But I Can Love You Better Than Him

Ah the peaky peaks and troughy troughs of teenage love, eh readers?

When I was 18, skinnier of trouser, paislier of shirt, more of an ingenue and infinitely less worldly and sophisticated than I am now, the world was a more emotional place. Love lurched at me from unexpected quarters and angles, often before receding like the tides before leaving me a sadder and (no) wiser man.

One day in the middle of a bout of emotional devastation THE LIKES OF WHICH NOBODY IN HUMAN HISTORY HAS EVER SUFFERED BEFORE OR SINCE* my mate Col leant me a tape that Kerrang! had said was good.

It was. Not only that but the first, the very first song on Shake Your Money Maker not only made me leap from my slough of despond but gave me a coping mechanism that I have employed to this very day when required – Strut it out, boy.

Action speaks louder than words
And I'm a man of great experience
I know you got another man
But I can love you better than him

Go Black Crowes! Go teenage 1537! Go Otis Redding (as I learned later)! ‘Hard To Handle’ is such a magnificent, deliriously cocksure, front-footed danceable strut that it still lights me up every time I hear it. I danced to it on a deserted station platform this morning in fact**. Pretty much my favourite rock song of the 90’s, released in only the second month of that decade.

From there Black Crowes accelerate into the bar band amphetamine blues of ‘Thick n Thin’ to exciting affect. Then we get ‘She Talks To Angels’ junkie spirituality which I still find very moving courtesy of a brilliant Chris Robinson vocal. The next couple of tracks are fine and noisy, but nowhere near as moving, the band hitting their straps hard throughout.

Shake Your Money Maker shook us on down on the flipside too. ‘Twice As Hard’ unfurls itself languorously but with some real intent. ‘Jealous Again’, another thematic fit for me in 1990, is a mid-paced toe tapper with some bonus key flourishes, courtesy of Chuck Leavell.

The Black Crowes then decide that the LP needs to finish uphill and we get three well sequenced tracks to pull that off. Starting with ‘Sister Luck’ another slow barn burning vocal tour de force, although the ‘playing second fiddle to a good man’ line didn’t chime too well with me back then. In another context ‘Could I’ve Been So Blind’ would be the weakest cut on the album, it just fits in here, especially as it accelerates into the home straight.

Then we finish it all with the still, soulful ‘Seeing Things’, which is just perfectly performed by everyone concerned, ending the album on a perfect note of hard won triumph and hope.

Except it didn’t.

---

When Col lent me Shake Your Money Maker he had played the first side and not rewound it, so when I first played it on my Walkman I heard it second side first, as described above. It stuck. The album just sounds utterly wrong to me as the band intended so when I copied it I did so second side first and it is the way I have always listened to it ever since.

So gentle reader your copy/experience of the album may have an utterly different narrative and mood, but hey, how wonderful music and art is that we can both co-exist.

Shake Your Money Maker is the absolute peak for the Black Crowes as far as I am concerned, they bore me after that to be frank, the odd cut aside. By the time I saw them on the Southern Harmony etc. tour they were already noodling up their own arses, only catching fire when playing a track from Shake Your Money Maker, or one of the new ones that sounded like it.

The band just sound so great and immediate on this record, props to producer man Mr Drakoulis, everyone playing up an absolute storm. Instrumentally the real star for me is drummer Steve Gorham who hits hard and precise throughout.

Strut it out, young man, you’re a better lover than he is they told me. It was the right answer for my fragile 18 year-old ego then and ever since. Olympic standard lover though I am, I could represent our galaxy at strutting, easily.

---

My copy of Shake Your Money Maker was bought a couple of months after it came out and is replete with marks from price stickers and all manner of wear and tear. It sounds good for 90’s vinyl, not as thin as LPs got later in the decade.

1233 Down.

PS: various cuttings from the Mighty Scrapbooks of Rock.

*my crush^ sat next to someone on the bus and was seen to laugh. How could she? when she should have known how much I had loved her since Tuesday, despite my never having spoken to her. God the memory stings to this very day!

^I’m deliberately not mentioning Sarah’s name here in order to protect her and her family from undue press attention following this post. True story.

**Spital station, if any future biographers want to try and source the CCTV footage from Merseyrail. I warn you now, it will need a 18 certificate, such is the raunch.