Oh man....I LOVE this album. I remember stealing the cassette (one of the many) from my parents and listening to it endlessly on my dual deck tape player in the headboard of my bed, and later in my '86 Ford LTD tearing up the back roads and hollers of Floyd County and Allegheny Springs. Now I realize a lot of folks probably don't like Marshall Tucker Band at all, and that can be understood if all they have ever heard is "Heard It In A Love Song". While not the worst song out there, it was certainly horribly overplayed. Fear not brave reader, cause Heard It In A Love song is NOT on this album. No that song came a few years later.
This album was released in 1975 and starts out with my two favorite Marshall Tucker Band songs....wait, first let's get something out of the way first. Marshall Tucker was not the name of any of it's band members rather a name the band members found on the key of their practice space and liked the sound of so much they named their band that. What was with 70's bands naming themselves after people? Ok, so back to what I was saying, this album starts with my favorite two Marshall Tucker Band songs. They are "Fire On The Mountain", and "Searchin' For A Rainbow". Fire kicks off the album with a mournful and huge pedal steel lick before kicking into the song which features some of my favorite pedal steel work throughout. The song reads like an episode synopsis of HBO's Deadwood series. With a man who takes his family away from his Carolina home in search of gold out west. What he finds is a place where "sin is the big thing", and "folks are shot down for sake of fun" or "just to hear the sound of their .44 guns". This is the song I'm featuring as a download cause I love it. Also features a flute solo, which is a trend that Marshall Tucker really tried to get going in country rock but thankfully never did. It's not really bad just different....I mean, makes you wonder why more country songs don't feature flute solos. Ahh but I guess Tull and Tucker are alone in their flute endeavors.
"Searchin' For Rainbow" is the follow up, and a slightly more upbeat song than "Fire" was. Searchin' feels like a look at the thought patterns from the character we got to know in Fire On The Mountain, here we get the tale of a man who is searching for his metaphorical pot of gold, an endless search that possibly drove him to the events that took place in Fire. At least that's my take on it. I'm probably way wrong on that :-P
Some other great songs on this album are the laid back "Virginia", the even more laid back western swing ode to the poor man's meditation that is fishing, "Bob Away My Blues", and the love ballad "Keep Me From All Wrong". Some of the other songs on this album tend to lean a little more to the jazz country side, but they are certainly in the minority, and even then they keep it reigned in. Also included is the live version of classic rock staple "Can't You See" tagged on at the end that is probably the best recorded version of that song. Overall I love this album (did I already say that?), and think it should be included with other great country rock albums of the 70's though I doubt it ever will.
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