If you’re of a certain age, the Sunday night of September 9th, 1956 is seared indelibly upon your memory, because it’s the night Elvis Presley first appeared on CBS Television’s The Ed Sullivan Show before 60 million viewers, changing your young life forever. If you’re of a younger age, the Sunday night of February 9, 1964 is the one you’ll never forget, because it’s the night The Beatles first appeared on CBS Television’s The Ed Sullivan Show before 63 million viewers, changing your young life forever.
But if you’re my age—which is to say you were born at the tail end of the Baby Boom—the Saturday morning (and by that I mean 1 AM) of April 9, 1976 is the moment that changed everything forever, because it’s the night Gary Wright appeared on CBS Television’s The Midnight Special. And just as was the case with Elvis and The Beatles, I wasn’t the only kid who would never be the same.
I would guesstimate that there were sixty-three other kids across the country who watched in awe as Wright, the American keyboardist who made his name in the English band Spooky Tooth, played his smash single “Dream Weaver” before cavorting across the stage with his portable keyboard as he “rocked out” to his other smash single “Love Is Alive.” And I would venture that all sixty-four of us wanted keyboards we could wear around our necks. Gary didn’t play a keytar that life-altering night but he was a keytar pioneer, and had he been playing one I dare say we’d all have gone out of our little minds.
I knew a visionary when I saw one. I may not have known that Wright had befriended and absorbed the Eastern religion of former Beatle George Harrison after playing keyboards on Harrison’s 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass, but you didn’t have to be a holy man to realize Gary was a sublimely spiritual being, one who had pierced the veil of Maya through means of pure keyboard karma. I too wanted to hop aboard the Dream Weaver train. I too wanted my very own astral plane. That wasn’t Gary Wright on stage that night—it was an avatar of Krishna. He wasn’t playing music—he was preaching an escape from samsara rebirth to the masses.
Like Krishna, Wright was a charioteer, and his chariot, of course, was 1975’s The Dream Weaver. One night Krishna appeared to Wright in a dream, wearing pretty much the same white suit with celestial necklace Wright wore on The Midnight Special, to say, “You will spread bliss by producing a very special album, an album that will transport its faithful adepts to the supreme abode of the all-pervading.” He added, “It would be really cool if you used only that holiest of holy instruments, the keyboard. Although I guess real drummers would be okay. And I wouldn’t object if you were to bring in Ronnie Montrose to play guitar on track five. It’s a real rocker.”
And who argues with the eighth avatar of Vishnu? Nobody who doesn’t want to answer to Hanuman, the shape-shifting monkey god and commander of his very own monkey army, and who served informally as Vishnu’s consigliere! Gary immediately set to work, in his native New Jersey of all places, on the songs that would make up the third, and most bliss-inducing, of his solo albums.
When I say The Dream Weaver was produced using mostly keyboards, I’m not implying that Gary was a one-man keyboards band. No, Wright’s band included two additional keyboardists, David Foster and Bobby Lyle. Three keyboardists! The album’s lousy with ‘em! And while all the keyboards leave the LP with this Space Age meets New Age aura, it doesn’t have an iota of Wendy Carlos in it. Wright’s a rocker at heart and a pop songwriter by trade and the results are what Robert Christgau, writing about another one of Wright’s solo LPs, once (dismissively for the most part) dubbed “cosmic-commercial.” Like his mentor George O’Hara (Google him!) Wright had one foot firmly planted in the spiritual world and the other in the material world, and maya or no maya, a gold record is a gold record.
Look, I don’t want to come off sounding like a shill for the Cosmological-Karmic-Musical-Industrial Complex, but The Dream Weaver is both your best way to escape the quivering wheel of meat conception forever and get a great ear massage at the same time. Believe me, your chakras will thank you. The album opens with the No. 2 on the pop charts hit “Love Is Alive,” a kind of big clunk-funk number on which Gary sounds like anything but a New Age wimp. The song has a big bottom, you don’t even miss the guitars, and if you check out The Midnight Special episode on YouTube you’ll be treated to one of the biggest, baddest cowbell workouts in the history of that exalted instrument.
“Let It Out” is a just slightly up-tempo softie and cosmic Yacht Rock perfect for listening to as your sails catch the space winds around the rings of Jupiter. Nothing revolutionary here, just Gary in mellow mode, which is not the case with the funky “Can’t Find the Judge,” on which Wright once again sounds almost nasty as the keyboards do some righteous Stevie Wonder percolating around him. Wright goes full-tilt soul man on this one, inner peace be damned.
But just as he followed “Love Is Alive” with a softball, he follows “Can’t Find the Judge” with the lowest-common-denominator pop-trifling “Made to Love You,” on which he whisper-sings along to what could be a prototype of a Foreigner power ballad. This one sounds like a shameless bid for the American Top Forty on Wright’s part, and for his sins the song stalled at the #79 on the pop charts before choking to death on its own insipidness. But cut the Keytar King some slack—even highly evolved beings fuck up.
“Power of Love” is astral plane heavy metal thanks to Ronnie Montrose’s guitar and one very heavy-handed organ. It opens with this rubberband-man synth doing a bass thing then the bottom hits bottom after bottom as Montrose and Wright pound things out between them. You got guitar in my synth! You got synth in my guitar! Meanwhile synths are zigzagging this way and thataway and soloing and man is it fun! That is if your not some snotty Suicide fan who holds poor mainstream Gary in contempt for being a natural-born spiritual entity who used his keyboards for good instead of a NYC nihilist. Swim in the mainstream and you’ll face contempt; dance around the stage in all-white with a keyboard on a strap around your neck and the jaded will laugh at you forever. But why so smug? I’ll bet you Suicide’s Lower East Side astral plane had rodents.
Gary Wright was no nihilist, of course, and the proof is the super-spacy and absolutely essential Astral Plane Disc “Dream Weaver,” which you’ll want to pack along with such other karmic goodies as the Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles” (cunnilingus as path to enlightenment), Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” and “Into the Mystic,” John Lennon’s “#9 Dream,” George Harrison’s Hare-Plagiarism classic “My Sweet Lord,” the Bellamy Brothers’ country-cosmic “Let Your Love Flow” and the Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” the last because all bliss and no play makes Jack a dull spiritual adept.
One thing’s for sure—the mystico-jingle-jangle at song’s beginning lets you know you’re about to visit the Milky Way without leaving your beanbag chair! And Gary’s vocals are as chill as the bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry wine in your fridge! If you can listen to this baby and not transcend your meat puppet you’re doing something wrong, you karmic midget! Me, I climb aboard the dream weaver train every time, and I don’t even have a ticket! And the way he drags out that totally transcendental note at the end? Sublime!
“Blind Feeling” slowly feels its way through some subtle drum work and cool synth into slinky being, then in comes Gary singing in a hush. The song brings to mind the Alan Parsons Project, only more laid-back because instead of singing about tales of mystery and imagination ala poor doomed Edgar Allen Poe Wright’s singing about another kind of mystery: “I realize it’s a mystery/You came and you saved my mind/From the fear that was near.” “Much Higher” is more space junk funk and finds Gary in full voice, hitting the high notes, and sounding downright randy; “Let’s get it on/’Cause I need you tonight/I’m caught up in my desire.”
As with “Miracles,” the stompin’ “Much Higher” (on which Wright goes high, low, and every which way but loose) is about attaining enlightenment through the vagina: “Long as I’m with you/I’m goin’ inside/To the realization/I get much higher/I get much higher/Bein’ in you/Yes I do.” “Feel for Me” is relaxed intergalactic mush, and while it’s pretty enough, it’s far from a miracle—the Dream Weaver doesn’t exactly sound like he’s going through the motions, but he’s hardly illuminating the cosmos with his soulful vocals. There’s some interesting synth work in there, but that’s about all there is. This one is a bit too chill for its own good.
For one bright and shining hour Gary Wright seemed a harbinger of the future—his New Age Rock & Roll Shtick seemed to herald an Age of Aquarius where the vibes were smooth and everybody would have their own snazzy Space Age astral plane. The problem was the year was 1975 and for all his futuristic trappings Wright was a dinosaur who didn’t know it. The Sex Pistols, the Ramones and all the rest were on horizon, waiting to wax anarchic on Gary and his ilk, and Gary’s future was no future.
But kids like me knew nothing about any of that—the Sex Pistols were coming at know-nothings like yours truly from a place far more remote than any distant star in New Age astrology. But hey, “Dream Weaver” is great fun, and so is the album it’s on. And I still dig it. Wright didn’t change my life forever, but then again neither did the Sex Pistols or any of the other bands about to rewrite the rock and roll history books. Like them, he just made me a little bit happier.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
