POP MUSIC REVIEW : Tuckers Give New Meaning to ‘Limbo Rock’

It’s rare that one hears preachers talking about limbo anymore. Instead, they go straight to the extremes of heaven and hell, and poor little limbo gets left out in the cold.

It would be a shame to see this concept of a realm of undesirable stasis pass from the world, especially after we’ve had it with us for so many years. So hooray for those elements of the music business that are keeping the limbo biz alive.

Take the Marshall Tucker Band which, at the Crazy Horse on Monday night, did a marvelous job of sounding as if it had been suspended in Jell-O for 20 years. I should point out here that Jell-O is the copyrighted name of a specific gelatin product and should not be taken as a generic term for the entirety of gelatinous products available on the market shelves of this fine nation. I feel compelled to mention this because we will get a concerned letter from the Jell-O people if we don’t, and because it helps to pad out this otherwise thin review.

Because when it comes down to it, there isn’t a heck of a lot to say about the Marshall Tucker Band. It wasn’t especially good, it wasn’t bad--it was just sort of there . And, like the dead-time of limbo, on the whole the band was worth purchasing a few indulgences to avoid.

That is not to deny the Tuckers their place in history, nor to begrudge them the little bubble of success they found recently with the Garth Brooks-penned single “Walk Outside the Lines” (which hit No. 70 on the Billboard country chart in June).

Still, though the place was crowded with loyal fans who might remember the performance more favorably, to me it seemed the seven-member band was only raking up the leaves from the treetops its music once assayed.

In the early ‘70s, these South Carolinians certainly were the most curious of the Southern boogie bands. While Lynyrd Skynyrd et al. were giving us six-pack party music, the Tuckers exhibited a free-roaming musicianship that came closer to that of the Allman Brothers. They only rarely achieved the incisive focus of the Allmans, going instead for rambling, jazzy jams that sometimes fell asleep before they reached a climax. At its best, though--on numbers like “Fire on the Mountain”--the group soared.

Most of that fire was due to songwriter/guitarist Toy Caldwell, a sharp, distinctive stylist who played his Les Paul with his bare thumb instead of a pick. In 1984, four years after the death of his brother, band bassist Tommy Caldwell, Toy left the band. He died in his sleep in February of this year.

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Now, the only remaining members of the original band are singer Doug Gray and flutist/sax player Jerry Eubanks, who do not a legacy make. Gray sings competently, with a voice that sounds curiously as though he is singing into a paper cup, while Eubanks at least plays flute a good sight better than the Moody Blues’ Ray Thomas, who may hold the record as the only man to appear professionally with a flute for 25 years without ever actually learning how to play it.

The other members--mostly replacements of replacements, though guitarist Rusty Milner has been with the band since Toy Caldwell’s departure--ambled through the set’s 11 songs in a manner that was professional but indistinguishable from your better-than-average bar band covering a Tucker tune.

They opened with the 1979 hit “Running Like the Wind,” showing off the band’s vocal strengths as six members chimed in on the chorus. The rest of the show included such oldies as “Heard It in a Love Song,” “Searchin’ for a Rainbow” and “Fire on the Mountain” and more recent tunes “Down We Go” and Brooks’ “Walk Outside the Lines,” a brash, likable boogie. The other sleeper in the set was “Desert Sky,” an atmospheric, loping cowboy tune colored by pedal steel guitar and a warm tenor sax solo from Eubanks.

Milner took a number of long solos throughout the evening, sometimes kicking up sparks, sometimes not. His hottest playing came during the encore as the show ended, inevitably, with the group’s anthem, “Can’t You See?”