Marshall Tucker Band

Description

DOORS: 6:00PM SHOW: 7:30 AGES: 13+ Whenever you drop that proverbial quarter into the virtual jukebox of songs that always manage to reach down and touch your soul the exact moment you cue them up, you inevitably find certain artists have a deeper resonance than others when it comes to providing the soundtrack that mirrors the highs and lows of your own life. The Marshall Tucker Band is one such group that continues to have a profound level of impact on successive generations of listeners who’ve been searchin’ for a rainbow and found it perfectly represented by this tried-and-true Southern institution for over five decades. “I’ve been in tune with how music can make you feel, right from when I was first in the crib,” observes lead vocalist and bandleader Doug Gray, who’s been fronting the MTB since the very beginning. “I was born with that. And I realized it early on, back when I was a little kid and my mom and dad encouraged me to get up there and sing whatever song came on the jukebox. It got to the point where people were listening to me more than what was on the jukebox! There’s a certain frequency I found I could share, whether I was in front of five people or 20,000 people. And once that frequency is there, everybody will listen.” The Marshall Tucker Band came together as a young, hungry, and quite driven six-piece outfit in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1972, having duly baptized themselves with the name of a blind piano tuner after they found it inscribed on a key to their original rehearsal space — and they’ve been in tune with tearing it up on live stages both big and small all across the globe ever since. Plus, the band’s mighty music catalog, consisting of more than 20 studio albums and a score of live releases, has racked up multi-platinum album sales many times over in its wake. A typically rich MTB setlist is bubbling over with a healthy dose of indelible hits like the heartfelt singalong “Heard It in a Love Song,” the insistent pleading of “Can’t You See” (the signature tune of MTB’s late co-founding lead guitarist and then-principal songwriter Toy Caldwell), the testifying travelogue warning of “Fire on the Mountain,” the wanderlust gallop of “Long Hard Ride,” and the unquenchable yearning pitch of “Ramblin’,” to name but a few. (See, we can hear you singing along to all of them in your head right now as you read this.) Indeed, the secret ingredient to the ongoing success of The Marshall Tucker Band can be found within a cauldron of musical styles that mixes together equal parts rock, blues, jazz, country, soul, and bluegrass. In essence, it’s this inimitable down-home sonic bouillabaisse that helped make the MTB the first truly progressive Southern band to grace this nation’s airwaves — the proof of which can be found within the gritty grooves and ever-shifting gears of “Take the Highway,” the first song on their self-titled April 1973 debut album on Capricorn Records, The Marshall Tucker Band. “We had the commonality of having all grown up together in Spartanburg,” explains Gray about his original MTB bandmates, the aforementioned guitar wizard Toy Caldwell and his brother, bassist Tommy Caldwell, alongside rhythm guitarist George McCorkle, drummer Paul T. Riddle, and flautist/saxophonist Jerry Eubanks. “The framework for Marshall Tucker’s music is more like a spaceship than a house,” Gray continues, “because you can look out of a lot of windows and see a variety of things that show where we’ve been and what we’ve done, and how we’ve traveled through time to bring those experiences out in all of our songs.”.