Growing up on his family’s cattle farm in rural Georgia, Gavin Adcock dreamt of becoming a professional bull rider. But the universe had other plans. After suffering a knee injury playing football in college, Gavin turned his attention to playing guitar and songwriting, and the rest, as they say, is history. In this episode of On the Bus, Country Thunder CEO Troy Vollhoffer sits down with rising country music star Gavin Adcock. Together, they talk about how Gavin got his big break, life on the road, and how he puts himself in the emotional headspace to write his hit songs. Plus, Troy shares a new single from Country Thunder Florida artist Blake Shelton in our Thunder Strike segment.
Chapter 1: What was Gavin Adcock's journey from sports to music?
And they were selling pretty good. So those two were there with me from the beginning.
Bradley Jordan's responsible for Luke Combs in the beginning, I believe. Yes, sir. Yeah, he knows what he's doing. He obviously has a great ear.
Yeah, he broke a few acts early on and found them and put them in their early day shows, which is awesome. At first I was like, I don't know, but I'm glad I took the chance and started playing the shows.
On your live show, what's your favorite part about touring? Every day is a new day. It's a new city. What's your favorite part about it?
I like going somewhere I've never been and just seeing the reaction before we go on stage. Maybe we hit it hard the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and you're whooped, and you're backstage, and all the band's kind of whooped. I'm ready for an off day, and the fans are just...
they hadn't they hadn't had that the past few days so their their energy feeds into you you can hear it down the hallway into the green room and they're chanting and screaming and having a good time and we take a shot of liquor and get stirred up and everybody's this is great we're good to go um talking about your influences so skinner was a big influence for you yeah they're uh they're a great bunch of guys those guys
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. We opened up for them on the Rock of the Countries last year, those dates. So that was a surreal moment for me to open up for Kid Rock and Skinner and Travis Tritt and a bunch of people I listened to when I was in a car seat, which is just mind-blowing to me.
Yeah, it's only in this business, it seems like. I mean, this and sports are kind of the only two places you can have that experience where you're actually playing with your heroes. It's a different vibe playing a club or a theater or an arena or a festival. Which one of those venues do you prefer playing at?
I love all of them for different reasons. The club, if you can get a set of 800 people playing, I feel like a club's like 200 to 800 to 1,000 people. If you can get those people with the right energy, it's so compact, it's insane how good it feels in there. And also how trashy it kind of feels. The PA's screaming.
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Chapter 2: How did Gavin's knee injury change his career path?
Not yet. We're going with Wallen to Canada coming up in the summer. And 2026, we're going to Australia to play, what's the festival called? CMC Rocks.
CMC Rocks, yeah.
Yeah. And I'm excited about that. I'm going to definitely get me a bed on the plane.
Yeah, I know.
I'm going to pay the extra money to get me a plane bed because I've never flown that far.
It's a long ways over there. Yeah. Like 13 hours, I think, from LA or something like that. Yeah, I went over there with Metallica and ran around with them. They're going back this fall, so that's pretty cool. The CMC Rocks thing, CMC Rocks, right? Yeah, it is a very cool festival. I mean, I think once you have your American following, automatically have an Australian following.
This from what I would have been told anyway. So let's talk about the beer stuff. What's going on with that? I see. How did how did that get started?
Well, we were in Ohio. The crowd was crazy. It was one of the biggest shows I ever played. And the first time, it was my fault. I just got to in the moment and I said, if you got a drink, throw that motherfucker. So you're on fire, right? Yeah, I was going crazy. And then here just goes a rain of cans and beers. And a little bit after that, we had them flying every once in a while.
It just depends on the city, really. Sometimes you go, there won't be but a couple things thrown. But at a rock concert, you see some stuff going through the air. That's just what it is at any wild rock concert. And it died off a little bit. And then I'm singing in Arkansas, which we played at this place in Arkansas. We played with Giovanni and the Hired Guns at the end of 2023.
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