Features

Chris Robinson: Transit of the Binary Star

As the tour wound its way across the long state—putting 13,500 miles on the 15-seater van—the band made a name for themselves. The members grew beards, bought cowboy hats, and sounded tighter on each pass. The crowds grew bigger, and, by mid-May, they were packing into the San Francisco dance hall The Independent.

In June, the band took another warm-up run through California, then headed east to tour with the J. Geils Band—with Robinson stopping in Colorado to play a one-off acoustic trio gig with Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and young blues rock hotshot Jackie Greene.

The Brotherhood spent October and November zigzagging around America. They ended the year in San Francisco, with four shows at a Great American Music Hall festooned by (((folk yeah!))) in prayer flags, colored lights and assorted psychedelica. Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who had included Robinson in various Phil Lesh & Friends lineups during the last decade, sat in one night; Weir joined on another. Behind the band hung a huge red, purple and black American flag, with a strange, mutant letter F in a ring of stars—crafted by Forbes’ lady, the clothing and textile artist Heather McGee, the freaky Betsy Ross who sewed the flag of the nation that Robinson and company were declaring, Freak California.

***

Robinson assembled the Brotherhood to create a particular sound—or to create the particular conditions in which a sound could coalesce. First, he tapped MacDougall, the current Crowes keyboardist.

“Once there was any talk of puttin’ the Crowes on ice,” the keyboardist says, “he was like, ‘You and me—we’re gonna do something and it’ll be cool.’” An expatriate New Yorker, MacDougall is skinny. He’s got sandy, long hair and a close-cropped beard. He is a monster lead keyboard player, but like everyone in this band, he’s soft-spoken and easygoing. Onstage, he sometimes wears a top hat. On his right forearm, he’s got a tattoo of Possible Dust Clouds, the owl.

MacDougall playing was steeped in jazz and funk—electro-jazz pioneer Herbie Hancock and Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell are his heroes. Robinson “sculpted the keyboard seat” accordingly. No piano. No organ. Nothing that would sound like The Black Crowes.

“He said, ‘Let’s make it more like Herbie and Bernie.’ I was like, ‘Great—so let’s get a clavinet and a Mini-Moog [synthesizer], and a [Fender] Rhodes.’ It’s a whole different vibe than, like, a Wurlitzer.”

It was Luther Dickinson who brought George Sluppick in.

Robinson was looking for a drummer who could handle an eclectic fusion. “I’m really into Herbie Hancock, Mwandishi -era stuff and Mel Tillis records,” the singer says. “Gabor Szabo and The Stanley Brothers. To be able to have this jazz freedom, but then when we had to, an earth-driven shuffle.”

“Luther said that Chris was looking for somebody specific,” Sluppick says—someone for whom soul music resonated, and who “understood the differences between a country shuffle and a Chicago shuffle.” So Dickinson gave Robinson the new record by Sluppick’s organ trio, The City Champs. Robinson didn’t audition anyone else.

The drummer wears thick-rimmed glasses and, onstage, a cowboy hat. He played in Robert Walter’s 20th Congress and with MOFRO. He is no stranger to creating improvisational space.

“I’m not a jazz drummer,” he says, “but I listen to a lot of jazz, so I understand how to open up sections in a jazzier format. I think Chris is coming from more of a Grateful Dead sort of jammy thing. For me, that’s a challenge, to open up a section and let it get kind of spacey, but still have there be time goin’ on, you know? I’m gettin’ better at it, the more we do it.”

The bassist, Mark “Muddy” Dutton, had played with L.A. Guns, the glam metal band, and with ex-Crowes guitarist Marc Ford in Burning Tree. Now, he’s got a forearm tattoo of Captain Nebula in a chariot driving a team of seahorses.

“Muddy brings the real rock and roll element to it,” Robinson says. He turns to Dutton. “I wouldn’t say this was in your kind of wheelhouse, in terms of what you had been playing before this band.”

“That’s true,” Dutton says, and he looks up from his laptop. “A girl last night told me we were her new religion,” he marvels. Fans are following the band’s setlists, their imagery. Someone in Asbury Park, New Jersey, brought the band a latch-hook rug of one of Forbes’ logos—an eye with a star, below the initials CRB. For Dutton, it’s a new experience.

“I was just talking to somebody about that after a show, and they were talking about how we speak to each other onstage,” the bassist says. He’s surprised by fans who pay such close attention to, as Robinson puts it, their learning of each other’s dance moves.

Guitarist Neal Casal is a solo artist, and an alumnus of Ryan Adams’ alt-country outfit, The Cardinals. He’s long and skinny, too, and has a salt-and-peppery beard. He’s wearing a CRB T-shirt with the peace pipe logo that Robinson is having inlaid into a new guitar. He says he understands why people compare his playing to Jerry Garcia’s—but that’s not what he’s trying to do.

“If there’s anything similar, it’s only that my guitar playing is a reaction to things that I don’t like about rock guitar,” he says. “I’m at war with certain aspects of rock guitar that I eliminate from my playing—which is a lot of harsh, aggressive attitude and this forceful, rock stance that a lot of guitar players take. It’s really not my thing. I kind of go for something softer and more melodic.”