Album of the Day-May 13
The Black Crowes — Shake Your Money Maker
The Black Crowes — Shake Your Money Maker
13.May.2020
The Black Crowes
Shake Your Money Maker
1990
The Black Crowes, Chris and Rich Robinson at this point will be taking their debut album out on the road this summer to celebrate its 30th anniversary…provided Covid-19 doesn’t make the tour go tits up.
Shake Your Money Maker, produced by George Drakoulias, was released in February of 1990, which would prove to be an interesting year in music, to say the least.
By then, college rock bands like R.E.M. and The Replacements had been co-opted by multi-national record labels.
MTV had launched Unplugged — which would go on to become a genre unto itself.
The last decent rock and roll band, Guns-n-Roses, had become knee-deep in drugs and a myriad of tumult.
And the forthcoming tsunami of grunge emerged in August with the Alice in Chains debut album Facelift.
The minute you heard the muddy opening riff to “Twice as Hard”, inviting you in — like any hospitable southerner would (The Black Crowes were from Georgia) — you were hearing something old, yet new…something different, yet the same. In any case, it was something that made you turn up the volume.
The single “Jealous Again” put the band on the map and showed the world that it may have been 1990, but as far as Chris Robinson was concerned it was 1970. That is to say, he’s a timeless lead singer. The cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” pushed the album into the mainstream. And then it was the ballad, “She Talks to Angels” that catapulted Shake Your Money Maker into multi-platinum status.
Those were the hits…not the best songs on the record.
“Could I’ve Been So Blind” is a battle cry of determination built upon frustration and anger. While I never quite wrapped my head around the car crash intro, “Thick and Thin” is anything but a car wreck of a song…it fucking kills.
The album closes with two songs loaded with more killer riffs and bluster and bravado than most bands could hope to write in an entire career, “Struttin Blues” and “Stare it Cold.” The album finishes so strongly it practically begs for an encore.
In 1990, The Black Crowes got a lot of shit for Shake Your Money Maker. Many critics poo-poo’d the album saying it sounded like an imitation of The Faces or peak-era Rolling Stones, but the truth is, the album is its own thing. Because here it is 30 years later and the album sounds just as fresh as it did in 1990 and 1970…had it been released then.
You see, great albums can cut across decades, regardless of the decade they were recorded in, The Black Crowes Shake Your Money Maker happens to be one of those records.