PHOENIX – Stew Wilson, monitor engineer for Korn, Dream Theater and other bands, died Jan. 2, 2025. He was 65.
Wilson, born in Evanston, IL in 1959, got his start in pro audio after moving to New York in the 1980s. He had been working as a bartender in a small nightclub on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that had been equipped with an Allen & Heath analog console and some old Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre speakers.
“One night after closing, about 4:30 in the morning, the owner got a call from Steve Winwood and Jimmy Buffet, who wanted to come over with a bunch of friends and try out some new songs,” Wilson told FRONT of HOUSE, for a story on Dream Theater’s 2016 tour in support of their album released earlier that year, The Astonishing.
Admitting that he was “kind of a novice at audio” at the time, he got behind the console and “managed to plug everything in correctly. Winwood played electric piano, Jimmy played acoustic guitar, and they previewed songs from [Winwood’s 1986] Back in the High Life album for about 60 people in the room. One of them was the owner of a sound company. He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ I said, ‘not really,’ but he said ‘I had an ear because it sounded tremendous and you should come work for me.’”
As it turned out, the sound company owner was Mark Friedman, who later became a partner at See Factor. “I worked for his small company — American Sound Reinforcement. He had a rehearsal room and a small touring rig, and we handled artists like Dwight Yoakam and Smokey Robinson on the road, but the rehearsal space had five-star entertainers in there all the time,” Wilson recalled. “I first worked with Joe Jackson, but he also had a ton of jazz artists — Billy Cobham, Jack DeJohnette, Lyle Mays, Pat Metheny, Mark Egan, Danny Gottlieb — and Keith Richards was in there for a month with The X-Pensive Winos.”
From there, Wilson started touring, learning more and more about audio on the road. He started as a monitor engineer, then went to front of house and then back to monitors. “I always enjoyed working with the band rather than the audience,” he said. “If you’re giving artists what they need and they aren’t thinking about their monitor mix, then they are giving a better performance to the audience. Besides, I find monitors more of a challenge.”
At the time of his passing, Wilson was living in the Phoenix area, and he was almost as big a fan of baseball as he was of music. Along with his wife, Samantha, and father, Bill, he is survived by two daughters, two sisters, three grandchildren and several nieces and nephews. A funeral and memorial service was held Feb. 8, 2025, in Glendale, AZ.
