David Heck joined Stillwater after the band’s initial Capricorn Records breakthrough, stepping behind the drums at a moment when Southern rock’s golden era was beginning to shift beneath the musicians living it.
A percussion major from Warner Robins with the discipline to memorize a two-hour set before his first show, David became the steady rhythmic center of the band’s later years, helping take Stillwater through the long miles between Southern rock mythology and real adult life.
David Heck drumming during the Stillwater reunion in 2008. Photo by Markham White.
David Heck’s story isn’t about a man who burned his life down for music. It’s the story of a man who took music with him while building a life sturdy enough to hold it all.
After joining the band in 1981, David biked twelve or fifteen miles each way to band rehearsals. He’d moved back into his childhood home in Warner Robins when the band needed a drummer, and a bicycle was the transportation he chose, so he pedaled out to practice all day, then pedaled home, then did it again the next morning.
That combination of endurance, practicality, and cheerful stubbornness is about as David Heck as it gets.
He wasn’t part of Stillwater’s original Capricorn-era mythology. He joined later, after the first rush of Southern rock glory had already crested and the ground beneath it was beginning to shift. But he arrived prepared. He memorized two full hours of music before ever stepping onstage with the group. He learned the material cold. No charts. No shortcuts. Just repetition, discipline, and trust in his own ability to do the work.
Mike Causey still says the band plays differently with David behind the drums. More naturally. More completely. The way it’s supposed to sound.
David had been circling in the band's orbit for years before he joined it, close enough to the Warner Robins scene to know all the players. And close enough to Stillwater that Rob Walker had invited him to the 1978 Rebel Jam in Atlanta, where he stood on the side of the stage watching Stillwater, the Dixie Dregs, and Sea Level perform. He had no way of knowing that in just a few years he'd be on stages like this one playing in Stillwater.
Briardale Avenue
To understand David Heck, it helps to understand the home he grew up in, the one on Briardale Avenue, close to Northside High School. Glenn and Margaret Stephens Heck created a home unlike most houses in Warner Robins in ways that mattered.
Glenn Heck arrived in Warner Robins in 1952 as a bassoonist with the 769th Air Force Band, part of the early wave of military families helping shape the fast-growing town that had risen beside Robins Air Force Base after World War II. A Wisconsin farm boy with formal musical training and seemingly inexhaustible civic energy, he spent the next half-century helping build the cultural identity of the city around him.
He came for a four-year military assignment and stayed, later proposing the nickname “Georgia’s International City” that reflected the constant movement of military families arriving from around the world.
Glenn later helped establish both the Houston Arts Alliance and the Macon Arts Alliance and served on the Houston County school board for thirteen years. As president of the Macon Arts Alliance, Glenn also helped establish Midsummer Macon, a program offering young people summer training in music and the arts.
He wrote “200 Years of Freedom” in 1975, a composition adopted as Warner Robins' official bicentennial song for the nation's 200th anniversary in 1976.
David’s mother Margaret Stephens Heck brought another layer of regional identity into the household. She came from Dublin, one of the old river towns whose culture long predated suburban Warner Robins and whose influence quietly traveled outward through families, churches, schools, and music. Her father served as a Superior Court judge in Laurens County. Margaret led the Victory Corps at Dublin High School during World War II, attended Mercer University, wrote radio copy after college, made costumes for Northside High productions, and wrote opinion letters to newspapers when she thought something needed saying. The family jokingly called her “The Bureau of Information.”
They lived in a regular neighborhood in a city still inventing itself. But inside that house, music, civic responsibility, curiosity, and participation were treated as ordinary parts of daily life.
The creativity inside the Heck household extended far beyond David alone. His younger sister Becky played flute in the Northside band alongside him and also played piano, which meant music regularly spilled into family life. At Christmas the family gathered around the piano singing carols together.
David’s youngest sister Karen gravitated toward theatre and performance, thriving under Northside drama teacher Ray Horne, whose productions shaped generations of students in Warner Robins. Karen was voted Miss Northside High in her senior year and later elected Miss Valdosta State, before heading west to Los Angeles to pursue acting and singing professionally.
“We all came out of the same musical household,” David says. “We had one heck of a time.”
David was born into that ethic. His middle name is Stephens, after his mother's family. The discipline, the civic instinct, the sense that music was both a private joy and a public responsibility was all modeled at the dinner table before he ever sat behind a drum kit.
David during his Suntower years. Photo by Markham White.
Learning Rooms
Music in the Heck household started early. David was playing piano at seven, taught by his father. In fifth and sixth grade Glenn taught him clarinet. By high school David had moved to bass clarinet in the Northside band, playing both the concert and marching seasons. But somewhere along the way he became fascinated with drums.
One day he told his father and the band director he wanted to play drums. The band director said there was no budget for another snare drum so Glenn went to Bibb Music in Macon and ordered one that matched Northside High's blue drums.
Problem solved.
That became a recurring rhythm in David’s life. A door opened, and he walked through it.
As a freshman he entered the Northside talent show playing organ arrangements of “Classical Gas,” “Baby Elephant Walk,” “Up, Up and Away,” and the Mission: Impossible television theme, accompanied by a primitive rhythm machine. He wasn’t expecting much when the winners were announced. Then the emcee called his name for first place.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was five-foot-two back then and the kids were cheering like crazy,” David recalls.
He made the organ cool.
By high school, David was earning fifteen dollars a night playing dances after football games and performing with local bands, including Living Proof and Wildwood, with future Stillwater bandmate Rob Walker.
He eventually joined Suntower, playing alongside David George, Steve Steele, Bob Barnett, Kim Megahee, and Markham White. The band worked fraternity parties and clubs throughout the Southeast, from Pensacola to Daytona, traveling the Southern college circuit.
He transferred from Macon Junior College to the University of Georgia in 1976, and became a percussion major, studying marimba, timpani, and multiple percussion while playing drum set in the Redcoat Band and Jazz One, the school’s top jazz ensemble.
He had learned to read charts formally from an early age, but like many Southern musicians of his generation, his deepest training came another way.
“You just put the needle down and learned the song.”
He understood the precision of written arrangements and formal percussion technique, but he could also listen to a recording, learn the material, and walk into a rehearsal prepared to play. That combination would become the foundation of his professional life and make him invaluable to Stillwater.
Joining Stillwater
David left college before graduating, drawn by the opportunities opening up on the road. He moved to Nashville in 1980 and started touring with Cristy Lane, a country and Christian singer.
Then the call came.
Stillwater needed a drummer so Sebie Lacey could move more fully into frontman duties. “I said yes without hesitation,” David recalls. “I’d known of these guys for years, and I’d always respected their musicianship and character.”
David moved back to Warner Robins, climbed on his bicycle each morning, and started rehearsing with the group.
His first show with Stillwater came in Jacksonville, Florida, opening for the Rossington-Collins Band before more than 10,000 people.
He had memorized the entire two-hour set but had never performed it live with the band in front of an audience.
“I was so focused on nailing it that I can barely remember what was going on during the show,” he says.
Afterward he stood in the wings watching Rossington-Collins perform, still coming down from the intensity of concentration.
Stillwater continued hard for several more years, but David’s role in the band extended beyond simply holding down the rhythm section. Mike Causey still describes him as the steady presence who could keep rehearsals loose, the guy whose quick wit and sharp observations could break the pressure in the room and keep everybody laughing.
That balance suited David naturally. He took the music seriously without taking himself too seriously. He’s not the chaotic rock-and-roll archetype. He’s the stabilizer. The grounded guy with a sense of humor. The person who helps a room function better simply by being in it.
So Stillwater with David behind the kit hit it hard for three more years, until, as he puts it plainly, "everything died." By then the Southern rock industry that had once sustained bands like theirs was shifting beneath everyone’s feet. Capricorn Records had collapsed. The business changed. Touring changed. The dream itself changed shape.
David watched it happen without bitterness.
That may be one of the things that makes him unusual.
David in Blackjack, circa 1978. Photo by Markham White.
Building a Life
David went back to Nashville, back to Cristy Lane, back to the road. It was at the Cristy Lane organization's office, where the band had come to help box albums, that he met Sherri. Originally from California, Sherri had studied music at California State University, Long Beach, before moving to Nashville on her own to pursue a singing career. She was working in the office when their paths crossed. They married in 1988.
Between tours with Cristy, he played two summers at Opryland amusement park, backed various artists through the Nashville circuit, and played the Grand Ole Opry a couple of times. When Cristy Lane bought a theater in Branson, joining Andy Williams, Roy Clark, and a wave of performers planting themselves in the Missouri Ozarks, David and Sherri went with her. Sherri sang backup. David played drums.
Over the years, David performed in every U.S. state except Alaska and Hawaii, working with artists and groups ranging from Cristy Lane to Beach Party, a Beach Boys tribute band. After settling in Colorado, he became deeply involved in the local music scene, performing with various groups and spending more than a decade as a drummer and vocalist with one of Pro Entertainment’s leading corporate and wedding bands. His longtime friendship with Pro Entertainment owner Pat Emerine also led to several years performing with Pat’s band, Under the Radar.
David also played select dates with the late singer-songwriter Jim Salestrom, who toured internationally with Dolly Parton and performed and recorded with John Denver. For two seasons, David performed with Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits fame at the Colorado State Fair.
One past performance especially stayed with him. In 1986, while touring with Cristy Lane, David performed aboard a ferry circling the Statue of Liberty during the monument’s 100th anniversary celebration, sharing the event lineup with Lee Greenwood as New York Harbor filled with music, lights, and patriotic spectacle.
Eventually David and Sherri decided they wanted something different from Nashville and Branson, so they drove west looking for a new place to build a home.
They found it in Colorado.
David and Sherri raised their sons, Daniel and Kyle, while David taught drums, Sherri taught piano, and both played local gigs and navigated the unpredictable finances familiar to working musicians everywhere.
David was never reckless about responsibility.
The combination of long mountain commutes, two young children, and the gap between what they earned and what the family needed eventually forced a reckoning.
By 2000, David was looking for more dependable employment. He found it in the University of Colorado healthcare system, beginning a career that would span more than twenty-five years. Today, he continues working remotely.
Colorado's great outdoors became part of family life for David, Sherri, and their sons, with hiking, camping, skiing, running, and biking among their favorite activities. Daniel became an avid skier, while Kyle developed a passion for fishing. Today, Daniel travels regularly in his work as a clinical research associate, while Kyle works as an EMT and is pursuing a nursing degree.
When the pandemic brought live performances to a halt in 2020, David stepped away from the circuit and chose not to return to regular touring.
"There are pros and cons to playing and touring,” David says. “Hauling drums, traveling, rehearsing is taxing mentally and physically. Now that I've stepped back, I can breathe."
What Runs Alongside Everything Else
Running and cycling have followed him through every phase of life: Warner Robins, Nashville, Branson, Colorado. Hundred-mile bike rides. Half-marathons. Ten BOLDERBoulder races. Training runs through mountain roads and Denver suburbs alike.
David just ran the Denver Colfax Marathon, a Boston qualifier, and while he didn’t qualify to run in Boston’s 2027 marathon, he’s gonna’ try to qualify next year to run in Boston in 2028.
The drums are still set up in the basement for the days when running isn't enough.
And then there are the unicycles.
David learned to ride one as a kid. Years later he discovered Rob Walker rode them too. Naturally, they started bringing unicycles to Stillwater rehearsals and riding between sessions because apparently two musicians left unsupervised long enough will invent their own circus.
At one hotel during a Florida tour, David borrowed Rob’s six-foot unicycle and rode it around the parking lot among a group of Shriners driving their miniature cars. One of them handed him a Shriner hat to complete the spectacle.
Somewhere there is a photo. We want to see it.
David still has his unicycles and occasionally takes them for a spin around the neighborhood.
"The neighbor kids think I'm crazy," he says.
David Heck playing the Stillwater reunion show in 2016.
Photo by Markham White.
Coming Back to Where It Started
David Heck has no immediate family remaining in Warner Robins. His parents are buried in Dublin, his sisters have made lives elsewhere, and much of his own adulthood has unfolded far from Middle Georgia.
And yet the place never entirely let go of him.
The friendships remain. The music remains. The old connections remain.
When news spread that Stillwater planned a reunion performance in 2026, friends started reaching out almost immediately. Urgently. Like people reclaiming part of their own history.
That says something not only about the band, but about the kind of loyalty David inspires.
Mike Causey was adamant about bringing David back behind the drums for the reunion.
“It has to be David,” he insisted.
Mike remembered the particular feel Stillwater developed with David during its later touring years, and wanted that same chemistry when the band came together again.
For David, a Stillwater reunion means more than stepping onstage with his old bandmates. Returning to the town his parents helped shape also means reconnecting with friendships that have endured decades of distance, marriages, children, career changes, and all the unexpected turns of adulthood.
“We’re like brothers,” he says. “The biggest thing for me is getting back to Warner Robins and seeing everyone, and then getting another chance to play again.”
His father gave Warner Robins its nickname. His mother stitched costumes for school productions and carried old Dublin culture into a young military town still discovering itself.
And David Heck, their steady son, is still showing up for the things that matter.
Stillwater’s story stretches across decades. Explore these other voices that helped shape the band and the world around it:
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths, even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
