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, and the first with legendary producer Rick Rubin. Hailing from Greenville, South Carolina, where he came of age learning guitar from his father, a professional blues-gospel musician named Marvin King, the young Marcus started playing shows when he was only eight years old, eventually recording a Pentecostal rock record with his dad called, perplexingly, Huge in Europe. At 17, King got a band together and cut his own record, Soul Insight, a hidden gem of recent Southern rock, and hit the road for his first tour to promote its release. 

It was on that first tour that the Marcus King Band stopped by Norman’s Rare Guitars in Los Angeles, where the owner overheard King playing in the backroom and quickly grabbed a camera.

“From growing up in the shop I can tell if a player is good from the first four seconds they start playing,” the shop’s owner says in the video’s opening. “And this guy is pretty damn good.”

What happens next is something I’m frankly not accustomed to seeing in Americans of my generation. To understand why, I need to give you a picture of this kid in the guitar shop. As a teenager, King looks like he’s been raised on a steady diet of Happy Meals and violent video games. His body is the platonic ideal of chubby. He’s got weirdly long, wavy hair and sits kind of beached-like on a low bar stool, wearing a Jack Daniels t-shirt and gray jeans. He’s got what looks suspiciously similar to a Jostens class ring on his ring finger. Tucked into his collar are the kind of sunglasses Hulk Hogan wears — experience tells me he probably dug them out of the family junk drawer, looked at himself in the mirror, and said, with feeling, “Hell yeah!”  

I’m saying all this because I know this kid, and you know this kid. You and I both know that this kid is statistically unlikely to do anything that will rock our world. The internet is full of idiot savants from third-world squalor who can flawlessly play entire concertos on instruments salvaged from industrial waste heaps. America, God bless her, tends to lack the requisite levels of poverty and desperation to produce such freaks.  

Which is why what happens next is so remarkable. The shop owner exits the frame, King flashes a grin, and suddenly this fat white kid from Nowheresville sticks his hand into the guts of a Gibson and pulls out a rendition of “Driftin Blues” that, I swear to God, puts Charles Brown and Eric Clapton to shame.

“Not often do you meet people that you immediately know will become legends,” Zac Brown told Rolling Stone recently, “But, when I met Marcus, I felt it.”

Nearly a decade later, King still has that baby-faced charm, but he has expanded his Upcountry Carolina blues into a potent brew of American rock, mixing in new notes of gospel, jazz, and Nashville twang with each release. He joins a new crop of young blues and bluegrass virtuosos like Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Billy Strings, who have not so much redefined as reasserted their respective traditions. It helps that King has been guided along by some of the country’s finest producers: first Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, who helped King earn a Grammy nomination for El Dorado, and now Rick Rubin, whose cool market-savvy touch softens King’s harder edges in 2024’s Mood Swings. 

King’s voice is just as remarkable as his guitar playing, and Rubin seems intent on fleshing out King’s lesser-appreciated talent in their first collaboration. Mood Swings lands somewhere in the matrix of Al Green, Leon Bridges, and, surprisingly, Adele. The most popular track, “F*ck My Life Up Again,” is like Sonnet 139 for the generation that sends the “u up” text. With its string section and haunting vocals, it sounds more like the theme song of a Bond movie than a country-blues standard.

King has clearly come a long way from that kid in the guitar shop. His studio sound is flirting with a coastal vibe that can obscure his hinterland gifts. But great American talent doesn’t really live in studio records; it’s live albums, performances, and film recordings that make a legend. Going all the way back to Robert Johnson strumming his blues in a San Antonio hotel room, the best music this country creates is always live music, in beer joints and nightclubs and dance halls and church pews, in basements, fairgrounds, dive bars, and even in guitar shops.

The Capitol Theater in Port Chester is by no means a shabby venue for a rock show. Bruce Wheeler, the manager of the place, gave me the grand tour when I arrived. Originally built by Thomas Lamb in 1926, the Capitol Theater became a premier venue for seventies-era bands after the Fillmore East in Manhattan was shuttered in 1971. Joe Cocker, Frank Zappa, and the Grateful Dead are among many legends who took the 55-minute train ride up from Grand Central to play a set at the Capitol, which drew fans from the region’s smaller towns who otherwise could not afford to see their heroes in the city. The Capitol then fell into a period of sad disuse before it was brought back to life a decade ago by Peter Shapiro, the concert promoter who performed a similar feat of resurrection on the Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg. Shapiro restored the Capitol’s gorgeous architectural details, including two chandeliers, six opera boxes, and 240 plasterwork squirrels (“Squirrels were hot back then,” Bruce assures me). Its interior is a bit Byzantine for my taste, but the Capitol is undeniably a jewel in this otherwise sleepy small town; more to the point, it has brought back the bands, who in turn have brought back the crowds which once made the Capitol Theater a hidden gem on national tours. A security guard named Dan was happy to bandy about some memories from the glory days.  

“I first saw the Dead at the Capitol in ’71. I was 14. Seen ’em about 150 times since.”

I asked if I could quote him on 150.

“You can quote me on 125.”

He told me some choice anecdotes from his Deadhead days, including one about a naked streaker who defied expectations by walking, not running, through the crowd. While he spoke, I realized that there was a question which had long weighed on my heart that he might be able to answer.

“Dan,” I asked, “did the girls stink at those Grateful Dead shows?”

He furrowed his brow and plucked at a salt-and-pepper mustache.

“No…” he finally said.

Then: “Some of them did.”

Then, with assurance: “We bathed.”

Dan told me about hitchhiking around the country when he was 16 and running out of gas in Arizona. After his halcyon days (“...life was good before AIDS, young man”) he settled down and worked a career at Philip Morris. Nine years ago, he came back to the Capitol as a part-time security guard. Now he’s 67 and seemingly knows everyone in the place, calling each of them by their first name as they walk past his chair. He told me the only regret he had in life was not marrying his high school sweetheart. Then, in a curious segue, he said:

“I saw The Who here, right before Keith Moon died.”

He had a serious look and cast it wide over the crowd.

“He hunched over his drum kit after playing ‘Substitute’… that was it, man.”

We chatted as the theater filled up, the sound of a train horn punctuating our conversation every now and then. The crowd gathering around us was not what you would call metropolitan. You could tell by the way people walked into the room: lumbering, kind of gutsy, their whole posture cantilevered around a tallboy. Jowly men in mesh-backed caps sidled up to seasoned women in long, thin shawls.  

King finally walked out on stage and 2,000 fans cheered. Only three of them held up their phones.

“Let’s play some honkey-tonk music, goddammit!” he hollered.

The band struck up a setlist of old favorites like “Beautiful Stranger,” “Virginia,” and “Goodbye Carolina,” along with new tracks like “F*ck Up My Life Again.” They played a rollicking cover of Gabe Lee’s “Honky Tonk Hell” that soared on King’s voice, and even dipped into a bit of funk with a brass-heavy track I couldn’t place.

“I played a lotta shows here I can’t remember,” King instructed. “I guess I’m glad you remember them for me.”

At the end of his show, King’s wife, the vocalist Briley Hussey, came out to join him onstage for a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” King credits Hussey with helping him sober up after some precocious drinking early in his career. Now, he likes to talk about wellness and mental health and the importance of “being present.”

What does that mean for his future music? Don’t ask me. I hounded King’s management for two weeks before the show, trying to arrange an interview, but received no reply save for a swarthy “wrong number.” At the show I tried to give the Capitol Theater security the slip by asking to use an ATM in a room off the main lobby where I spotted King chatting, but a sinewy security guard was wise to my play. Somehow this inaccessibility felt right. That kind of distance between the artist and his audience accords with his talent, which, regardless of the new studio stuff, still reaches Olympian heights on stage. 

King rips into a solo on just about every track, and each one is a small miracle. Stadium rock made the guitar solo into something that resembles jack rabbits mating, but King’s solos take the blues as their cue: you can feel the sap rise as he plays, slow and sweet, with a breezy swing that carries them along. 

What makes King’s live performances truly special, though, is his orchestral awareness of his band. As a group they play like a jazz ensemble, trading solos in each song, and King has the attentiveness of a big swing-band conductor when it comes to playing with their quirks. At one point during the show, his keyboard player, in an awkward bout of showmanship, attempted to remove his shirt mid-song. King, never missing a beat, began to play the absent notes on his own guitar as the pianist struggled; then he did something I’ve never seen before: As the pianist fought to untangle himself, King began to play the pianist himself. Like, not just the notes he was missing, but the man’s very movements: the rhythm of his struggle to remove a sweaty t-shirt became the focal point for King’s solo. 

The crowd, at first slow to catch on, soon burst out whooping and laughing. As the pianist fought valiantly, King brought the tempo higher and higher, until we were treated to a piece of genuine theater. When the pianist was finally freed, the crowd exploded in applause, and King swung his band back into harmony, not a note unaccounted for.

“Classic blues were both entertainment and a form of folklore,” Ralph Ellison once wrote, and that’s what I mean when I say it’s best to keep talents like King at a distance: Get too close, and you risk missing out on that joie de vivre Hemingway found in the sweat on a wine bottle. “If you don’t enjoy how those beads of sweat look,” Albert Murray once said, “and how your partner looks, and how the sunlight comes through… you missed it.” 

With a cold can of beer and the right crowd, Marcus King is hard to miss.