Gary Wright- The Dream Weaver

Gary Wright was the humble  yet bold musical innovator who made a hit rock album released in July 1975, The Dream Weaver, almost exclusively featuring electronic keyboards instead of the electric guitar. Released with little fanfare, the album ever so slowly became a unique programming feature of the burgeoning progressive rock radio stations, which were emerging from their “underground” origins to influence considerable album sales, across the US by mid-decade. By late Spring 1976, this very modern-sounding album The Dream Weaver had stunned everybody with #7 sales on Billboard Album Sales chart and spun off TWO #2-charting hit songs, “Love is Alive” and the title song, for Gary Wright.

When  it comes to technical innovation in the history of recorded music, certain names top any serious list: Thomas Edison (invented the recorder and phonograph 1878 ); Leo Fender (electric guitar ); Les Paul ( multi-track recording ); Ray Dolby (noise reduction ); Robert Moog (the synthesizer ). But as Beatles producer George Martin proved by recording and producing Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band   on only four tracks, it is human creativity which drives technology, not the other way around. Simon and Garfunkel are credited to have first used Moog’s contraption in 1968 on the song “Save the Life of My Child” from Bookends,  and the effect was truly startling. But Moog’s synthesizer was massive, balky, and could only generate one note at a time, so it was incapable of playing a chord back then.

Meanwhile about the same time, a young American in London named Gary Wright was the keyboard player/songwriter for the otherwise British band Spooky Tooth  (which included a pre-Foreigner Mick Jones), and used Wright’s reputation there to play on Beatle George Harrison’s landmark 1970 solo album All Things Must Pass.  After two attempts at Spooky Tooth with limited success, Gary Wright by 1975 returned to his native New Jersey with a handful of songs and an idea to arrange them with only electronic keyboard, organ, and synthesizer for his third solo album, The Dream Weaver. Wright chose a bold pioneering effort which had rarely been attempted, with spectacular results from the songs “Love Is Alive”,”Made to Love You”,”Blind Feeling”,”Much Higher”,”Power of Love” (the only song to include electric guitar, courtesy of Ronnie Montrose), and the million-selling hit “Dream Weaver”. Gary Wright, who passed away in 2023, joined me here in a very rare In the Studio classic rock  interview to mark Dream Weaver‘s  fiftieth anniversary. –Redbeard