Crowes put 3,000 in flight at Eagles set

Look up "derivative" in any dictionary and you'll find a picture of the Black Crowes.

It's not that the Atlanta sextet is a poor man's Rolling Stones, although Saturday's show at the Eagles Ballroom found them uncomfortably close to guilty as charged on more than a few occasions.

What the Crowes really are, though, is a young man's Rolling Stones. And now that the grandfatherly genuine article is doing $50-a-head stadium tours with an entourage of on-stage inflatables (not including Mick Jagger's lips and ego), there's a desperate need for a raucous, no- frills outfit like the Crowes to show a new generation how true raunchy rock 'n' roll is done.

The Crowes' music is shot- through with time-honored influences, often in the same song: Delta blues; gospel; Southern boogie blues-rock; loopy stoner jams; even Latin rhythms in the brilliant new "High Head Blues." Saturday, before a near-capacity crowd of 3,000, they even created a few genres of their own, including the instrumental Middle Eastern-hillbilly-trance space jam of "My Morning Song."

As usual, spoke-legged lead singer Chris Robinson was the riveting focal point, twitching, strutting and dancing with his microphone stand like the unholy squalling spawn of a menage a trois between Jagger, Rod Stewart and Aerosmith's Steven Tyler (complete with a Jaggeresque devil crawling around on the equipment during "High Head Blues").

But for all of Robinson's preening, cocksure charisma, the Crowes aren't just a backing band for their frontman's antics. Punched up by house lights, "Twice As Hard" was one of the evening's highlights, with snarling guitar lines and rich organ chords that suggest some serious Allman Brothers damage at a young and impressionable age.

While the Crowes' live show is as impeccable as always, the puzzling aspect to their formerly high-flying career is that while their third and latest album "Amorica," ranks as their most cohesive, daring and mature efforts to date, it didn't catch fire beyond the single "A Conspiracy" and peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard charts before sinking like a stone to its current No. 179.

So it was disappointing, though not surprising, that the part of Saturday's set reviewed before deadline drew heavily from the group's first two albums (including the songs "Sting Me," "Hotel Illness," "Sometimes Salvation" and "Tied Up & Swallowed," the latter an outtake from their second album, "The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion").

The only true drawback to Saturday's show was its location. The Crowes' loose-limbed, sprawling songs and Robinson's histrionic delivery tend to sound alike, a quality that was exacerbated by the atrocious acoustics in the Eagles Ballroom.

The muddy sound was even harder on Saturday's opening act, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. The eight-man New Orleans concert hall jazz band displayed the proper party spirit in opening for the Dirty Half-Dozen that is the Crowes. But they ultimately ended up sounding like a brass band inside a tin can, with all of the sly rhythmic interplay between the horn lines reduced to Sousaphone-fueled mush.

Copyright 1995
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