The Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson has recalled one of the wildest shows he has ever played.
During an interview with YouTube personality Rick Beato, Robinson and his brother Rich reminisced about their formative years as teenage musicians pre-Black Crowes, when they played clubs and house parties in their hometown of Atlanta with their first band, Mr. Crowe’s Garden in the mid ’80s.
One memory which has always stuck in the singer’s mind was a four-band show, organised by their then-bassist Ted Selke and his room-mates, in the house where they were living at the time, which had been earmarked for demolition in an area of the city being redeveloped.
“They were like, We’re going to have a party, like a Wreck The House party,” he tells Beato. “But what happened was all the punk kids and skinheads, really violent kids, came, and actually started to tear the fucking place apart.
“I mean it was like The Shining, [with] axes through the walls. We’re playing and some kid hit the gas with an axe in the kitchen, and a kid hit it with a lighter so that it was like a flamethrower shooting out into the woods, and the cops were coming, and people were smashing out all the windows… I remember going, Wow, this is insane!”
Robinson also recalls that he and his brother had no real expectations of making it in the music business, but that they also had no Plan B.
“Everyone in our lives was like, ‘You’re not going to college? You’re an idiot’,” he remembers. They said, ‘You’ll never make it.’ I’m happy though that that was the feedback, because it gave us something else, it put a chip on your shoulders, [and we thought], Well, let’s see. let’s see.”
The brothers also agree that their stubborn-ness and their refusal to be forced off their path ultimately paid off for The Black Crowes.
” Chris used to say – and it was amazing in the day to have that gumption and the balls to say it – to Sony or to Colombia, ‘You have 1500 bands, I have one. I don’t give a fuck what you do with those bands. I care what I do with my band’,” says Rich.
“I would rather us fall on our face, than listen to you and fall on our faces” the singer adds.
You can watch the episode in full below,
(LouderSound)
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