For Greenville, South Carolina’s Marcus King, music is in his blood. A third-generation musician, his father, Marvin, and his grandfather were popular regional musicians. Marcus started young, playing shows with his father when he was only eight years old, and fronting his own bands in his teens, playing “soul-influenced psychedelic Southern rock.”
King and his band recently brought these deep traditions and decades of experiences to The Anthem, thrilling the audience with his dazzling guitar work and their fiery brand of cosmic Americana.
Darling Blue, released last year, is his first album credited to the Marcus King Band since 2018’s Carolina Confessions. While it’s by no means a country album, it is a Nashville album. He worked with noted Music City songwriters Hilary Lindsey and Meg McRee (“Levi’s & Goodbyes”), Jonathan Singleton (“Heartlands”), Angelo Petraglia (“Angel”), and Ben Chapman and the late Ronnie Bowman (“Blue Ridge Mountain Home”). But he also looked further afield; he co-wrote “The Shadows” with Los Angeles’s Nick Monson and Madi Yanofsky. On No Room For Blue, a companion album he put out this year, there’s a guitar solo contributed by the late Brent Hines of Mastodon.
At The Anthem on June 3, the set included a couple more numbers from that album: “Falling for the Devil,” “Lilac Wine,” and “Good Run.”
Watch Marcus King perform “Good Run” live for Lightning 100 on YouTube:
For all the talent he brought, Marcus’s ongoing growth as a songwriter really shined on the songs he wrote alone: “On & On,” “Honky Tonk Hell,” and “Carolina Honey.” While’s he been forging a path as a solo artist for most of this decade, he opted to do just a few of the songs (“Delilah” from Mood Swings; “Lie Lie Lie” from Young Blood; “Wildflowers & Wine” from El Dorado), with the balance of the set coming from Carolina Confessions: “8 AM,” “Goodbye Carolina,” and “Homesick.”
King wears his influences on his sleeve. He opened his set with Grand Funk Railroad’s “Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother,” and he finished the night playing The Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man” as his encore after finishing his main set with opening act Penelope Road joining him on “Bustin’ Loose.” For as much as Marcus is plugged into classic southern rock and the jam band scene, his spin on it is modern, often dealing with subjects like mental illness (he lives with bipolar disorder). Speaking of jam bands, they’re often a hard sell for me: I have severe ADHD, and attending concerts at night, when my meds have worked their way out of my system, focus can be a real challenge, and I can lose the plot during extended jams. Artists like Marcus and the Tedeschi Trucks Band (who he’s toured with) stand a bit apart for their focusing as much on sturdy, finely crafted crafted songs that aren’t afraid to go deep on difficult issues.
One might even say that there’s a bit of stealth at work here: Marcus’s guitar fireworks get a lot of attention and appeal to a certain fanbase, but he’s using it as a vehicle for getting across some fairly serious stuff. I don’t mean this in jest, or pejoratively, but it’s a little like getting your dog to take a pill by hiding it a folded slice of American cheese.
Penelope Road, who opened the show, is a fine young band, soon to be releasing their first full-length album. They share some DNA with Marcus, but they also share his ecleticism, covering “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears and Australian psychedelic rockers’ Ocean Alley’s “Knees,” along with their own “Tired of Love,” “California,” “Smile Again,” “Out Tonight,” and “Mercy.”
I hadn’t seen Penelope Road before, and I’m really looking forward to their album. Marcus, as always delivered the goods, playing his ass off and singing with passion.
