Lafayette swamp rocker’s gets new ‘blood’

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music critic
• Published: Jun 26, 2009

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After making swamp-rock and -pop for years with his band, the Lafayette Marquis, as well as Acadiana super-group Lil’ Band O’ Gold, C.C. Adcock is getting the greatest mainstream exposure of his career through a song featured on the recently released True Blood soundtrack CD.

Adcock’s “Bleed 2 Feed,” the first single from the soundtrack, is infiltrating rock radio. The soundtrack album, too, has sold an impressive 50,000 copies and the newly launched second season of True Blood, that racy HBO series about vampires in rural Louisiana, is drawing big ratings.

Adcock and the Lafayette Marquis appeared in episode 10 of True Blood’s first season. Playing themselves, they performed five songs at Merlottes, the bar where main character Sookie Stackhouse works. There’s also a “Bleed 2 Feed” music video.

“I’ve always been in the cracks, between the lines, so to have something played at rock radio is kind of funny for me,” Adcock said from Lafayette this week. “But it’s on the strength of the show, and maybe the strength of the song.”

Adcock, knowing that True Blood creator and executive producer Alan Ball was already interested in his music, wrote “Bleed 2 Feed” specifically for the show.

“I went to Los Angeles and Alan showed me the pilot,” he said. “I went home that night and wrote the song. It didn’t make the theme, but it ended up on the soundtrack CD.”

Chances are very good that “Bleed 2 Feed” will be among the songs Adcock performs Thursday during the Louisiana songwriters night at the Manship Theatre. Adcock joins Baton Rouge blues artist Larry Garner; Joe Stark, a singer-songwriter from Houma who’s one-third of pop-rock band Sons of Williams; and Kristin Diable, a singer-songwriter from Baton Rouge who spent five years in New York and now lives in New Orleans.

“We’ll all get out there and sort of pass the song around, tell stories about how the song came to be,” Adcock said.

The four singer-songwriters have much in common even though they work in different genres.

“People always identify Louisiana music as Cajun, zydeco, funk and brass-band music,” Adcock said. “A lot of times people identify it by the instrumentation. And certainly people identify Louisiana music by that second-line beat or that zydeco beat or that Cajun beat or blues beat.

“But I think the great legacy of Louisiana music is the storytelling. Down here, we’re naturally good storytellers. And the way we can play with words and syllables and dialects really is conducive to telling a good story. In south Louisiana, you can make any two words rhyme.”

Adcock has performed solo acoustic before and toured as opening act for one of the great songwriters from Louisiana, Lucinda Williams, in a duo format with the fiddle- and accordion-playing Cedric Watson. Even so, performing on his own is still a novelty for the normally electrified Adcock.

“I didn’t grow up playing folk tunes in a coffeehouse,” he said. “It’s nice to scratch that itch, but I promise you I won’t strap on a harmonica or read poetry.”