Chris Robinson at SoHo
A friend and I were sitting in my car passing a pipe back and forth during the set break for the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, the Black Crowes singer's hiatus project, solo vehicle and Dead cover band, when he handed it back to me and said "I'm good" two hits into it. "Oh yeah," I said, "you don't want to be too high for Chris Robinson," in faux sarcastic admonishment. He looked at me in mock shame and nodded. "Maybe one more toke."
Nobody could be as high as Robinson. Not only is he as high as a kite (we watched him take his own little toke break as well) but he rides a pretty high horse and isn't afraid to tell you how he feels about anything. Maybe it's the elevation in Topanga, which is referenced often in his lyrics as some kind of hippy Mount Olympus. He is taking his little band of brothers, which includes Crowes keyboard player Adam MacDougall and former Ryan Adams Cardinal Neal Casal on a rotating residency of California roadhouses from March through May. He plays every other Tuesday at SoHo in Santa Barbara, where I caught him on a recent stop.
Comparing the Black Crowes and the Brotherhood is easy. Just take the songs about heroin and whiskey and replace them with songs about weed and hippy girls. Musically, it's a stone groove, mellower and more effortlessly danceable than some of the monolithic riffs cooked up by brother Rich. The Crowes have always been a musical melting pot, a sauce with a rich Stones base, a little Zeppelin for texture and a dollop of Faces-era Rod Stewart. The Brotherhood is equal parts Gram Parsons, Harvest-era Neil Young and blue-eyed southern soul recalling the seveties solo output of that other famous brother, Gregg Allman (check out "Girl, I Love You"). And a whole lotta Dead. Three tunes of the set actually, with New Minglewood Blues showing up early in the first set, Viola Lee Blues to open the second and Mr. Charlie to close the show. After his tenure with Phil Lesh, this may be the one of the best Dead cover bands on the planet.
As for the rest of the set, the solo material filled in the spaces between the covers, and while they are able to establish a pretty good groove, it doesn't really lift off in flight like the Crowes can and do. In fact, despite how obviously he wears his stoner tendencies on his sleeve, the songs seem grounded in their subject matter: love, family, fatherhood. Some of the imagery is hippy-dippy ("Eagles on the Highway", "Tubleweed in Eden") and doesn't really resolve into much of a narrative, other than an exhortation to follow Robinson's messiah-protagonist on a "ride, "drive" or "to the other side", mining the same psychedelic themes of deliverance from the corporeal world as Jim Morrison, but without any of the darkness, death or apocalyptic imagery that made that material resonate so powerfully.
If you want to shake your ass, you will not be disappointed. But don't expect anything to shake up your world view. In fact, it's when he addresses the crowd and rambles and digresses about life on the road, the superficial nature of Los Angeles audiences or the insular obsessiveness of video phones and those who insist on viewing him through a two-inch screen instead of enjoying the concert that Robinson is at his most revealing: the epitome of the self-righteous, condescending hippy. I'm sure his rants allow him to blow off a little steam, but he often comes perilously close to revealing a deep lack of respect for the audience and disdain for the people that paid to see him, bought his records and paid for his mansion on the hill. Each time I have seen him, with and without the Crowes, there have been moments where I felt that we lacked his approval as an audience. Of course I have never been pilloried in the press, or had a very public cuckolding by Owen Wilson, but his assumptions that we can all relate to him and his complaints are a bit misguided.
Definitely check him out; his band is tight, the covers faithfully renedered and his voice is world class. He has after all played on the biggest stages in the owrld, inhabited the role of Robert Plant on tour with Jimmy Page and has a long pedigree of affiliations with the Dead and the Allmans. But if you want to take the wheel and drive his ride to the other side, you better take another hit first and smoke it to the roach. Can you feel me now, brother?
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