“Two thousand fifteen was — as the year’s just a few grains left in the hourglass now — it was awesome,” reports Chris Robinson, the namesake of the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, on the year’s nearing end. It was a year jam-packed with shows, and though the band had no new material to support, the Brotherhood is bigger than ever. The group is wrapping up the show-studded year with a winter West Coast tour, featuring their beloved Santa Barbara at the Lobero Theatre Thursday, December 10. With a new album of live recordings released this year, Betty’s Blends Vol. 2: Best From the West, and a busy tour schedule behind and ahead, it’s fitting that, come New Year’s Eve, they will be straddling the interstitial space between years upon a Denver stage.
The Chris Robinson Brotherhood isn't so much a commercial engine playing to promote this album or that single; rather, this psychedelic jam band is in a constant state of becoming. “We're still building our culture, show by show, tour by tour, song by song,” Robinson said. Theirs is not a mechanized, big-budget rehearsal act; sets are largely improvised, with not one identical. The Brotherhood began in 2011 as an organic experiment for Robinson to leave behind his Black Crowes background for more explorative blues-rock pastures. The experiment was successful: The band quickly found themselves on the road, where they established their reputation as a live act to watch.
In fact, so compelling was their take on psychedelic blues-rock that it perked the ears of none other than Betty Cantor-Jackson, The Grateful Dead's legendary recording engineer and soundboard recorder, who heard them play at Wavy Gravy's 75th birthday party five springs ago. “She was like, 'I'm gonna record your band — is that cool? I'm gonna follow you around and do it because your band is awesome,’” Robinson recounted. The result is two volumes of live recordings, Betty's Blends, preserved in limited-edition vinyl.