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Mostly Cloudy Side Track is coming back
Early '80s band to perform reunion show in Valley Stream
Three decades ago, Side Track was on the right track to music success. The Valley Stream band was delighting crowds throughout the village, but the group’s run was short lived.
Side Track will do a reunion show this Saturday evening at Buckley’s in Valley Stream, reuniting four Central High School graduates who made music a big part of their lives in the early 1980s. The group formed in late 1981 and played at the Drummer Club’s Christmas party in Central High School’s Keller Auditorium.
In early 1982, they performed in Memorial Junior High School’s gymnasium and at the Hendrickson Park administration building. After a few other gigs around town, the band broke up.
Joe Chinnici, one of two guitarists, said the members of the band stayed on good terms after breaking up with the exception of the singer, the only member of the group not from Valley Stream.
The other musicians are Paul Biscardi on the guitar, Mike DeMita on the bass and drummer Russ Angrisani. Tom McCue will be joining the band as the new singer. The four instrumentalists were seniors at Central, or had just graduated, during their run 30 years ago. All but Chinnici had since put down their instruments.
Chinnici said that even though many of the band members hadn’t played in a long time, they sounded pretty good during a rehearsal at his home in the Catskills earlier this summer. “It was like we had never stopped playing together,” he said. “The truth is, it sounds great.”
Biscardi, too, was a bit surprised at how well the band sounded. “I, for one, took a 10-year break from guitar playing,” he said. “It’s great to be doing it again. We sound really good, a thousand times better than we were 17.”
It was in Biscardi’s basement on Highland Road, just around the corner from Central High School, where the band used to rehearse. With his parents having full-time jobs and his dad having been a musician, it was the perfect place to go to hone their skills. They would practice until about 6 p.m. each day, then go home to eat dinner and do homework.
The members of the band reconnected last year. One of the men jokingly saying “let’s play a couple of tunes” turned into serious discussions about doing a show, according to Chinnici.
