News Articles

Breaking through
This is the year things get started
for local musician Dave 'Corncob' McCormick

Michael Lipton <lipton@grafwv.com>
For the Daily Mail

Thursday March 07, 2002; 11:16 AM

To paraphrase Al Stewart, this just might be the "Year of the Cob." After making a living singing other people's tunes for two decades, Dave "Corncob" McCormick is putting the finishing touches on his first-ever recording and, just as importantly, recently pocketed a cool $5,000 as winner of a local Battle of the Bands.

"This is the year things get started," said McCormick.

"Truthfully, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in my musical career -- maybe there's a little bit of validation going on."

Over the past few months, McCormick and his nine-piece band Rockin' Horse duked it out with 28 other local groups. The finals, held late last month at CJ's Olde Main Pub in St. Albans, pitted Rockin' Horse against finalist Lack Thereof.

Playing in long-lived bands like Diamond Back and shorter stints with groups like the Redstar Rockets, Steve Mullins' Southern Sounds and Highway 51 (with fellow picker Robert Shafer), as well as performing solo, McCormick has been a staple of the area music scene for decades.

He is best known, perhaps, for his standout guitar chops and an uncanny vocal resemblance to Marshall Tucker's Doug Gray. But only recently has he made an all-out effort to push his own material.

"One morning, right before 2000, I woke up and said, 'What are you doing? You need to plug your own music,' " he said. "I served a 20-year sentence doing covers. You kill a man and you only get 25."

Doing a musical turnabout, McCormick's solo gigs now consist of all original material. With his band, soon to be renamed "The Outlaw Orchestra," he plays about two-thirds originals.

"I have an agenda and my agenda is my songs," he said. "If I play a cover song, that's one of my originals I didn't get to play."

McCormick, 35, is the first to point out that recognition has been a long time coming.

"I've never won a contest before," he said. "Matter of fact, I've never won anything. I'm used to losing, so winning is a new thing for me."

McCormick traced his decision to pursue music full time back to one memorable day when he was in high school. He was 17 and working as a bank teller in West Hamlin. It was his first -- and last -- day job.

"They were training me to be a loan officer," he recalled. "They took me out to repo a car from someone they shouldn't have repo'd it from. I felt ashamed. When I got back to the bank, I told them I couldn't do that."