Sid

Sid (a.k.a. “Mr. Alison”)
Webmaster, Soundman, Recording Engineer, Occasional Performer, and Heavy-Stuff Carrier

Sid comes from a very talented family. His father, mother, and two brothers all were talented singers and musicians. He began singing in church with his parents at a very early age, and quickly lost his fear of performing in front of crowds. His father, a guitarist himself, put a guitar in Sid’s lap as soon as he was big enough to hold one, and began teaching him to play. By the time he hit high school, he had bought his own high performance guitar amp (the speaker cabinet would barely fit in the trunk of the car – if the spare tire rode in the back seat!), and would drive his mother out of the house playing along with his Ventures albums. (She said the volume sounded just about right from her flower garden.)

When his two older brothers (who were 13 and 16 when Sid was born) visited, the guitars would inevitably come out, and long jam sessions would ensue – most often playing the folk music of the late 50s and early 60s – and Sid has never lost his love for the music of The Brothers Four, The Kingston Trio, The Limelighters, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. At least three generations of children (counting Sid) have grown up to the strains of Puff, the Magic Dragon.

When Sid was a senior in high school, he was recruited by a Tacoma-based gospel quartet that happened to perform at a church-sponsored graduation banquet he attended. He spent the next couple of years touring the Northwest with the Evangelaires Quartet, singing bass and playing bass and lead guitar. During that time, he got his first glimpse of a recording studio: not knowing it couldn’t be done, the Evangelaires recorded an entire 12-song LP album in one very long day in a Vancouver, BC, studio.

A few years after leaving the Evangelaires, the performing bug bit again, and Sid joined The Crossroads Quartet, one of the best-known Seattle-area gospel groups of the 70s and 80s, and spent a year or so enjoying being able to just stand there and sing while the boys in the band made the music. But faces come and go, as they often do, and the first face that went belonged to the piano player/lead singer. After a couple of months, performing to taped background music was getting old, and the rest of the band (lead guitar, bass guitar, and drums) wanted to get back into the act. Since Sid had been observed doodling on the piano from time to time, pressure began to build until he reluctantly agreed to step into the role of piano player/lead singer (as long as the rest of the band was there to cover up his mistakes). There being no better teacher than necessity, Sid’s keyboard talents began to blossom.

The Crossroads had a number of record albums to their credit, although only one was recorded during Sid’s years with the group. The experience couldn’t have been more different from the one-day marathon session with The Evangelaires. This time, there was a real producer – who would disappear for a few weeks, then come back for more money (“need to lay down some horns…”). By the time the singers set foot in the studio, the soundtracks were nearly done!

After leaving The Crossroads in the early 80s, Sid began to experiment with home recording. The early efforts were, to be kind, pretty crude – as was the technology available to anyone without deep pockets or access to a professional studio. But perseverance pays off, and the studio came together a piece at a time: a synthesizer here, a good drum synth there, a four-track cassette deck, another sound module, etc., etc. But the biggest advances in the last five or six years have come in the huge improvements in home computing power and hard disk size. These days a few thousand dollars buys a PC-based hard disk recording system that’s as good or better than the multi-thousand dollar studio equipment of the 70s and 80s.

Sid and Alison have made good use of their home studio: editing songs for Alison to use in her classes, producing master CDs for shows and recitals, and bringing the kids into the studio to record their own voices on the soundtracks they’ll be singing and dancing to. Sid has continued to compose, arrange, and record a variety of music for his own satisfaction and the enjoyment of friends.

Sid has also made numerous stage appearances both with and without Alison, both to emcee and perform at various studio recitals. In fact, nearly all of the recitals Alison has been involved in over the last 19 years (hint: it’s been more than 19) have involved Sid as a singer, actor, emcee, stage hand, heavy-stuff lifter, and/or soundman. His stage credits include appearing as Herr Drosselmeier in the Everett Dance Theater’s 2003 performances of The Nutcracker, but perhaps the most memorable (at least in his own painful memories) was being pressed into service as Alison’s partner in a duet performance of Sisters (from the musical White Christmas), clad in a long white evening gown and black feather boa with attractive matching red-and-black high top “Air Jordans.” (As they say – you woulda had to have been there.)

Since his “day job” involves computer networks, Sid also serves as the Applause Studio Webmaster and PC support technician.