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ARCHDALE — As stories in Greek and Egyptian mythology go, the Phoenix is a majestic winged creature that would entertain the sun god Apollo with song. After 500 years of living, it is said the bird would build a pyre, sprinkle it with aromatic herbs and consume itself in flames only to be resurrected.
How appropriate that Doug Sienerth would be born in an Arizona city by the same name.
Born in Phoenix, Sienerth was nourished by country music. He can remember learning to harmonize, and later play along, with his mother’s Marty Robbins and Jim Reeves albums. But as his father’s job changed the family’s scenery and moved them to Salisbury, Sienerth’s taste in music changed, too.
As many young adults will do, Sienerth eventually decided that old music sound wasn’t what he wanted, that he had a taste for rock ‘n’ roll. He weaned himself from country’s twangy, heart-throb songs and played more edgy rock sets as a keyboardist, guitarist and sometimes vocalist with one band or another.
Later, although he once craved it, he found himself feeling like a stranger to rock and wanted to return to his musical base, country.
Performances came with a number of local bands including China Grove’s “Southern Breeze,”“Southern Touch,” “Neon Cactus” and “Mid-Life Crisis.” He was happy to be doing gigs on nearly every stage in the central North Carolina club scene, including The Foxy Lady, which he said was one of the better live music venues in the area before it became a club for exotic dancers. But he grew increasingly disappointed when band members started showing up drunk to rehearsals or shows — or not showing up at all. Sienerth gave up on irresponsible musicians, but not on the music. He knew if he wanted to do it the way he felt was right, he would have to do it himself. He would have to start building the pyre.
In the next few years, he would survive a series of events that would be both an interference and an inspiration to his work — including a divorce and the death of his daughter, Alicia, who died at age 10 as the result of a gun accident.
Sienerth struggled to write for about eight years, explaining that the death “took a lot out of me.”
But it was that very same person who ultimately brought him back to his creative self.
He remembered once when Alicia was in school and the children talked about what their parents did for a living.
“My daddy plays in bars,”Alicia told her classmates. For that, she was most proud of him, and he then became most proud of himself.
From that point he wrote and played, promoting his own work by giving his CD to radio stations. But they found it hard to take him seriously since there was no major label backing him.
“I said, ‘OK. If big ones don’t want to do this, the little ones will.’”
The first independent, or “indie,” label to which he was introduced was in 1997 after he entered a talent contest sponsored by the Nashville, Tenn.-based Crystal Talent Agency. He caught the attention of Doug Thurston, president and chief executive officer of Sonic Records in Washington, N.C., with a song called, “The Game.”
Sonic Records is a full-service record company that releases products for radio play and retail sales.
Sienerth said the company told him the things he needed to do to become the next hot star. He would also be born again, this time with a new name. His birth name was too hard to pronounce, they said, but Sienerth wanted it to be as close to Doug Sienerth as possible.
They even wanted to go as far as giving him a one-name moniker, but Sienerth thought, “This is not a hip-hop album. A country singer has to have two names.”
And they called him DC Sayner.
The next year Sonic Records would record a two-song demo CD for its new act, of which Sayner would get 50 copies, and would fervently promote it and him.
“But there was no proof of anything else beyond that, even though they said they’d distributed it,”Sayner said. “And they relieved me of $5,000 in the process.”
“Everybody pays to get their first product,”Thurston said. “Garth Brooks paid a half million, LeAnn Rimes’ parents paid $273,000 … We’re not a marketing company. We don’t put singles in stores. We try to get new artists charted.”
Thurston said he believes Sayner made it onto one of the many reputable national country music charts — such as the Inside Country Indie Chart — with “The Game,”a song Thurston thought had one problem.
“He did a beautiful song, and I told him it was too long but he didn’t want to listen,”said Thurston, adding that a good length for a song is about 3-1/2 minutes long. Sayner’s was 5 minutes.
“And he wanted to be a superstar with one song and for a few thousand we produced all the music, put it on a single, sent it around the country and when he didn’t become a star he got upset,” Thurston said. “There are lots of people who put up thousands to major labels every day, but you’ll never hear of them. You can make a lot of waves in a small pond or you can have a lot of money to make small waves in a big pond. And it all depends on the radio station … and that’s something we can’t control. We can’t make them play anybody’s music. I tell people all the time, this is not a get-rich-quick business. It takes time and effort, a lot of perseverance.”
Easy as it might have been to give up at that point, Sayner was not about to stop trying. There were still other moments in his life to look forward to, like his career as a systems analyst at Carolina Color and talking again to Sandra Mawhinney, a woman who managed to drum up conversation with him one night in an Internet chat room where divorced individuals met.
“I was sitting there looking over everybody’s name in the room, watching who was having conversation and looking at the people who weren’t talking. His was one of them,”she said. “I noticed he had an unusual name, and I had an unusual name, too, so I casually struck up conversation with him. By the time we were finished, he asked if he could talk to me later because I seemed like a normal person.”
For the couple of years that Sayner and Mawhinney, a country music fan herself, talked only via the Internet and telephone, very rarely did he mention how he was struggling to fulfill his country music dream.
“He told me he used to play for a band, and I’d heard some of his songs on his Web page, but that was one thing that was never really talked about,”Mawhinney said. “We talked about life. He would talk about his kids, I would talk about my kids, but (his music) wasn’t something he bragged about.”
But he should have. The details with which he hadn’t chosen to bore Mawhinney were that he’d taken a new approach to doing his own music, arming himself with a Kawai K-11 keyboard (“If this thing dies, I’m dead”), a Fostex FD-8 8-track digital recorder and Alesis effects unit, PG Music PowerTracks Pro sequencing and Syntrillium CoolEdit software and a Microsoft/Intel platform. He was, in essence, a one-man band and production unit.
“The best thing about doing my music is being able to do it the way I want it to be done,” Sayner said. “But with creativity comes responsibility. I’ve got to do everything —make the CDs and labels, distribute them … most of the job falls on me to get stuff done. But with the machines, I’m in control. I know what I can do and when.”
He took one last shot at indie labels when he responded to an Internet ad posted by the Rocky Mountain Country Music Association headed by Misty Dawn, who was looking for unsigned artists for a multi-artist CD that she would release throughout the United States and Europe. He forwarded her one of the two-song demo CDs.
“I was very impressed,”Dawn said. “He’s just so much at ease and so gifted.”
Dawn also sympathized with Sayner’s experience with Sonic because she, too, had been in similar situations.
“Artists are so tired of the payola thing that’s there,”she said. “Artists are not being allowed to record what they want. If they don’t get in the top 20 within a certain amount of time they’re dropped from the major (labels). And they have to be singing models.
“With the indies, as long as they’re getting airplay they don’t get dropped. And they go by the talent, not the age or how big or small you are.”
Right away, even before meeting him in person, Dawn sent Sayner a contract to sign and distributed the CD with his songs on it to independent stations.
This was exciting new for Sayner, but not as much as when he finally met Mawhinney face-to-face October 1999.
“It was like, ‘Wow! This is the person I’ve been talking to all this time and he’s real,” Mawhinney said. She’d sparked the flame that would consume Sayner. The couple married last May.
Now was Sayner’s time to rise from the ashes. With a new wife, airplay in Europe, Canada and Australia, and listings in Indie-Tracker Magazine’s Top-300 Worldwide Most-Played Indie/Major Artists, it seemed that hardly anything could elevate him more.
That was before he brought home about a dozen awards from this year’s North American Country Music Association International Awards held in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., in the Rising Star/Songwriter/New Country, Vocal Group of the Year/Traditional Country and Horizon/Instrumentalist/New Country categories. More awards came at Dawn’s Colorado Country Music Association Awards, in the Male Vocalist/New Country, Songwriter/New Country, Instrumentalist/New Country, and two in the Co-Writer/New Country categories for the songs “Picture Album”(the title track from the third album of his own label)and “2 Different Mirrors.”
Sandra Sienerth even earned two awards, in the Co-Writer/New Country categories for “Picture Album”and “2 Different Mirrors,”the latter having been inspired by an actual conversation between the couple.
“We were getting ready for work one morning and he made a remark about me being pretty and I said, ‘Pffbtt! We must be looking in two different mirrors,’ and I saw that look on his face. And he said, ‘I like that.’ What it boiled down to was no matter what other people think about you, all that matters is the person who loves you.”
Dawn, who wants to make Sayner a partner in her company and would like to convince him to move to Colorado, hopes to get some bookings for Sayner in this area soon and would like to see him on a tour of Europe where, she said, country music is loved.
In the meantime, Sayner’s first live solo performance will be at the Bush Hill Festival in Archdale Sept. 8.
“That’ll be the big test to see if the music will work with the public,” he said. “I’ll have nowhere to hide then.”
And will he continue to look for a contract with a major label?
“I used to think getting signed by a big label was the ultimate, but I would just like to play a coliseum, especially if it was just me.”
And, with that, the phoenix rises from the ashes.
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To contact Doug “DC Sayner”Sienerth, call (336) 687-1848.
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Contact Mai Li Muñoz Adams at (704) 797-4273 or mmunoz@salisburypost.com
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