(editor’s note – no ex post facto proof for Orleans)
Tucker Band ragged at center
by Steve Webb, The Knickerbocker News, August 4, 1981
The house lights dimmed, the Marshall Tucker Band walked on stage, and guitarists Toy Caldwell and George McCorkle kicked off “Take the Highway.” Very little has changed.
The band is among a handful of rock groups who make annual stops at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and they are among those who have experienced a decline in audience size over the last two years. That audience peaked with crowds of more than 29,000 over two nights in 1979, and dropped to 19,000 over two nights last year.
This time the South Carolinan country-rock band drew approximately 11,200 in one night, hampered by rain but declining just the same. Musically, the band hasn’t particularly progressed with the times. That shouldn’t particularly be taken as a fault, since it has developed its own turf blending Western melodies and harmonies with the stereotypical Southern rock’n’roll style. The show Monday was split between material from the band’s latest album, “Dedication,” and oldies dating back to 1973. The latter met the greatest response, although the new material was well-received.
The highlights of the new material were a Western Swing-like number, “Bop Away My Blues,” featuring Caldwell on pedal steel guitar. and “Silverado,” a story-song featuring some of lead vocalist Doug Gray’s best work of the night. Generally, the new material was mellower than such standbys as “Can’t You See” and “Take the Highway,” although the lone failure of the evening was a scattered blues number called “Tell the Blues to Take the Night Off.”
Much of the evening suffered from a poor sound mix, something the band’s crew seems to always accomplish at the center. The finer points of Caldwell’s guitaring and keyboardist-reed player Jerry Eubanks’ playing was often lost in the rumble, and few of Gray’s vocals yielded hints at what the lyrics said.
The Knickerbocker News, August 3, 1981
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