Photo by Brad Hodge
As The Black Crowes prepare to take the second (and some are rumoring final) extended hiatus of their 20-plus-year career, I thought it would be interesting to look back on the highs and lows of their live performances over the years and see how they have evolved as a band. I have been fortunate enough to see the Crowes 10 times between 1992 and 2010, and each show was a unique experience.
Orpheum Theatre, Boston, MA August 30, 1992
The aptly named “High As The Moon” tour stopped by The Orpheum, a venue the Crowes would play many times through 2005 (more on that later), and found an energetic, cocky young band celebrating the release of its second straight platinum album, The Southern Harmony Musical Companion.
Without exaggerating, this show ranks in the top five of probably 200 live performances I’ve seen over the years. From the first moment, which featured a dim spotlight revealing the outline of Rich Robinson crunching out the opening chords of “No Speak No Slave,” it was clear the Crowes had come to kick ass and take no prisoners.
Southern Harmony was a deeper, more groove-oriented album than its predecessor, the straightforward blues rocker Shake Your Moneymaker, and hinted at the future jam-oriented direction the Crowes would take. This show did also, featuring extended jams on “Thorn in My Pride” and the final encore of “Remedy,” as well as hard-rocking blasts through numbers like “Twice as Hard” and “Stare It Cold.”
A giant banner with a pot leaf emblem emblazoned with the logo “Legalize Now Free Us” hung behind the stage much of the night, and Chris Robinson actually stopped the show mid-song (for the life of me I cannot recall which one) to yell at security guards for cracking down on audience members who were smoking weed. After delivering a threat to end the show if one more person was stopped from smoking pot and inviting security to take the Crowes’ place on stage and perform for everybody, Robinson resumed the song and the rest of the concert continued without a hitch.
Orpheum Theater, Boston, MA, March 26, 1995
The Crowes were supporting Amorica, their third album which had a darker tone than the first two and which the band admitted was produced in a period of heavy drug use. This show found the Crowes sadder and wiser than the upstarts who had paraded through the Orpheum a few years earlier, opening with the downbeat “Cursed Diamond” and also featuring melancholy numbers like “Sister Luck” and “Sometimes Salvation.”
However, this was still a Crowes show, and they rocked out with tunes like “No Speak,” “Jealous Again” and “Sting Me.” Also an extended jam that opened “My Morning Song” demonstrated the band was steering out of Faces/Stones territory and setting a course for the Allmans/Dead Zone.
Great Woods, Mansfield, MA August 12, 1995
The Black Crowes took a big step forward as a jam band by headlining the HORDE Tour, founded as a jam showcase a few years earlier by Blues Traveler, who went on right before the Crowes.
Fitting an amphitheater show on a hot summer night, the tone was decidedly more upbeat than the Crowes’ Orpheum concert a few months earlier. The festival-length 11-song set opened with a rocking version of “A Conspiracy” and also featured “Moneymaker” classics like “Twice as Hard” and “Jealous Again,” as well as jammier tunes from “Amorica” like “High Head Blues” and “Gone.”
Extended jams were also featured during “Thorn in My Pride” and “Hard to Handle,” and a dancer in a crow costume with a giant head came out on stage to delight the crowd during the “Remedy” encore.
Polish American Beach Club, Gardner, MA July 18, 1996
This unusual venue is a lakeside resort in a small Massachusetts town that in theory should have been the perfect place to enjoy an outdoor concert on a summer evening. However, the musical performance was overshadowed and inhibited by an extremely intoxicated and violent crowd. Numerous fistfights broke out throughout the performance, and at least one female concertgoer was carried out on a stretcher with some type of head injury.
In a scene weirdly reminiscent of Altamont, Robinson signaled the band to stop playing at one point and implored the crowd to calm down and inform them, “If you want to beat the shit out of each other you don’t need us here, we can just go home.”
He later cut a song short to angrily warn crowd members who were throwing shoes at the stage that the band would leave if one more shoe got thrown (similar to his threat to security in 1992, but a far less humorous situation). Memories of the music are overshadowed by memories of the bad crowd vibe; this was probably not one of the Crowes’ better live performances but for very understandable reasons.
Photo by Brad Hodge
Worcester Centrum, Worcester, MA, October 16, 1999 (w/Jimmy Page)
This was a warm-up for what were originally supposed to be two shows with Jimmy Page in New York City and two shows in L.A. that ultimately led to the Crowes/Page 2000 summer tour. The set list for this historic event was heavy on Zeppelin and nobody in the crowd or on stage seemed to mind a bit. Chris Robinson handled Robert Plant’s difficult vocal lines expertly, adding his own authentic Southern touch to Plant’s British wail, and guitarists Audley Freed and Rich Robinson gave Page a solid blues foundation on which to build his thundering riffs and solos. Page also played a mean theremin during an encore of “Whole Lotta Love” and nicely adapted to the two Crowes originals of the evening, “No Speak” and “Remedy.”
Several times during the night, members of the Crowes watched Page perform his guitar magic from the stage with their mouths open, his work was that awe-inspiring. To further up the classic rock legend ante, local guitar hero Joe Perry from Aerosmith made a surprise appearance on the last two songs of the night, “You Shook Me” and a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well.”
Tweeter Center, Mansfield, MA, June 11, 2001
Bill Murray famously said it took him 10 years to fully get Hunter S. Thompson out of his system after playing the good doctor in Where the Buffalo Roam, and Page was obviously still in the Crowes’ system almost two years after the Worcester show during this stop on the “Tour of Brotherly Love” shed tour that featured Oasis as a dual headliner.
The set list featured several songs from the 2001 Zeppelin-influenced release Lions, including an extremely heavy opener of “Midnight From the Insight Out” and a towering “Greasy Grass River.” Probably the Crowes’ hardest-rocking performance (without Page) since the early 90s, it also featured “Remedy” as an unusually early third song.
Orpheum, Boston, MA October 30, 2001
The next-to-last performance by the Crowes before their first hiatus, which lasted till early 2005. Fittingly, the show served as a retrospective of the band’s career, drawing evenly from all their albums released to that point except 1999’s By Your Side, represented only by a spirited “Kickin’ My Heart Around.”
Other highlights included a strutting “Thick n Thin,” gorgeous rendition of “How Much for Your Wings,” and perfectly distorted “Nebakanezer.” The strongest song of the night, however, was probably the last, a blistering cover of “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’” by the Rolling Stones. The Crowes headed into the great unknown saluting one of their primary influences, a band with its own set of battling (honorary) brothers which has had a few virtual hiatuses of its own over the years (including the current one).
Orpheum, Boston, MA May 10, 2005
The Black Crowes came back from their break with a much stronger emphasis on jamming, and this concert in particular was heavy on the jams right from the opening “Greasy Grass River.” The non-album favorite “Darling of the Underground Press” was a highlight of a show that frankly overdid the between-song jamming and found the band still working off its rust from three-and-a-half years under wraps.
Marc Ford, doing a second tour of duty as lead guitarist, kicked off a show-closing cover of the Stones’ “Happy” in the wrong key, drawing optical daggers from Chris Robinson. Robinson also announced how much he hated the Orpheum as they wouldn’t let the crowd “burn one down” (the problem from 1992 rearing its ugly head again) and promised the band would never play there again. Following the Crowes’ scheduled gig there the following night, they haven’t returned since.
Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, Hampton, NH, May 27, 2006
By far the mellowest Black Crowes show I have ever attended. It was even more jam-packed than their ’05 Orpheum performance, but with more purpose, mainly to chill everyone out. The Casino Ballroom is a small wooden room across the street from the beach on a boardwalk full of arcades, T-shirt shops and tattoo parlors, and the relaxed vibe fit the Memorial Day weekend atmosphere.
“Black Moon Creeping,” “Downtown Money Waster,” “Share the Ride,” “Waitin’ Guilty” and “Nonfiction” all featured extended jam segments. Covers like “Hide Your Love Away” from The Beatles and “Torn and Frayed” from the Stones also showed off the Crowes’ 70s AM rock side.
Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, Hampton, NH, October 24, 2010
The Black Crowes trooped onstage single-file with clear intent to shake the house to its foundations, and did just that with a powerful introductory trifecta of “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution,” “Jealous Again” and “Hotel Illness.” If you closed your eyes, you’d swear it was 1992 again and a bunch of 20-somethings were proving themselves as bona fide rock stars.
Like the 2001 Orpheum show, this pre-hiatus concert served as an overview of the Crowes’ entire career, shifting gears from their hard rock side to their psychedelic jam side with songs like a floating version of “Appaloosa” that showed off lead guitarist Luther Dickinson’s slide virtuosity, as well as a cover of Velvet Underground’s “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” that found Rich Robinson to be an emotionally effective lead vocalist.
This was probably the Crowes’ best overall performance since 1992 (the Page show is really in its own category as a Led Zeppelin side project), and if they’re going out, they’re going out on top. But let’s hope the Robinson brothers’ family drama will play out for at least one more act, I could stand seeing these guys 10 more times in the next decade or two.
