Gary Wright, the musician greatest identified for his hit singles “Dream Weaver” and “Love Is Alive,” has died. He was 80. Wright’s son Dorian confirmed the information to Selection; no reason behind demise was introduced.
He was a founding member of the U.Okay.-based band Spooky Tooth and was an in-demand session participant from the late ’60s on, enjoying on all of George Harrison’s solo albums — together with his epochal 1970 debut, “All Issues Should Move” — and on Ringo Starr’s early singles (and, a lot later, with Starr’s All-Starr Band) in addition to Nilsson, Tim Rose, B.B. King and lots of others. But he can be greatest remembered for the mid-Seventies hits talked about above, which had been a part of a vaguely mystical, synthesizer-driven model of hit single of the period — Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle” is one other instance — and which noticed him showing on many music exhibits, sporting satin gear and rocking a keytar.
His first album for Warner Bros., “The Dream Weaver” — with a title monitor impressed by a visit to India with Harrison — was launched in 1975, and whereas the only was a gradual builder, by the next spring it was a serious hit and Wright had turn out to be an enormous star. Nevertheless, it was practically two years earlier than he adopted with “The Gentle of Smiles,” and his subsequent efforts didn’t strategy his earlier success. His final charting single was 1981’s “Actually Wanna Know You.”
Within the following years, Wright specialised in instrumental and soundtrack work — though he made a shock look within the 1992 movie “Wayne’s World,” singing a re-recorded model of “Dream Weaver” — however he returned to extra typical rock music and issued a sequence of albums, with the final one, “Linked,” being launched in 2010. He toured steadily, as a solo act, with Spooky Tooth and with Ringo’s All-Starr Band.
Over time, his songs have continued to be lined — Chaka Khan recorded a blazing model of “Love Is Alive” for her 1984 smash album “I Really feel for You” — and sampled by artists starting from Jay-Z to Tone-Loc.
