Written by In the spring of 1994, The Black Crowes were putting the finishing touches to their third album in Conway studios in Los Angeles, with brothers Chris and Rich Robinson producing the sessions. The album, the follow-up to the Atlanta, Georgia band’s brilliant second record, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, was to be titled Tall, and frontman Chris Robinson promised that the record would have “more atmosphere” than its predecessor, but also feature “some rock ‘n’ roll and funkiness.”
Seasoned Black Crowes observers would not have been surprised to learn that the making of the record had not been entirely drama-free, owing to the fractious nature of the Robinson brother’s relationship.
“It was pretty bad around January,” the singer confessed to Kerrang! “It was a power struggle, fighting over little things, which is bullshit. I always love writing songs with Rich – that part of it we’ve never found a hassle. It was getting along on a personal level that was really rough.”
As if this wasn’t enough turmoil to contend with, the 1994 Northridge earthquake hit Los Angeles on January 17.
“Our studio, Conway on Sunset, collapsed,” Robinson told MOJO magazine. “The ceiling dropped ten feet, and we had to postpone recording. That really freaked everyone out: no-one could get any sleep because of the aftershocks and all that.”
The time out did have one positive outcome, however, in that it got the Robinson brothers communicating again.
“Rich and I sat down and started talking,” Chris told Kerrang!, “and it was like, Wow, this is our life, and this is the most important thing to us… You gotta hit rock bottom to move somewhere else.”
Asked to offer up titles of some songs set to feature on the record, Robinson mentioned Thunderstorm 6.25, Evil Eye, and “one song called Feathers, that I really, really think is something else.”
Robinson suggested that the record would be in stores around September 1, 1994. This, as it turned out, was a somewhat ambitious forecast, for in late August, the singer revealed that his band had scrapped everything they had recorded, and were now starting again from scratch, working with producer Jack Joseph Puig, perhaps best known for his engineering work with artists from the Contemporary Christian music scene, plus albums by Olivia Newton-John, Bette Midler, and Dire Straits.
“We started over again from day one and just made a whole new album,” Robinson said. “I just think its more dynamic, in a performance and sonic sense. And we’ve also given each song its own space and character.”
And Feathers? That one had seemingly disappeared completely from view.
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The third Black Crowes album was now bearing the provisional title Amorica. With ‘Amor’ meaning love, the new record was to be “a raw, psychedelic love letter to freedom, brotherhood, and the uncompromising pursuit of art without permission”.
“From the first session, we’ve kept A Conspiracy, Tied Up And Swallowed, High Head Blues, Non Fiction and Wiser Time,” Chris Robinson revealed to Kerrang! “We re-did She Gave Good Sunflower, which we played on tour, but didn’t record in the first session. Then we wrote some new ones.”
“The new versions are just more up, more vibed, more confident,” Robinson told MOJO. “I didn’t like the earlier versions because they sorta sounded like people fighting – which is cool, but I don’t think it’s cool for us right now: It didn’t sound like a cohesive, focused thing. These new versions just feel like everybody’s in the same place.”
Amorica was released worldwide on November 1, 1994. The album reached number 11 in the US, and number 8 in the UK.
When the record was reissued in 1998, two Tall sessions songs – Song of the Flesh and Sunday Night Buttermilk Waltz – were appended as bonus tracks. Evil Eye, another original Tall track, was re-recorded for 1996’s Three Snakes and One Charm, and another, Tornado, was reworked for Phosphorescent Harvest, the third studio album by Chris Robinson Brotherhood, released in 2014.
And Feathers? That’d finally surface on The Lost Crowes, a two disc compilation bringing together the songs from Tall, and another lost album, Band, recorded and shelved by the band in 1997.
But that’s a whole other story…
