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Chris Robinson: Transit of the Binary Star

Robinson is talking about Alan Forbes. The artist who drew the original drinkin’ and smokin’ pair of anthropomorphic crows for Shake Your Moneymaker —and much of the Crowes’ early imagery—had since become a lead artist in California’s new psychedelic movement. Robinson brought him back into the Crowes’ fold in the new era, then made him the Brotherhood’s iconographer—the keeper and designer of the band’s visual mythology.

“He’s like, ‘What do you want to do for the July [tour] poster?’” Robinson says, “and I said, ‘maybe like a Gulliver’s Travels kind of thing, where Captain Nebula is [Gulliver]—but instead of being tied down, the classic image, we have him pouring medicine and they’re chasing him to pour medicine into their cups. But instead of liquid coming out, stars are falling out.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. Alright.’ And then, 24 hours later, there’s a drawing of it—exactly what we were talking about. I’m like ‘That’s amazing!’”

Robinson laughs like a tickled sailor. He pulls out a mockup of the cover for The Magic Door, which will be the Brotherhood’s second studio album, following last May’s Big Moon Ritual. The cover, hand-inked in black line, is a play on Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut “Celestial Map of the Northern Sky,” employing the CRB’s menagerie of mythical creatures as constellations amid the zodiac. For Ursa Major, Forbes has drawn the mushroom-eating, unicorn-horned California state flag grizzly bear that adorned the group’s T-shirts last fall. Possible Dust Clouds appears in wizard guise in the top right corner, holding a heavenly sphere. Another wizard-god, a bearded eyeball, is in another corner. Inside—through the magic door (an allusion to Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf )—lies more tripped-out Forbes art: the eyeball as an Indian chief; an elf-eared lady, whom Robinson says Captain Nebula would call “his goddess;” and the owl again, this time in profile, with a unicorn horn protruding from his forehead.

It’s all being built by hand, hand-wired, drawn from scratch—this whole thing, which one might call a concept band.

There’s a logic to it.

“It’s the same idea, I think, as the music,” Robinson says. “We keep changing and tweaking and moving things around and writing new songs. It’s reciprocal, and all of it should reverberate—if that’s your inclination.”

Robinson believes that the synchrony between the band’s music and its visual representation—its mythology—is decidedly Californian, that the concert culture in California is different from other places.

“That you could put a band together and go to Felton, Calif., on a Tuesday night, pack the place out five or six times in a six-week period —with, like, three hundred people who are all feeling this same entheogen-driven, rhythmic thing—that’s not happening in Rhode Island.” He laughs. “No offense to Rhode Island.”

***

You could tell from the beginning that something was afoot in the Golden State. The first CRB tour was a two-month run in the spring of 2011, returning time and time again to a handful of small clubs up and down the state—the Echoplex in LA, Cafe du Nord in San Francisco, Soho in Santa Barbara, Casbah in San Diego, and Pappy and Harriet’s in the desert outside Joshua Tree. The hip new-psych/freak folk promoter Britt Govea’s (((folk yeah!))) put on many of the gigs. (Disclaimer: some of these were Relix -sponsored.)

It was a residency in the whole state, with the bear flag as backdrop. The tour ended at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur for two gigs with Howlin Rain. This was a band establishing itself, methodically, in the California independent psychedelic rock idiom.

At the first Cafe du Nord show, early in the tour, the dark, narrow basement room was packed with Crowes fans, local psych luminaries and Deadheads who, due to Robinson’s increasing forays into Grateful Dead orbit, had embraced the singer as their own.

Word from the first few shows was that this was a “Grateful Dead band.” The jams were long and spaced-out, Neal Casal’s guitar leads laid-back and melodic. They did, indeed, feel Garcia-esque. Robinson’s vocal approach was easygoing, too. He seemed relaxed, like this outing was a respite from life as a big rock star in a big rock band.

As the night drew long, the crowd thinned. There was no “She Talks to Angels,” no “Remedy.” It was a weeknight, after all. At one point, a girl who was perhaps seeing, in her mind’s eye, the androgynous, raven-haired snake dancer of yore, took advantage of a break in the music to scream out, “CHRIS! YOU’RE SO FUCKING SEXY!”

The blue-jeaned rhythm guitarist grinned, bemused, through his long beard, and said: “Thank you!”