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The lazy, hazy summer of 1990: Every day was warm and woozy. Or so it seems now. LA rocked, and so did London. Guns N’ Roses were number one, permanently; Mötley Crüe were number two; the rest were duking it out for position. Rock was out of the ghetto; even dudes like Run DMC and Public Enemy thought so. They were hooking up, connecting, remixing.
Wanton record companies had more money than sense. They signed anything with hair and a pulse. Hundreds of albums came out every week – great ones, okay ones, funny ones, disastrous ones, dirty and dumb ones. The scene fed on itself. Everything was hot, everything was sunny, everything was beautiful.
Right into this wide open space dropped Burning Tree – great name, taken from the street sign outside the guitarist’s girlfriend’s house. Classic line-up: the power trio. Cool concept: a retro-rock take on trippy metal. They had the look, but they’d cut their hair and gone shopping in 1966. They had the muso chops, but they subjugated them for the benefit of their songs.
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They had the chance to fall in line, but they preferred to make their own way. Burning Tree was a singular record in a time of general conformity. It stood out, but got itself swamped by the tide. It left a legacy, though: the guitarist and singer in Burning Tree was Marc Ford, who would go on to join the Robinson brothers in the Black Crowes.
The album was released as part of the Epic label’s Epic Rock series – essentially an excuse to throw a bunch of crap against the wall to see what stuck. Nine albums were released on the same day, but Epic ended up cannibalising their own marketing budget. None of the bands made videos, and the stunt failed. Only Suicidal Tendencies’ Lights… Camera… Revolution! was a commercial success, and Burning Tree was lost.
Perhaps Burning Tree wasn’t quite immediate enough in a time when subtlety was often swamped by straightforwardness. The record took a while to tune up, to get going; the eponymous opener was woolly and indistinct, probably their worst song; Wigs, Blues And High-Heeled Shoes was a woozy wig-out, and Fly On was a clunker. But they imparted the Burning Tree vibe well enough. This was rock from a desert climate, blurred and soft-edged in the heat haze.
Mistreated Lover was the album’s first great song, with barely the momentum to move above its semi-spoken beginnings before its shimmering chorus; Playing In The Wind might have come off Cream’s Disraeli Gears; Turtle should have been the last tune at an all-night party.
But what made the record rare and worthy were Crush and Baker’s Song. The former could have been remixed by PM Dawn; it’s a lyric about the seductions of being in a band set to a tune that should have filled stadiums. When the band sang – and they all sang – the hip little ‘nah nah nahs’ at the end, all felt right with the world.
Baker’s Song, though, is the tune the Black Crowes might have covered. A doomy tale (‘Worried me none/that the river rolled by my loaded gun’), it nonetheless had the epic sweep of all truly great songs; you could hum it forever.
Marc Ford got his due in the Crowes, and joined Rich Robinson’s The Magpie Salute when the Crowes were on hiatus. Drummer Doni Gray played in the Chris Robinson Brotherhood during the same period, and bassist Mark Dutton recorded with Izzy Stradlin before hooking up with LA Guns, and joined the Black Crowes in 2025.
Sporadic reunion shows have taken place in the decades since Burning Tree’s 1992 breakup, and a studio reunion in all but name occurred when the three musicians worked together on Ford’s 2007 solo album Weary And Wired.
A second Burning Tree record might have been special, but such is the band’s timeless sound that the first wouldn’t sound out of place if it were released today. It’s that good.
