YMMV / The Black Crowes

• Covered Up: Not any of their songs, but their cover of "Hard to Handle" is much more popular than the Otis Redding original.
• Overshadowed By Controversy: The cover for their third album, Amorica, was the cover to the bicentennial issue of Hustler magazine. It depicts a close-up view of a woman's crotch- but don't freak out! She's wearing a thong (an American flag thong, natch), and nothing is exposed. Well, a few wisps of pubic hair are poking out from the side of the thong, but who cares about that, right? It turns out, quite a few people cared. Moral Guardians threw a fit, major retailers refused to carry it, and an alternate cover, with everything (both hair and woman) blacked out except for the American flag thong had to be released. According to Chris Robinson (who was one who demanded the cover, ever when all the other band members voted against it), it was just putting two things he loved together: America, and sex. In fact, years later Chris gave an interview where he admitted he was shocked that nobody said a thing about the American flag aspect of the image, and that so many people cared about some pubic hair. Either way, despite good reviews, Amorica sold only about half as many copies as it's predecessor.
  • Again, the quote drummer Steve Gorman's book on the topic: "Chris refused to budge. He talked himself into thinking he was actually taking a principled stand. To this day, I think the Amorica cover looks like a Mötley Crüe record. It's like when Spinal Tap put out Smell the Glove. Chris was our very own Nigel Tufnel, wondering, 'what's wrong with being sexy?' It's juvenile. Embarrassing. And, most importantly, it has zero connection to the music."
• Never Live It Down: in 1991, fresh off the success of their first album, Chris got arrested for spitting on a woman in a convenience store. He denied it at the time, but later admitted the truth. According to him, their tour had stopped in a town that stopped selling beer after sundown, and he was waiting for the store to empty in hopes of bribing the clerk to sell him a six-pack. A woman recognized him from tv, and her friend started yelling at Chris (apparently trying to talk her friend out of leaving with him). Fed up, Chris spat in her face, then ran around the corner to his hotel room. It was not hard for the cops to find him.
• What Could Have Been: Plenty of examples -
  • Before recording their third record, Amorica, they recorded a whole album titled "Tall," that wasn't released for multiple reasons. Chris Robinson appointed himself producer and turned the whole affair into the audio equivalent of Apocalypse Now. He was inspired by the legendary stories of the Stones recording Exile on Main St.. and did his best to purposefully emulate the drugged up excess of those sessions. First, he made the band toss out the songs they had written and performed on their previous tour, considering them road songs that weren't fit for a record. The, he insisted the band had to create the right atmosphere to properly record, and to that end, he spent the first several days just decorating the studio with all kinds of psychedelic art, peace signs, and candles. He refused to record anything before the sun went down, which ultimately left the entire band exhausted and lifeless when tape finally started rolling (Chris himself was fine, as he was inhaling as much cocaine as oxygen at that point). Fed up with all the attention the grunge bands were getting, he wanted the Crowes to move beyond being, in his words, "some stupid rock band," leading him to try and sound like Steely Dan. Between his technical ineptitude, the tired and listless performances of the band, and the bizarre goal of not sounding like a rock band in the first place, Tall ended up sounding, at best, non-commercial and, at worst, just outright bad. While everyone was struggling with how to tell Chris they needed to rerecord everything, he heard a pre-release copy of the Stones' newest album, Voodoo Lounge. Suddenly, he wanted to rock again. Most of the Tall songs would be rerecorded for Amorica, while some tracks would eventually be released on The Lost Crowes compilation in 2006. Still others circulate only as bootlegs.
  • Another unreleased album, titled "Band," was recorded before By Your Side. This time, it is known that the label rejected it. "They couldn't go with the vibe, and wanted something more safe," according to Chris. Again, several tracks from these sessions would be released on The Lost Crowes, and again, several more songs circulate only as bootlegs.
  • After Izzy Stradlin left Guns N' Roses, he was (allegedly) offered a position in The Black Crowes. He turned it down, having vowed to never work with a lead singer again (this is the same reason he would later turn down a spot in Velvet Revolver). It's interesting to consider what the Crowes would have sounded like with Izzy's influence (and, logically, without Marc Ford's), or how Izzy's solo career would have been different by being in the Crowe's. It's likely that, even if he'd taken the job, he wouldn't have been able to put up with Chris Robinson for long; his loose rhythm guitar style is also a little too similar to Rich's own sound. Regardless, his songwriting skills would have fit right in. If nothing else, having another capable singer would have altered their sound dramatically.
  • Hell, a big "what could have been" is just how they would have fared had they not broken up at the start of the millennium. Right after they split up, The White Stripes ushered in a garage rock revival, and suddenly all the popular bands started trying to sound like it was the 70s again, something The Black Crowe's had been doing for over a decade. They may have missed a shot at a big commercial comeback.
  • At least one critic wondered how their career trajectory might have gone another direction had they truly embraced music videos. While their sound was retro, their salesmanship could have been more modern; in the golden age of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and the Dayton/Faris team (the couple responsible for most of The Smashing Pumpkins videos), The Black Crowes stuck to pretty straightforward performance videos. No real surreal music videos, no animated music videos, they never even attached a song to movie soundtrack, so no Video Full of Film Clips. Their record sales likely wouldn't have dropped off as the decade wound down had they done more to stand out on MTV. Even today, while they eventually broke down and set up an official Youtube channel, it only boasts a few of their most popular videos, not anywhere close to a full filmography.
    • Actually, they did make one high-concept video, for "High Head Blues," from Amorica. As Steve Gorman says in his book: "Michel Gondry directed. He later made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ... but in 1994 he was known as the hippest music video director working. By 1995, all his videos were in constant rotation all across the world. Well, all except one. It was a pretty wild concept. Chris Robinson plays Chris Robinson, and the rest of us are orange-clad aliens that climb inside his brain one night while he's asleep. We then assume control of his actions. Or something like that. I'm not entirely sure. I honestly don't know that I ever saw the finished product. Few people ever did. The single never got any traction at radio, and the video followed suit."
  • Their second album sold over five million copies. Their third album, due to the cover art, was not carried by major retailers, and by the time an alternate version was pressed, the momentum had slowed. The Crowes would never regain the commercial success of their first two albums. How would their career had been different had Amorica had a less contemptible cover?