The Black Crowes

Live At The Greek

Attention Critics: Rock Still Has A Pulse

Review Score:

(10/10)
Hark! Yet another loud bomb in the faces of those who jumped on the "rock is dead" bandwagon. Haven't we heard enough of that stale claim? For fifty years, rock has endured through nightmarish bouts with cencorship, greedy commercialism and other enemies, but it pulled out of that decade and blossomed into the electric religion that it became in the 60's with the advent of the first rock supergroups ever: Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, CSNY, the list expands infinitely onward.

Even after slick popsters tried to kill it it the 80's with synthesizers, pink hair, quirky songwriting and disco, rock survived with a vengeance, as Live At The Greek shows. This album, certainly the finest rock album of the year, is perhaps rock's most furious call for attention since Crazy Horse's own dobule live album, 'Weld," released in 1991. Ironically, the tireless intensity pervading Live at the Greek hasn't blown over the world of rock since Led Zeppelin's "Physical graffitti" of 1975. How many more albums like Live at the Greek need to surface before fans and critics alike respect rock for the undying institution that it is? No, rock is not dead, nor will it ever be.

While some may have conveniently looked the other way, one evening in the fall of 1999, Jimmy Page, heralded as the greatest guitarist to arise from the musical maelstrom ofthe 1960's, took to a stage somewhere in LA and tore the lid right off of the theater. As if to top his resurrection of rock with a glowing cherry, Page teamed up with a group of younger guys who understand, the Black Crowes, who stolidly deny the intervention of any pop production or commercialism into their purpose: to create raw, gritty rock 'n roll at a time when many record executives are far more interested in calculating the dollar signs tattooed on the legs of Britney Spears, or on the carefully beautified faces of that ceaseless stream of "Boyz."

As if to say "to hell with all that," page strapped on his guitar and thrashed away, Crowes frontman Chris Robinson squealed, moaned and bellowed the old Plant anthems, while his band plucked their mandolins, guitars and made their organs sing like it was their last hour on Earth; just like it used to be when Hendrix danced around a stage-fire at Woodstock, when Dylan took his amps and electric guitars to the folk festival in 1965, when Neil Young crooned 'Hey Hey My My Rock n Roll Will never Die" to raving audiences mowing through stashes of beer and cigarettes.

Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes took to the stage one fall evening in LA in the name of what is good, and their achievement, documented here on Live at the Greek, stands as an altar to those long-gone but not forgotten days when rock WAS pop music.

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