It’s Gary Wright‘s 69th birthday today. While the sounds of his 1976 hits Dream Weaver & Love Is Alive may be familiar now, back in the day, this was some trippy-ass stuff.
If you were alive back then, you can let us know what you did while listening to Dream Weaver in the comments!
Wright had his biggest hits in the 70’s and 80’s, but he’s stayed active, touring recently with Ringo Starr & His All-Star Band.
Here’s a classic dual-keytar version of Love Is A Live, from the Midnight Special in 1976.
Driving around the Valley (i.e. the San Fernando Valley) on a Friday night, looking for a place to buy some beer. Then reaching for the cassette player to put on some Yes and wash the bad taste of pseudo-prog away.
I was flying through the astral plane at 300 micro grams per second.
I was never a fan of disco or “dance” music or Giorgio Moroder (at sf conventions when I was a kid you often stayed up all night to watch old sf movies, and hotels always had discos and at around 3:30 am or 4am the sharply dressed, “beautiful” women who had looked so cool dancing four hours earlier would be scattered about the hotel lobby and corridor floors, passed out drunk, filthy in pools of their own vomit, that’s what I associate with Moroder and “dance” music).
But Gary Wright and “Dreamweaver” have nothing but good and inspiring memories. It used to get billed as the first all-synthesizer top-forty song, but I don’t know if that’s true or just hype. It was certainly the first synthesizer song I ever heard.
If I remember right, there were Beatles connections, where George Harrison gave Wright some book.
And I’d always heard from film buffs that Wes Craven liked the song and somehow listened to it and came up with ideas for the original “Nightmare on Elm Street”.
It’s so wonderful remembering a beautiful song that had an interesting background and created so much inspiration and (so far as I know) nothing bad.
Great stuff, Gary Wright. Happy Birthday!
It sounds to me as if the beginning of Dream Weaver (rhodes?) isn’t synthesized, nor are the drums, but the synthesizers (and string machines perhaps?) sound great and Mr. Wright is an excellent singer.
The Love is Alive (?) performance is outstanding – I’d never heard the song, but the bass/drum groove and string pads are great against the vocals – it’s also an excellent and crazy performance before the wireless/midi/keytar era!
I swear I’ve been dreaming of that string sound – I can’t quite reproduce it with my current hardware and software synths.
Thanks Gary! If it wasnt for you, Id never be able to code all of my client’s websites over the years!
Whenever “Dream Weaver” came on the radio, I would jam one finger in my left ear, another in my right ear and use my other hand to re-tune the radio.
I don’t recall where I found that other finger, but boy was it useful!
…and I think you’ll find that love is an emotion, not “a live”. But I could be a nidiot.
we had it in the jukebox in the youth center i went to in australia in 70″s. lots of fun.
on the flip side of that single was Om Nama Shivaya, but i was the only one who liked that…
peace