The Black Crowes: Three Snakes and One Charm (American)
Sylvie Simmons, Q, 1996

sent in by David Montgomery

from the Crowesnest: http://qfg.tierranet.com/crowesnest.html




Their fourth album, recorded over a two month period in a house in Atlanta.
Jack Puig — of Amorica — co-produces once again.

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 closer 'Evil Eye', this
is a mature, profound and highly musical album — as good as most anything by
the ‘70s 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... 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 synthesised 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/Traffic of
'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.

*

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 was less traumatic?

Chris Robinson: Amorica wasn’t hard to make because it was our third album —
it was hard to make because we were depressed 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.

What brought about the change?

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 ten minute conversation which was basically ‘I love 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 with 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
Big Pink. It was very communal.

Did any of the lost Amorica tracks resurface?

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

What does the album title mean?

It’s something everyone else’ll be able to tell us for the rest of time. It’
s like Amorica didn’t mean anything — they kept going, ‘It’s about Utopia,
right? A place 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.


from the Crowesnest: http://qfg.tierranet.com/crowesnest.html