The 23-year-old guitarist has been playing since he was a toddler.
Marcus King is a fourth generation blues player who has, as they say, lived it. The Greenville, South Carolina, native started playing guitar at age 3. He first performed in his father, Marvin King’s church when he turned 11. But making music and knowing it will be your life’s work are two different things. For some, it takes a dark turn to light the way for that.
King’s teen years were darkened by bouts of clinical depression. At 13, his first love died in a car accident. “That I would lose people who were close to me, for a long time music was the only thing that really had my heart in it,” says King. Even before the tragedy, King felt like an outcast in school, kept mostly to himself, and had a father out on the road. “Music was my babysitter, my best friend growing up,” he says in a phone interview from Birmingham, Alabama, on the first leg of a tour that will stop for two nights at the Majestic Theatre on Nov. 23 and 24.
He’s only 23 now, and has come a long way since those downcast days in Greenville. Eric Clapton is a fan. Chris Stapleton says King is “one of my favorite artists.” King’s new album, El Dorado, drops in January and was produced by Grammy nominee Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.
To hear King play guitar is to sense how his music and his life are inseparable. Classic blues guitarists bring tension, understand phrasing and color, and know the exact moments when to let the audience catch its collective breath. King knows all of that. But more than that, he is irresolutely and beautifully unhinged. There’s a Vaughan Brothers-like danger in his playing, but even more restless and insatiable.
King says he still struggles with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but that his recent move from Greenville to Nashville has been good for his mental health. There he finds a music community that understands the toll a tour can take. “In a town like Nashville, it’s like a neon sign that’s just kind of always fluorescently buzzing, letting you know that it’s still there,” says King. “So when I come home, [I’m] resting up, [I] spend a couple days writing with some friends. Get in a creative place and get hyped up by them, hear what they’re doing. It’s great.”
It’s easy to see why King gets excited when he describes the band that came together in Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio in Nashville to back him for El Dorado. They recorded 12 tracks in just three days. One of the players, Billy Sanford, is the guitarist who played the famous licks on Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” King says Sanford played the same guitar for both sessions. Bassist Dave Roe has played with Johnny Cash. And drummer Gene Chrisman and keyboard legend Bobby Wood are original members of the Memphis Boys, the house band heard on Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.”
So much has happened in the past decade, King has to focus on staying grounded while undertaking a grueling touring schedule. “We’re running ourselves to death, it seems like sometimes,” says King. “But I’m always anxious to get back on stage because that’s where I feel at home and at peace. Those demons start to get a little louder in your head on the days off.”
Staying good while staying alive is a challenge for many performers, and King maintains a network for other musicians to talk about mental health and staying fit on and off stage. “A lot of musicians struggle with mental health out here on the road,” he says. “You gotta be willing to sacrifice for your art. You gotta be willing to die for it. You gotta love it that much.”
When he hits the Majestic, King says he’s going to “leave every single thing that I got out on that stage and I’m going to just pray that I have enough energy in me for the next night. And I’ll do it all again.”
