something new.” That's more or less how it started, it was Tommy and George McCorkle. Then the band started practicing in a small warehouse down on Spring Street, back be- hind the Ruins, or the Sitar - I can’t remem- ber if it was called the Sitar first or The Ruins. Toy Caldwell stopped by one night and said to Tommy, “ Brother I will play with you guys.” So Toy started playing with us and I'd cer- tainly never heard anything like that before. I had only heard the Toy Factory when I was younger. I was blown away. I was younger than them, so I'd sneak into the clubs and stuff and hear him play. Now I was playing with Toy and Tommy.
Cool experience at sixteen, I’d imagine. Oh yeah. So, in a nut shell, that's how it all started. Then Tommy started talking AND said.
“Let's get Doug (Gray) to sing, and then we got Jerry Eubanks to play the sax, and the whole conception was to play original music. That was the whole thing. and that. Even though I was still living at home, they let me play. When you get older it’s different, but back then I was the pup. Everyone was real serious about playing music, and I'm think- ing, well that's cool with me! I was just kind of overwhelmed with the music itself. So, that's what we did, was started
playing songs and original music, and Toy churned out songs like “Can’t You See,” which I think was one of his first original songs that they'd been playing out a little bit with Toy Factory. But we start playing that and “In My Own Way” and “Ramblin’” and “See You Later, I’m Gone.” Things like that. Lots of things that were on the first record. We just started playing and we didn't really know what we were doing, we just knew that we liked it. It was a big deal the first time we went
to record. It wasn’t like it is now. Recording is no big deal today, but back then it was. I re- member someone brought a jam box to re-
hearsal and we recorded to see what we sounded like, and kind of used that a s a blue- print when we cut our demo at Mark V in Greenville. At the time, the studio only had gospel
groups recording there. The first time, we saved up like five hundred bucks to cut this demo. So, we’re going to go in there and I’m carrying a drum kit in and the guy that was the engineer said, “Why is he bringing drums in here?” Because back then all they had was the gospel quartets and piano player, like for a Sunday morning church service or what not. And here we go bringing in drums and Mar- shall amps and all this stuff you know. I’m sure it was a shock to everyone who worked there. But that's the truth of it, we got the demo recorded and basically that demo was songs that would be our first record. From there, we got heard by Jimmy Hall of Wet Willie, who in turn pitched us to Phil Walden at Capricorn Records.
Absolutely. Tommy and George were hanging out at the Ruins, and Willie was playing on like, I forget, probably a Friday night. Tommy and George were talking to Jimmy and Jack Hall about music, and about our band. It's kind of ironic because they had the two brothers in the band and we had two brothers in our band. Tommy was telling the Jimmy and Jack about our band and they said, “Why don't you come up and open for our band.” Somehow, I forget how it happened, but someone reached me at Spartan High and I got a call from Tommy. He says “You’ve got to get out of school. I’ve got to come get you. We're going to play tonight. We’re going to get set up at the Ruins.” So, we set our gear up in we opened for
Wet Willie at the Ruins in Spartanburg. They were like, blown away, like they really could- n't believe it. I guess they just didn’t expect what they heard. They were really sweet to us. I credit Jimmy and Jack with getting us
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