King of the Capitol
Baby-faced Carolinian can sure pick it
Freakish prodigy was raised on Happy Meals and old-time religion, discovered in a guitar shop
Now a full-grown man, Marcus’s talent as bluesman is unmistakable, despite Rick Rubin’s best efforts to make him sound like Adele
Ernest Hemingway found his joie de vivre in the sweat on a wine bottle. I get mine from a cold can of beer. It helps if you’re holding that can of beer at a Marcus King concert, which is where I found myself on a recent Saturday evening up there at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. I had been itching to go “up there” lately. Not “upstate” exactly, which exists exactly nowhere outside the imagination of urbanites who, as Ben Metcalf once wrote, “thought that thermal underwear and down vests [...] put them well in touch with rural experience.” When I say up there I mean it more like outta here. So I went up there to Port Chester, on the New Haven line, on a lead-gray March afternoon, hoping to enjoy myself not only a can of cold beer and a good rock show but the kind of company who knows such things are good enough for their own sake. King played the historic Capitol while touring for his latest album, Mood Swings, the third since his Grammy-nominated solo debut El Dorado, …