Marcus King: Old School
Marcus King once tried to hold a job that didn’t involve playing the guitar. He didn’t last long, but he learned a valuable lesson.
“I had a gig at a pizza parlor,” the 26-year-old musician from Greenville, S.C., says. “I worked there for a while, and it just wasn’t for me—obviously. So after I got out of school, I just hit the road and I never looked back. I was always gonna do this. I never once considered anything else.” That’s something for which we can all be thankful. For the past several years, both with his Marcus King Band and, more recently, on solo albums like 2020’s Grammy-nominated, Dan Auerbach-produced El Dorado and the new Young Blood—also helmed by The Black Keys frontman—King has evolved into one of the most exciting keepers of the classic-rock flame. Grounded in the blues, his music extends outward, also informed by country, jazz and all manner of roots-rock.
Listening to Young Blood—or any of King’s live or studio recordings, for that matter—a fan who’s been missing the authenticity of Southern rockers like The Allman Brothers Band and early Lynyrd Skynyrd, or the gutsy, no-nonsense artistry of earthy ‘70s British acts like Bad Company and Robin Trower, might feel like they’ve come home again. Yet, despite wearing his influences proudly on his sleeve, King’s music never feels derivative or retro. Young Blood, especially, is an unabashedly contemporary update of those vintage values, complete with some of the most brain-numbing electric-guitar solos heard on a rock album in years.
When King recently performed “Hard Working Man,” the first single from the new album, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, he received a hero’s welcome from the program’s staff.
“They,” he says, referring to Fallon and his crew, “were all really excited to hear, as they put it, people playing their own instruments.”
That’s a response that King has encountered often since he first started performing in public. He serves as a reminder that stellar musicianship and a heavy dollop of dazzle still matter to many listeners. King began tinkering with the guitar at the tender age of three, egged on by his dad, Marvin King, a successful blues-rock musician. Marvin, too, had been the son of a musician. By eight, Marcus was playing gigs with his dad, and by his teens, leading his own bands.
“Music runs so deep in Marcus’ blood, he might not even realize he is born to do this,” Auerbach says in a supplied statement culled from King’s promotional materials. “He probably does, but God, he’s the real deal. Marcus has Southern soul as part of his foundation. It’s just who he is.”
“I was blessed with an older family,” Marcus says. “My dad was 42 when I was born. He was a child of the ‘60s and he was a rock-and-roll hippie. His record collection was fantastic. He had a straight job—contracting—when I was young, and he later went back to music, which he still does. But when I was little, he’d go off to work and I would just stay at home, and the guitar and the record collection were my babysitters.”
King gave up on school when he was in his senior year of high school; he knew what he was meant to do and the encouragement he got from audiences assured him that it was the right decision. He did earn his GED, but as far as King was concerned, playing music was his future, not trigonometry. He spent virtually every minute of the day honing his craft, soaking up inspiration wherever he could find it— and not just from the blues, although that style remained his bedrock.
“There are many Hank Williams songs that, to me, carry the same weight as the Son House and Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf records that I have,” King says. “I’d stay at home with the blues records, and then my grandfather would come to visit and he’d bring George Jones and Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard and Charley Pride into the mix. That’s when things really got cooking. Then, on my own, I heard James Brown’s ‘Cold Sweat’ on the radio, and it became my mission in life to find more of that. So that’s how Parliament-Funkadelic came into the mix. Tina Turner was in there. It’s all just early American heritage music.
“But I was also a big Janis Joplin fan,” he continues, “and I like Heart a lot. I just loved loud, in-your-face music because I was a shy kid.”
By his late teens, King had become a YouTube sensation, racking up millions of views by playing the kind of incendiary roots-based guitar-rock that most fans hadn’t heard since the days of Stevie Ray Vaughan. However, from the start, it was important to King to be seen as an originator, not an imitator.
“When I was about 13 or 14, I was playing with my dad’s group,” he says. “I was into Stevie Ray and Hendrix and B.B., Freddie and Albert,” the last three being blues giants who shared the young guitarist’s surname.
“But,” he adds, “it occurred to me, around that age, that if I kept listening to these guitar players, then I was just gonna sound like a watered-down version of them. So I quit listening to guitar players for a few years. That’s when I got into jazz cats like John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy—a more experimental thing. And then I started listening to Col. Bruce Hampton and got more into a fusion thing. I’ve always wanted to sound like me.”
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Young Blood, which is set for release via American Records/Republic on Aug. 26, takes its title from a nickname bestowed on King by The Allman Brothers Band drummer Jaimoe. “That’s a direct quote from him,” King explains. “That’s what he’s always called me since I’ve known him. [The phrase is] a term of endearment. I hear it more in the South; older musicians call me Young Blood. It’s pretty self-explanatory. I mentioned to Dan that I wanted to call the album Young Blood, for Jaimoe, and he was like, ‘You gotta be shitting me.’ He then showed me a photo—he had just bought this ‘40s Harley and it had this sissy bar on the back that said ‘Young Blood’ in the shape of a crown. It was just serendipitous.”
The album is the fifth to be released under King’s name: The first three were Marcus King Band projects: 2015’s Soul Insight, followed by 2016’s self-titled The Marcus King Band and 2018’s Carolina Confessions. Those first two records were produced by early champion Warren Haynes and the third by Dave Cobb, whose other credits include recordings by Sturgill Simpson, John Prine and Jason Isbell. An EP, Due North, came in 2017. The debut album was an immediate hit, reaching No. 8 on the Billboard Blues Album chart; the others each landed at No. 2. Marcus King was proving a consistent draw among aficionados of the “real deal.”
In 2020, King decided it was time to make a solo album—El Dorado was King’s first to make it into the main Billboard 200 chart, garnering excellent reviews and a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album, along the way.
King doesn’t especially like listening to any of them today. “Oh, man, I hate hearing myself,” he says. “I’m a real big critic of myself. I always want to be growing.” And that’s exactly what he’s done on Young Blood, relying on a cast of musicians hand-picked by Auerbach.
“If I want to work with a producer, I’m gonna do what they recommend I do,” King says. “They’re getting a certain fee to advise and to produce these records.”
The goal this time was to try to capture an arena-rock vibe that King feels is elusive these days. “It’s about stripping it back to basics, man,” King says. “We are bringing it back to when people were playing their amplifiers loud out of necessity because PA systems weren’t what they are today. I think that was a big reason that guitars got this guttural sound—and bass guitar too. One of my favorite concerts is Cream at Royal Albert Hall. And Grand Funk Live Album—that’s one of the most gnarly bass tones I’ve ever heard. Dan and I talked about making a power-trio-style, rock-and[1]roll record—kind of echoing the sounds of the groups we both loved growing up, like Free and Zeppelin and ZZ Top. I was like, ‘If we can get anywhere close to that, then I’ll be happy.’”
King entered the sessions armed with a collection of new songs. Some of them, inspired by a fizzled relationship, rank among the most personal that he has ever written. And, though a number of those tracks were co-written with Auerbach and/or others, all of them still bear the guitarist’s distinctive stamp. The album is, for the most part, ballad-free. Simply put, it rocks.
“‘Rescue Me’ and ‘Dark Cloud’ are special ones for me,” King says, when asked about the album’s key tracks. “They all are special songs for me, but those two, in particular, come from vulnerable places. I can physically put myself back where I was when I wrote them.” Other cuts, notably “Pain” and “Blood on the Tracks,” reveal an intimacy that pushes King’s compositional skills to the next level.
“This album was a lot different in approach. I was going through a pretty tumultuous time personally,” King says. “I was really hurting and struggling. I’ve heard some feedback that’s like, ‘This doesn’t even sound like you. This is just so far from you.’ But it’s the truest version of myself that I’ve released in my whole career. It’s funny that some people feel that way.”
King and Auerbach cut the album in the latter’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. King, who now also lives in Music City, found the experience very conducive to getting the results he desired. “The band was amazing and everyone worked so well together,” he says. “And Dan, as a producer, is like a pilot or a great sea captain—a good Captain Ahab. I trust Dan. He’s got at least eight more Grammys than me, and 20 more years of experience. I just kinda take my foot off the gas in the leadership role. That allows me to have the freedom to be just a musician, a guitarist and a singer.”
“This record didn’t take a lot of pushing,” Auerbach says in his statement for King’s bio. “We put the right people in the room and let them do their thing. These songs are live performances. The whole damn thing is live—the solos and everything. It’s so rare in this day and age.”
“Dan’s able to speak a language and he has his guys that he trusts just as much as I trust my guys,” King says, elaborating. “So when I’m in the studio, I’m just another musician in there, and we’re all adhering to what Dan says. But then, when I go on the road, I change everything up for our live show. It’s a seven-piece band, so you gotta understand how to navigate that. It’s like a herd of bison. It’s very thunderous. If we’re edging toward a cliff and one of us falls, then we all fall.”
Touring is the next thing on the calendar for King. He recently finished up a string of dates in Europe and, from early September through late October, he and his band will return to the road in North America, with stops scheduled for such storied venues as New York’s Beacon Theatre and Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. “It’s sublime getting back to touring,” he says. “It’s a tour I’ve been wanting to put together for years and it’s gonna be some of our favorite venues in the country. It’s a special show that I put together in hopes of giving everybody all that they deserve after so much time away.”
For King, just being able to get back to the life that he loves is the ultimate payoff for all of the waiting around that most music fans have had to endure during the past couple of years. “I started playing guitar when I was three or something and it’s still an ever-going journey,” he says. “I want to get better and better every day. The guitar is my security blanket. I’m most comfortable Dino Perrucci with a guitar around my neck.”
