After 52 years, The Marshall Tucker Band still on ‘Cloud 9’: Upstate Beat

Doug Gray never wanted to sing “Can’t You See.”

It’s somewhat confusing, seeing as Gray is the lead singer of The Marshall Tucker Band, and “Can’t You See” — written by Toy Caldwell, the band’s late, great lead guitarist — is arguably the band’s most enduring hit, alongside cuts like “Heard it in a Love Song” and “Fire on the Mountain,” on both of which Gray sings.

But when it came to “Can’t You See,” Gray knew from the first time he heard it that the man to sing it was the man who wrote it.

“Toy would come down and say, ‘Hey, take this song,’” Gray recalls. “He said, ‘I just don’t feel good, and I don’t want to sing.’ I told him, ‘You go into that studio and you sing.’ So he sang it two or three times all the way through and he got it. There ain’t no way I could compete with the intensity that he put in that song. That’s his song. He made it his song, and now it belongs to the entire world.”

Gray isn’t kidding. The song has been streamed more than a billion times on Pandora and over 66 million times on Spotify. And when The Marshall Tucker Band plays at the Peace Center Aug. 8, Gray will do what he always does: Turn his mic towards the audience and let them sing the song, just as one should when the song belongs to the world.

“It’s a blessing for me to be able to go out there and let the audience participate,” Gray says.

The tour that brings the band to town next week is called the “Live on Cloud 9 Tour,” a sign that Gray, now 76 years old, is still having the time of his life leading The Marshall Tucker Band.

“Songs like ‘Can’t You See,’ and ‘Heard it in a Love Song’ — stuff like that makes you feel like you are on cloud nine.” Gray says. “It’s been 52 years and I’m still on cloud nine. I’m excited to see all those people.”

You should also take that tour name as a sign that even as Southern rock peers like Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers have retired or simply passed on, Gray and The Marshall Tucker Band have no intention of hanging it up anytime soon.

“I’m still standing,” Gray says, his voice a mix of pride and defiance. “I don’t know if I’ll be the last one, but I just think that there are too many things out there yet for me to do, and that I can still make the kids understand what real music is all about.”

Want to go?

Who: The Marshall Tucker Band

When: Thursday, Aug. 8

Where: Peace Center

Tickets and info: peacecenter.org

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