Happy 30th Anniversary to The Black Crowes’ third studio album Amorica, originally released November 1, 1994.
While I am an unabashed late-period Black Crowes partisan (I think both 2008’s Warpaint and 2009’s Before The Frost… Until The Freeze are full of great tunes, just not necessarily great Black Crowes tunes), neither record has the ferocious rock-and-roll tension—sprinkled with earned, unexpected tenderness—of the early records. The band that made Amorica only existed once.
All of the group’s first four records drip with Crowes-iness, but Amorica is where everything that defines the Crowes comes together into the most cohesive unit. Sure, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (1992) rocks harder and Shake Your Money Maker (1990) includes some of the most iconic tunes in the repertoire, but Amorica is more balanced, with the band’s full talents, not just their ability to rock, on display.
Which is not to say that Amorica doesn’t deliver the hard edge of the early output. Your opening one-two punch of “Gone” and “A Conspiracy” would make even the likes of Crowes standbys “Sting Me” and “My Morning Song” nod in respectful affirmation, while “She Gave Good Sunflower” offers perhaps Rich Robinson’s most fun gain-saturated riff, while “P. 25 London” grooves spectacularly. There’s heavy stuff.
And yet, the band had proven at this point that it can do Fast and Loud quite well, thank you, but that there are other avenues worth exploring. For the first time, the Black Crowes aren’t just trying to tear the roof off the joint. “Slow” isn’t exactly the right word for the new direction some of the songs on Amorica take; it’s more about the record using a full palette of the band’s talent.
Skeletally, “Nonfiction” is nice folk song, but the bass and electric guitar parts bring it to an atmospheric place that the Crowes had never before explored. “Wiser Time,” a future jam vehicle, is marked on the studio cut by its vocal harmony, a southern rock feature that is largely absent from the Crowes’ early catalog. The last thing we hear on the record is a long, delicate piano solo courtesy of Eddie Harsch—an unexpected move for a band that built its identity around Chris Robinson’s voice and a steady stream of guitar solos.
Listen to the Album:
You’ve also got “Cursed Diamond,” which follows the “quiet to buildup” architecture of many run-of-the-mill rock ballads, but stands alone in the Crowes’ catalog in its brutal honesty. “Well, I hate myself / doesn’t everybody hate themselves? / so what, I scare myself? / then I tell myself it’s all in my mind” is quite a lot to sing when you’re positioning yourself as the unassailable, even mythical, frontman of a massive rock band.
What’s special about Amorica is not simply the introduction of a more diverse songwriting idiom. What’s special is that this is really the only time the Crowes nailed this diverse palette and created a unified piece in which the flow of energy from one song to the next feels managed—like the energy flow of a great live show—to create a forty-five minute ebb and flow that makes musical sense. The rest of the band’s efforts from this point are either perplexing (1996’s Three Snakes and One Charm) or, uh, uneven (2001’s Lions) or Searching for a New Sound (Warpaint). This is the only time the band did everything it’s capable of at the highest possible level.
Drummer Steve Gorman details in his new book Hard To Handle: The Life and Death of The Black Crowes that Amorica was a disappointment to some fans who expected the group to churn out a steady stream of albums that sounded like Shake Your Money Maker. But just because that record came first and sold the most copies doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the band’s definitive sound.
At the same time, Amorica sold terribly. A change in the band’s direction could explain some of the dropoff in sales, but the more obvious culprit is Chris Robinson’s explosive interaction with a Best Buy executive alongside the album’s, let’s say, controversial cover, which got it banned from many big box stores. With Amorica underselling, this more dynamic sound never made it out to most of the audience who heard Shake Your Money Maker and Southern Harmony, meaning that the full potential of the Crowes, the sound that existed for eleven songs and then flamed out, went mostly unheard.
The history of The Black Crowes is so tumultuous, so full of changes in lineup and artistic direction that there’s actually not much that defines the band across the years. Amorica, somehow, preposterously, holds so many of those contradictions at once.
LISTEN:
Editor's note: this anniversary tribute was originally published in 2019 and has since been edited for accuracy and timeliness.