ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Those looking to go back in time through music will soon have just that opportunity.
The Sidekicks will be performing Monday, Sept. 8 in Maskus Auditorium at Liberal High School to kick off this year's Community Concerts of Liberal series. The show will start at 7:30 p.m., and tickets will be available at the door that evening. The group specializes in paying tribute to the 1970s and early 1980s, and the show will also feature musical hits and pop-culture tidbits.
The group has been together for a few years, and as member Alyssa Cassada tells it, it has been a lot of fun.
“This is our third summer as The Sidekicks, but everyone in the group has been playing together in some capacity, or with other groups, for the past 10 to 15 years, and this is just one of the projects we decided to put together. We've been The Sidekicks since 2023, that was our first summer as a group,” Cassada said. “We perform a pretty wide variety of music, but we were getting a lot of requests for songs from the 1980s and the classic rock genre at the performances we were doing at fairs and corporate events and other similar places. We realized there seemed to be a bit of a hole in the market for that music, especially when it came to smaller groups, so we decided to all come together. We were booked through Allied Concerts, and they put together this whole little tour. We put together our press/music package for them last summer, got picked, and we officially found out we were booked for Liberal earlier this spring.”
Cassada added she and the group were excited to be asked to perform in Liberal.
“We're excited to be on the road all together, we do a lot of shows in a lot of different places. We usually just do one night at a time, but doing this little tour will be fun because we'll be on the road for about two and a half weeks, and we actually have three different stops in Kansas, which should be really fun,” Cassada said. “I'm excited to see how the audience reacts. It's going to be a really fun show and I think everyone will know a lot of the songs we'll be performing, which is always really fun. We'll be doing songs from the 1970s and 1980s that everyone should be familiar with, including some potentially forgotten gems.”
Cassada added she and the group are also excited to be the Community Concerts of Liberal season opener.
“I hope we can help kick off some excitement! It's going to be a really high-energy show, and I hope us being the opener will help encourage everyone to go and see the other acts that will be performing as the Community Concerts season goes on,” Cassada said. “We have a very fun job, and it's great being able to hang out with your friends every night – we get to chat and hang out backstage before the show, and then we get to go onstage and create a really fun experience for the audience, which is always great. This is a job where there's a lot of instant feedback, which can be hard to come by in other job fields. In a world where everything's becoming more digitized, live music is so, so special, and I love how I get to connect not only with the people I'm performing with, but also the people in the audience.”
The show will also feature a lot of energy for the audience, Cassada said.
“We definitely want there to be a lot of energy, and there are some opportunities for audience participation – though I assure everyone those opportunities aren't scary. If you want to have a fun evening where you'll hear a bunch of music you grew up loving and travel back in time a bit, this will be the show for you,” Cassada said. “We always try to keep the show fresh. While the general outline of the show remains the same, we never do the exact same lineup in the exact same order every night, we do mix things up a bit depending where we are. Our goal is to keep the show fresh not just for the audience, but also ourselves as a group, and that's always fun.”
Overall, Cassada said, the concert should be a fun time for everyone who turns out.
“After the Liberal show, we have a show in Pratt, and then we go up to North Dakota and then Minnesota. We're really excited to pick up some of the flavor of every town we visit, it's always great finding that one thing that makes a community special. There are also a bunch of places on this tour I've never performed in, so that'll also be really exciting,” Cassada said. “If anyone wants to check out any of our music before the show, they can do so through thesidekicksband.com, or they can look us up on YouTube or on Facebook or Instagram. We're just really excited to get to Liberal, and we hope to see as many people as possible that night!”
