Thad Cockrell – Steppin’ out
Indeed, the credits reveal how much influence the NC Triangle’s alt-country community has had on Cockrell’s music. “Oh, I think that it’s mattered in a huge way,” he admits. “I heard a lot of great music, first of all. But also, I got to meet Chris Stamey in the first place because of Caitlin; I’d met her playing on a bill with her side project, Tres Chicas….Greg [Readling] introduced me to a lot of musicians. Jon Kemppainen [fiddle player for the Two Dollar Pistols] played guitar with me.”
Cockrell also credits Steve Gardner, an area radio DJ, house concert producer and Sugar Hill Records veteran, with helping him find significant attention by sending out copies of his initial demo tape to some key people he thought would be taken with it — including Jeff Weiss and Corrie Gregory of mail-order company Miles Of Music, which went on to issue Stack Of Dreams on their own label.
A story that’s not really been spelled out, though, is how Cockrell went (rather rapidly, as these things go) from heartbroken intercollegiate wrestler and journalism major at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (Lynchburg, Virginia, circa 1997) to recording and performing songwriter amidst that active North Carolina scene.
The very first steps have been recounted before. Encouragement and help from Jeff Dernlan, his wrestling coach at Lynchburg who happened to be an experienced songwriter, was followed quickly by Cockrell’s move (after having written exactly one song) to Wake Forest, North Carolina, to attend the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The precedent for what actually happened next was to be found in, of all things, his competitive wrestling saga.
Division I wrestlers are, pretty universally, guys who have been at it since they could walk. Cockrell had never wrestled at all until his sophomore year in college and still didn’t have a coach in his junior year, but he “watched videos and practiced” and proceeded to meet his goal of joining the Division I wrestling team in his senior year.
“For some reason,” he says, “I made that my goal, and it happened. But afterward I realized that I’d been stupid to have tried!”
So this is the guy — who’s got the one self-penned song, and whose performing experience amounts to having joined in on backup choruses a couple of times at his buddies’ gigs in Lynchburg — who arrives in Wake Forest that summer, knowing no one in that little town.
“I call that ‘The Summer Of No Conversation’,” Cockrell recalls. “I knew nobody in North Carolina. I didn’t know there was a music scene there either. I didn’t know who Whiskeytown was. I didn’t know anything! All I knew was that I was always a freak about country music — and a huge music fan, period.
“Walking around, I saw this place called the Garden Gate Cafe in downtown Wake Forest, and I walked in there and asked “Hey, do you guys ever have musicians play?’ And they’re like ‘Yeah; the owner is looking to have music.’ So I said, ‘Here’s my name and number; I’d love to play.'”
Just like that. On impulse?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah; that’s me. I do it. But then I didn’t hear from them. I went on working painting houses during the day, with a bunch of crack addicts and alcoholics, by the way, until I got home one night and there was a message: ‘Hello Thad, this is the Garden Gate Cafe. Tomorrow night’s your big break! You can play and it’s two hours — and if things go well, you can play the next night, too. And if that goes well, you can have the gig for the school year, you can play every Friday and Saturday night. Twenty bucks a night.”
At first, he’d play his one song, and literally the couple of others he knew (Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night” and Neil Young’s “Lotta Love”, plus half of another), and start them all over as soon as people would leave. He somehow stretched that into two hour-long sets. With the strong impetus to expand his repertoire, Cockrell set a goal of writing one song a week for the next year.
“This has always been my thing,” he says. “I make goals because I don’t really know the reality of it, and I don’t realize till later how crazy it was. One a week is a lot — really!”
He didn’t write 52 songs that year, but such honky-tonk standouts from Stack Of Dreams as “Vacancy” and “Pretending” (the latter a sort of twang turn on the idea of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination”, and a second-place winner at Merlefest’s renowned Chris Austin Songwriting Contest in 2001) were among those that showed up.
Cockrell sang at that small cafe for six months before getting a gig at the Caribou Cafe in North Raleigh — a bit closer to where all those acts could actually be seen, but hardly one of the Triangle’s hip music venues. He’d catch the Two Dollar Pistols, Merritt, Cary and others, and eventually approached them with his demo tape — as a fan with some songs that maybe would interest them.