Stompin' Room Only

Twenty seven years after it was compiled, the apocryphal Stompin' Room Only is finally released. The album, which suffers only from being the seam album between Marshall Tucker's tenures at Capricorn and Warner Bros, was recorded during the European tour in support of Carolina Dreams. Here are 11 tracks by the original band -- with guests on a few -- with two cuts from a Milwaukee 1974 show tacked on for good measure. This is Marshall Tucker as they have never been heard on record. Like the Allmans, the Tuckers were all about seamlessly expanding from one musical form into another. Whereas studio versions of "Can't You See," "Take the Highway," "Ramblin'," and "24 Hours at a time," would weave elements of jazz, blues, honky tonk, gospel, and Appalachian folk music into the body of a song, on these extended jamming excursions they fully indulged their passions, winding in and out of genres without seams or sudden shifts. On an elongated cover of B.B. King's signature tune, "The Thrill Is Gone," with a number of guests including Dickey Betts and Charlie Daniels (making for a four-guitar front line!) as well as Jimmy Hall and Chuck Leavell, Chicago blues, jazz, and country are all enmeshed simultaneously, as the hidden nuances in the song come to the fore. On the gloriously long "24 Hours at a Time," Tom Caldwell's bass moves through the various jazz eras as Daniels fiddles his ass off to keep time with Toy Caldwell's knotty, razor-wire leads. And for those fans of the Marshal Tucker Band whose gauge is the song, "Can't You See," there isn't a better one on record or bootleg that's better than this one. With its shuffling, funky backbeat, and Toy Caldwell's impassioned vocal leading the charge to his burning solos, it literally send chills up the spine. This is one of the few cases where a found "lost" recording lives up its legend. ~ Thom Jurek|