The Marshall Tucker Band: The Lost Interviews; Chuck McCorkle

On June 29, 2007, founding Marshall Tucker Band member George McCorkle died. To those of us who loved him, it was a shock we still live with to this day.

Then in March of 2009, George's brother Chuck died at his home in Columbia, SC. I had lost another dear friend.

I had met Chuck many times, and we always had great conversations about music. The following is an interview I conducted withj Chuck in Spartanburg, SC back in 1996. I sure do miss both of those McCorkle brothers, something fierce.

•••

“The very earliest things I remember was when mother bought us a guitar,” remembers Chuck McCorkle, the older brother of Marshall Tucker’s original rhythm guitarist George, today living in Columbia. “That was for two people, a single guitar. She did the best she could. We were very poor, and my father had left us. I think I was about 14, George was 12 and she bought us an acoustic guitar from Montgomery Ward. If I remember correctly, it was $19.95. It came with a little instruction book that showed how to make the chords, and it came with a pitch pipe for tuning. Ironically, I was more interested in the guitar than George was.”

When their mother would go to work in the morning, and George would go to school, Chuck would get that guitar out and start playing it. He was obsessed.

“Pretty soon, George would be home from school, and I would have been playing that thing all day without realizing it. I never had another obsession like that in my life, except my love for Freeda. We lived over on the South side of town then, near Southside Baptist Church, where Jenkins Junior High used to be. Eventually, mom bought a small house over in Park Hills. It’s kind of cloudy to me now how we got to know Toy and Tommy and Franklin and those. They already lived there. We moved there when we were in junior high. We all started getting together and playing music.”
On Saturdays, while other kids were playing basketball, the McCorkle boys played music. At first, they played in an old room on Spring Street, behind the old Smith Music Store. Tommy Caldwell played drums a lot during those days, and Chuck was usually the guitarist.

“ The first time George and I played together was in a band called The Originals,” says Chuck, “ That was with Dave Haddox and Ronnie Cooksey. I met Ronnie in junior high. He was about 21 years old and in the ninth grade. His brother played too. One of the things I remember most about The Originals was that we all wore matching outfits. We had black ones and white ones. One night we were playing at some bar out here on Greenville Highway, near the old South 29 drive-in. I saw a guy get stabbed to death. Several people jumped on this guy and started stabbing him to death. We just kept on playing. The police came and hauled everybody off. Later, after we finished the gig, the guy was outside with a 45 automatic, threatening to kill us. He said he’d kill anybody who came out the door, because he had been waiting for the owner all night. The owner owed us $15 each, and he wanted to pay us with this prostitute. Hell, I was only 15, and this was a big girl. I don’t remember what happened, but I think we called the police, and they lead us out at three in the morning.

“The only other story I remember with The Originals was the time we played this party at Rainbow Lake. There was this song we played, and the people wanted to hear it again. Well, it was quitting time, but we played it again anyway. Then they told us, “Ya’ll aren’t going anywhere. We want to hear it again. They were real drunk, and they made us stay an extra couple of hours and play, or they’d whip our butts. Then a fight broke out, and we were running and unplugging our amps and stuff. We got our stuff and got out of there.”

Like David Haddox, Chuck McCorkle remembers how the band decided on the name for The Originals.

“In the ninth grade we had a teacher named Rosey,” says Chuck. “Well, there was a band out called Rosey and the Originals, and they had a record out called “Angel Baby.” We all had the hots for this teacher, and she was probably about Ronnie’s age, come to think of it. (Laughs) We were all trying to hit on Rosey, and she always liked the attention.
“I think about the time I was in The Originals, I was always strictly rhythm, Ronnie played all the lead, and I think George played bass. Of course, David was the drummer. That was about the time I met and fell in love with Freeda. She and I were inseparable, and still are. We’ve been married now for 28 years. I quit playing in bands, but I still played and jammed. We used to play in the Caldwell’s basement, as well as Wilkie’s garage. The Rants started rehearsing, and I’d jam with them and stuff. But what I remember most is that it seemed like overnight one weekend, Toy became this killer guitar player. I mean he got good, real good. We all had Silvertone guitars and amps, little cheap shit. I walked in one day and Toy had this Gibson 335 and a Fender Twin, and he was just smokin,’ I said Toy, how do you play like that? He said, “I don’t know, that’s just how I play.” It was like Toy had been blessed overnight, and had just transcended into a higher realm, to become the best guitar player around. Tommy was always the killer drummer and bass player. I was so busy pulling up out of the poverty we had come up in. I wanted to go to college and I did. I went to Spartanburg Junior College and Clemson University. Then we formed a band called The Puzzle, and started playing around. And there was Pax Parachute. But when Toy came out of the service, all of the the band members started congregating around him. He was just so good. That’s the way The Marshall Tucker Band came to be.”

In 1973, Chuck started his own band, The Early Wyldes, in his home, Columbia, SC.

“We opened shows for Marshall Tucker, and got good reviews. We played places like Syracuse. University of Pennsylvania. It was great fun. It’s really a rush to play in front of 30,000 screaming bodies. When you walk onstage, and plug your guitar in and the ‘thump’ sounds like an explosion, and the entire crowd begins to scream. There’s nothing like that.”

Chuck McCorkle ended up going on the road with his brother’s band on two occasions, once in the mid-seventies, and again in the early eighties.
“The first time I went out on the road with Tucker was 1975,” says Chuck. “I went out as photographer for the band - that was my minor in college. I shot over a hundred rolls of film. They used my photos for the artist to go by for the Where We All Belong album. We stayed in the best hotels, they rode us around in limousines and they rode us in and out of gigs in helicopters. It was great, man. It was amazing to me. I remember standing on the stage with Wolfman Jack at the August Jam in Charlotte. I worked with Marshall Tucker in 1981 and early 1982. I was guitar technician. George always carried a shit-load of guitars on the road, some of which were mine. We still have some guitars in common that are both his and mine. But my job was to keep the guitars tuned and cleaned, and everybody was fine with that...all except Franklin Wilkie. He wouldn’t let me do his bass. He said, ‘I take care of my own bass.’ And he took it and put strings on it. What it was, was Frank thought it was beneath me to clean and tune his guitar. Of course, it was my job, but that was really nice of him, and I’ll never forget it.”

MTB 1981, during the time Chuck was working with the band. George takes a smoking lead solo...

related tags

Read More...

Comments

Please login or you can to leave a comment.

If you aren't registered, Register Now to start leaving comments.