In 1990, Rich Robinson and his brother Chris introduced The Black Crowes to the world. 26 years and several breakups later—the last one seems to be final—Robinson is looking back on his solo career, which began as a side project with 2004’s Paper, with a set of rereleases on his new Eagle Rock. Included in the releases is a complete reimagining of that first solo record, with Robinson going back into the studio to remaster and re-sing every track. Combine that with a new record coming this June, a summer tour with Bad Company and even a side career as a visual artist—not to mention three young children at home—Robinson is busier than ever.
On a recent trip to New York to play some tunes for the Relix/Jambands.com offices, Robinson sat down to discuss the process of revisiting Paper over a decade later, how his albums have progressed with and without The Crowes, how he came to be Bad Company’s guest guitarist and why he thinks the modern world is squandering the sacred gift of music.
You have several re-releases in the works. Can you talk a little about how you came to do those, the process and also the re-recording of Paper ?
Paper was the one that was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy. I always wanted to redo Paper —I was never happy with the mix. When I signed with Eagle, part of the deal was to gather all of the stuff I released before and put it under one roof. The opportunity arose to be able re-mix it, but the tapes were destroyed during Sandy with all of my gear. I had this great opportunity when a friend of mine, Matt Wells, who is based in New York, got the tapes and restored them and got them on file so that they were listenable. When they came, though, they didn’t have any vocals on them, so while I was in the studio making my new record that’s coming out in June, I was like, “Fuck it, I’ll just re-sing it.” It was about twenty songs that I had recorded, so there was extra stuff that hadn’t been finished or released, so I was able to finish that and re-sing everything. I was also able to rewrite some stuff I wasn’t thrilled with the first time around and re-mix it so it sounded great. Pulling it up on the faders was like, “Wow, this is what we remember it sounding like.” It sounded so much better, and it was cool to be able to do that again, just to totally re-imagine—for lack of a better word—what that record could be, and I’m really happy with it.
That came out in February, as did Llama Blues, which is this little EP I recorded. I was just in the studio and I had a song that I had written that didn’t really fit with the rest of the record. I was thinking, “What if we just go in and make a little EP in a room with one mic?” We had a little mic sitting there, an RCA from the ‘40s, a huge ribbon mic. The drums were on one side, I was on the other with my amp and we recorded it that way. It was more for just fun, and we made up a thousand of them just to have. They sold out really quickly so it was like, “Let’s take that and re-master it and put it on vinyl.” It’s cool to be able to have something like that on vinyl.
Recently we’ve been doing colored vinyl, which actually sounds really good. It was funny because The Crowes reissued all of our first four records, and the original Amorica was on white vinyl, and people talk shit about colored vinyl. I put that shit on and it sounded great. My last record Ceaseless Sight was on a marbled vinyl that was really cool and it sounded fucking great. So listening to what they can do now is really cool. Coming up in April, Through a Crooked Sun is being re-released. I have some really cool live tracks that were never released before that I added on that record. We did this series called the Woodstock Sessions, which is not unlike how we made Before the Frost, where The Crowes made it live in front of the studio record. We did it throughout two and half weeks of recording. We went up there to the studio I work in called Applehead, and a live audience comes in and just watches us record this live record. We did it over two days, two sets a day, with an acoustic set and an electric set. People ask questions and we’re just hanging out in this place because it’s so small and nice to just hang out in. We had some other stuff that was not released on the first record and it was all set to go. This is kind of a newly reimagined Woodstock Sessions because I tweaked the sequence and did this and that. For whatever reason even if it’s subconscious, just having everything under one roof makes sense to me.
Was that part of the deal when you signed with Eagle Rock?That’s what was so cool about it. They were like, “Yeah, let’s bring it all here.”
What is it like to going back to these songs and re-recording the tracks?
I can’t believe that was thirteen years ago we recorded that. It was cool. I mean shit, man—Eddie Harsch played on it, but in the mix, because it became so compressed, you can’t hear. There wasn’t a lot of breath in that mix. Donnie Herron—who plays with Dylan now and is in a band called BR549 playing some beautiful fiddle—he’s playing pedal steel, and just to be able to listen to those [recordings] for the first time in a long time and to hear them clearly is really cool shit.
In re-recording the vocals, have you changed as a vocalist since then?
Yeah, I’ve changed as a vocalist. We started so young, you know? Chris was the singer and I played guitar. My wheelhouse was music, and that’s all I was interested in. For eleven or twelve years, Chris would be like, “Just sing the high part.” That’s just what I did, whether I could do it or not, I just did it. Then I put together a band called Hookah Brown that didn’t last very long and I was like, “Fuck, man, I have all these songs. I want to make a record—that’s what I do.” So I put everything out there and tried to have a concept for how I would sing. What I love is juxtaposition—to juxtapose this loud rock-and-roll music with these almost David Gilmour-esque vocals. I was trying to be more melodic and softer in a vocal approach, just conceptually, to see how it worked. I also threw some George Harrison-y, long, cool, double vocal parts in there.
Thirteen years later, after touring on my own a bunch, four solo records in and two EPs, and live records and shit, I definitely have more of an understanding of what works, and I’m more comfortable with it. The problem is that people get used to someone in a context. Crowes fans are so diehard, and that band and that music really mean so much to the people who like it. To take that sound—the music that comes from me—and to put it with different vocals is kind of a stretch for some people. It takes re-contextualizing. I don’t sing like Chris—I never said I wanted to or could. It’s not what I do. This is a different thing. To me, now that I’m getting into it and understanding it and bringing my concept of what I know that I can do—what I can bring to my music—it’s been really cool, and I really like it.
In that vein, do you think that when you started doing your solo stuff with Paper that your music writing changed when you added your own vocals?
I think that I understood more about my voice. I would put it as growing and changing as a singer. I had a concept, and I knew could do this thing, but I didn’t really know what I was doing, so it was really a period of discovery more than anything. Like, “What can I do? How can I do this? This is what sounds cool to me, how can I try this and that?” I don’t know how much of the way the music is written is fueled by my age and my changing of experience versus singing, because I still write the way I’ve always written. I just write what I like, that’s all you can do.
I write what moves me. I hear something and it sounds great to me, so I make a song out of it. It’s all very organic, and the way that I create always has to come from something. I don’t go in with a solid idea, like, “I need a rock-and-roll sound;” I just kind of play around. Something catches my ear, I do this and it ends up here. That’s a joy that comes from that process of creation, because it’s unexpected to me. There are so many times I’ve written a song and recorded a song and I’m not into it, and then one thing will shift and I’m like, “That’s fucking it.” It could be so subtle—it could be a chord change or it could be a lyric or it could be a melody, and it turns it from this song I was never really that into into something that’s like, and that’s what’s cool about it to me.
You also released an Eric Clapton cover for Record Store Day. What are your thoughts on the day? I feel like Record Store Day is kind of when artists pick pet projects, things that they’re passionate about that maybe wouldn’t fit on other releases.
I did the last three Record Store Days, which has been really cool. I believe the future of music is the past, in a sense. It’s almost like people can’t understand why music is inherently important to us as a species on this planet. I read this amazing book called The Singing Neanderthals where they talk about how Neanderthals and proto-humans used music far before language, because even as language started coming in, there was no context, no grammar, you know—“Bear kills man. Man kills bear.” There was nothing to really hold onto, and you couldn’t convey emotion. [The book] quotes Noam Chomsky a lot, with his linguistic background. They talk about how music is used to help us communicate and help our language, but it also helps us communicate the emotion of something. Music, in particular, is so important to us as human beings, but we just fucking ruined it—it’s everywhere. It’s a flood. Everywhere you go, you hear shitty music in a store, you hear shitty music in a cab, you hear shitty music on an airplane—for whatever reason, you’re inundated with the shittiest of music. It’s not like you’re walking down and Neil Young from Massey Hall is playing; it’s some fucking asshole who had fifteen people write their fucking song because they want to be in show business. It’s really getting to be schlocky-ass show business now. We’ve cheapened that importance in our lives.
It’s really the only creative medium that has a religion based around it. If you think about Sufis and what music means to them and what chanting means in the Buddhist philosophy and hymns and singing in Christianity. It always goes hand in hand with one of the most single important things to humans, which, next to surviving, is spirituality. So why are we treating it with such disrespect? Then with Record Store Day, bringing people in to go buy vinyl—vinyl in particular, even if you’re unaware of it on a conscious level, there is a process to it. You hold it in your hand—it’s a multi-sensory process—and you have tactile process of feeling this sizable thing. You have to open it up, use a muscle, and you don’t [just hit a button]. You open the thing, you pull it out, you look at it and you read it. There’s information—information about the studio, the players, the people who wrote it, the people who produced it, the engineer, the people who designed the artwork—you get something out of it. Then you walk over to a turntable, you turn the turntable on, you put the needle on and then you hear that sound. It could be a scratch or it could be the start of it. Then you have to listen vigilantly, because a side is only four or five songs, and you know if you go out of the room and that shit ends, you’re going to hear that horrible sound and it’s going to fuck up your needle. You have to give it your attention.
It’s all a choice we live with every day. We have choices—we have a choice to be a douchebag or to be cool. We have a choice to be inquisitive or to be lazy. We have a choice to eat healthy or eat fucking Kentucky Fried Chicken where they found a lung—some dude found a lung in a piece of chicken. Everything that we do as humans, we have choices, and for me, showing respect to something that gives us so much is key. That could be the beginning of everything. So by doing that, doing a thing like Record Store Day and trying to bring people into those stores is a celebration of what is important. It’s not a matter of, “I have eleven thousand vinyls.” Well how many fucking vinyls do you listen to? You can have ten of your favorite vinyls and you can listen to them—or one—and get something out of it every day. That’s the respect I think music is owed, because music gives us so much and I think we just cheapen it on a daily basis.
One of Rich’s paintings displayed at Morrison Hotel Gallery
Could you talk a bit about going on tour with Bad Company this summer?
About a year ago, there was talk of doing a possible Free reunion, and then Andy Fraser died and it didn’t happen. I’ve always been a huge Paul Rodgers fan, a huge Free fan, a huge fan of Simon Kirke, Paul Kossoff and Andy Fraser. Before Christmas, I went to honor Jimmy Page at the Experience Music Project where he was an honored member. It was Duff McKagan and I, the drummer from The Screaming Trees [Barrett Martin] who’s a really cool guy , Kim [Thayil] from Soundgarden, Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains, Krist Novoselic from Nirvana and a bunch of people like that who were there to play Jimmy’s songs for him. They asked me to do it, and it was cool. I flew my friend John Hogg out to sing and it was great. That’s where I met Paul [Rodgers]. Paul came up to do a couple of Firm songs, and he saw me at soundcheck and wanted me to play on his song. So that was it. It was great to be able to meet him. Then I got a call that Mick [Ralphs] couldn’t do the tour, so they asked me if I would fill in and I was like, “Yeah, that would be fucking great.”
Have you guys played together before?
Nope. It starts May 5th in Chicago. I know the first show is in Dallas, but we’re doing something in Chicago, so it should be really cool.
Have you done that before, filled in for someone in another band, especially for a whole tour?
Never, so that’s what’s going to be interesting. I don’t know, I think it’ll be cool for me. I don’t have to do anything; it’s not my band. I just have to learn the songs and get up and play, which will be great. I don’t have to do a damn thing except for play, which is fun.
Switching mediums here, you’re also a painter, and you’ve had some paintings up in New York’s Morrison Hotel recently. Have you always done that?
I’ve done it for about 25 years. I have had about five or six or seven shows. One was up for six weeks in a gallery in Atlanta, which is cool because they had about 20 pieces. This is at Morrison Hotel Gallery and it’s 20 new pieces I’ve never shown before. I just finished them before we came up. There’s four right now hanging in a gallery in Toronto, and then I did a couple of shows in Connecticut and a show in a Malibu.
I’m curious about people who do multiple artistic endeavors—is it something where you have to give time to music and then kind of put that on the side to do the art, or is it something you can do together?
I just kind of do it. It’s peaceful to me. There’s no band, there’s no politics. It’s easy—well not easy, in the sense that there’s always a journey to get where you want it to be, but it’s pleasant, because you just get to get in there and create this thing off of a blank canvas, which is very meditative to me in a sense. I get lost in it.
Would you equate doing a painting to writing a song or are they completely different things?
I think, for me, it’s different, because they are both supposed to elicit a feeling, but there is something about the visual aspect that is different. I do abstract work with oil—it’s an interesting way. Music is subconscious; there is no explanation to the actual musical side of things. Everyone has their own relationship with any kind of creative endeavor that they appreciate. Whatever I meant when I wrote “Thorn in My Pride”, whoever is a fan of that song has their own attachment to it, their own relationship to that song based on their filters and their life. I find painting is the same way. I see things in it, I know when it’s done and I know what kind of feeling it elicits for me when my work is done and I see it up there, but someone else can come in and see something totally different. That’s what’s really cool about it. That, to me, is what it’s about.
Could you talk a little bit about what we can expect from your new album, The Ceaseless Sight ?
I went up to Woodstock again and made this record. I kind of took the approach to the last record and took it to the next level on this one. I didn’t have anything really going into the studio. Last record I had a few ideas, nothing concrete, and I wanted to use the studio to kickstart, bring that energy. It was cool and it worked really well and I was really happy with it. With this record I went in with even less. I’m like, “Let’s just go in and see what happens.” There’s always that journey. There’s a high and there’s a low and then you come back out again and you go through this struggle, because you’re trying to pull something out that you can’t describe. It’s like, “I can’t say what I don’t like about it, I just know I don’t like it,” and then it shifts, like I said earlier, and something great comes out of it. I really like that approach.
Do you prefer writing in the studio versus outside of it?
Well, I think that, in a sense, there’s an urgency to being in the studio and coming up with something, because you have to get it done. Also, you’re in a place to be creative. I have three small babies—five, four, and three months, so trying to write in that scenario is kind of difficult. You want to be elsewhere, too—I want to do this and I want to see them—so when you go into the studio, this is what it is.
That’s the funny thing man, ProTools and these types of things are really convenient and they’re cool, but it’s never going to replace a studio. Studios were invented to be creative places. They were invented to sound good. I don’t care how many fucking apps you have on your ProTools, there’s still the physics of the air, the physics of space, and there’s also a feeling that will come from you as a musician by being in this place that was created [for you] that ProTools or these things will never reach. Although, like I said, do I like having thirteen thousand songs on my phone? Yeah, it’s kind of cool, but I’d prefer to always sit down to listen to vinyl. It’s convenient and it’s cool, and when I want to hear something when I’m flying, that’s great. There’s something more real and authentic to siting and listening to something and giving it your attention.
Since this was written all in the studio, how do you think the music that came out of that compares to the last album?
I think it’s the next step. There’s always a journey involved. The cool thing about The Crowes or what I’ve done for 25 years now, it’s a gift. Some bands are forced into this place because they’re big and they want to stay big. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot from a commercial standpoint, but we always lived and wrote the records we wanted to write. You can look at [1990’s] Shake Your Money Maker, which was a great record. I was nineteen when I wrote most of that, and seventeen when I wrote “She Talks to Angels.” [1992’s] The Southern Harmony, that was a huge growth for the band—we went on tour for 22 months and played 350 shows and we made that record and that was a left turn. Then we do [1994’s] Amorica, which is a much deeper record—with not one ounce of consideration was for any kind of commercial viability. Then Three Snakes —I mean fuck, man, to just record those four records, and to have this band and the way that I’ve always written and the way that we’ve always existed and to grow like that musically… Maybe it wasn’t the most commercially viable thing for us to do, but we knew no other way—it’s just what we did. So, that’s how I’ve always done it and that’s how I’ll always do it.
Some people say, “I know how to write a hit”—no one knows how to write a fucking hit. You can write some sort of weird formulaic bullshit—who fucking cares—but I can only write for myself. I don’t know what the fuck anyone else likes. The writing of this music and the creation of these songs or the creation of a record is self-expression. I’m expressing something, and my way is this way. My son’s way of expressing is writing. Everyone has their own way of expression. You can even be an accountant and express yourself. There is joy that accountants get after seeing some sort of spreadsheet that makes sense. That’s no less valid. To appreciate that as a form of expression and then to create your own relationship with that work, that’s what it’s all about.
