THE SIDE DOORS
Description:
Title:
THE SIDE DOORS
Artist:
PAUL SIDORE & STEVE SIDORE
Originally Recorded & released:
1981 (Fish & Cat cassette
#FCA9053)
Issued on CD:
2001 (Fish & Cat CD #193)
Produced by:
Paul Sidore
Personnel:
Paul Sidore
(all tracks) •
Steve Sidore
(all tracks except 1/4/9/10)
CD Liner Notes:
Paul Sidore’s third
“album,” recorded in the fall of 1981, is almost entirely a quick
collaboration with older brother Steve, devised in their parent’s
home in the northern California suburban mid-luxury tract called
Clayton. Steve would have
been visiting on break from his UCLA studies, and Paul, just turning
seventeen, was merely a high-school senior.
Paul may have been smoking a
lot of bad pot; Steve was likely not.
Nevertheless, they were quite productive, knocking out
nearly one whole album’s worth of work in just a few days.
This record simply sounds way
better than his first two. Paul
knew well the home-recording scheme by now, copying tracks from tape
to tape as new parts were added
(no 4-track machines existed
yet in 1981!) -- but most of what we hear sounds pretty
spontaneous. THE SIDE
DOORS has plenty of semi-psychedelic mood pieces, a genre Paul
would perfect in his coming collegiate years.
Somehow all of Steve’s vocal
performances even contribute to the moodiness, sounding like weird
overdubbed instruments rather than telling stories.
The effect is most pronounced
on “Someone...” where Paul synched up two completely different
attempts at the song (“like
Strawberry Fields!” he joked) -- resulting in a great blend.
The set is bookended
by solo-Paul tracks, for reasons undisclosed
(“A Long Long Boring Day In August” is all Paul as
well). “Let Us All
Listen to My Mouth”--the LP’s finale--consists entirely of the sound
of a mic fully stuffed-in, and amped thru a “Dr. Q”
envelope-follower effect-pedal. And
the major piece of course is Steve’s opus “The Whale,” suitably
evolved-up from earlier Trippi-enhanced versions.
I added a new track at the
very end, excerpted from an “audio letter” Paul sent to me in 1981
on the cassette master tape. The
whole record has been digitally cleaned up to fix EQ problems, tape
dropouts, pops & clicks, any major performance errors (!) and pitch
wavering. Paul’s original
cover art appears here for the first time ever (I previously had
traced it to make cassette “J-cards” in my high-school Graphic Arts
shop class). Most of all, I
guess I just wanted to hear it all again.
And now, I have. And, now,
you can, too.
- Chris Matthews, September 2001