Amorica by The Black Crowes

Amorica (stylized as amorica.) is the third studio album by American rock band The Black Crowes. Spawned from the band's unreleased, scrapped album Tall, Amorica was released November 1, 1994 on American Recordings and reissued in the UK in 1998 with two bonus tracks. The record notably featured a cover that displayed a woman's crotch wearing a United States flag thong with pubic hair sticking out, taken from the cover of the July 1976 issue of Hustler magazine. The album was subsequently banned from chain stores like Walmart and Kmart, resulting in the cover being censored with a solid black background, displaying only the thong. Amorica reached gold status in the United States, shipping 500,000 copies. The Amorica album came as a re-recording of a previous Black Crowes project tentatively titled "Tall,” which was produced by Chris Robinson. Rich Robinson stated, “Chris and I got into a huge fight over it because he wanted to produce it and I’m like, no, but he did it anyway because the rest of the band was sort of on his side.” Chris also stated, “Rich obviously has his head up his ass about what 'Tall' was because I wanted to produce the band. I really wanted to take away the big Black Crowes sound, I mean, there were guitars there, but they weren’t the main thing...I had Jellyfish singing on a lot of things with me, big harmonies...and there were French horn players on there, and lots of percussionists, different things and Amorica is more Rich's ideas from "Tall" really and my ideas were kind of scraped off there.” (Classic Rock, July 2001) The "Tall" songs were released (featuring new mixes by Paul Stacey) as part of the 2006 compilation The Lost Crowes (the original mixes of the "Tall" material circulate on bootlegs). Other songs recorded during the Amorica sessions were "Feathers," "Tied Up and Swallowed" and "Chevrolet" (a Taj Mahal cover). These tracks were later released as b-sides, bonus tracks or on compilation albums.