By Mike Morsch
From the Princeton Packet
Doug Gray is sitting down in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, looking out his window at a palm tree and wondering if someone had trimmed it back just right specifically for him so that he could clearly see the view from his perch.
The original front man and lead vocalist for The Marshall Tucker Band, Mr. Gray recently came off the latest road trip of the Long Hard Ride tour, which is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of the band’s 1976 album of the same name.
He sounds a little fatigued, but that might be expected. He’s been carrying the torch and calling the shots now since the original Marshall Tucker Band members split in the early 1980s.
“Has it been a long hard ride? Not necessarily. It’s been a beautiful ride. Some of the time it’s just been a little bit unbelievable, if you want to know the truth. I can’t complain that it’s been a long hard ride, but it was a good name for a record a long time ago,” Mr. Gray says.
A record that didn’t sell well at the time, though, according to Mr. Gray. Despite the instrumental title track — which the band still plays today in concert — being nominated for a Grammy and featuring friend and fellow Southern rocker Charlie Daniels on fiddle, the “Long Hard Ride” album itself didn’t make much of a splash in 1976.
“We were kind of disappointed with the sales on ‘Long Hard Ride’ and so was the record company. Everybody said ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ because the music style hadn’t changed,” Mr. Gray says. “We were out on the road for a year almost, with the Allman Brothers, and we were playing these songs that people were recognizing. And the songs were being played on the radio. But the sales were down and nobody could figure out what was going on.”
So the band just moved on and started working on its next album, “Carolina Dreams,” and that one would do much better. Released in 1977, it featured what would become the band’s biggest single, “Heard it in a Love Song.”
All of that Marshall Tucker Band history will be on display when Mr. Gray and the band gets back on the road this month, including a stop at the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City, Oct. 15.
The original Marshall Tucker Band, which first formed in 1972, included brothers Toy and Tommy Caldwell, George McCorkle, Jerry Eubanks, Paul Riddle and Mr. Gray.
The band enjoyed commercial success in the 1970s and is recognized as playing an integral part in the establishment of the Southern rock genre of music.
But it was a tragedy that started the unraveling of the original band. In April 1980, co-founder and bassist Tommy Caldwell died from injuries he sustained in a car accident. For the first few years of that decade, the band struggled, unable to recapture the commercial success that it had enjoyed in the 1970s. By 1983, most of the original members had parted ways.
But that didn’t necessarily mean the end of The Marshall Tucker Band.
“What needed to be done was that somebody needed to take it and put the band back into the musical, powerful force that it was,” said Mr. Gray. “And everybody looked at me and said, ‘Hey man, you’re the only one who can do it. You sing 99 percent of them songs, why not go out and take this on?’”
And that’s what he did then, and continues to do to this day.
Mr. Gray is quick to credit the current band members for carrying on what he calls “the timeless essence of The Marshall Tucker Band sound.” They include drummer B.B. Borden; multi-instrumentalist and backing vocalist Marcus Henderson; bassist Pat Elwood; Rick Willis on lead guitar and vocals; and Chris Hicks, also on lead guitar and vocals.
“Most of these guys have been with the band 25 years now,” Mr. Gray says of the musicians who play about 130 dates a year with him. “People come up after the show and say, ‘Man, y’all look like you had so much fun up there.’ I keep a permanent smile on my face as we play. I’m proud of that.”
And Mr. Gray sees no end in sight for the band.
“The public never really cared whether we were country or rock ’n’ roll,” he says. “They called us a Southern rock band, but we’ve always played everything. Without gloating here a little bit, when we get to that stage, we close our eyes and play balls to the wall. And if a band is up there opening, or they’re closing behind us, they’d better have their stuff together. But we’re not a band to be afraid of, we’re a band that gets in there and has a good time.”
The Marshall Tucker Band will perform at the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City, Oct. 15, 8 p.m. For tickets and information, go to www.tropicana.net.
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