The Black Crowes have been enjoying quite a renaissance as of late. Since the Southern rock band’s famously feuding Robinsons patched things up in 2019 — a sibling rock reunion that at one time seemed as hell-freezingly unlikely as Oasis’s — they’ve been up for a Best Rock Album Grammy (and are on track to get another nod for this year’s A Pound of Feathers), have received two consecutive Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominations, and have garnered the sort of critical acclaim that inexplicably eluded them for years. But swaggering, peacocking frontman Chris Robinson is uncharacteristically humble when Lyndsanity congratulatorily points this out.

“I wish it was a renaissance!” he chuckles. “Then you would go out in the world and there’d be less people wearing sweatpants and Crocs. You know what I mean?”

Chris is still every inch the fashionable rock star, of course, looking more ready for the stage than for a home Zoom interview with rooster haircut, vintage King Tubby T-shirt, ‘70s shades, and stacked silver jewelry. And the Crowes’ notoriously mouthy mouthpiece is unexpectedly earnest (he employs the emphasis phrase “you know what I mean?” literally 84 times during this conversation), particularly when discussing his reconciliation with younger brother Rich, with whom he once didn’t speak for nearly seven years.

“There’s wisdom there, there’s forgiveness, there’s respect, and there’s also curiosity, you know what I mean? … Where we are today is miraculous,” Chris gushes.

Despite being only two and a half years apart in age, and playing music together off and on for four decades, the Robinson brothers have always been very different, resulting in a friction that sometimes worked wonderfully for the Crowes’ chemistry (“Rich and I being such juxtaposed opposites is part of the catalyst and the spark that makes it possible,” Chris notes) — and sometimes really didn’t.

“We’re in the same band, we’ve been in the same house, we had the same parents, but it was completely different experiences,” the singer muses. “How Rich goes about it and how I go about it are two different worlds, in every aspect of our lives.”

Chris stresses that he and Rich are “the engine of the band creatively,” saying, “It’s funny, because there are outside pressures, manipulations, my shortcomings, his shortcomings, the people surrounding us, greed, egos… but when Rich and I were in a room writing songs together, it was always a vibe.” But he also readily declares himself the band’s “leader” (or, more amusingly, “Professor Snape”), saying with a shrug, “I’m glad to take the ‘bad guy’ role in the Black Crowes, hands down.”

It was Chris who “pulled the plug” after what he calls the band’s “Contractual Obligation Tour” back in 2013, because he was “so heartbroken and disappointed with what the band had turned into.” However, he credits his wife, Camille Johnson, for helping him realize just how foolish the Robinsons’ stubborn feud really was.

“She’s the one who, for the first time in my life, was like, ‘What is this? What the f***?’” he explains. “And that simple kind of inquiry just made it like, ‘Oh. You’re right’ — realizing that another almost decade had gone by.”

Chris and Rich may have butted long-haired heads since boyhood (“We’re brothers! It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s one porkchop left, who’s going to get it?’ You know what I mean?”), but the two were a united front in 1990, when the Crowes explosively debuted with Shake Your Money Maker. That album’s bloozy boogie-rock sounded utterly unlike the electronically driven post-punk, jangly college rock, grunge, and hair metal that dominated the scene at the time.

“Yeah, we were different. We weren’t Jane’s Addiction, and we weren’t Guns N’ Roses,” Chris says. “Like, we were in [U.K. hard rock magazine] Kerrang! — there was no place for us, because we weren’t in the New Music Express or Alternative Press or whatever.” And even when the Crowes became mainstream rock stars after their debut album went quintuple-platinum, they remained against grain, onstage and off.

For instance, early in their career, Chris’s mid-concert rants against corporate sponsorship led to the Crowes being booted off ZZ Top’s (Miller Brewing-sponsored) tour. And 35 years later, his anti-corporation stance hasn’t changed much. “That’s what I want from the bands that I like, the bands that I don’t like, the bands that I love! I want the teeth in there. I want a snarl, sometimes,” he explains. “I think in this day and age of obsessive consumerism and aggressive capitalism, everything comes with a smile and it smells good and it’s happy, and it seems like it only goes to eight. Which is fine, but that’s not the type of dynamic that inspires me. And what I mean by that is ultimately, my imagination needs to be stirred.”

By the time the Crowes released their third album, 1994’s Amorica (with a cover featuring a woman’s curly pubes peeking out from her stars-and-stripes bikini bottom, an image pulled from a 1976 bicentennial issue of Huster), they were definitely stirring up more than just their imaginations. They were alienating many other corporations — including Walmart and Kmart (who refused to sell the record with its uncensored artwork) and, more surprisingly, even Rolling Stone.

“It’s unbelievable. In the ’90s, with Operation Desert Storm, f***ing racism, drugs, murders all over the world, all this s*** — and that’s offensive?” Chris says incredulously. “If you really think about it, [the Amorica album cover] wasn’t even about being sexy, or sexual. It was about gratuitous America. I don’t usually deal in surface meaning. … And it’s hardly patriotic, either. To this day, I would do it again. I like the visceral thing that people have with it. I like that some people like it. I like that some people don’t. I’ve always laughed about it, though.”

Chris says he never consulted anyone at the band’s label at the time (the ironically named American Recordings) about whether or not Amorica’s hairy cover would be a problem. He certainly never asked for permission. “I said, ‘This is the art, and this is our record,’” he recalls matter-of-factly. “We had that kind of pull still. The record still went gold in the United States. Art comes before some guy’s opinion who’s not us.”

For the apparently divisive Amorica campaign, the Black Crowes also threw their now-legendary fancy-dress bacchanal known among superfans as the “Mushroom Party,” full footage of which was finally uploaded to YouTube last year. The band totally expected Rolling Stone magazine to be on board with their far-out costume-party concept, but that turned out to not be the case.

“I had our tour manager dress up like a policeman in a pig outfit,” Chris chucklingly reminisces. “Our booking agent at the time was dressed as the Pope. I was like, ‘Oh, this’ll be great! Put your hands up!’ And the policeman was looking at the camera and he had this pistol in the Pope’s back. It’s really silly. The Pope was wearing Elvis sunglasses! That was the ad for the record. And [Rolling Stone] was like, “Um, no.” … They didn’t think it was funny.”

Much more recently, the Crowes’ frontman got in hot water when, during a gig in Florida, some audience members chanted “U-S-A!” and he reacted with: “Thanks for the geography lesson. I don’t know what you’re so proud of right now.” When Chris’s snarky comment prompted some offended concertgoers to boo (or even walk out), he snapped back: “Some of us have real faith. For those of you f***ing booing us, some of us are not afraid. And we most assuredly are not f***ing ignorant.”

Now, four months after the backlash stemming from that incident has subsided, Chris says, “It was typical of outrage culture. It was two weeks of a certain type of person threatening to murder me and my family, and then it went away. It’s funny, though. People don’t like to be called ‘fascist,’ but if they knew what fascists did, which is threaten and intimidate people with violence…”

When asked if some supposed Crowes fans are surprised by his liberal-leaning political views, given that he’s from the South, Chris answers, “I mean, I think a really dull person would think that! I’m also from Atlanta, so I’m from a very progressive city. … It would be pretty hard to find any conservative views in anything. My only conservative view is I like traditional French cuisine! And I’ve always felt this way as an artist. I’ve always felt that I’m not a Puritan; I’m hardly, hardly that. The world is an open place, and if you’re going to call that place ‘free,’ then it’s not just for straight white males. That’s just the way it is. And if you’re a straight white male and you don’t like that, then you’re not talking about freedom; you’re talking about something else.

“We were always a counterculture band. We’ve always been outsiders. We’ve always seen injustice,” Chris elaborates. “We’ve seen the bigotry and hatred and racism all around us our whole lives. I mean, I’m from the deep South! We’ve seen the greed and avarice. We’ve seen it all. … That’s why [rock ‘n’ roll] is for outsiders. That’s why it’s for marginalized, bohemian, weird people. Today, all the kids [in rock bands] look like they were on the football team or they’re jocks, and their teeth are clean and they’re happy. That wasn’t how we came up. My mom [used to tell me], ‘How come everyone you know looks like they should be in a mental ward, including you?’ I’m like, ‘Mom, give it a minute. Some of us will be in the mental ward.’ My mental ward was just on a tour bus for the first decade.”

On that subject — and back on the subject of his currently simpatico relationship with Rich — Chris looks back at the Crowes’ whirlwind early fame and reflects, “The situation we found ourselves in with success and stuff, you have to always remember, in that era and where we come from, there’s no sensitivity. There’s no, ‘Let’s talk about our problems and how we feel.’ These kids today, they’re like, ‘I need to take a mental health break,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, good for you! My parents didn’t have any money.’ Rich and I didn’t have something to fall back on, like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to sit it out for a while and let all the other bands f***ing do it.’

“I know I didn’t take a mental health break — but I wrote those songs,” Chris continues. “I didn’t really deal with how [fame and success were] affecting me and the people around me in a bad way, just because that’s the nature of the beast. You just keep going, and you keep writing and creating. And that was the therapeutic part of it, even though, of course, you wouldn’t look at it that way then. But again, unimaginably, I would never change a thing about it.”

Chris truly has no regrets, saying, “These are things I had to go through and live through; the muse dictated so much of my behavior,” and pointing out, “Like, how was I supposed to make a good decision at 24 years old? You know what I mean? I’m not Mick Jagger. I didn’t go to the London School of Economics.” Chris even remembers that when Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, who had plenty of firsthand experience dealing with fraught band relations and the dangerous of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, phoned him in 1991 to check in and offer some sage advice, he paid Tyler no mind. “Steven was like, ‘Hey man, you’ve got to really watch your back and take care.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, cool, thanks.’ Are you serious? I’m 23 years old or 24, whatever. Everything was ahead of me.”

Now that he’s about to turn 60, Chris is happy that the Black Crowes are still “an island unto our own selves,” and he’s “grateful to be still playing rock ‘n’ roll music the way we want to do it, this far into the dystopian future that we’ve found ourselves.” And he’s immensely proud of A Pound of Feathers, which was recorded over just 10 days and truly captures the electricity of a stuff-of-legend live Crowes experience.

“I definitely wanted [A Pound of Feathers] to be more raw, you know what I mean? In a world of this f***ing digital everything, AI s***, everyone’s so f***ing lazy, man,” Chris says. “I got into this for human reasons, and human beings playing music together is the thing that I love. … And we love the music we’ve made. We’re appreciative of the past, we acknowledge our hardships, and now we’re also very optimistic of where we’re going. In a world full of chaos that is just inundating us with hate and fear, to be able to have some sort of control over our navigation is nice.

“And it really is about Rich and I,” Chris adds. “Ultimately, it gets back to where we started. There’s an authenticity, and there is an eternal flame — cue Susanna Hoffs! — that we really feel is our commitment to music. Music is a mystical revelation to me all the time. It’s never hissed at me. It’s never bit me. It’s never stolen from me. And it’s never let me down. You know what I mean?”

This interview originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch it in full in the video player at the top of this page.