From vstar.com (Ventura County Star):
Singer-songwriter Gary Stockdale will perform with the National In-Choir on Saturday in Thousand Oaks.
Gary Stockdale celebrated his 60th birthday last month by working his butt off, performing a tight, 60-minute set of pop-rock originals for a jam-packed crowd at the Mayflower Club in North Hollywood. In the audience were family members, old high school chums and songwriter pals like Severin Browne and Harriet Schock.
Though Stockdale has worked in the music business for decades, he never considered himself a real songwriter, not like Browne or Schock. Instead, he was a gun for hire, working as an assistant for Lalo Schifrin; singing and acting in Steven Bochco’s epic TV flop “Cop/Rock”; penning scores for ’80s jiggle flicks like “Hard Ticket to Hawaii”; gigging and recording with Bill Mumy’s rock band, The Jenerators; and writing music for TV series like “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” and “Penn & Teller’s Bulls—!”
As he got older, though, Stockdale’s appreciation for people like Browne grew, people who, he said, “have put their lives and their thoughts into perfect little four-and-a-half-minute novels, full of demons and saints and villains and victims.” One day Stockdale finally decided it was time to stop writing “what other people wanted me to write” and, instead, commit himself to becoming a real singer-songwriter.