Saturday’s concert at the Robins Theatre may be the last opportunity for local fans to see Average White Band live.

Alan Gorrie, a founding member whose bass lines and / or guitar riffs propelled the band’s songs, said the group is planning an international farewell tour in 2024. The tour will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the band’s self-titled 1974 release — referred to by fans as “the White Album” — that included the number one single “Pick Up the Pieces” and started a run of four Gold- or Platinum-selling albums.

“With the 50th anniversary of the White Album, we’re reminded that our families have been denied our presence for a half century of time, so we’ll give you some of our best last years,” Gorrie said.

The increasing headaches trying to tour in a post-COVID world, when air travel is more expensive, less reliable and increasingly inconvenient, makes that decision easier.

“The 90 minutes on stage are wonderful, but the other 48 hours to get there and back can be quite grueling,” he said. “If we had a magic carpet to bring us to the theaters, we might reconsider, but it’s not what you want to do for the rest of your life, sitting in an airport at 7 o’clock in the morning waiting for an airplane that’s two hours late and wondering if you’ll make it to the gig on time.”

Gorrie and many of the other early members of the band hail from Scotland, but the musicians were influenced by American soul and R&B acts in the same way UK musicians a decade before them were influenced by Black blues artists.

For Gorrie the list of musicians that inspired him includes the entire roster of Motown and the grittier soul out of Memphis, from the artists on Stax Records to singers like Al Green and Wilson Pickett. Gorrie believes those sounds spoke to white Europeans because it wasn’t easy to find in their countries.

“We were kind of deprived of that music,” he said. “You had to seek it out. When you have to seek it out, you become more of an avid fan than if it’s laid on a plate for you. Radio did nothing to promote it (in the UK), so you had to seek it out, and that added some of the cache.”

By 1970, the musicians who became AWB were all in London. Guitar player and backing vocalist Onnie McIntyre, the other AWB member who’s been there since the beginning, can be heard backing Chuck Berry on his “The London Chuck Berry Sessions.” Gorrie and other future members of AWB can be heard on such songs as Johnny Nash’s hit single “I Can See Clearly Now.”

According to the bio on the band’s website, the group became AWB when it was booked to play the Lincoln Music Festival in England in 1972 before it had settled on a name and was adapted from the catchphrase of a British diplomat, who said, “Too much for the average white man …”

When Gorrie was asked about an interview he’d done a few years ago in Guitar World magazine, where he talked about how he simplified the bassline for “Pick Up the Pieces” at the advice of legendary producer Jerry Wexler, he said the name also was a joking reference to the approach of many musicians in the ’70s.

“I think the ethic for us was everyone find their part like a jigsaw. If the parts fit together, don’t complicate them, keep them simple,” Gorrie said. “The summation of those parts is what makes the music so great. Instead of going, ‘Wow, look at me,’ we were the antithesis, the opposite of what an average white band would have been. It was all about shredding on guitar then. We said the name as an ironic, tongue-in-cheek thing. It was really the opposite of that.”

The group now boasts a multi-racial lineup with Gorrie and McIntyre joined by Cliff Lyons, alto sax, keyboards and vocals; Rob Aries, keyboard and bass; Brent Carter, lead vocals; Rocky Bryant, drums; and Fred Vigdor, tenor sax, keyboards, and vocals.

The current band can play the hits while also putting its own spin on the material, Gorrie said. “I Just Can’t Give You Up,” a deep cut from that 1974 album, has become a live favorite because of Carter’s vocal performance. A reggae-fied version of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song “Walk on By” is another example he cited.

“Obviously, we play what the audience wants to hear, what they know, as much as possible, but we also want to be inspired by somebody who brings something new to that. The current lineup, we didn’t handpick them, they kind of picked themselves. They are steeped in the catalog. They’re a decade younger than Onnie and I, so they grew up with the AWB catalog and fell into it very easy. They all brought incredible musicianship and vocal prowess.”

If you go …

WHO: Average White Band

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Robins Theatre, 160 E. Market St., Warren

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $35 to $55 and are available at the Robins box office and online at robinstheatre.com