Following The Black Crowes over the course of their on-and-off, near-forty year career has arguably been a combined exercise in frustration and futility, seasoned with some rare satisfaction. The explosive success of the group’s debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, generated after-shocks that augured well for their long-term success, so that, while their main musical influences were most assuredly obvious on the immediate successors, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion and Amorica, the group so stylishly embraced their debts to the Rolling Stones, early Rod Stewart and latter-day Humble Pie, they were able to transcend them.
Yet the Crowes took a much more circuitous route to the 2001 release of Lions (released 5/7/01). It was a fitful progression(sic) through the nebulous likes of Three Snakes and One Charm, followed by what is perhaps the weakest album in the band’s discography, the overtly derivative By Your Side. The single upside of the latter 1999 LP was its fulfillment of contractual obligations to Columbia Records, thus allowing the group to ostensibly move ahead on both the creative and business fronts. Hindsight, however, begs the question of whether that really happened with Don Was supervising recording sessions resulting in the eventual release of the completed album on the brand new Richard Branson-helmed V2 record label.
His Grammy Awards notwithstanding, Was doesn’t distinguish himself in his producer’s role much more than when, a decade prior, he worked on Bob Dylan’s Under The Red Sky. The future president of Blue Note Records not only allows the inclusion of sub-par material such as “Young Man, Old Man,” but presumably helped to forge extravagant arrangements that only partially camouflage the incomplete likes of “Cypress Tree.” The acoustic touches there also weave in and out of other of these thirteen tracks to add some welcome changes from the cacophonous likes of electric rave-ups like “Midnight From The Inside Out” and “Lickin’.”
But, as is the case on “Losing My Mind,” such textures often hearken too directly to Led Zeppelin, with whose guitarist Jimmy Page the Crowes toured in 1999 and 2000. “Soul Singing is a marked exception to the composers’ impressionable nature as the raw bluesy intro leads into a gospel rave-up. But “Miracle to Me” is mawkish in lyric, if not predictable in melody and, while Chris Robinson sings in more straightforward fashion there than during “Come On,” on the latter he flaunts Dixie-based provincialism otherwise (thankfully) rare in the Black Crowes’ discography.
Steve Gorman’s drumming is the one consistent bright spot throughout Lions, but he alone can’t quite conjure the sense of a unified band, a virtue that might’ve otherwise compensated for shortfalls in material, arrangement and production. And that shortfall of unity only sounds more prominent in retrospect, a perception mitigated only slightly overtime via the revelation the group’s constant inner turmoil arose largely from the tempestuous relationship between the two Robinsons (see aforementioned Gorman’s book, Hard to Handle: The Life and Death of the Black Crowes–A Memoir).
In the wake of the halting reunion following the 2002-2005 hiatus—see the ill-fated ‘Mr. Crowes Garden’ club tour—guitarist Luther Dickinson became a formal member of the group in 2007, providing exactly the personal and creative stability the group needed. The subsequent presence of guitarist/vocalist Jackie Greene in a similar role from 2013 to 2015 did not spur the band to record), so the North Mississippi Allstar’s participation remains fundamental to the arguable pinnacles of this star-crossed unit’s discography.
Warpaint and Before The Frost…Until The Freeze, in combination with the acoustic-based Croweology, render Lions a mere afterthought of this cautionary tale, the Southern gothic overtones of which seem all the more fitting in the wake of the Robinsons early 2020 reconvening of the Black Crowes–without recruiting any members of past lineups.
