Gary Wright, a spiritually minded singer-songwriter who helped modernize the sound of pop music together with his pioneering use of synthesizers whereas crafting infectious and seemingly inescapable hits of the Seventies like “Dream Weaver” and “Love Is Alive,” died on Monday at his house in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. He was 80.
The trigger was issues of Parkinson’s illness and Lewy physique dementia, his son Justin mentioned.
The New Jersey-bred Mr. Wright rose to prominence within the late Sixties after relocating to London and serving to to kind the bluesy British progressive rock band Spooky Tooth.
He quickly befriended George Harrison, with whom he would collaborate continuously through the years, together with taking part in keyboards on that former Beatle’s magnum opus triple album, “All Issues Should Go,” launched in 1970.
Their lengthy friendship would have a long-lasting impression on each Mr. Wright’s life and his music. Mr. Harrison launched him to Jap mysticism, giving him a duplicate of “Autobiography of a Yogi,” by Paramahansa Yogananda, who helped popularize yoga and meditation in the USA, and Mr. Harrison traveled with him to India.
“That was his life path after that,” Justin Wright mentioned in a cellphone interview. “Deep down inside him, he was trying to find one thing, and this was the reply for him.”
His religious awakening helped spawn “Dream Weaver,” a monitor from his 1975 album, “The Dream Weaver,” which hit No. 7 on the Billboard album chart and rocketed him to fame. The tune was impressed by the yogi’s poem “God, God, God,” which incorporates the road “My thoughts weaves goals.”
Mr. Wright begins the tune with the lyrics “I’ve simply closed my eyes once more/Climbed aboard the dream weaver practice/Driver take away my worries of in the present day/And go away tomorrow behind.”
The “Dream Weaver” single, swept alongside by a wave of lush electronica that bordered on the interstellar, soared to No. 2 on the Billboard Sizzling 100 in March 1976. The tune turned a soft-rock touchstone, showing in such films as “Wayne’s World” (1992) and “The Folks vs. Larry Flynt” (1996), in addition to on a 2010 episode (referred to as “Dream On”) of the musical comedy-drama tv sequence “Glee.”
It was not the one smash hit from that album. That July “Love Is Alive,” like “Dream Weaver,” rose to No. 2 conjuring the languid sexuality of the waterbed period. Mr. Wright carried out at stadium exhibits on the identical invoice as heavyweights like Peter Frampton and Yes, standing out among the many guitar gods together with his strap-on keyboard, generally known as a keytar.
Whereas his greatest hits turned emblematic sounds of the Seventies, Mr. Wright had taken an unconventional musical method on the album “The Dream Weaver”: He relied virtually fully on keyboard devices, together with a Minimoog synthesizer, versus guitars, foreshadowing the synth-pop increase of the early ’80s.
“The theme of getting solely keyboards, drums, voices — and no guitars — came accidentally,” Mr. Wright mentioned in a 2010 interview with Musoscribe, a music web site. When he went again and listened to the demos he had recorded, he mentioned, “I assumed, ‘Wow. This sounds good. It doesn’t actually need guitars.’”
Gary Malcolm Wright was born on April 26, 1943, in Cresskill, in northeast New Jersey. He was the center of three youngsters of Lou Wright, a structural engineer, and Anne (Belvedere) Wright.
His mom helped instill in him an curiosity in music and performing, driving him to piano classes and ultimately to auditions. Their efforts paid off when he made an look on the seminal science fiction TV sequence “Captain Video and His Video Rangers” and later received a task within the 1954 Broadway musical “Fanny,” starring Florence Henderson.
“I initially got here into the play as an understudy to the primary function, after which I picked up the main child role,” Mr. Wright mentioned in a 2014 interview with Smashing Interviews journal. “I used to be solely 11 and 12 throughout these years. It was an incredible expertise to behave and sing each evening earlier than sold-out audiences and sing with a full orchestral band.”
Inside a couple of years, he deserted the stage and display screen “to be a traditional form of particular person in class, taking part in sports activities and Little League baseball and that form of factor,” he advised Smashing Interviews. Whereas attending Tenafly Excessive College, he performed in numerous rock teams, together with a duo referred to as Gary and Billy together with his faculty pal Invoice Markle. Their single “Working After College” was performed on the TV present “American Bandstand.”
After highschool, Mr. Wright attended William & Mary in Virginia for a yr earlier than transferring to New York College, the place he switched his focus to medication. After graduating in 1965, he briefly enrolled in medical faculty earlier than shifting to Berlin to check psychology.
Shedding curiosity in a life in medical follow, he went again to music, serving to to kind a band that constructed a following in Europe; at one level it opened for the rock group Site visitors in Oslo. There he caught the eye of Chris Blackwell, the founding father of Island Information. Mr. Blackwell summoned him to England to hitch a band referred to as Artwork, which advanced into Spooky Tooth.
Spooky Tooth quickly disbanded in 1970, and a yr later Mr. Wright launched his first solo album, “Footprint.” That album featured Mr. Harrison on guitar on the monitor “Two Confronted Man,” which the 2 carried out with Mr. Wright’s band Wonderwheel on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971.
Along with his son Justin, Mr. Wright is survived by his spouse, Rose (Anthony) Wright; one other son, Dorian; a sister, Lorna Lee; and two grandchildren. His marriages to Christina Uppstrom, the mom of his sons, and Dori Accordino resulted in divorce.
Alongside together with his work with Mr. Harrison, Mr. Wright was a session keyboardist for Harry Nilsson, B.B. King and Jerry Lee Lewis, and he continued to document solo albums.
Within the Musoscribe interview, he mentioned his 2010 launch, “Related,” and the album’s hook-laden opening monitor, “Satisfied,” in phrases that might have utilized to “Dream Weaver.”
“The phrase ‘hook’ means drawing folks into one thing,” he mentioned. “Once I write songs, I all the time attempt to make them that method — catchy — so that folks will bear in mind them. They’ll be extra embedded in folks’s consciousness.”
