25 Years Later: The Black Crowes Fly Lost With Middling ‘Lions’

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 1990 debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, augured well for their long-term success, so that, while their main musical influences were (too?) 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 1996’s Three Snakes and One Charm, followed three years later by what is perhaps the weakest album in the band’s discography, the overtly derivative By Your Side. 

The sole upside of the latter LP was its fulfillment of contractual obligations to Columbia Records, thereby allowing the group to move ahead on both the creative and business fronts. Hindsight, however, begs the question of whether that really happened under the supervision of Don Was during the recording sessions for the brand-new Richard Branson-helmed V2 label. 

Grammy Awards notwithstanding, Was didn’t distinguish himself in his producer’s role. The future president of Blue Note Records not only allowed 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 others among these thirteen tracks to add some welcome changes to the cacophonous 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 whom the Crowes toured in 1999 and 2000 (and Jimmy Page offered to produce the band but was refused).  

“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 a 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 only sounds more prominent in a quarter-century retrospect.

So pervasive is that negative impression that it has hardly been mitigated by the passage of time, in part due to the revelation that the group’s constant inner turmoil arose largely from the tempestuous relationship between Chris and his brother Rich (see the 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 North Mississippi Allstars’ participation was fundamental to the pinnacles of this star-crossed unit’s discography: Warpaint and Before The Frost…Until The Freeze, as well as the acoustic-based Croweology.

Lions is thus a mere afterthought of this cautionary tale, a perspective all the more inescapable in the wake of the Robinsons’ 2019 reconvening of a lineup they called ‘the Black Crowes,’ a mercenary, self-serving gesture considering there were no former members included except themselves and bassist Sven Pipien