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. From: https://www.thevinyldistrict.com/storefront/graded-on-a-curve-gary-wright-the-dream-weaver/
