Black Crowes use shows to develop new material

By John Benson

When it came time for the Black Crowes to record the follow-up to its 2008 album “Warpaint,” the jam-band had an epiphany.

“What we do is we go make a record, we hit the road, and then the shape of those songs kind of find a new flavor a lot of times live,” said The Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman, calling from Nashville, Tenn. “So this time we thought, ‘Let’s eliminate that [studio] process and see how they feel and see how they shape up with people in the room and with everyone really being on their toes.’

“So this new album is just a continuation of that and a much, much riskier endeavor because we did it with a live audience. So the new album is new material but played live in front of a couple of hundred people each day.”

Recorded over a three-week period earlier this year, “Before the Frost…,” which is due out Sept. 1, found the Black Crowes working at Levon Helm’s Woodstock, N.Y., studio in a workingman’s fashion.

“We’d play Monday through Friday working up a bunch of new tunes, and then on the weekends we’d play the songs for people,” Gorman said. “The first week of shows we worked up I think 11 songs, and we would play them and say, ‘How’d that feel?’ And Paul Stacey, our producer, would say, ‘Yeah, run it down again’ or ‘That was great, leave it alone and come back later.’

“And there were starts and stops, and somebody would go out of tune or if something was a little too quick we’d stop it and start over. It was just trying to get to a point where we were getting solid takes, and we did enough of those over the five nights that we came up with almost 30 songs that felt pretty good.”

Among the new “Before the Frost …” songs fans attending The Black Crowes’ July 14 show at Amphitheatre at Station Square in Pittsburgh will be hearing are “Been A Long Time [Waiting on Love],” “Appaloosa” and “I Ain’t Hiding.”

Considering the wealth of material the band recorded, the Chris and Rich Robinson-led act is also making available an accompanying album called “… Until The Freeze” via the Internet using a specific download code from the purchase of “Before the Frost …”

Feeling confident about not only The Black Crowes’ history but its future, Gorman had this message for music fans who haven’t yet experienced the rock band in action.

“You know what, I don’t know a better rock ’n’ roll band to go see,” Gorman said. “And I think ‘Before the Frost …’ is a continuation of ‘Warpaint,’ which reestablished us as a band with a future. It’s something we were looking forward to, as it had been seven years since we made a record. So in the grand scheme of things, ‘Warpaint’ will go down as the record that turned the ship around, that showed we were looking forward.”