It’s Friday the 13th. A thick orange firesmoke cloud hangs over the Rocky Mountains like a dust starship. The high plains are as hot as the devil’s breath on the back of his hand. A long white bus rolls into Denver.

Aboard are the members of a rising young psychedelic band out of California, the CRB. Their totems are the gnome-like space traveler Captain Nebula, and a supernatural guiding owl named Possible Dust Clouds.

Deep in the heart of the bus, the outfit’s bearded commander sits beside a stack of vinyl LPs acquired in some suburban wayside. He’s flipping through back issues of Heavy Metal, the sci-fi/fantasy comic magazine from the late 1970s. He finds an image he likes – a naked girl, with big hair, entwined in a graphic zephyr, against a field of blue. He carefully pulls the page out and posts it high on the fake wood wall beside an old black-and-white shot of Howlin’ Wolf with a guitar and a bottle of booze, and a color photograph of Elvis Presley.

Across the way, the blind hard-bop saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk stands black-bereted in shadow, slung with his arsenal of giant horns. Conway Twitty hangs above the stereo, one eyebrow raised, as if he’s keeping everybody in line. It’s that kind of bus.

The captain is a voracious consumer of culture. A singer, guitarist and songwriter, he’s flipping through records, shuffling through the magazines, rattling off a mystifying roll of musicians and novelists. He’s preparing for a gig and conducting an interview, and all of the time, he’s listening to Dolphins Into The Future, the weird, organic electronica burbling out of the speakers, which seems to speed up or slow down with his discussion. It is as if he is wired to the bus, a holographic construct of the mega-computer at its heart.

Now, as the long, white tube motors out of Denver’s skyscraper zone and toward the slightly more desolate Five Points, the singer is talking about The Ice Trilogy, a post-Cold War sci-fi fantasy by Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin. According to The London Review of Books :

The Ice Trilogy is devoted to the fortunes of an apocalyptic Brotherhood whose members believe they are bodily incarnations of a primordial light. But they are only made aware of their true identity by being ‘awakened,’ in a process that involves being bashed in the chest with a hammer made of ice – and not ordinary ice but ice from the Tunguska meteorite that supposedly landed in eastern Siberia in 1908…The Brotherhood’s goal is for all its members to return to their incorporeal state, which will also coincidentally destroy the world – a cosmic error they are destined to correct. But they can only do this once they have located and ‘awakened’ 23,000 brothers and sisters, and united them for a final, cataclysmic ritual.

Tonight, at 11 p.m. mountain time, a massive solar flare is expected to cross the earth. Tonight, the members of the Chris Robinson Brotherhood take the stage.

When The Black Crowes reunited after a handful of years off and eventually recorded 2008’s Warpaint, the band included keyboardist Adam MacDougall and North Mississippi Allstars guitar whiz Luther Dickinson. The Crowes’ new sound was rootsy and sepia-toned; their imagery veering to railroads and goldmines and mules. This was American folk rock – an amped-up western blues and gospel, with licks of psychedelia. Spacemen and mushrooms popped up on the record cover – among a stampeding posse of banditos and desperados, cowboys and Indians, wizards and skeletons.

In 2009, the band recorded the double-live/studio hybrid Before The Frost/Until The Freeze – with an audience – at Levon Helm’s barn in Woodstock, N.Y. The psychedelic fantasy watercolorist Arik Roper painted the covers. In 2010, they re-recorded Crowes classics (and one Gram Parsons tune, “She” ) as acoustic numbers for another double record, Croweology, released in celebration of their 20th anniversary. When they toured, they billed the show as “Say Goodbye to the Bad Guys,” and then they hung up their spurs.

And even as that last tour was still rolling – with the Crowes at the top of their game, cementing their place as The Last Great American Rock Band – Chris Robinson was booking a two-month tour up and down and up and down the Golden State for the new band he was cooking up with MacDougall – the name, lineup and carefully considered iconography of which were all still works in progress.

Now, the brown-bearded singer (and songwriter, and now rhythm guitarist) is chilling on one of the brown leather built-in couches that run down either side of the tour bus. He’s wearing a tie-dyed polo shirt, faded nearly to white. Next to him, bassist Mark “Muddy” Dutton mans the ship’s computer, his hair a mass of brown coils, his face a scraggled beard.

Robinson is talking about Alan Forbes. The artist who drew the original drinkin’ and smokin’ pair of anthropomorphic crows for Shake Your Moneymaker – and much of the Crowes’ early imagery – had since become a lead artist in California’s new psychedelic movement. Robinson brought him back into the Crowes’ fold in the new era, then made him the Brotherhood’s iconographer – the keeper and designer of the band’s visual mythology.

“He’s like, ‘What do you want to do for the July [tour] poster?’” Robinson says, “and I said, ‘maybe like a Gulliver’s Travels kind of thing, where Captain Nebula is [Gulliver] – but instead of being tied down, the classic image, we have him pouring medicine and they’re chasing him to pour medicine into their cups. But instead of liquid coming out, stars are falling out.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. Alright.’ And then, 24 hours later, there’s a drawing of it – exactly what we were talking about. I’m like ‘That’s amazing!’”

Robinson laughs like a tickled sailor. He pulls out a mockup of the cover for The Magic Door, which will be the Brotherhood’s second studio album, following last May’s Big Moon Ritual. The cover, hand-inked in black line, is a play on Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut “Celestial Map of the Northern Sky,” employing the CRB’s menagerie of mythical creatures as constellations amid the zodiac. For Ursa Major, Forbes has drawn the mushroom-eating, unicorn-horned California state flag grizzly bear that adorned the group’s T-shirts last fall. Possible Dust Clouds appears in wizard guise in the top right corner, holding a heavenly sphere. Another wizard-god, a bearded eyeball, is in another corner. Inside – through the magic door (an allusion to Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf ) – lies more tripped-out Forbes art: the eyeball as an Indian chief; an elf-eared lady, whom Robinson says Captain Nebula would call “his goddess;” and the owl again, this time in profile, with a unicorn horn protruding from his forehead.

It’s all being built by hand, hand-wired, drawn from scratch – this whole thing, which one might call a concept band.

There’s a logic to it.

“It’s the same idea, I think, as the music,” Robinson says. “We keep changing and tweaking and moving things around and writing new songs. It’s reciprocal, and all of it should reverberate – if that’s your inclination.”

Robinson believes that the synchrony between the band’s music and its visual representation – its mythology – is decidedly Californian, that the concert culture in California is different from other places.

“That you could put a band together and go to Felton, Calif., on a Tuesday night, pack the place out five or six times in a six-week period – with, like, three hundred people who are all feeling this same entheogen-driven, rhythmic thing – that’s not happening in Rhode Island.” He laughs. “No offense to Rhode Island.”

You could tell from the beginning that something was afoot in the Golden State. The first CRB tour was a two-month run in the spring of 2011, returning time and time again to a handful of small clubs up and down the state – the Echoplex in LA, Cafe du Nord in San Francisco, Soho in Santa Barbara, Casbah in San Diego, and Pappy and Harriet’s in the desert outside Joshua Tree. The hip new-psych/freak folk promoter Britt Govea’s (((folk yeah!))) put on many of the gigs. (Disclaimer: some of these were Relix -sponsored.)

It was a residency in the whole state, with the bear flag as backdrop. The tour ended at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur for two gigs with Howlin Rain. This was a band establishing itself, methodically, in the California independent psychedelic rock idiom.

At the first Cafe du Nord show, early in the tour, the dark, narrow basement room was packed with Crowes fans, local psych luminaries and Deadheads who, due to Robinson’s increasing forays into Grateful Dead orbit, had embraced the singer as their own.

Word from the first few shows was that this was a “Grateful Dead band.” The jams were long and spaced-out, Neal Casal’s guitar leads laid-back and melodic. They did, indeed, feel Garcia-esque. Robinson’s vocal approach was easygoing, too. He seemed relaxed, like this outing was a respite from life as a big rock star in a big rock band.

As the night drew long, the crowd thinned. There was no “She Talks to Angels,” no “Remedy.” It was a weeknight, after all. At one point, a girl who was perhaps seeing, in her mind’s eye, the androgynous, raven-haired snake dancer of yore, took advantage of a break in the music to scream out, “CHRIS! YOU’RE SO FUCKING SEXY!”

The blue-jeaned rhythm guitarist grinned, bemused, through his long beard, and said: “Thank you!”

As the tour wound its way across the long state – putting 13,500 miles on the 15-seater van – the band made a name for themselves. The members grew beards, bought cowboy hats, and sounded tighter on each pass. The crowds grew bigger, and, by mid-May, they were packing into the San Francisco dance hall The Independent.

In June, the band took another warm-up run through California, then headed east to tour with the J. Geils Band – with Robinson stopping in Colorado to play a one-off acoustic trio gig with Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and young blues rock hotshot Jackie Greene.

The Brotherhood spent October and November zigzagging around America. They ended the year in San Francisco, with four shows at a Great American Music Hall festooned by (((folk yeah!))) in prayer flags, colored lights and assorted psychedelica. Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who had included Robinson in various Phil Lesh & Friends lineups during the last decade, sat in one night; Weir joined on another. Behind the band hung a huge red, purple and black American flag, with a strange, mutant letter F in a ring of stars – crafted by Forbes’ lady, the clothing and textile artist Heather McGee, the freaky Betsy Ross who sewed the flag of the nation that Robinson and company were declaring, Freak California.

Robinson assembled the Brotherhood to create a particular sound – or to create the particular conditions in which a sound could coalesce. First, he tapped MacDougall, the current Crowes keyboardist.

“Once there was any talk of puttin’ the Crowes on ice,” the keyboardist says, “he was like, ‘You and me – we’re gonna do something and it’ll be cool.’” An expatriate New Yorker, MacDougall is skinny. He’s got sandy, long hair and a close-cropped beard. He is a monster lead keyboard player, but like everyone in this band, he’s soft-spoken and easygoing. Onstage, he sometimes wears a top hat. On his right forearm, he’s got a tattoo of Possible Dust Clouds, the owl.

MacDougall playing was steeped in jazz and funk – electro-jazz pioneer Herbie Hancock and Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell are his heroes. Robinson “sculpted the keyboard seat” accordingly. No piano. No organ. Nothing that would sound like The Black Crowes.

“He said, ‘Let’s make it more like Herbie and Bernie.’ I was like, ‘Great – so let’s get a clavinet and a Mini-Moog [synthesizer], and a [Fender] Rhodes.’ It’s a whole different vibe than, like, a Wurlitzer.”

It was Luther Dickinson who brought George Sluppick in.

Robinson was looking for a drummer who could handle an eclectic fusion. “I’m really into Herbie Hancock, Mwandishi -era stuff and Mel Tillis records,” the singer says. “Gabor Szabo and The Stanley Brothers. To be able to have this jazz freedom, but then when we had to, an earth-driven shuffle.”

“Luther said that Chris was looking for somebody specific,” Sluppick says – someone for whom soul music resonated, and who “understood the differences between a country shuffle and a Chicago shuffle.” So Dickinson gave Robinson the new record by Sluppick’s organ trio, The City Champs. Robinson didn’t audition anyone else.

The drummer wears thick-rimmed glasses and, onstage, a cowboy hat. He played in Robert Walter’s 20th Congress and with MOFRO. He is no stranger to creating improvisational space.

“I’m not a jazz drummer,” he says, “but I listen to a lot of jazz, so I understand how to open up sections in a jazzier format. I think Chris is coming from more of a Grateful Dead sort of jammy thing. For me, that’s a challenge, to open up a section and let it get kind of spacey, but still have there be time goin’ on, you know? I’m gettin’ better at it, the more we do it.”

The bassist, Mark “Muddy” Dutton, had played with L.A. Guns, the glam metal band, and with ex-Crowes guitarist Marc Ford in Burning Tree. Now, he’s got a forearm tattoo of Captain Nebula in a chariot driving a team of seahorses.

“Muddy brings the real rock and roll element to it,” Robinson says. He turns to Dutton. “I wouldn’t say this was in your kind of wheelhouse, in terms of what you had been playing before this band.”
“That’s true,” Dutton says, and he looks up from his laptop. “A girl last night told me we were her new religion,” he marvels. Fans are following the band’s setlists, their imagery. Someone in Asbury Park, New Jersey, brought the band a latch-hook rug of one of Forbes’ logos – an eye with a star, below the initials CRB. For Dutton, it’s a new experience.
“I was just talking to somebody about that after a show, and they were talking about how we speak to each other onstage,” the bassist says. He’s surprised by fans who pay such close attention to, as Robinson puts it, their learning of each other’s dance moves.

Guitarist Neal Casal is a solo artist, and an alumnus of Ryan Adams’ alt-country outfit, The Cardinals. He’s long and skinny, too, and has a salt-and-peppery beard. He’s wearing a CRB T-shirt with the peace pipe logo that Robinson is having inlaid into a new guitar. He says he understands why people compare his playing to Jerry Garcia’s – but that’s not what he’s trying to do.

“If there’s anything similar, it’s only that my guitar playing is a reaction to things that I don’t like about rock guitar,” he says. “I’m at war with certain aspects of rock guitar that I eliminate from my playing – which is a lot of harsh, aggressive attitude and this forceful, rock stance that a lot of guitar players take. It’s really not my thing. I kind of go for something softer and more melodic.”

Casal admits that, at early CRB gigs, he was a reluctant lead player. But you could sense him, throughout the course of 2011, becoming more comfortable with grabbing the wheel. He kept a Les Paul onstage as a backup, and everyone kept asking him, “Why don’t you play the Les Paul?” He compares the experience to being a samurai, waiting for the right moment in his training, when he is worthy enough to draw the magic sword. The hammer of ice.

He is mindful of serving the Brotherhood’s needs – especially singing the tight, brother-team-style close harmonies with Robinson – and with MacDougall and Dutton. But he’s also trying to give Robinson space.

“One of the more exciting things for him is to take his guitar playing further,” says Casal. “Obviously, we all know what he can do as a singer. And we all know what he can do as a songwriter, too. He has the ability at any moment to come in with a great song. But his guitar playing is newer territory for him. So, apart from being the lead player, I really do my best to give him a lot of support as a rhythm player, so he can find his way.”

Robinson says the band members rarely talk about their musical intentions. They just all move in similar directions. “The one thing that we really discussed in this band is: the CRB, we never rock,” he says. “This band swings .”

He scats a swingin’ groove. P-tut, p-poop, p-ta, p-toop.

“For Muddy to hold that down with George – and then, there’s Adam over there, who’s like in his own fuckin’ spaceship, who one minute is like, you know, phosphorescent Ray Charles, and in the next minute he’s like Garth Hudson, and then like some weird robotic Moon Mulligan or something.”

He talks about the keyboard setup, then turns to the guitarists’ roles.

“I’m a rhythmic guitar player,” he says, “and Neal’s so eloquent, melodic and beautiful. I’m more, like, punchy and…”
“Percussive,” Dutton says.
“Yeah,” Robinson says. “Definitely.”

Cervantes’ Masterpiece in Denver is a sort of old West dance hall – a big square room, ringed with balconies. The finish is worn off the floor in front of the bar. In one spot, the narrow floorboards are falling through. An enormous disco ball hangs like a moon.

It’s sound check time and Robinson wants to run through the soul ballad “Do Right Woman.” Aretha Franklin had a hit with it in 1967, but the Brotherhood’s take is a fairly straight read on the Flying Burrito Brothers’ version, released in 1969 on the seminal cosmic country album The Gilded Palace of Sin.

In the vacant hall, you can hear every nuance of Robinson’s vocals. His voice breaks with emotion where Parsons’ does. But when the country arrangement yields to the soul bridge, “They say that it’s a man’s world/ But you can’t prove that by me,” Robinson is even more convincing. Of course, Robinson is a mature soul singer, with a twenty-year career notched into his belt. Parsons died at 25, in 1973, in Joshua Tree.

He’s something of a lodestar for Robinson.

“Country rock was one of my first real loves,” Robinson says on the bus. “I was a Byrds fanatic, and, as a Byrds fanatic, I was a Sweetheart of the Rodeo fanatic. Gram was my bridge to the Stones.”

He says he’s always been drawn to the fractured ones – Parsons, Syd Barrett, Alex Chilton, Skip Spence.

“And I think Gram being from Georgia – that was a big connection, as well. A guy from Georgia who went off and…”

He stops himself.

“I wouldn’t really have been romantic about his demise,” he says. “I just always felt those records were so cool. I can listen to the originators of those styles and get just as much. But I like the bastardization of this glittery, stoned, beautiful amalgamation of music that comes together in a transient place like Los Angeles – that still, again, we’re here today and people are still interested in it.”

The band runs through “Badlands Here We Come,” a cowboy tune. Robinson leaves the stage and stands out front as the others keep tinkering.

“I just think we should do a little riff here together,” Casal tells MacDougall, and he flat-picks a Knopfler-esque run. He tries it a few more times. Robinson sings out his suggestion from the floor. MacDougall tries it on the clavinet. He’s skeptical. They play it again and again, until they lock it down.

That night, nearly a thousand people pack the hall. There are more Dead shirts than Crowes shirts.

The Chris Robinson Brotherhood come out stomping, with Hank Ballard’s early rock and roller “Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go” – which opens The Magic Door – and they never let up. After a year and a half of touring, the band is super-tight, especially on the vocal harmonies. They do “Tomorrow Blues” from Big Moon Ritual. The rhythm section thumps it in, then MacDougall’s Mini-Moog whistles across. Indeed, its sound is the band’s signature.

“Badlands Here We Come” comes off as an eerie, supernatural western. The new riff comes around and Casal hits it the first time. He’s playing the Les Paul. On the second run, he and MacDougall nail it together.

They play “Star or Stone,” a mournful ballad that alludes to Judas – a song of betrayal, from the betrayer’s point of view (it could well be about dissolving the Crowes). They snort into Mel Tillis’ “Goodbye, Wheeling,” and “Roll Old Jeremiah,” from Until The Freeze. They’re playing to the place – to Colorado.

At around the time the solar flare hits earth, “Do Right Woman” unfolds into space, and segues into the super laid-back groove of “Tulsa Yesterday,” from Big Moon Ritual. It is a perfect cowboy set.

The second set opens with Bobby Mitchell’s “Try Rock N Roll,” from 1956. Robinson doesn’t sound like he’s faking it. And it’s a rock set. When they get to Three Dog Night’s “Never Been to Spain,” with the band deep in the pocket and all singing the verses in rollicking harmony, Robinson is in full throat.

“Vibration and Light Suite,” which appears on The Magic Door as a full psychedelic cycle, bends the Dead’s “Eyes of the World” groove back toward Marvin Gaye. “Ride,” from Robinson’s solo debut New Earth Mud, is a gospel-funk cataclysm.

People get ready to die
People get ready to ride

Robinson spits the lyrics like a machine gun.

The audience hoots and whistles, like a thousand hearts hammered.

“Rosalee,” from Big Moon Ritual, is a bounding, hooky dance tune. But two-thirds through, it melts down completely into space noise.

It’s all downhill
To the beach from here

This, Robinson explains backstage, is the entheogenic ritual at the beach. This is the California.

Phil Lesh is speaking by phone from his house by the beach, in Marin County, California. “The thing that Chris brings,” he says, “besides that wonderful voice, and all of the songs that he’s written, is he brings that encyclopedic knowledge of American music. He can reach way back and pull out some stuff that I’d never heard before, or he can help me remember songs,” like Fred Neil’s lost psych classic “The Dolphins,” “He’s an ideal participant in the Ramble kind of concept of what I’m trying to do.”

Robinson has been affiliated with the Dead since The Black Crowes joined the Furthur tour in 1997. The men have grown close. Robinson, Lesh says, is a kindred spirit – “a thinking singer.” His voracious reading, his interest in so many disparate subjects, remind Lesh of Garcia. And when Lesh opened his new club, Terrapin Crossroads, he invited Robinson to participate in the first few handfuls of shows – including the rambles Lesh styled after those at Levon Helm’s barn.

Robinson regards Lesh as family – as a brother, an uncle, a mentor. Likewise, Weir. Robinson toured this year with Weir and Greene, in a three-man acoustic guitar pull – a song circle, done with very little fanfare. The CRB also play a few Dead tunes live. It’s one of the things Robinson had meant for this band to do.

Lesh says that the Brotherhood, if it is in some way a response to Grateful Dead, is the best kind of response – that Robinson has studied the structures that lie beneath the music, that he has a deep understanding of how it works. It’s not mindless jamming.

“Jerry, Phil, Bob and all those guys listened to a lot of music, and they read a lot of books,” Robinson says. “I think, in terms of these archetypal sorts of pieces, maybe that’s what Phil means. Because I have an understanding of Memphis jug-band music. I can see where that is a piece of the Grateful Dead at different times in their inspiration over the years, and I can get into [composers] Terry Riley and [Karlheinz] Stockhausen and I see where Seastones fits into Phil’s thing just as much as ‘Unbroken Chain.’ Some of that is just, like, these genetic building blocks of rock music. Phil likes Fats Domino just as much as he likes Stockhausen. That’s where we’re coming from, as well.”

Robinson seems to have used the Dead’s ethos – the knowing fusion of musical traditions, the improvisation and the culture – as a model for how to start a new band from helpings of electrofunk, doo-wop, Southern soul, cowboy music and dripping psychedelia.

If the first record felt like the band’s live shows – and if there’s a Dead-like sonic imprint – then The Magic Door, which is a bit more produced, feels like the work of a band whose sound has successfully outgrown the appropriated patterns into something distinct: a flying cosmic jukebox fueled by old vinyl and arcane knowledge. A cowboy choir that can take it to the sock hop or the sub-ether.

This, Robinson says, is the deepest collaboration that he’s ever worked in. He is relishing the freedom outside his career in The Black Crowes, outside of show business – the freedom to start a new band as if he were a kid again.

The digital tripnotica in the background winds down to a low tone, as if it is punctuation in the cyberpsychic computer that runs in synch with Robinson’s program. He tells a joke, and the music seems to laugh along with him.

“I read in an Arthur magazine interview years ago that Ethan [Miller, of Comets on Fire and Howlin Rain] said that he liked psychedelic music,” Robinson says. “That he knew that handmade, acid, communal experience that everyone was sharing made it real. And that’s what interests me, as well. I mean, here we are – it’s just us. We load our own gear, we unload our own gear, we pack up, we only get hotel rooms on days off, we live on this bus, we play fuckin’ over three hours a night, and we get up and we go to the next one. And we’re on our second year. There are no guitar techs; there’s no lighting director. It’s just us still and we’re more interested in it and more in love with what we’re doing than we were when we realized last year, like, ‘Wow. This is good, you know? This is fun, too.’”