Meet the Lidwells! A Rock n' Roll Family Memoir

By Jon Chaisson

"Rule number one in the music business: never start a band with any members of your family.

Sure, it’ll start off just fine, everyone having fun, with big dreams of success and gold records, but then you realize you’re stuck in a stinking, too-small tour bus with your siblings for the fifth year running, and your brother hates you. Next thing you know, the band implodes just as it’s reaching its highest success, your family won’t talk to you anymore, the press is having a field day ripping you to shreds, and you’ll need to start your career all over again as a solo act. If you dare to at that point.

Rule number two in the music business: rules were made to be broken." -- Thomas Lidwell

Meet the Lidwells! is the story of four siblings and two cousins who start a band as teenagers and achieve success beyond their wildest dreams. But while they consistently top the charts with their irresistibly catchy tunes, they're also fighting their own demons: perfectionism, disenchantment, addiction, exhaustion, sexism...and figuring out how to become an adult in front of millions of fans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Chaisson
• Release date: Mar 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370386109

Jon Chaisson

Jon Chaisson lives in San Francisco with his wife Amanda, several books, two precocious cats, and a ridiculously large music collection. He's the author of the Bridgetown Trilogy, published here at Smashwords.He blogs on Mondays about the writing life at Welcome to Bridgetown (http://welcometobridgetown.com). He also blogs on Thursdays about his possibly unhealthy obsession with collecting and listening to music at Walk in Silence (http://jonchaisson.com).

Book preview

MEET

THE

LIDWELLS!

a rock & roll family memoir

by Jon Chaisson

e-book 1st Edition

Mendaihu Press

Copyright 2018 Jon Chaisson

Smashwords Edition

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this e-book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS

Intro

Track 1

Track 2

Track 3

Track 4

Track 5

Track 6

Track 7

Track 8

Track 9

Track 10

Track 11

Track 12

Track 13

Track 14

Outro

Acknowledgements

About the Author

INTRO

by Thomas Lidwell (vocals, percussion, guitar, songwriting)

Rule number one in the music business: never start a band with any members of your family. Sure, it’ll start off just fine, everyone having fun, with big dreams of success and gold records, but then you realize you’re stuck in a stinking, too-small tour bus with your siblings for the fifth year running, and your brother hates you. Next thing you know, the band implodes just as it’s reaching its highest success, your family won’t talk to you anymore, the press is having a field day ripping you to shreds, and you’ll need to start your career all over again as a solo act. If you dare to at that point.

Rule number two in the music business: rules were made to be broken.

The Lidwells consisted of me, my eldest brother Jason, my sister Amy, my next oldest brother Danny, and my cousins Alex and Hannah. Our fathers were not only our original managers but our business advisors throughout our entire run. Our respites from touring were often family reunions. I was completely surrounded by relatives, whether I wanted to be or not. Still, we were all kids when we started. I was nine when we first played in front of audience, and ten when we dropped our first single. So maybe having a bunch of adult chaperones wasn’t exactly a bad thing.

The Lidwells came onto the scene in late 1990, just in time for alternative rock to start taking over the radio and the charts, where nearly any band with a new and fresh sound had a chance to catch on with listeners. We somehow managed to catch that brass ring by way of borrowing our sounds from both new and old records. But we adamantly refused to cash in on our youth; the last thing we wanted to do was be ‘that cute teen band’. We were reaching for the older crowds as well, and we did so by writing smart, intelligent (and sometimes silly) music that anyone would enjoy listening to, regardless of age.

That was our secret: we followed rule number two.

It’s late 2017 as I write this. It’s been ten years since our last releases, and those were the remastered editions of our albums and singles that came out ten years before that. People have written about us in books, articles, blogs, and everything in between. Some of it is true, some of it is hearsay. Some of it is complete bullshit. In 2015 the author of this book, a self-professed Lidwells fan and complete music nerd (one that gives my brother Jason a run for his money), contacted me and Amy with the idea of writing a book about us. He wanted to set the story straight by interviewing all six of us, plus our production team, over the course of a year and covering our history from start to finish, from our own points of view. Well – who were we to say no?

This story is for all of you out there, the older fans who grew up listening to our goofy-ass pop, or jumped on the bandwagon because of your older siblings or maybe even your parents. There was a time when you literally could not go a day without hearing one of our songs on the radio (usually Grapevine, the one everyone remembers and loves the most). Twenty years on and you’ll still hear us on the internet or on the radio from time to time. [And let me tell you, I still get a kick out it when it happens, my high voice and all.]

Our own story ended years ago in the late nineties, when we all went our separate ways. We all wanted to do our own things. We wanted to grow up some. Live our own lives, as separate people rather than a family unit. Start our own family units. At our height, I was still a loudmouth teen living from moment to moment and trying my damnedest to keep track of everything that went on. When we called it a day, I suddenly had a hell of a lot of time on my hands. I’d turned nineteen and it was time to figure out my own future.

That was the true reason why we ended the band. We knew who we were on stage.

We just didn’t know who the hell we were otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved being in The Lidwells, and I don’t regret one damn minute of it. And deep down, I think we all loved it. It was more than just a rock band to us. It was a family event. Even we got on each other’s nerves, even when we had our own moments of throwing down the mike and calling it done, we loved making the music. It’s hard to describe unless you understand exactly what I mean: there’s something about the creativity of music that resonates with everyone, that transcends the Real. It transcends whatever is going on emotionally, physically, or politically in your life.

My siblings and cousins fully embraced being in The Lidwells, and we’re damn proud of what we did.

The Lidwells were a band for a little over nine years, from inception to ending. That’s a small stretch of time in any career. But it was the best nine years of my life.

And with this book, I’d like to you Meet the Lidwells.

TRACK 1

The main core of the Lidwell family – James and Grace Lidwell, with their four children, Jason, Amy, Daniel and Thomas – lived in the quiet suburb of Andersonville, MA, just outside of Boston. The large house was handed down to Grace from her father, and was a common meeting place for numerous friends and relatives for many decades. The four children were never without companionship, whether it was sibling or cousin; both James and Grace came from large families, many of them still living in the surrounding area.

The Lidwell clan has always been musical in one way or another. Numerous relatives played in local bands or played together at family outings, with their styles ranging from jazz to folk to rock. Other relatives, like James’ older brother David, were avid record collectors, amassing an incredible and vast library over the course of decades. [Many of these discs are now a part of the permanent collection at the Andersonville Town Library, which has become a mecca for many a musicophile.]

The Lidwells – the band – were not exactly the creation of James and David Lidwell, as many are often led to believe, quite mistakenly. Rather, the band evolved over a number of years, beginning as a high school group led by Jason Lidwell and his cousin Alex, along with a rotation of school friends.

Jason, Alex, and a rotating group of other members would meet up every few weeks in the Lidwell sun room, a long and narrow room at the back of the house, and have jam sessions. They preferred writing their own songs inspired by the different genres they and their families listened to, and would record them to cassette tape via Jason’s boombox.

JASON LIDWELL (lead singer, rhythm guitar, songwriting): Alex and I were best friends from way back. I’m pretty sure our mothers plopped us down in the same crib to keep each other company, come to think of it. We got into all sorts of trouble once we became teenagers in the 80s. We had MTV on our cable box, and he and I would be glued to that damn channel for hours at a time. We’d also head to the center of town and hang out with our buddies in front of the library. Alex and I would pop into the small music store next door to the credit union, and we’d just stay there listening to music until it was time to go home. We were two years apart in age, but that never stopped us from being best buds.

ALEX LIDWELL (bass guitar, backing vocals, songwriting): The music was always there in one form or another. It was a family thing. If you didn’t play an instrument or sing, you collected records. Jason and I did both. Our allowances were always spent on singles or cassettes. We were completely obsessed. I think it was early 1988 when we both thought it would be fun to start a band. I’d just turned twelve and Jason was fourteen.

JASON: I’d saved up some money from odd jobs and allowance. There was a guy downtown that sold used guitars and gear, low end stuff, and I bought an off-brand electric for fifty bucks. Uncle David gave me one of his old amplifiers.

ALEX: I bought this awesome bass, real beater from who knows when. It was white and didn’t have a headstock; the tuning pegs were down at the bottom. Jason thought that was the coolest thing and talked me into buying it soon after he got his guitar. I think I must have paid what, twenty-five dollars total on it? But I loved that damn thing. Practiced daily on it. I still have the body, even though the pickups are completely rusted out.

JASON: We played nearly every other weekend and went through a bunch of different members, just like the Quarrymen. Whoever was interested that particular month. It was mainly me and Alex, and Tony Young. Tony was a buddy of mine from my class, played a mean lead guitar. Didn’t quite fit into the style we were looking for, but he was great. We were more guitar pop, he wanted to be hair metal.

ALEX: Technically, Tony never left. When we made it big, he became our roadie.

JASON: Our first drummer was the keyboard presets!

ALEX: Ha! Yes, that’s right. That dinky keyboard was [Alex’s older sister] Katie’s. She wanted to play with us at one point but never had the time. She let us use the keyboard until we got a real drummer.

JASON: I loved those jam sessions, we had so much fun. We thought we were so rebellious! All our classmates were either jocks or part of the popular crowd, and we never quite fit in. We were totally into the college radio stuff that Alex’s older sisters got us into. REM, The Cure, stuff like that. [Alex’s oldest sister] Shannon would let us borrow her tapes every now and again. I taught myself how to play by playing along with those.

ALEX: Same, and that’s why my style sounds a lot like a cross between Simon Raymonde [of Cocteau Twins] and Peter Hook [of Joy Division and New Order]. I was completely into the melodic style rather than it simply being an instrument to prop everyone else up.

JASON: We were into the pop scene at the time as well. We may not have dressed the part, but we were big on whatever was playing on the Top 40 stations.

ALEX: You still have those tapes, don’t you?

JASON: I do. Transferred them to mp3 a few years back, cleaned up the sound a little bit. It’s hilarious hearing them now. My voice is about five octaves higher. Higher than Thomas’ when he started!

ALEX: I would make covers for them. I’d make those c-cards out of printer paper, paste a picture on the front for the album cover, and even write up all the liner notes on the inside.

JASON: We’d find all sorts of weird pictures to use. Someone’s out of focus photo, an action shot we found in a magazine. Create little pieces of art. We kept the ‘album covers’ blank of any text because we could never agree on a name!

ALEX: We even used the Lidwells at some point. But Jason thought that sounded too dorky.

JASON: Come on, it was the mid-eighties! Family bands were either hokey or prefabricated pop by that time. I wanted something original! We just could never agree on a good name.

ALEX: We wanted to live up to our imagined view of being college kids, is what we wanted. Even though we were young teens, we wanted to be the cool kids listening to college radio and talking philosophy and shit.

JASON: Sure. We were trying to get ourselves out of the doldrums of living in a blue-collar world, stuck in a small town. We wanted to see more, do more. The music was part of that drive.

Jason’s younger sister Amy would soon join the group in early 1989, taking Tony Young’s place as the lead guitarist. Amy was self-taught, having taken the same route as Jason and Alex: playing along to the family record collection.

AMY LIDWELL (lead vocals, lead guitar, songwriting): I started playing my dad’s acoustic guitar at an early age, probably around the same time Jason started teaching himself. I took a lot of cues from him at first; he was the big brother with the guitar, and it looked like a lot of fun, and I wanted in. There was something about the guitar that resonated with me, if you’ll pardon the pun. I immediately fell in love with it. It was an instrument that stood front and center, attracting attention to itself…and yet it was an integral part of the rest of the music. I hated those squealy arpeggiated guitar solos from the 80s. Those guys were just showing off and there was rarely any substance to it. But every now and again I’d hear a solo that would fit so perfectly with the context of the rest of the song.

I remember hearing Heart’s Crazy On You one day when I was about eight, hearing Nancy Wilson’s phenomenal acoustic intro. Two things happened right then: at first I was like, wow, that’s a woman playing! All the big-name guitar heroes on the radio were always men, but here was a rock chick that could totally shred it. And my second thought was: I want to do THAT. Sure, it would take me years before I could even measure up to that level of proficiency, but I had something to aim for now.

I didn’t try to ingratiate myself into the band. I’m sure it might have looked that way to Jason at the time, you know how it is. Younger sibling sees older sibling doing something cool and wants to be a part of it. But I was never a pain in the ass about it. Jason and I were at the same level of proficiency then. There wasn’t any way we’d outdo each other. In fact, I think he kind of liked that I was there. He liked how our voices played off each other when we both sang. I liked that as well.

I didn’t take Tony’s place, though. Tony just played a different style. He was more interested in metal and wanted to play covers of Guns ‘n Roses and stuff like that. He was the first person I knew in Andersonville High who mastered that opening riff for Sweet Child o’ Mine. He ended up jamming with a couple of other guys and had a decent local following before he joined back up as our roadie.

Soon after Amy joining the band, younger sibling Daniel wanted in as well. Danny is the only sibling who had any previous lessons; he’d taken piano lessons since he was eight and was an amazingly fast learner. He would often sit in on the band jam sessions as a willing audience, and would sometimes join them on the occasional song when keyboards were needed.

DANNY LIDWELL (vocals, keyboards, songwriting, producing): I often joke that my first role in the band was to kick off the drum presets on the keyboard! They didn’t mind me sitting in at all. I was just as excited about making a musical noise as they were. I wasn’t a Mozart by any stretch of the imagination, but I knew my basic chords and understood what they were doing. Music was – is an instinct to me. I listened to a hell of a lot of music growing up. My parents’ records, my cousins’ records, whatever was on the radio. It just hit me like a drug.

The early incarnation of the Lidwells was Jason, Alex, Amy and me. The core was Jason and Amy – the Lennon-McCartney roles. Right away I could tell they were perfectly matched as songwriters.

I was there when Tony was a part of the band, and even after he left he would sometimes come over and join in the fun. He could see we were onto something. He knew the family dynamic already, but he could also see that something was brewing between the four of us.

I’ll be honest, I did feel a bit like I was budging in on their fun, but Jason and Amy never complained. They appreciated my input. At the beginning I never dared to suggest any radical changes to their songs. Not that I really knew much at the time, anyway. But they were open minded. I think it kind of relieved any tension, having me there.

We lasted maybe three or four sessions before they all realized that our keyboard drums weren’t cutting it. We needed a real drummer.

As it happened…

As it happened, Alex’s younger sister Hannah had already been spending a lot of time with the foursome in the sun room. She was Amy’s age (their birthdays are less than a month apart) and Amy was more than happy to have another girl in the room. Hannah often played the random percussion instruments that were always lying around, and soon graduated to a basic drum set, given to them by an uncle.

HANNAH LIDWELL (drums, backing vocals, songwriting): We were nervous about me joining the ranks, because they were worried we’d turn into The Lidwells Good Time Family Band or something. I know that was Jason’s worry, at any rate: he was adamant that the music be the selling point and not the name. I was nervous myself, because I had almost no background in drumming at all. I’ve been told I have an excellent ear and a steady beat, but a lot of it has really been pure luck and instinct.

My first set was from Uncle Aaron, his old Ludwig set of a bass, snare, a few toms and cymbals. A real honest to god Ringo Starr set. He’d bought it in the mid-sixties to emulate his favorite drummer. He’d played it in all kinds of cocktail bar jazz bands in the sixties and seventies, but it had been gathering dust in his basement for most of the eighties.

I practiced on that set daily, after school and on weekends. Pop set it up in our basement next to the stereo, handed me these big aviator headphones and a list of albums to learn from. I’m amazed I was able to pick it up as quickly as I did! Yeah, I got blisters on my fingers something fierce. I ended up wearing fingerless gloves for a few years because of that, and they became my trademark. It was a baptism of fire, that’s for sure. If I had to do it all over again I probably would have taken lessons or practice for another year or so, but everyone says I was a natural.

But you know, as soon as I became the official drummer for the band, I was a perfect fit. Jason already had some solid songs written by the time I came aboard. I started off mimicking the keyboard presets, but little by little the style became my own. I had a few fills I could pull off, and with my constant practicing I was able to improvise.

It really was a family affair by the time I joined. Tony was in the background, and Jason and Alex’s friends had already signed off to do their own things.

Eventually the last member of the band would join, and possibly the most famous: littlest brother Thomas. A young extrovert with magnetic stage presence, he was given center stage to sing lead alongside Jason and Amy, playing percussion and eventually joining in on additional guitar work.

THOMAS LIDWELL (lead vocals, percussion, guitar, songwriting): There’s a ton of theories and stories about how I joined the band, and none of them are true. I file these stories into one of two columns: One, that my dad and Uncle David wanted to complete the prefabricated pop band theme with the Cute Kid Factor. Or Two, I bullied, cried and whined my way into the lineup like any kid brother would do.

But the truth: Dad was seriously concerned about me being a part of the group since I was so young. I was only nine, a little kid in school who didn’t quite know what the world was about. He didn’t want me to alienate myself from the other kids my age. And I certainly didn’t bully my way into the group. I sat in on those sessions from the start, listening to Jason and Alex and their buddies. I would rarely make a peep, but they’d always ask me if I liked their songs. I thought they were all cool, of course. Just like the others, I’m an avid music listener, and I used to listen to the radio all day long if I could, even at that age. I understood what they were trying to do, even if I couldn’t quite explain it yet.

One day, not long after Hannah joined, Amy thought it would be a laugh to have me sing a few of their songs. My voice hadn’t cracked yet, so they thought it would be fun to hear some of their songs in a high voice. Apparently I nailed them on the first try! I don’t even remember what the songs were, just that I was imitating their singing styles the best I could, and they fell about laughing, saying ‘Oh, we have GOT to have you in this band!’

Total lark, but you know, at that moment we all realized how much fun it would be if we made this a real thing. And that is how I joined the band.

TRACK 2

Throughout 1989 and into 1990, the four siblings and their two cousins practiced almost daily in the sun room, perfecting their sound. James and Grace Lidwell fondly remember the relentless energy the kids had at this time, fully committed to their music.*

[* Grace Lidwell, a strong presence in the family’s private life and an ardent supporter of the kids, has chosen not to be a part of the public side of it and maintains her privacy to this day. She wishes not to be a part of this biography project, but has given the writer her blessing. -Ed.]

JAMES LIDWELL (father, former co-manager): Grace and I were so proud of them. They were anxious to get better and become a performing group as soon as possible. They took their practice seriously, both together and alone. I’d have to check in on them during the afternoons, make sure they were doing their homework and not noodling around on their instruments! They were all good students, even after they became big, but I didn’t want them to miss out on that. We made sure Jason and Amy finished high school, and that Danny and Thomas were home-schooled until they finished as well. It was completely up to them if they still wanted to pursue higher education after that. We wouldn’t push them, not if they were successful musicians.

When it became clear that this might become a reality, we had a family meeting and brought it up with the kids. They were shocked and a little nervous, but they also felt a sense of release. We were giving them the freedom that they needed to make this happen.

Grace had been looking in on them one evening