofessional," Rich comments with a sniff.

  "Plus, we have so much fun playing," he adds with a devilish smile,
  "why worry about that asshole?"

  Chris is well stocked with books and music for the unexpected four-week
  vacation the Black Crowes are getting courtesy of ZZ Top.  Scattered
  on the floor of his hotel room are dozens of CDs- a compilation of
  early Sixties folk-gospel sides by the Staple Singers is on the box
  right now- and a small library's worth of paperbacks, including
  Adventures in the Skin Trade by Dylan Thomas, Jim Thompson's Killer
  Inside Me, short stories by Joseph Conrad and Minefield, an anthology
  of poems by Gregory Corso.

  "I guess it looks pretty pretentious and eggheady," Chris says,
  grinning.  In fact, Chris briefly contemplated a career as a writer,
  majoring in English during his abbreviated stays at Georgia State
  and Wofford College in South Carolina.  "My mom thought I'd just
  fade away and go write the Great American Seedy Disgusting Perverse
  Novel," says Chris.  Instead he's writing songs like "You must keep
  pepper in your pussy to act this mean."

  "I like that because it's funny," Chris says, flipping excitedly
  through a notebook full of new jottings that may well end up on 
  the next Crowes album.  "Ain't that weird?  It just sounds right."

  "Okay, this thing," Chris continues, reading from another page.
  "'You sting me just like Halloween/And you kiss me like Judas between
  the sheets/You burn me right to my rotten bones.'  I know that is
  going to be in a song.  I like that picture. [Check out the lyrics
  to 'Sting Me' from the second album. D.F.]

  "I just love language," says Chris.  "And to me the cool thing about
  rock & roll is that it can be a 'mind' thing and it can be a 'gut'
  thing.  Regardless of what I'm singing, when you hear Rich up there
  doing his thing, that's primal, man.

  "But when you hear that line 'The sunshine bores the daylights out
  of me' [From "Rocks Off," on Exile on Main Street], that's poetry,
  man.  It's rock & roll, that attitude.

  Chris Robinson has dedicated his life to that attitude, and he's
  savoring the rewards that have come to him because of his fealty.
  But like any young man who finds that his greatest wish has come 
  true sooner than expected, Chris doesn't entirely trust his good
  fortune.  "I sometimes wonder if there's anything weird about being
  young and reaching your goals," Chris says with a nervous apprehension
  that sounds odd coming from this otherwise cocksure rocker.  "Like,
  you go to the self-help section of the bookstore, and the books are all 
  about attaining your goals.  But no one tells you what the fuck you
  do when you get there.  That's a whole new can of worms."

  The cloud passes quickly though.  "But you just make it your
  environment- your reality," he proclaims.  "It's cool.  And I dig it."
  


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