War of the Crowes

Chris says that since he and rich restarted the Crowes, "the thing that ties us together — the music — is stronger." After a few false starts at writing together again, the brothers whipped up the ten original songs on Warpaint shortly before the sessions in Woodstock, New York, last summer. The Robinsons, Pipien, longtime drummer Steve Gorman, keyboard player Adam MacDougall and new guitarist Luther Dickinson made the whole record inside of three weeks, cutting luminous bruisers such as "We Who See the Deep," "Evergreen" and the freak-nation anthem "Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution" mostly live in the studio.

"Chris and Rich have a great collaboration going," says Dickinson, 35, who is the son of legendary musician-producer Jim Dickinson and who also plays with his brother Cody in the North Mississippi Allstars. "All my life, my dad told me stories about the Stones at Muscle Shoals. He saw how they worked, that the first complete take is it — chaos, chaos, chaos, magic! That's the way Warpaint went."

"That's the payoff for everything else," Chris says of the new record, with a mix of triumph and relief. "It's incredible, the amount of quality shows we've done, the songs Rich and I have written, for two people who have a hard time being in the same room. I don't think it has anything to do with love. Rich and I are doing this for ourselves — we always felt it was us versus them. I can't believe that isn't in rock & roll anymore. What happened to a little defiance against any system? Anyone tries to lay their fucking thing on you, man — you don't want to do it."

There is still, as he puts it, "the stuff that keeps us apart — it's like earthquakes in Los Angeles," says Chris, who lives there now. "You don't talk about them. When one rears its beastly head, well, so it does. How do I fucking deal with this? I don't know. I know Rich would say the same thing."

Basically, he does. "I love that song," Rich says of "Torn and Frayed," a week after recording it with his brother. "When we connect on those levels, we connect. We feel the same things. It's funny. After Amorica" — the Crowes' third album, released in 1994 — "we were ready to split up. We fucking hated each other. But then we toured with the Stones, and Chris and I shared a moment we hadn't had since we were kids — the two of us standing, listening, behind Keith Richards' amps. The shit left, and we were watching the people who moved us in such a profound way.

"Outside of music, we probably would never speak to each other," Rich says, laughing, something he does a lot when Chris is not around. "That's the way it is."

In his hotel room, with his hair parted in American Indian-style braids and E Pluribus Unum, the 1968 album by raga-folk guitarist Sandy Bull, playing in the background, Chris runs down who gets what from which side of the family. "I'm totally built like my mom's people, the Bradleys from Tennessee — tall and thin," he says. "The Robinson side is more like my brother. His shoulders are twice as broad as mine. My dad's a big guy too.

"My dad's gregarious and social, and I have that part of him — the humor," Chris goes on. He says their mother, Nancy, "is sarcastic and dry. Most people would say I have my mom's temperament. And my mom and dad — I don't think they can say where Rich is from." Chris laughs but sounds like he is only half-kidding.

Rich agrees that he takes after his father, but not just in frame: "There is a warmth to Dad they don't see in me, because I'm pretty shy. But he's a caring person, and I've always been sensitive — oversensitive a lot of the time. My face is pretty stoic onstage. People say, 'He's an asshole. He looks angry.' I'm literally just listening, trying to hear the whole band.

"If you're stuck in a family with two brothers, it's a pain in the ass," Rich says bluntly. "There are no sisters, just me and Chris. We are opposite spokes on a wheel. The hub is where we want to be." When they meet there, Rich insists, "it brings us both a lot of joy. There is harmony — literally."

There was mostly silence from January 2002, when the Black Crowes officially announced a "hiatus," until March 2005, when the band played seven sold-out shows at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom. Chris has a shopping list of reasons why he left the group, including tensions within the band ("No one was happy"), his impatience ("I didn't think we were working enough — there wasn't enough music") and changes in his personal life. On New Year's Eve 2000, Chris married actress Kate Hudson. By 2001, he had also ended "a druggy period of my life. I had all this extra energy. I needed to do something that had nothing to do with the Black Crowes."

The one thing Chris cannot say about the split is how Rich reacted to the sudden end of their band. "I don't know," Chris confesses. "We didn't speak for a couple of years. I said, 'See ya later,' and that was it. But we don't talk a lot anyway."

"I was pretty blindsided," Rich says, sitting in the Manhattan office of a friend's book-publishing company. "There were hints. But all of a sudden it was 'I'm not going to do this anymore. We're going to call it a hiatus.' I remember he said that." The two did not speak again until January 2004. "Chris called me the day Ryder" — Chris and Hudson's son — "was born. It was great to be an uncle." (Rich, who lives in Connecticut, has two sons by a previous marriage.) Chris and Hudson divorced in 2006. "It was hard," the singer says. "But we're friends, and we created another life together."