She Talks To Angels

There is a hush that rolls through the room whenever the needle finds “She Talks To Angels.” The Zoo Crew has been living with this cut since the first spins of Shake Your Money Maker, and the Zoo Freaks still lean in like somebody just turned the lights down. The Black Crowes laid it on that debut record, the one that came out in February of 1990 on Def American, and it still feels like a front-porch confession dressed up as a rock and roll ballad. Chris Robinson sings it low and close. Rich Robinson’s guitar sits under him in open E, those drone strings ringing like a little choir that never quite leaves the porch. It is the quiet one on a loud record, and that is exactly why it stuck.

The riff belongs to the younger brother, and he wrote it before he was old enough to buy a beer. Rich has said he was still in high school, about seventeen, when a friend of Chris named James Hall showed him an open E chord. He fiddled with that shape and the song fell out. Most of the early Crowes tunes got written on their father’s acoustic, but this one came off a strange little electric called a Robin, an odd-shaped guitar that did not look like anything else in the house. Open E means the whole instrument rings as an E major chord before a finger ever lands. That is the secret in the intro, the bell-like harmonics and the slide that walks across the frets while the open strings keep singing. Folks have tried to fake it with a capo and regular shapes for years. It never quite breathes the same way.

Chris wrote the words, and he has told the story more than one way, which is how a good song stays alive. On VH1 Storytellers, down at the Bottom Line in New York back in 1996, he called the girl in the song a “hot dog” of people they knew from the Atlanta club scene in the early days. Not all the best parts, he said, or the best parts for you. There was always a girl in those rooms with the dark makeup, the Siouxsie and the Banshees kind of paint, and one day the line “she paints her eyes as black as night” showed up on a scrap of paper. From there he wrote her a whole biography. He has been clear that a lot of it was made up. In a later talk he put it plain: the dark details, the drugs and the rest, would become part of growing up in that world, but when he wrote the song he had not lived any of it. Everything was in his imagination. That is a rare kind of honesty from a singer who later saw plenty.

Listeners still argue over how much of her was real. The picture is specific enough to feel like a person. She never mentions the word addiction in certain company. She will tell you she is an orphan after you have already met her family. She keeps a lock of hair in her pocket, from a little boy, and a cross around her neck from someone she has not met yet. She pulls the shades down tight and smiles when the pain comes, because the pain is going to make everything all right. Chris has pointed at a goth girl from the Atlanta underground as the loose model, somebody on the edge of that late-eighties scene, black clothes and a private weather system. Other nights he has said the biography was fiction built on a look. Both can be true. A kid in a club sees a face, takes it home, and writes a life onto it. The angels she talks to are not harp players. The song is a portrait of heroin, drawn by somebody who had only watched it from across the room.

That is why the tune landed so hard and stayed. It went to number one on the mainstream rock chart and reached number 30 on the Hot 100, riding next to the Otis Redding cover “Hard to Handle” off the same album. Shake Your Money Maker moved more than five million copies. The sessions started in the summer of 1989, split between Atlanta and Los Angeles, with George Drakoulias producing for Rick Rubin’s Def American label. Rich had turned twenty. He has said he had graduated high school only a year before, with about four years on the guitar and not a ton of life behind him. Chris and Rich could write, but neither of them was a seasoned player yet. They cut the record anyway, then did something like 360 shows in eighteen months and learned how to be a band on the highway. An acoustic version and an old Mr. Crowe’s Garden demo of “She Talks To Angels” both turned up later on the thirtieth-anniversary sets, proof the song was already in the bag before the name on the marquee changed.

The road to that name started in a Marietta basement. Chris Robinson was born in Atlanta in December of 1966. Rich followed in May of 1969. Their father, Stan Robinson, had his own little moment on the charts in 1959 with a single called “Boom-A-Dip-Dip.” The boys did not exactly get a free pass at home. Chris has said his dad once told him he could not carry a tune, and that the folks in the house never quite knew what to do with the outsider kid. By sixteen the arrow was pointing at the door. Down the street there was a neighbor who could actually play, and a cousin with a drum kit. Everybody piled into the parents’ basement. Chris invited school friends. Rich came down uninvited, parked an amp, and started chiming in. It was horrible, Chris has laughed since, and it was also the moment the two of them stopped being only brothers who fought in the hallway.

They called the outfit Mr. Crowe’s Garden, after a children’s book, Johnny Crow’s Garden, by Leonard Leslie Brooke. The year was 1984, and both of them were still at Walton High School in Marietta, out in the East Cobb suburbs. Early on they leaned toward the local college-rock thing and a bit of psychedelic pop, the kind of band that might have chased R.E.M. around Athens. Rich was young enough that he sometimes had to sneak in and out of the rooms they played, and if he came back the next night as a customer they might not let him through the door. A first professional demo went down for A&M in 1987. Nothing stuck. Then producer George Drakoulias caught them at a New York show in 1989 and walked them into Rubin’s new label. Drakoulias turned the brothers on to the Faces and Humble Pie, pushed covers of the Rolling Stones, and got Rich into open tunings. The old name no longer fit. They kicked around The Heartless Crowes and The Stone Mountain Crowes before they settled on The Black Crowes. Shake Your Money Maker arrived the next year, with Jeff Cease on the other guitar, Johnny Colt on bass, and Steve Gorman on the drums, and the Atlanta kids were suddenly a national rock and roll band.

What they carried out of that basement was a stubborn idea. They wanted the swing of the old soul and blues records, the hip-shot guitar of the British bands their dad’s generation had argued about, and a singer who could sound like he had been up all night even when he was still a kid making it up. “She Talks To Angels” is the cleanest proof that the idea worked before they had the miles. A seventeen-year-old writes a riff on a weird guitar. His brother invents a girl in black eye paint and gives her a cross and a lock of hair. A producer in Los Angeles hears a band that is not seasoned and cuts the song anyway. A few years later the same two brothers are standing on a Storytellers stage explaining that the darkest lines came out of imagination, not a diary. The Zoo Freaks know that feeling. A record reaches you before your own life catches up to it, and then your life catches up, and the song is still standing there.

The Crowes kept going long after that first gold rush. They fought, split, came back, made The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion and Amorica, stood onstage with Jimmy Page, wandered off again, and found their way back to the same two brothers writing in a room. The song never left the set. It is the one that makes a loud room go soft, the one people request when they want the band to remember where they started. Over on THE ZOO the Crew still pulls it when the night needs a breath, right between the harder stuff, the way a good freeform show is supposed to work. No ads, no countdown clock, just the record and the story behind it.

The brothers keep the porch light on at the official home, The Black Crowes, where Shake Your Money Maker still sits in the discography with “She Talks To Angels” listed among the tracks and the old lyrics right there on the page. The same camp posts road news and old photos over on Facebook, shares the newer records and the tour scraps on Instagram, and keeps a shorter wire running at X. However a listener finds them, the path runs back to the same place: two kids in a Marietta basement, a strange guitar in open E, and a girl who talks to angels whether or not she was ever entirely real.