Papa Was a Rollin' Stone

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on The Black Crowes taking a swing at "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," the closer on their 1972 covers set, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO you already know this is the kind of record that smells like cigarette ash, tube amps, and a long Sunday afternoon. The brothers Robinson did not invent the song. Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote it, and the Temptations cut the famous version for the 1972 album All Directions. The single that hit the radio was already a long walk, and the album take stretched out past eleven minutes, a slow Motown sermon about a father who never stayed put. Dennis Edwards of the Temptations later said the group almost refused to sing it. They were tired of Whitfield's long psychedelic soul pieces and told him their fans wanted something else. Whitfield promised them a hit, they were under contract, and they went in anyway. Edwards also said the line about the third of September hit close to home, because that was the day his own father had died. The Crowes were not trying to out-Motown Motown. They were trying to drag that story into a rock room and see if it still walked.

Rich Robinson told Macomb Daily that "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" was the outlier on the EP and one of the harder songs to arrange. The Crowes are not an R&B band, he said, so the move was rhythmic. They put a backbeat under the chorus, leaned on the pocket, and let the thing lift into a rock and roll footprint. "Ultimately we are who we are," he said. "Chris sounds like Chris; he's not gonna sound like anyone else, and I sound like me. Knowing that kinda takes the stress off, and we just did the song like us." That is the whole Crowes method in one breath. You do not sand yourself down to fit the original. You plug in and play it the way your hands already know.

Chris Robinson called the whole 1972 project a love letter. In the Ultimate Classic Rock interview around the sessions he said the music on that EP was the same stuff that had been a vehicle for Shake Your Money Maker years earlier, and that there would be somebody out there who had never really heard "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," or T. Rex's "The Slider," and might find it through them. "We wanted to approach it and we wanted to inevitably get into this session with just all the love in the world for this music," he said, "and if we can blow some life into it and find the little spots in it here and there to make it the Black Crowes, then that's what it's about." In the press notes he put it plainer. 1972 was a watershed year, some of the greatest rock and roll songs ever made came out of it, and getting the band back in a studio had to be a celebration. "This record is about love and devotion to something that makes us feel good."

The sessions happened in January 2022 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, the first time the Crowes had been in a studio together in more than a decade. Rich had already cut some of his parts at home. He told the same interview that the first time he went into a studio he was fifteen, and that planning has never been the family business. Plug in the amp, play the song, get out. Management and Amazon Music had floated the idea of a covers EP built only from songs released in 1972. Rich said it sounded right up their alley, because they have always worn the influences on their sleeves. The hard part was picking. They looked at a pile of records and figured they could have made a triple album. What came out, on their Silver Arrow label in May 2022, was six songs: the Stones' "Rocks Off," T. Rex's "The Slider," Rod Stewart's "You Wear It Well," Little Feat's "Easy to Slip," Bowie's "Moonage Daydream," and the Temptations closer. The official discography page still lists "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" right there at the end of the track list, which is how you know the brothers never treated it like a novelty.

If you want the long view on how those two even got in a room together, you start in Marietta, Georgia, not on a tour bus. Chris Robinson was born in Atlanta in December 1966. Rich came along in May 1969. Their father, Stan Robinson, had a little 1959 single called "Boom-A-Dip-Dip" that scraped the Billboard chart, so music was already in the house, even if the old man was not exactly handing out encouragement. Chris has said his dad told him he could not carry a tune. By sixteen Chris felt like the arrow was pointing at the door. The folks loved him, he has said, but they did not really understand the outsider kid. Down the street there was a neighbor who could play, a cousin had a drum kit, and the first jam happened in the parents' basement. Chris invited school friends over. Rich, who had a guitar, came down the stairs, set an amp on the floor, and started playing even though he had not exactly been invited. It was rough. It was also the moment the brothers stopped being just two kids who fought in the same house.

They put a band together in 1984 while they were at Walton High School and called it Mr. Crowe's Garden, after a children's book, Johnny Crow's Garden. Rich was young enough that he sometimes had to sneak in and out of the rooms they played. Early on they were soaking up local Atlanta bands, a little psychedelic pop, and the southern rock that was already in the air. A demo deal with A&M in 1987 got them into a studio in North Carolina. By 1989 they had changed the name. They kicked around Kicker Black Heartless Crowes and Stone Mountain Crowes before they settled on The Black Crowes. Producer George Drakoulias caught them at a New York show, turned them on to the Faces and Humble Pie, and got them signed to Rick Rubin's Def American. Rich started playing in open-G tunings the way Keith Richards did. The debut, Shake Your Money Maker, arrived in 1990. The Otis Redding cover "Hard to Handle" is what broke them wide open, five million copies and a lane that most of the hair-metal radio dial had already abandoned. Rich wrote the music for "She Talks to Angels" when he was fifteen. The first time he went in a studio, same age. That is the through-line to 1972. Two kids in a Marietta basement, still knocking songs out the way they feel them, still more interested in the records that raised them than in whatever the room says is current.

You can poke around the whole story, the new records, and the tour dates on the band's own site at theblackcrowes.com. The socials stay busy when they are out with friends like Whiskey Myers or riding along with Guns N' Roses: Facebook, Instagram, and X. The paid hangout is the Crowe-Mafia, back in business over at join.thechorus.com/theblackcrowes, with early tickets, a patch, and a chat room for the lifers. If you would rather just talk records with other folks who never took the poster down, the public group The Black Crowes. is still kicking around on Facebook. Either way, when this cut comes around again on the Zoo, let it roll. Papa laid his hat wherever he landed. The Crowes laid theirs in a Los Angeles studio and played the song like themselves. That is plenty.