It was a perfect day for a concert — and what a venue, right beside the Englishtown, NJ, race track. It was a hot, late-summer afternoon. My friends and I pulled into the outskirts of Englishtown and decided to park a good walk away, because we asked and heard that the small town was full of cars, and people were paying to park on peoples’ front yards.
So, we walked about thirty, forty-five minutes to Raceway Park, right beside where the concert was going to be. It was a huge area surrounded by 18-wheeler trailers for a fence, and the huge stage took up a large area in the front, at the bottom of a very large, slowly descending hill. Besides the speakers on the stage, there were several large stacks of speakers scattered across the side of the hill, for the people who were further back, like myself. People were lying on blankets or standing around talking, My friends and I had missed the New Riders of the Purple Sage — a country-rock group who had opened up the show.
All of a sudden, there arose a large commotion, and the Marshall Tucker Band came out around 3″00 in the afternoon. We could not see or hear the group at first, You could barely hear the music where we were hanging out, and there were several people behind us, There was an estimated one 150,000 people there. It was a very mellow crowd — people enjoying what they knew was a very special moment.
It took a while for the sound to get loud enough for the whole crowd to hear the MTB. Finally, the sound got straightened out and the band sounded great as they played several of their popular songs from that era. Both the Grateful Dead, who Marshall Tucker was opening for, and Marshall Tucker were playing in the peak of their careers. It was quite an experience.
This CD is a copy of a soundboard tape for the MTB, so the sound quality is not that good. The volume of the recording was the same volume thrughout the show, and the quality of the recording improves as the show goes on. The set ends with a rousing “24 Hours at a Time” and the encore is “Can’t You See” — a killer version.
This is definitely a must-have if you were at the historic show. Marshall Tucker did not release a lot of live material. This will be available on Amazon on October 14, 2014.
