Twenty years ago, The Black Crowes stormed onto the rock music scene out of Atlanta, getting heavy rotation on MTV with a cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” and the ballad “She Talks to Angels.”
There wasn’t a prize to eye or a finish line for the band to cross, drummer Steve Gorman explained during a telephone interview from a tour stop in Baltimore.
“We just wanted to be a great band,” he said. “I look back on those first tours in ’90 and ’91, and we were the guys who would get off stage and go on the bus and we’d have on Led Zeppelin bootlegs and Little Feat bootlegs and we always listened to live shows.
“We’re sitting around laughing and drinking a beer while listening, but it was almost like we went to school every night.”
In the two decades since, The Black Crowes have become a household name in rock music, with a dedicated fan base following the band’s jam-ridden live shows. The group even joined Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page for live shows in Los Angeles and New York in 1999.
The band plays Spotlight 29 Casino in Coachella on Wednesday and the Hollywood Palladium on Dec. 11.
After The Black Crowes wraps up its tour, “Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys,” the band plans an indefinite hiatus
The Spotlight 29 show will be an all-electric set, but at the Palladium, the band plans a set of acoustic favorites — rearranged with a rootsy feel like the band has done for new collection “Croweology” — followed by a set of plugged-in tunes.
“We do want to try to cover as much ground as we can. We don’t look at it so much as picking a song from every album, but more every era, every time frame of the band. We definitely are more aware than we normally would be of covering each little pocket of time,” Gorman said.
The tour is dubbed “Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys”; after wrapping up six nights at The Fillmore in San Francisco on Dec. 19, the band plans an indefinite hiatus. That doesn’t mean the break is a break-up.
“We really needed one in the mid-90s, and we had planned to take one at the end of the tour in ’95 and we didn’t. I think that really led to the band falling apart in ’97,” Gorman said. “From the summer of ’89 until the summer of ’95, we never took a breath, we just stayed busy. Even when we weren’t touring we were just obsessed and thinking about the band.”
While the members were passionate about the band, he said, it also became a black cloud that took over everyone’s life.
Now, the group is finding balance to keep from falling apart, Gorman said. “Everyone’s in agreement. We love what we’re doing, but it’s also time to stop for a while.”
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