Stillwater’s David Heck: The Professional
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’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.
He’ll tell you, with complete sincerity and only mild exaggeration, that he biked twelve or fifteen miles each way to Stillwater rehearsals after joining the band in 1981. 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 five years later 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.
His home was formed by Glenn and Margaret Stephens Heck, and it was 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 his four-year military stint and stayed, coining Warner Robins’ enduring nickname, “Georgia’s International City,” that reflected the constant movement of military families arriving from around the world. He later helped establish both the Houston Arts Alliance and the Macon Arts Alliance, served on the Houston County school board for thirteen years, and wrote “200 Years of Freedom,” a bicentennial composition celebrating the nation’s 200th birthday 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.”
None of this happened from some grand estate or political dynasty. 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.
David was born into that ethic. He inherited all of it. 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.
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 he was playing dances after football games, earning fifteen dollars, and moving through bands with Rob Walker and other young musicians from the Warner Robins scene. He eventually joined Suntower, a regional group that worked fraternity parties and clubs throughout the Southeast, from Pensacola to Daytona, threading through the old Southern college circuit that once kept countless musicians employed.
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.”
That ability to absorb music quickly would later make him invaluable to Stillwater.
Joining Stillwater
David pulled out of college before finishing, as musicians do when the road starts calling louder than the classroom. 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. 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 fifteen thousand 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.
Building a Life
David went back to Nashville, back to Cristy Lane, back to the road. He met his wife Sherri in the Cristy Lane organization's office, where the band came in to help box albums. Sherri was working the front desk. She was from California, a singer who had studied music in Long Beach, part of a jazz choir there assembled by a director connected to Karen Carpenter, who had come through that same program. Sherri had moved to Nashville on her own, met David and they married in 1988.
Between touring stretches 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.
Eventually the two of them 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.
First Westminster, then Bailey near Conifer, high in the mountains at 8,500 feet. They raised two sons there while teaching music, gigging locally, and piecing together the unpredictable economics 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 he was looking at temp work and ultimately landed at University of Colorado Health, where he spent twenty-five years, and now works from home full-time.
When the pandemic hit, live entertainment faded in 2019 and stopped in 2020. Since then he has deliberately remained out of the circuit life.
"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 Boulder-to-Boulder races. Training runs through mountain roads and Denver suburbs alike.
As of this writing he is training for the Denver Colfax Marathon, a Boston qualifier. If he runs it in four hours and ten minutes, he'll be on the start line in Boston in April 2027.
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.
He still has his unicycles and gets them out occasionally, riding them in his neighborhood.
"The neighbor kids think I'm crazy," he says.
Coming Back to Where It Started
David Heck does hard physical things for the love of them. Biking fifteen miles each way to rehearsal, unicycling among Shriners in hotel parking lots, running Boulder-to-Boulder ten times, memorizing two hours of set list for a show he'd never played in front of an audience. That disposition comes from somewhere.
Glenn and Margaret modeled it at the dinner table and in community involvement before David picked up drum sticks, or the clarinet, or sat at an organ.
David Heck has no blood relatives left in Warner Robins now. His parents are buried in Dublin. His sisters live elsewhere. Much of his adult life 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 reunion performances in July, 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 is blunt about it. When other drummers were suggested for the reunion performances, Mike refused.
“It has to be David.”
He is, in Mike's estimation, the only drummer who makes the band play optimally, not just adequately, not just competently, but the way it's supposed to sound.
David himself describes it differently.
For him, the concerts are almost secondary. The real meaning lies in seeing the people again, returning to the town his parents helped shape, reconnecting with friendships that survived decades, distance, marriages, children, career changes, and the long strange drift of adulthood.
“We’re like brothers,” he says. “The biggest thing for me is getting back to Warner Robins and seeing everyone. The concerts are the icing on the cake.”
His father helped give 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.
