Seeing Things

The Zoo Crew has got "Seeing Things" rolling out of the speakers, and if you have been riding with the Crowes since the bell-bottoms came back around, you already know this one sits a little deeper in the groove than the radio hits. It is track five on Shake Your Money Maker, the 1990 debut that turned a couple of Atlanta kids nobody was booking into a band that could fill a shed. Chris Robinson and his younger brother Rich wrote it together, and when the record finally got a proper single push, "Seeing Things" was the one that went out in the fall of 1991, long after "Jealous Again," "Hard to Handle," "Twice As Hard," and "She Talks to Angels" had already done the heavy lifting. Five minutes and eighteen seconds of slow burn. Chris sings it like a man who has already packed the suitcase.

Rich has told the story plain enough. Producer George Drakoulias wanted a Stax kind of song, something with that Memphis muscle under the rock and roll. Rich went after the feeling of "I Got the Blues" off the Stones' Sticky Fingers and tried to cop a little Steve Cropper in the guitar part, that clipped, crying rhythm Cropper laid down behind Otis. It is not a soul band, and Rich has always been the first to say so, but the intention is right there in the pocket. The lyric is a walking-out song. "Don't leave a light on for me, 'cause I ain't comin' home." "Sorry" does not buy anything. A hundred years will not ease what he saw with his own two eyes. Chris delivers it with that young swagger he had before the road sanded him down, half wounded and half already gone.

Years later, talking to Classic Rock, Chris called it Seein' Things and put it on the short list of songs off that record the band still loves to play. Struttin' Blues got lost along the way. This one did not. He said that if they are out on the road they will probably hit it twice a week. That is high praise from a singer who has never been shy about moving on from his own past. The 30th anniversary sets even kept a long live take in the box, the kind of stretched-out reading the Crowes have always preferred once the houselights drop and the room gets loose. On THE ZOO it sits just right between the deep cuts and the biker anthems, a slow one for the Zoo Freaks who came for the album, not just the single.

The record around it was made the old way. No Pro Tools, no safety net. Chris has said they played "Twice As Hard" something like thirty times to get a keeper. Drums and guitar mostly went down live in big rooms in Atlanta and Los Angeles, amps cranked, microphones everywhere, solos and vocals stacked on after. Drakoulias, who had signed them to Rick Rubin's Def American label, kept pushing. The brothers have both said they were kids with a couple of guitars and no food budget, eating whatever George left on the plate, figuring they would milk the adventure and then go figure out real life. They did not do drugs in those sessions because they did not have the money. Rich was still living at home, eighteen or nineteen, writing into a boom box and mailing the tapes. Chuck Leavell, the Allman Brothers piano man out of Alabama, came in and put keys on the album. Jeff Cease played most of the leads. Steve Gorman was on the drums. Johnny Colt held down the bass.

The climb was ridiculous. Chris has laughed about the Atlanta clubs, where every other band rehearsed and the Crowes were the worst of the lot, no work ethic, no local following, ordering pitchers and hoping the visiting label people would just buy dinner. A listening party for the finished record drew about a dozen souls, and they were giving the liquor away. Rich has told that one with a grin. Inside of three months they were opening for Aerosmith. Before the album even landed, Izzy Stradlin from Guns N' Roses asked for a sit-down to tell them what was coming. The tour ran about twenty months and something like 350 shows. Chris left Atlanta in January 1990 with one suitcase, two shirts, and a pair of cowboy boots. He was 23. Rich was 20. They went from nobody giving a damn to a record that sold in the neighborhood of five or six million copies, and life flew past.

None of that happens if the brothers do not start in a Marietta basement. Chris was born in Atlanta in December 1966. Rich came along on May 24, 1969. Their old man, Stan Robinson, had a 1959 single called "Boom-A-Dip-Dip" that scraped the Billboard chart at number 83, so the house was never quiet. Rich has talked about digging through his dad's records and finding Sly and the Family Stone when that stuff was unhip, and about a living room that ran from Robert Johnson and Son House to Buffalo Springfield and the Who. Chris has said his parents did not quite know what to do with the freaky kid in the hallway. By sixteen the arrow was pointing at the door.

The first band had a cousin's drum kit and a kid from down the street. Chris invited school friends into the basement and did not exactly invite his little brother, who came down anyway, parked an amp, and started playing. It was awful, and it was the start of everything. They named the group Mr. Crowe's Garden after the old children's book Johnny Crow's Garden, and they were at it by 1984 while both of them were still at Walton High School. Rich was so young he had to sneak in and out of the clubs. If he came back the next day to see somebody else, they would not let him in. Early on they leaned toward the paisley and jangle thing, R.E.M. and the psychedelic pop floating around Atlanta, before the blues-rock took over.

A manager named Dave Macias got them a demo deal with A&M. In 1987 they cut tracks at Steve Gronback's studio in Carrboro, North Carolina, on a two-thousand-dollar budget, with Jeff Sullivan on the drums. Later demos brought in Steve Gorman. Nothing stuck with the big labels the way they hoped, and Chris has said they ran from the corporate types as fast as they could. Then Drakoulias caught a New York show in 1989 and heard something the rest of the business had missed. He turned them on to the Faces and Humble Pie, got Rich into open-G tuning, and pushed the songs until they stopped sounding like an amateur outfit. They kicked around names, The Heartless Crowes, the Stone Mountain Crowes, and landed on The Black Crowes. The only reason anybody is still talking about that debut, Chris has said, is the songwriting. George saw it when other people did not.

If you want the band from the source, the official site is The Black Crowes, where the tour dates and the Crowe-Mafia fan club live. They keep a running conversation going on Facebook, post the road pictures on Instagram, and drop the record talk on X. For the folks who argue set lists and trade stories about nights like this one, the open Black Crowes fan group stays busy. Put "Seeing Things" on again. It still sounds like two brothers figuring out, in real time, that the old life is over.