(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 12 April 2026 14:00, UK
When Mick Jagger first joined The Rolling Stones, you couldn’t say that they were the most original band in the world.
They were already making a name for themselves playing blues covers, and if it weren’t for The Beatles inspiring them to take writing seriously, who knows if they would have even got off the ground and started making their own masterpieces? But even if Jagger and Keith Richards became one of the best musical tandems that rock and roll had ever seen, they knew that they needed to push rock a little further than what they were seeing from the next generation.
Then again, there’s always going to be room for throwbacks in rock and roll. Some of the biggest bands of all time can’t help but wear their influences on their sleeve whenever they make new music, and it’s not like you couldn’t see Jagger trying to steal some moves from everyone fromJames Brown to Tina Turner when he started performing live. But when you get to the third and fourth waves of classic rock, he was starting to see a little bit of a problem in bands like The Black Crowes.
Granted, if we had to string up every band for sounding a little bit like The Stones, we would probably be here all day. There isn’t a single rock and roll band that hasn’t taken at least a little bit of inspiration from them, and even when you look at the other American giants like Kiss and Aerosmith, you can still hear a bit of Stonesy flair in the way that they structure their riffs. But the Crowes were something a lot different.
In fact, before grunge really hit, it looked like a band like The Black Crowes were going to be the next big thing in rock and roll. This rootsy approach to rock only may have been popular for half a second before Nirvana became the biggest band in the world, but it’s not like they didn’t have the chops to pull off a song like ‘Hard to Handle’ or ‘Twice as Hard’ when they stormed onto the radio.
But even if Jagger liked the direction that they were going in, he felt that The Crowes didn’t have that certain spice that made them stick out compared to every other retro band, saying, “As much as I admire new rock bands like The Black Crowes or whatever, they seem to be coming from some sort of time zone which I vaguely remember. I find it sort of interesting, but we’ve seen it all before. I’d prefer to see something that is either new and different or at least a mixture of things.”
And considering what they’ve done since then, that’s actually a fair argument to have. The band does have some stone-cold classics under their belt, like ‘She Talks to Angels’, but if you remove all of the legendary collaborations with Jimmy Page and two of their classic albums, they weren’t exactly looking to break new ground like any of the other bands coming out at the time, like Soundgarden or even Stone Temple Pilots.
In fact, their approach seemed to fit in more with Richards’s way of thinking whenever the Stones made a new record. Voodoo Lounge sounded great because it sounded like the band with a little more grit, and even if Jagger wanted to innovate and change with the times, that’s not always the best policy for a band that tried to switch up their styles before and even up with songs like ‘Miss You’.
Sometimes it’s better to stay in one’s lane, and even though The Black Crowes do have a solid following, no one’s asking them to become the next Beatles or Led Zeppelin by any stretch. They do fit the definition of being a one-trick pony, but that’s not exactly an insult if you’re actually really good at your one trick.
