HOMEBOYS ON THE RANGE: TUCK’S GONNA DO IT

HOMEBOYS ON THE RANGE: TUCK’S GONNA DO IT

BY

TOM DUPREE

You’d expect a lot of people to show up for the very first Marshall Tucker Band concert in the capital city of their home state, and you’d be right. A big auditorium in downtown Columbia, South Carolina is packed with glistening Tuckerphiles, and there ain’t a rhinestone in the place. As the Tucker boys wander out on stage, Tommy Caldwell decides he’ll test him out a microphone: “How about it, Columbia?” YEEEEE-HAAAAA! go the people. Hot goddamn! A little FOOOOM from an amplifier, then the Tucks strike up “Hillbilly Band,” and the people lock and load on a fervent devotion that won’t let Marshall Tucker go home until they’ve played three encores.

This is incredible, just like the movies. A youngstuh in the front row, maybe 15, 16, clandestinely puffs on a (real) cigarette and looks around nervously every once in a while as if his mama had, incredibly, found some way to get squeal-spy-tattletales into the theatre. He finally decides that his mama’s potential agents prolly wouldn’t be caught dead inside the place, so this big triumphant grin crosses his Carolina face and he gives the Tucks his undivided. He can sing every single word right along with Doug Gray, even the “Oh Lawd’s.”

There’s this beautiful young girl in the same front row who is staring at the band with a smile on her face, only she’s leaning on the stage with both hands clasped to her left cheek, like Olive Oyl looking at Popeye. Her attention goes from drummer Paul Riddle to flautist Jerry Eubanks, back to Gray, to Tommy, to kamikaze chicken-pickin’ Toy Caldwell, to rhythm player George McCorkle, but that sweet sighing look never leaves her face. She loves them crackers.

A young Columbia honey, stoned out of her tree, is swaying with eyes closed. Alone. She is terrifically out of place, an undulating anachronism, a mush in a crowd of alert, vibrant people, like Billy Graham at a Rev. Ike rally. The point here is not the scene or the show, it’s the music. The only flash in the room is coming from the speakers. Hell, this ain’t Dee-troit or El Ay or even Hot’lanna. This here’s Carolina, and the mufuggin’ Marshall Tucker Band!

The best part about it is that this audience is hip. They know there’s nobody = named Marshall Tucker in the Marshall Tucker Band. They aren’t waiting for o the opening act to come on stage like they were five years ago when the Tucks (then known as the Toy Factory) opened for the Allman Brothers in this same hall. They closed the curtain right on Duane Allman’s head that night, because he said something like he was going to fuckin’ blow it out, and the city of Columbia, which runs the place, objected mightily. Just play the guitar, boy, don’t cuss at us.

That was the Toy Factory, this is Tucker, and it is their first concert here (they’ve only done two as the MTB in their home town of Spartanburg). The people have the records and they don’t give a flipper that Marshall Tucker hasn’t ever had a hit single, yet consistently places their LPs in the Top Fifty. They are here because they honestly dig the music, and because they think Marshall Tucker is absolutely the best South Carolina band in the history of the world and quite certainly one of the ' finest bands in the country, and since I /do too, I can relate to ’em.

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MARSHALL TUCKER

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There’s one thing,'"though, and that goes whether you like Marshall Tucker or not: it’s nearbout the happiest bunch1 I’ve ever seen. When he ain’t cookin’ on stage, Toy Caldwell steps back and winks to his wife and baby. Doug Gray stands back and watches and says hoowee. Before, after and'during their set, Marshall Tucker likes what it’s doing— for real—and if you don’t, why the hell are you in the theatre?

You take Toy Caldwell, resplendent in cowboy hat ,and slappin’ people on thg back that he don’t know from Adam’s dairy cow. He’s not being insincere: he honestly likes you until you give him a reason not to. (Like the Dixie journalist who once gave Toy a crazy and admittedly unfounded review— prolly too many free record company drinx that nite; there’s a fine line between promotion and overkill—of whom Mr. C. bpines, “If I ever get my hands qn that cocksucker, I’m gonna choke him to delath.” You gotta give him this: he’s honest, not like a lotta them sissies who say they never read their reviews.)

Toy’ll talk a blue streak once he gets startedy and he’ll argue with you if he disagrees, but if he sez it he means it and he won’t take it back. I’s shootin’ the breeze with him after the show, and after one sizzling jawflap Toy looked at my tape recorder .ruefully qnd said, “This gonna go in the magazine?” “Do they grow soybeans in Ty Ty?” I said. “Well, whoo,” Toy said, trying to see it in print. And it would have been in here too, if I had turned over my tape in time to catch it.

Toy was “up,” as they say, after the show. His band would much rather play three hours for you in person than be cramped up in a studio trying to make a record. “A studio’s like a cage,” Toy says, adding that the Tucks are a one-time band. “We can’t do a tune twice in a row,” he says, “because then we lose it.” Tucker w&s on Midnight Special a while back and got a standing invite to return any time because of the dis’patch with which they did their teevee set. “You know that band, Montrose?” Toy said. “Yehboy,” I-rejoined. “When we got there, Montrose had been there for two weeks tryin’ to get their take. Todd Rundgren was in there forever. Man, we was in the studio, and Montrose went to get makeup and shit.” That is a hooter to a member of the Marshall Tucker Band, too.

“The audience was real tired when we came on,” said Toy, “so we tried to loosen’ ’em up. Tommy ‘n’ me started acting like Flip Wilson, you know. There was a black cameraman to the side, an’ I said real loud, Tell that nigger to bring that camera over here.’ He started laughin’ and said I should do somethin’ bad to myself, and everybody was in a good mood. We got a sound check and said," let ’er go. After we finished, man, that was it. If you didn’t get it then, tough shit.”

You gotta have recordsnthough, no matter how you dislike it. Tucker is blessed with a fine Capricorn Records producer in Paul Hornsby, and they tolerate the studio as a necessary evil. They' went in for their fourth album the first of May in Macon , one that Toy says" will be “a little bit more rock and roily, just raise hayll songs.” The band has always been hard to pin down musically : some see country influences and some see jazz. Toy hates that shit.

“I hate that shit,” he says. “People always gotta compare you with something or somebody. You should be able to go to a concert and just listen to the music and not think about who somebody sounds like/ because listen”— here he moves forward confidentially: “There is no such thing as an original fuckin’ lick. I’ll steal a lick from any motherfucker I see, and anybody who denies that is a lyin’ motherfucker. The guitar players I like, we all play the same style. Our roots are in the same place, with slurred kind of notes, and we all hit it at about the same time. Each one of us has his own thing, you see, but we are tradin’ off all jthe time. Xguitar player listens to a record arid says,}. ‘Stop! Back that motherfucker up!’

“We all listen to e&ch other’s sets and we’ll go into the dressin’ room afterwards and somebody’ll say, ‘Hey, show me that lick you hit on so and so: play that sumbitch one more time and I got it.’

“Lately, I’ve caught myself doin’ this real1 fast, rock & roll kind of pickin’— which is all right, long as you do it with some taste—in the Warehouse in New Orelans, and I had to kick myself in the ass. Now, I didn’t stop and think where \ I might have got that from, because when I listen to somebody play, I don’t think about where he learned his licks from, I just listen to the goddam artist,”,

Yes sir, Mr. Toy. But you can’t tell me that you don’t like lissniny to some of ’em more than others, I said. “My favorite band is Little Feat, I could listen to them all night. Lowell George, whoo. Poco too: they got a little flippy there for a while, but they got back in the groove. And then there’s my friends, like Elvin Bishop, who may be one bf thq ugliest motherfuckers on earth, looks about like Harpo. And ol’ Cholly Daniels, now I think that boy is about to bust loose with this single of his.”

I thought you didn’t pay no nevermind .to singles, I said.

“I ain’t got nothin’ against singles. I can see what a single does to the pocketbook: you take Lynyrd Skynyrd, those boys started tearin’ it up after their song was a hit. What I object to is people choppin’ my stuff up. I mean, I know why you havej to do it and all, but on ‘This OP Cowboy,’ by the time they got through editin’ it for a single, there wasn’t nothin’ left. Right now, we got people buyin’ our albums just because they like our band. We might sell a few more to people who //ant to get the single, and I wouldn’t be against that at all, but I can’t imagine anybody coming to one of our gigs to listed for one song.”

“See,” Toy leaned back, “right now you got Tucker fans, you got CDB fans, you got Skynyrd fans, and it don’t make a damn where we play, if they get word of it, they’ll show up. We just, went up North again, and I bet you that if you took a head count of the people in the audience, 75 percent of them that were there the first time we played were there the third time. Now, that’s really who should show up at a concert, the people who just plain like the way the band sounds together.”

I can tell you for a fact that the band sounds better than ever, and the folks in South Carolina agreed with me. “We’ve accomplished something in the time we’ve been together,” muses the chicken-picker. “We’ve matured a lot and we’ve gotten to the point that we know each other well enough to let a tune loose and not know what the fuck is going on. On a song like ‘24 Hours At A Time / the more we played the song, % it got to where it busted loose into a jam. We got cues to come back into the song, but between them times nobody knows what anybody’s gonna play. That’s really more fun to do, too: we were gonna do ‘Blue Ridge Mountain Sky’ tonight/—it woulda been nice "for the region they were in, yeh, I thought to myself—“but I can’t remember the damn words, and I wrote the thing.

Lotta people think Tuck’s so far into country that they’ll never get out, but Toy sez this next album is going to be a bit of a break from that pattern, on account of “you can’t really capture an audience with country, not the type of people we like to play to. If we do ‘Can’t You See’ and ‘In My Own Way’ backto-back,, then it better be time to cook, because the noses are on their way into the popcorn boxes. Speaking of that, less get out of here.” We did, and ran right into another beautiful Carolina kid who had been waiting thru the entire interview, long after everybody else had gone to their Blue Ridge Mountain homes, for the honor of shaking Toy’s hand. He had bought a MTB poster and Toy glommed my pen to. sign it. “This here feller’s from the CREEM magazine,” Toy told the boy. “And, I have told him some shit, boy, this article's gonna look weird.” Well, here it is, and not so weird after all, but it goes out to Toy and Tommy and Jerry and Doug and Charles and Paul and all the guys in Spartanburg. You boys is all right.