25 Years Later: Revisiting When The Black Crowes Hit Creative Crossroads On ‘Three Snakes and One Charm’

With the retrospective of a quarter-century, it may be fair to state Three Snakes and One Charm marks the point The Black Crowes hit the skids. Growing dysfunction within the group recounted so vividly in drummer Steve Gorman’s book Hard To Handle reached a point where communication(or lack thereof) was such that musical ideas could not be exchanged sufficiently clearly. As a result, the band could not render many of its original songs with the clarity, style, and soul that permeated its preceding three albums. The assertive confidence of the previous two albums is virtually non-existent here and occurs only in scant flashes  as on “Nebakenezer.” 

To the Crowes’ credit, they were trying for some diversity on this their fourth studio work. Unfortunately, those efforts did not always result in a thorough sense of rediscovery. “Girl From A Pawnshop” is a well-crafted piece of material juxtaposed with too many seemingly not crafted at all, but merely thrown together, like “One Mirror Too Many.” The slide guitar and harp on “Good Friday” suggest more than a passing fancy with the blues (as does this cover of Willie Dixon’s “Mellow Down Easy” released as a bonus cut on the version of the album contained in the 1998 box set Sho’ Nuff), while, on “Let Me Share the Ride,” The Dirty Dozen Brass Band amplify a collective thrust to certify the authenticity of the band’s roots (though those horns are wasted on the outro to “Evil Eye”).

Contradicting the Black Crowes’ initiative to transcend strictly contemporary influences, the primarily acoustic arrangements of “Bring On, Bring On” betray their debts to Led Zeppelin. As does the similarly-textured “How Much For Your Wings.” The comparisons are too obvious to ignore, while the derivative nature of the songs and style go unsuccessfully disguised by the gospel-influenced backup vocals that became such a distinct component of this Georgia-born group’s sound in the coming years. On The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion and Amorica, the  Robinsons and their bandmates processed their influences with much more panache, even when too obviously recalling the sources, like Humble Pie and Faces.

On Three Snakes and One Charm, however, the sibling songwriting team seems to strain for ideas, and the resulting arrangements and musicianship sound similarly forced, as when the entire ensemble is lumbering along during “Under A Mountain.” Still, the sextet’s co-production with Jack Joseph Puig (who had worked on previous records) does assign proper prominence to acoustic guitars and keyboards in the mix along with the dense layering of the electric fretboard work from the younger sibling and Mark Ford; the two had become fretboard alter-egos of each other at this point, roughly five years into their partnership since the latter’s substitution of Jeff Cease.

But an overriding sense of dislocation in the performances mirrors of the turbulence just below the surface in the relationships within the Black Crowes’. The muddled album of five years later, Lions, bears a remarkable similarity to Three Snakes and One Charm, but it’s definitely superior to the abject aping of the Rolling Stones of 1999’s By Your Side. It would not be until after a hiatus that the Robinson brothers deigned to reorganize, but it was a fitful process leading to only relative stability until guitarist Luther Dickinson joined the lineup in 2007; at that point, the realigned ensemble proceeded through what is arguably the most productive phase of their existence since the release of their hit debut 1990’s Shake Your Money Maker; the co-founder of the North Mississippi Allstars may well have provided a buffer between the so-often fractious interactions of the group, this in addition to serving as a practical source of musical ideas.

The culmination of this phase of the Black Crowes seemed to signal the end of the band itself. The tour of 2013 with guitarist/vocalist Jackie Greene held out some hope, but it flagged when the Robinsons could not reach a business rapprochement with each other and charter member Gorman; that process generated enough bitterness to jettisoned the charter members in different directions altogether, including but not limited to, The Chris Robinson Brotherhood and multiple solo efforts from Rich out of which came The Magpie Salute.

Yet 2019 saw the siblings announce a truce leading to the ‘reformation’ of the Black Crowes, albeit with musicians who had never been part of previous personnel (some of whom, not surprisingly, have already been replaced in the interim). The pandemic scotched a massive tour in 2020, but the itinerary’s been rescheduled, begging the question of the Black Crowes’ chemistry. if not their productivity: the ‘brothers of a feather’ claim to be sitting on a clutch of new tunes. With the hindsight of a quarter-century, we might well have seen that kind of paradox looming with Three Snakes and One Charm.