Didi Stewart
photo by Susan Wilson
Singer Didi Stewart migrated to Boston from New Jersey in the ‘70s to study at Berklee College of Music and now she teaches there, as an associate professor in the Voice Department. During the years in between being a student and joining the faculty, she belted out songs in the groups Long Tall Sally, Didi Stewart & The Amplifiers and Girls Night Out, winning two Boston Music Awards for Best Female Vocalist in the process.
The Amplifiers came about in the mid-’70s because, Stewart says, “I eventually just had to form a band because, for a girl at the time, it was too hard to get into one.” Starting with three male and three female members, but going through many lineup changes over the years, the band signed with Don Kirshner’s label in a deal that led to an album two years later but crashed and burned when the label went bankrupt. The band broke up as a result but a short time later, when Stewart was hanging out with original Amplifier members Sandy Martin and Kathy Burkly, they came up with the idea to form an all-girl band – Girls Night Out – for one night only.
Named after a song on The Amplifiers’ album, the lineup was Stewart, Martin, Burkly, Alizon Lissance, Cercie Miller, Patty Larkin and Myanna, dressed up in paisley mini-dresses and fishnet stockings and wearing white lipstick. Their first show (in 1983 at Inn-Square Men’s Bar in Cambridge) was a smash, with The Boston Phoenix calling them “the best new band in Boston.” After a second successful gig at The Tam in Brookline, they decided to be a regular band (though Larkin left to pursue a solo career, replaced by Wendy Sobel).
Stewart had already written plenty of original music, but the group played mostly covers of tunes by The Ronettes, Dusty Springfield, Mary Wells and The Velvelettes (though they had local hits with the Stewart-penned “Matter of Time” and “Affair of the Heart”). Between 1983 and 1987, they played all over New England and released an EP, becoming known as a solid pop band with a horn section. Musician magazine named them the Best Unsigned Band in 1986, and they did some showcases in New York City, but they never landed record deal. “We were in our early 30s at that point, and the rap from the labels was that we weren’t young enough to be a girl group,” Stewart says. “It was profoundly sexist, but that was the music business.” There have been a few reunions over the years, including one in 2002 at Somerville Theater.
During the 1990s, Stewart became well known for performing a series of songwriter tributes, which celebrated composers including Laura Nyro, Randy Newman, Carole King, Jacques Brel, Rodgers & Hart and Cole Porter; her live show “An Evening of Burt Bacharach and Hal David” won a Boston magazine award for Best Club Performance n 1990. A highly sought-after composer for film and television, her songs have been featured in Melrose Place, One Life to Live, The Young and the Restless, Touched by an Angel, Dark Skies, Any Day Now, The Twilight Zone and The Beast, among others. Her most recent solo albums are 2017’s Devious Angel and 2018’s No Love Songs: Laments for a Broken Society.
Stewart says her years working and traveling with different bands gave her a real-world perspective on being a professional singer that she enjoys sharing with her students. “I think of myself as more a mentor than a teacher, and I’m teaching the kids everything I learned through trial, error and pain,” she’s quoted as saying on Berklee’s website. “For instance, it doesn’t matter if some really great singer happens to go on right before them. I’m finding that a lot of my voice students want to belt like Janis Joplin, and I used to be that way. I used to love screaming my guts out. But if you’re going to do that for five or six weeks on the road, you have to know how to survive it.”
(by Ed Symkus)
