Dion McGregor, The Dream World of Dion McGregor, Bernard Geis 1964.
„Dion McGregor was a sleeptalker like no other. It’s always entertaining to listen on occasion to the REM ramblings of a loved one, family member or roommate, as long as it doesn’t disrupt one’s own sleep — but these recordings are otherworldly, deeply fascinating and sexually disturbing, to list but a few descriptions. The Guardian sez:
There is a delicious irony to the story of musician Dion McGregor. A bohemian chancer who struggled for years to produce a hit record, he finally released an album on Decca in 1964, except it didn’t feature songs, but dreams. For McGregor is probably the world’s most famous sleep-talker. He was a man who could speak in complete, comprehensible sentences while asleep, painstakingly describing the events of his hallucinations as they unfolded, before, more often than not, his nightmares would conclude with a howl. Whether he was a conman or the genuine article, it’s certainly an unusual take on the American Dream.
After hearing these records quite a few times, I’m unconvinced that anyone could make this stuff up out of any conscious desire. My absolute favorite parts are the dreams’ finales, when Dion inevitably lets forth a truly terrifying, bloodcurdling shrieky blurts.
The first album, “The Dream World of Dion McGregor”, was released in the ’60s, and is rather tame, compared to the freaky uncensored realms of the two later compilations.“
"Somewhere between Jonathan Winters and Brother Theodore on the one hand, and William Burroughs and Terry Southern on the other, there existed a totally un-famous yet incredibly imaginative failed songwriter who happened to “sleeptalk” very odd material in the early morning hours. Dion McGregor was the gent’s name, and he is about as forgotten in pop culture circles as Murray Roman.
However, those who have listened to his amazing spoken-word 1964 LP The Dream World of Dion McGregor know that McGregor was a seminally weird performer — who just happened to never have once performed on a stage (he acted in several films in his early years, but gave up the craft by the 1950s). The mythology on McGregor was that he “sleeptalked” these bizarrely surreal vignettes, which run the gamut from laidback moments of oddball discussion, to vague and hazy trips through queerly-inhabited landscapes, to incidents rife with melodramatic and cartoonish peril. The Dream Life album contained 10 of these dreams, which were taped on reel-to-reel by his songwriting collaborator Mike Barr in their apartment at First Avenue and 53rd St. in NYC, from 1961-1967.
I had heard the album for the first time more than a decade ago, but wasn’t aware until about two weeks back that two CD sequels existed, culled from the same material. All three albums are available online for free (although, of course, I recommend you buy the CDs if you like the material) — but more about that below. First, let me consider the obvious question: what is this stuff? It definitely qualifies as humor of a sort, but it’s not a standard comedy LP. At times one can be convinced that McGregor is insane but, as with Brother Theodore and Jonathan Winters, this is actually a creative person *playing the role* of a crazy person — or, more appropriately, given the mythology, a creative person’s subconscious running wild, on tape.
The question of whether McGregor was for real is addressed in the best biographical article on the man ever published, which can be found here. Author Phil Milstein maintains that he interviewed several people who knew McGregor and saw him actually sleeptalk. He swears that it’s for real. As you listen to the original LP and its CD sequels, however, it’s sorta hard to believe that contention, since McGregor’s pieces, while scattershot (like the best Winters improv sessions), are developed vignettes that have specific characterizations, take their bizarre premises as far as they can possibly go, and have a weird internal rhythm that suggests they weren’t just (ahem) dreamed up out of the blue. The dreams were in fact also converted into print — Dream Life of Dion McGregor book was published in 1964 by Bernard Geis, with illustrations by a very appropriate artist, Edward Gorey.
The most interesting aspect of McGregor’s life to me, is the revelation in Milstein’s article that McGregor was part of the NYC “private film society” scene in the 1950s and ’60s — the folks who where the American equivalent of the Cinematheque/Cahiers crowd, who gathered at various apartments to watch 16mm prints of old movies and attended Manhattan’s many repertory houses together to check out Golden Age classics. McGregor, in fact, had an encyclopedic knowledge of old movies, and had a very large still collection which he supplied to the Citadel Films of… series (he gets co-author credit on The Films of Greta Garbo), which at that time was supervised by Mark Ricci of the Memory Shop (where McGregor worked when he needed dough – and which he mentions in one of his “trips” represented on YouTube [see below]).
I urge you to listen to all of McGregor’s work linked to below, and yes, check the vids and the MySpace if you want a quick fix. Also, read Milstein’s article, which gives you the full story behind the recordings. The long and the short of it was that McGregor was an aspiring songwriter who wanted his work to appear on Broadway, but the closest he got was to have a few songs included in various performers’ nightclub acts and have a few shows mounted off-Broadway (one, co-written by Robert Cobert of Dark Shadows fame, actually made its bow as an “original cast album” of a show that was never actually produced!). His single biggest moment of fame was having Barbra Streisand include one of his and Barr’s tunes (“Where is the Wonder”) on her My Name is Barbra LP and TV special. Dion (his parents named him for Dionysus — little more needs be added) lived from 1922-94, was a New Yorker by birth and disposition, but lived on the West Coast in his latter years with his last partner, whom he met (surprise) at an old movie screening.
The three McGregor albums are truly unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Which is not to say they’re hysterically, laugh-out loud funny. They’re more strange than anything, and in fact, do neatly fit with both the “sick humor” of Lenny Bruce and co., as well as the “black humor” of Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman, Joseph Heller, and friends. While re-listening to the albums today, I was struck by how the stuff could easily be described as the kind of thing that drug-taking artistes would come up with, but to all accounts McGregor was a straight arrow (well, maybe not straight, but…). I wondered if maybe the gent imbibed, because at times he does sound like the later Truman Capote (who was always as sharp as a tack while he was stewed to the gills). Apparently, though, McGregor didn’t indulge in that fashion either. Milstein notes that a few tapes of his real speaking voice exist — among them, an appearance promoting the LP and the hardback book on the Long John Nebel show. On those tapes he speaks differently, so perhaps the somewhat liquored-up effect or slow speech pattern was indeed what he sounded like when he was sleeptalking. Or, of course, the last option: that the voice was just another aspect of his performing and he, along with his friends (and publisher and record producer "witnesses"), made the whole sleeptalking thing up. In any case, whatever the truth may be, the albums are worth hearing, and so we move to the audio portion of the program.
The three albums have been uploaded by Bret B. at Egg City Radio (those who are familiar with the TV scripts of Stanley Ralph Ross will notice that I didn’t go for “eggs-cellent”). I heavily recommend Bret’s blog, which also has links to Lester Bangs’ Jook Savages on the Brazos LP, as well as several National Lampoon Radio Hours. The latter are as fresh and vibrant as when they were recorded in 1973-74, with any single hour as funny as the cumulative Saturday Night Live output for the last 24 years. Lorne Michaels should thank his lucky stars that Mr. Mike existed (as should we).
But back to McGregor. The first album, as noted, is the 1964 Decca LP The Dream Life of Dion McGregor. The dreams are all joined in media res, with McGregor just launching into his character, whether he be a guy reminiscing about a magical girl he knew years before, or a man lamenting “Terrible Town” and wanting to visit “Lovely-ville,” or the greedy relative who wants to write a letter to his uncle using the word “perspicacity,” which he can’t spell. Since there are no samples of this available for fast perusal, I put up the most grisly vision, “The Swimming Pool” on YouTube (“well, that lady died rather uselessly, didn’t she?”). It ends with his stock in trade, a frenzied scream:
The second album was released in 1999.It contained additional “dreams” from the original reel-to-reel tapes, which were apparently kept by Mike Barr all those many years. It is called Dion McGregor Dreams Again, and features dreams that are surreally dirty (I’m thinking Dion was well-aware of not only Lenny but Mr. Burroughs’ mid-day repast). The album is well worth your time, and has its own little website here. The album’s stranger tracks include: “Vulvina,” a visit to see a stripper/psychic who demands that Dion’s character (a frustrated husband) put his head in her vagina; a collector of mythological creatures who finally finds a gryphon (yeah sure, this stuff was all improv-ed from the subconscious); and Dion working as a tattoo artist who has to put “LOVE” and “HATE” on either side of a fat woman’s tongue.
I would recommend that you check out the page put up on MySpace for McGregor which contains a few choice cuts. Also, you can immediately hear the weirdest tracks on Youtube. This is one of the filthier flights of fancy, “The Wagon”:
This one, which mentions TONS of now-long-gone Manhattan movie theaters (and the Memory Shop), is a MUST-LISTEN for New Yorkers who remember what used to be in the way of movie palaces around this burg (“Do you want to go to the Thalia — do you want to go to the Thalia?”):
And a little “thought for the day”:
The third and final album (so far) is from 2004. It’s called The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor. My personal fave bit is a loooong routine called "Midget City," but he also has a wonderful trip through a mansion being offered for sale — with different implements of murder in every room. There’s no better way to end this survey of McGregor’s insane fancies than his account of a battle to avoid “the poison éclair,” the exceedingly nutsy “Food Roulette.” And one final question: how come those loud car horns never woke our sleeptalker up?" -
mediafunhouse.blogspot.com
"DION McGREGOR IS the greatest sleeptalker in recorded history. In another age, the brilliance of his slumbered monologues would have seen him branded a spirit medium or a sorcerer, subjected him to persecution for demonic possession, or led to his being declared insane. But in this slightly more enlightened era, sleeptalking as sparkling as Dion McGregor's can only be celebrated. His dream-stories are so unique that a special word had to be coined just to describe them. And so, what you're about to hear are the somniloquies of DION McGREGOR.
Unlike your average garden-variety sleeptalker, whose utterings rarely go beyond a few indistinct words here and there or perhaps the occasional semi-coherent mumbled sentence, Dion McGregor actually dreams out loud, verbalizing fully-realized miniature dramas of the subconscious. His clear articulation is underscored by the noises of the New York City street traffic outside his open second-storey window. The somniloquies of Dion McGregor are among the damnedest sounds you'll ever hear.
In one sense, Dion McGregor's dreams are not really all that different from those of us mortals. Like ours, the premises of his dreams are unearthly takes on real-life events and thoughts, their plots prone to labyrinthine twists and broad leaps of logic. The premise is always resolved (although, alas, in his case almost never happily so). But this is where the similarity to the dreams of ordinary people the dreams of Dion McGregor end. Quite unlike the rest of us, Dion McGregor narrated his dreams, in a fey, slightly distracted and sometimes insolent voice, the irregularity of his cadences only amplifying the hypnotic effect. Only Dion McGregor's dreams were incessantly tape recorded. And only Dion McGregor's dreams were the end-products of such an unbridled subvoluntary imagination.
McGregor's special brand of nocturnal emissions includes puns, rhymes, internal dialogues, made-up songs, sound effects, brogues and dialects, spelling games, existential dilemmas, chase scenes, violent arguments, and even nonsensical "tongues." The characters that inhabit his somniloquies include an ugly woman who'd been married 28 times, a woman with an orifice large enough to house a sideshow tip, an array of post-endangered animal species, various faded screen stars, and the perspicacious old Uncle Horace. His sleeptalking sessions conjure such fantastical scenarios as a cemetery for midgets, a martini eyewash, the Candy of Knowledge, a contest for cunnilinguists, a balloon ride to the moon, the Thumb Your Nose club (founded by Lenny Bruce), and a pastry table that starts its own food fight.
W E GO BACK. Picture New York, New York in its great grey Cold War period -- the city of Automats and Polo Grounds and Flatiron Buildings. The year is 1953, the address 255 E. 50th Street at 2nd Avenue, on the east side of midtown Manhattan. Our protagonist, an indigent wit, lyricist and movie buff named Dion McGregor, has just set himself up as the uninvited houseguest of yet another friend, this one a multitalented, semi-famous entertainer named Carleton Carpenter, who has just been granted his release from an MGM acting contract. McGregor and Carpenter have recently begun writing songs together, McGregor handling the words and Carpenter the music. McGregor, known to his friends as an "inveterate freeloader," an "international freebie," and "the man who came to dinner," has made a temporary home for himself on a slide-out ottoman in Carpenter's living room.
Despite the extravagant street noises intruding into their apartment, and despite the fact that the living room was a long hallway away from Carpenter's bedroom, midnight mutterings were heard. But McGregor's utterances were not yet the clear, spoken-aloud dreams of the sort that comprise this album - the true epiphany was yet to come. McGregor himself would later tell a radio audience (appropriately, in the middle of the night) that he'd been talking in his sleep since he was five years old, but we can presume that back then, too, his talent was not a very well-defined one.
In the late summer or early autumn of 1955, Carpenter's actual roommate returned to New York and McGregor was forced to find another couch to call home. He hiked the few blocks to 961 1st AVENUE (photo courtesy Ellery Eskelin), a nondescript five-storey walkup near the corner of 53rd Street, where another new songwriting partner of his named MICHAEL BARR had an apartment on the second floor. McGregor's sleeptalking was still a very occasional and unremarkable thing, and during this period Barr never even got to hear any of it. McGregor eventually moved (or was moved) up three flights to the apartment of yet another friend, Peter de Rome, a British writer and filmmaker (and later a prominent director of gay erotic films), where he lasted for a year or so as a resident of de Rome's couch.
It was during this year -- 1960, give or take a few months -- that McGregor's sleeptalking finally blossomed, and was ready to be recognized as the rare and marvelous beast that it was. Not having to hear his somniloquies himself, McGregor wasn't especially moved one way or another by them, but de Rome was intrigued. According to the introductory notes McGregor wrote to the book version of The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, de Rome "tried taking the dreams down in longhand, but the words came faster than he could write. I had a good laugh about it and then forgot it." But when de Rome told Barr about the sleeptalking, Barr immediately recognized that he had stumbled onto something special. Barr, a budding composer whose hobby was tape-recording the audio portions of movie musicals off late-night TV, was eager to turn his microphone on McGregor's dreams. McGregor, on the other hand, was not quite so eager to have his dreams turned upon, but for the historical record -- as well as for a more-or-less permanent address -- he would endure. All that he hoped to directly gain from having his dreams recorded were ideas for potential song lyrics. McGregor moved back to the spare twin bed in Barr's living room, where his exceptional talent would be voluminously documented over the course of the next seven years.
Barr's fascination with making these tapes quickly grew to an obsession. The somniloquies would typically arrive just prior to McGregor's awakening, not every morning like clockwork but rather, as if to keep Barr on his toes, four or five days per week. To compensate for their inconstancy, he would sometimes emit more than one dream in a day, amounting to as many as seven separate somniloquies in a single session.
By the time McGregor began speaking each morning, Barr would already be up and waiting for him, the microphone of his second-hand Pentron reel-to-reel recorder (soon upgraded to an Ampex) resting on a pink table behind and slightly above the sleeper's head, his own breath at half-speed in anticipation of the weirdness that was about to arise. The phone would be taken off the hook so its ring -- you never know when someone might need to call you at 6 a.m. -- would not interfere with the dream, nor with the taping of it. The tape deck itself rested in the hallway near Barr's bedroom, the better to smother his face in his pillow to stifle waves of laughter from leaking onto the tape.
By Barr's estimate, he eventually recorded over 500 of his roommate's somniloquies. McGregor complained (lightheartedly, one assumes) in the book's introduction about "the miles of tape that have taken over the apartment." In reality, the 7" reels were stored neatly in their boxes, the boxes stacked in bookshelves along the walls of the living room -- but there were a lot of boxes.
As the collection of tape reels grew, Barr began playing them for some of their friends in New York's theatrical whirl. They eventually reached the ears of producer and talent agent Jules Green, a co-creator of The Tonight Show and manager of Steve Allen, still a hot property at the time. At that point, things quickly moved into high gear. Green was struck by the alien notion of a man who dreams out loud, and by the compounded strangeness of being able to eavesdrop on those dreams. He approached Milt Gabler, A&R director of Decca Records, to suggest that Decca release an audio verité album of the best of the somniloquy tapes.
Gabler was a savvy industry insider with an ear for unique material. He had been the founder of Commodore Records, the world's first independent jazz label, which in 1939 released Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit," a song that directly and chillingly addressed the topic of racial lynchings in the South. "Strange Fruit" was so withering that Billie's contracted label, Columbia, had shied away from releasing it. Gabler jumped at the opportunity, and his release of "Strange Fruit" put Commodore on the map. The song's impact remains powerful enough that it merited a full-length article in the September 1998 issue of Vanity Fair, a rare achievement for a single song.
In 1954, by then a member of Decca's A&R staff, Gabler produced a New Jersey-based hillbilly combo doing their best imitation of a rhythm and blues number. The band was Bill Haley & The Comets, the song was "Rock Around The Clock," and alongside a few of Elvis Presley's early RCA releases it ignited the rocknroll era.
To finally make the point, Milt Gabler was a truly wild cat, who decided to release THE DREAM WORLD OF DION McGREGOR (HE TALKS IN HIS SLEEP) (left: album cover), "because I was a nut!" Gabler had no expectation nor even reasonable hope that such a strange album might do any significant business. "I knew it wouldn't be a gigantic seller," he says today, "but I thought I should do it just to show that some people talk in their sleep. This guy told complete stories and that's what I wanted to prove." Gabler adds, as if the point weren't inherently clear, "I did it because it was different." The album of ten dream-tapes was released in January of 1964.
Green also played the tapes for Bernard Geis, a respected book publisher whose imprint was distributed by Random House. Unlike Gabler, Geis was looking for sales. "I thought it might catch on as a novelty," he remembers. "I thought it was quite an unusual book and took a flyer on it." On May 27, 1964, Bernard Geis Associates published THE DREAM WORLD OF DION McGREGOR (right: book cover), a collection of transcriptions of 70 of McGregor's somniloquies.
To render the gorgeous three-color (red, black and a near-golden yellow) cover illustration and the 30 black-and-white line drawings inside, Geis hired Edward Gorey, a high school classmate of his wife's who was just beginning his rise to fame as an illustrator of the whimsical and the macabre. The album jacket used virtually the same cover art as the book, but because of its different shape had to be redrawn from scratch. Gorey lettered both covers by hand, but the album bore a subtitle, (He Talks In His Sleep), that was not conferred to the book. The reason for this difference is uncertain, but it was probably just a matter of space. At a glance, however, it's hard to tell the two covers apart.
The releases were given sparse promotion. On the same day Bernard Geis Associates published The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, they also released a biography of Jean Harlow that was a tie-in to a big-budget movie starring the bombshell Carroll Baker. The Harlow book (which, by perverse irony, included several stills supplied by McGregor) got the lion's share of the company's publicity muscle, but a wee bit still managed to spill over onto their quirky little sleeptalking volume. A bookstore devoted an entire Fifth Avenue window to a display of both the album and the book. The New York Times ran a small ad. In a clever endorsement concept, McGregor was scheduled to appear at a trade show booth sponsored by the Simmons Mattress company, but that fell through. Some television appearances were planned, but they too never came to pass. The few press reviews that trickled in were mixed -- one particularly glowing one in a Tampa newspaper, of all unexpected places, seemed to get it.
The one thing that does remain is a tape of an overnight radio program which aired on July 8, 1964, hosted by bizarro New York talkmaster LONG JOHN NEBEL. Over the course of a midnight-to-5 a.m. roundtable discussion, Nebel subjected McGregor to the taunts of his gang of smug know-it-alls, who alternately play along with and patronize our sleeptalker. But McGregor emerged imperturbed. His wall of defense was erected automatically by the fact that he was never "into" the sleeptalking nearly as much as Barr was, and so he wryly agreed with Nebel's goons that these releases were indeed fairly ridiculous. His bemused detachment allowed him to maintain dignity in the face of a barrage of misdirected spitballs. In typical fashion, Nebel even produced a hypnotist, who brought McGregor under for a while. He elicited snatches of two dreams, one a repeat of a portion of "Peony" (a dream about "a Chinese-Austrian dwarf" which appears both in the book and on the first album), the other a recreation of McGregor's failed attempt to levitate two tables and a roomful of friends. It was the levitation portion that finally impressed the panel, although it's hard to tell whether they were responding more to the dream they heard or to McGregor's telling them, after coming out of the state and hearing a playback of it, that the events he dreamt of actually happened. [transcript]
The album and the book both stiffed. Geis recalls, "I don't think we sold more than six, seven thousand copies," out of an initial press run of ten thousand. The remains were remaindered. Gabler (who really does speak in exclamation points) doesn't recall any numbers on the record, but it still stands out in his memory as "one of the biggest flops I ever put out!" He seemed more proud of the fact than distressed by it.
W ITH McGREGOR'S COOPERATION and Green's supervision, Barr had pulled off a most subversive stunt: he had taken a set of utterly anti-commercial tape recordings and had snookered two major publishing firms into releasing versions of them. Although still as fascinated as ever by their haunting occurrence, there was little more to be accomplished by his taping of further dreams. In 1967 McGregor finally got a place of his own, on E. 3rd Street in a building directly across from the Hell's Angels' stomping ground. He referred to the place as Fear Village, and so naturally didn't spend a whole lot of time there, but he wasn't spending many nights at Barr's apartment anymore, either. Mike Barr was finally forced to hit the Stop button on his tapings of the somniloquies of Dion McGregor.
To this day, though, Michael Barr refers to those tapes as "the paramount thing in my life." Early on, Barr and McGregor started thinking of them as the basis for a musical they would write. They even had a serious nibble towards getting a show produced, but, in a fashion that would repeat itself over and over again in McGregor's professional life, nothing came of it. But it is an idea which Barr has continued to develop over the years. He has finally completed a musical version of The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, which will interweave the original dream-tapes with his own songs and those he and McGregor wrote together. He is currently shopping around a demo tape in the hopes of finding a producer." - Phil Milstein
Download his three albums
„Dion McGregor was a sleeptalker like no other. It’s always entertaining to listen on occasion to the REM ramblings of a loved one, family member or roommate, as long as it doesn’t disrupt one’s own sleep — but these recordings are otherworldly, deeply fascinating and sexually disturbing, to list but a few descriptions. The Guardian sez:
There is a delicious irony to the story of musician Dion McGregor. A bohemian chancer who struggled for years to produce a hit record, he finally released an album on Decca in 1964, except it didn’t feature songs, but dreams. For McGregor is probably the world’s most famous sleep-talker. He was a man who could speak in complete, comprehensible sentences while asleep, painstakingly describing the events of his hallucinations as they unfolded, before, more often than not, his nightmares would conclude with a howl. Whether he was a conman or the genuine article, it’s certainly an unusual take on the American Dream.
After hearing these records quite a few times, I’m unconvinced that anyone could make this stuff up out of any conscious desire. My absolute favorite parts are the dreams’ finales, when Dion inevitably lets forth a truly terrifying, bloodcurdling shrieky blurts.
The first album, “The Dream World of Dion McGregor”, was released in the ’60s, and is rather tame, compared to the freaky uncensored realms of the two later compilations.“
"Somewhere between Jonathan Winters and Brother Theodore on the one hand, and William Burroughs and Terry Southern on the other, there existed a totally un-famous yet incredibly imaginative failed songwriter who happened to “sleeptalk” very odd material in the early morning hours. Dion McGregor was the gent’s name, and he is about as forgotten in pop culture circles as Murray Roman.
However, those who have listened to his amazing spoken-word 1964 LP The Dream World of Dion McGregor know that McGregor was a seminally weird performer — who just happened to never have once performed on a stage (he acted in several films in his early years, but gave up the craft by the 1950s). The mythology on McGregor was that he “sleeptalked” these bizarrely surreal vignettes, which run the gamut from laidback moments of oddball discussion, to vague and hazy trips through queerly-inhabited landscapes, to incidents rife with melodramatic and cartoonish peril. The Dream Life album contained 10 of these dreams, which were taped on reel-to-reel by his songwriting collaborator Mike Barr in their apartment at First Avenue and 53rd St. in NYC, from 1961-1967.
I had heard the album for the first time more than a decade ago, but wasn’t aware until about two weeks back that two CD sequels existed, culled from the same material. All three albums are available online for free (although, of course, I recommend you buy the CDs if you like the material) — but more about that below. First, let me consider the obvious question: what is this stuff? It definitely qualifies as humor of a sort, but it’s not a standard comedy LP. At times one can be convinced that McGregor is insane but, as with Brother Theodore and Jonathan Winters, this is actually a creative person *playing the role* of a crazy person — or, more appropriately, given the mythology, a creative person’s subconscious running wild, on tape.
The question of whether McGregor was for real is addressed in the best biographical article on the man ever published, which can be found here. Author Phil Milstein maintains that he interviewed several people who knew McGregor and saw him actually sleeptalk. He swears that it’s for real. As you listen to the original LP and its CD sequels, however, it’s sorta hard to believe that contention, since McGregor’s pieces, while scattershot (like the best Winters improv sessions), are developed vignettes that have specific characterizations, take their bizarre premises as far as they can possibly go, and have a weird internal rhythm that suggests they weren’t just (ahem) dreamed up out of the blue. The dreams were in fact also converted into print — Dream Life of Dion McGregor book was published in 1964 by Bernard Geis, with illustrations by a very appropriate artist, Edward Gorey.
The most interesting aspect of McGregor’s life to me, is the revelation in Milstein’s article that McGregor was part of the NYC “private film society” scene in the 1950s and ’60s — the folks who where the American equivalent of the Cinematheque/Cahiers crowd, who gathered at various apartments to watch 16mm prints of old movies and attended Manhattan’s many repertory houses together to check out Golden Age classics. McGregor, in fact, had an encyclopedic knowledge of old movies, and had a very large still collection which he supplied to the Citadel Films of… series (he gets co-author credit on The Films of Greta Garbo), which at that time was supervised by Mark Ricci of the Memory Shop (where McGregor worked when he needed dough – and which he mentions in one of his “trips” represented on YouTube [see below]).
I urge you to listen to all of McGregor’s work linked to below, and yes, check the vids and the MySpace if you want a quick fix. Also, read Milstein’s article, which gives you the full story behind the recordings. The long and the short of it was that McGregor was an aspiring songwriter who wanted his work to appear on Broadway, but the closest he got was to have a few songs included in various performers’ nightclub acts and have a few shows mounted off-Broadway (one, co-written by Robert Cobert of Dark Shadows fame, actually made its bow as an “original cast album” of a show that was never actually produced!). His single biggest moment of fame was having Barbra Streisand include one of his and Barr’s tunes (“Where is the Wonder”) on her My Name is Barbra LP and TV special. Dion (his parents named him for Dionysus — little more needs be added) lived from 1922-94, was a New Yorker by birth and disposition, but lived on the West Coast in his latter years with his last partner, whom he met (surprise) at an old movie screening.
The three McGregor albums are truly unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Which is not to say they’re hysterically, laugh-out loud funny. They’re more strange than anything, and in fact, do neatly fit with both the “sick humor” of Lenny Bruce and co., as well as the “black humor” of Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman, Joseph Heller, and friends. While re-listening to the albums today, I was struck by how the stuff could easily be described as the kind of thing that drug-taking artistes would come up with, but to all accounts McGregor was a straight arrow (well, maybe not straight, but…). I wondered if maybe the gent imbibed, because at times he does sound like the later Truman Capote (who was always as sharp as a tack while he was stewed to the gills). Apparently, though, McGregor didn’t indulge in that fashion either. Milstein notes that a few tapes of his real speaking voice exist — among them, an appearance promoting the LP and the hardback book on the Long John Nebel show. On those tapes he speaks differently, so perhaps the somewhat liquored-up effect or slow speech pattern was indeed what he sounded like when he was sleeptalking. Or, of course, the last option: that the voice was just another aspect of his performing and he, along with his friends (and publisher and record producer "witnesses"), made the whole sleeptalking thing up. In any case, whatever the truth may be, the albums are worth hearing, and so we move to the audio portion of the program.
The three albums have been uploaded by Bret B. at Egg City Radio (those who are familiar with the TV scripts of Stanley Ralph Ross will notice that I didn’t go for “eggs-cellent”). I heavily recommend Bret’s blog, which also has links to Lester Bangs’ Jook Savages on the Brazos LP, as well as several National Lampoon Radio Hours. The latter are as fresh and vibrant as when they were recorded in 1973-74, with any single hour as funny as the cumulative Saturday Night Live output for the last 24 years. Lorne Michaels should thank his lucky stars that Mr. Mike existed (as should we).
But back to McGregor. The first album, as noted, is the 1964 Decca LP The Dream Life of Dion McGregor. The dreams are all joined in media res, with McGregor just launching into his character, whether he be a guy reminiscing about a magical girl he knew years before, or a man lamenting “Terrible Town” and wanting to visit “Lovely-ville,” or the greedy relative who wants to write a letter to his uncle using the word “perspicacity,” which he can’t spell. Since there are no samples of this available for fast perusal, I put up the most grisly vision, “The Swimming Pool” on YouTube (“well, that lady died rather uselessly, didn’t she?”). It ends with his stock in trade, a frenzied scream:
The second album was released in 1999.It contained additional “dreams” from the original reel-to-reel tapes, which were apparently kept by Mike Barr all those many years. It is called Dion McGregor Dreams Again, and features dreams that are surreally dirty (I’m thinking Dion was well-aware of not only Lenny but Mr. Burroughs’ mid-day repast). The album is well worth your time, and has its own little website here. The album’s stranger tracks include: “Vulvina,” a visit to see a stripper/psychic who demands that Dion’s character (a frustrated husband) put his head in her vagina; a collector of mythological creatures who finally finds a gryphon (yeah sure, this stuff was all improv-ed from the subconscious); and Dion working as a tattoo artist who has to put “LOVE” and “HATE” on either side of a fat woman’s tongue.
I would recommend that you check out the page put up on MySpace for McGregor which contains a few choice cuts. Also, you can immediately hear the weirdest tracks on Youtube. This is one of the filthier flights of fancy, “The Wagon”:
This one, which mentions TONS of now-long-gone Manhattan movie theaters (and the Memory Shop), is a MUST-LISTEN for New Yorkers who remember what used to be in the way of movie palaces around this burg (“Do you want to go to the Thalia — do you want to go to the Thalia?”):
And a little “thought for the day”:
The third and final album (so far) is from 2004. It’s called The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor. My personal fave bit is a loooong routine called "Midget City," but he also has a wonderful trip through a mansion being offered for sale — with different implements of murder in every room. There’s no better way to end this survey of McGregor’s insane fancies than his account of a battle to avoid “the poison éclair,” the exceedingly nutsy “Food Roulette.” And one final question: how come those loud car horns never woke our sleeptalker up?" -
mediafunhouse.blogspot.com
"DION McGREGOR IS the greatest sleeptalker in recorded history. In another age, the brilliance of his slumbered monologues would have seen him branded a spirit medium or a sorcerer, subjected him to persecution for demonic possession, or led to his being declared insane. But in this slightly more enlightened era, sleeptalking as sparkling as Dion McGregor's can only be celebrated. His dream-stories are so unique that a special word had to be coined just to describe them. And so, what you're about to hear are the somniloquies of DION McGREGOR.
Unlike your average garden-variety sleeptalker, whose utterings rarely go beyond a few indistinct words here and there or perhaps the occasional semi-coherent mumbled sentence, Dion McGregor actually dreams out loud, verbalizing fully-realized miniature dramas of the subconscious. His clear articulation is underscored by the noises of the New York City street traffic outside his open second-storey window. The somniloquies of Dion McGregor are among the damnedest sounds you'll ever hear.
In one sense, Dion McGregor's dreams are not really all that different from those of us mortals. Like ours, the premises of his dreams are unearthly takes on real-life events and thoughts, their plots prone to labyrinthine twists and broad leaps of logic. The premise is always resolved (although, alas, in his case almost never happily so). But this is where the similarity to the dreams of ordinary people the dreams of Dion McGregor end. Quite unlike the rest of us, Dion McGregor narrated his dreams, in a fey, slightly distracted and sometimes insolent voice, the irregularity of his cadences only amplifying the hypnotic effect. Only Dion McGregor's dreams were incessantly tape recorded. And only Dion McGregor's dreams were the end-products of such an unbridled subvoluntary imagination.
McGregor's special brand of nocturnal emissions includes puns, rhymes, internal dialogues, made-up songs, sound effects, brogues and dialects, spelling games, existential dilemmas, chase scenes, violent arguments, and even nonsensical "tongues." The characters that inhabit his somniloquies include an ugly woman who'd been married 28 times, a woman with an orifice large enough to house a sideshow tip, an array of post-endangered animal species, various faded screen stars, and the perspicacious old Uncle Horace. His sleeptalking sessions conjure such fantastical scenarios as a cemetery for midgets, a martini eyewash, the Candy of Knowledge, a contest for cunnilinguists, a balloon ride to the moon, the Thumb Your Nose club (founded by Lenny Bruce), and a pastry table that starts its own food fight.
W E GO BACK. Picture New York, New York in its great grey Cold War period -- the city of Automats and Polo Grounds and Flatiron Buildings. The year is 1953, the address 255 E. 50th Street at 2nd Avenue, on the east side of midtown Manhattan. Our protagonist, an indigent wit, lyricist and movie buff named Dion McGregor, has just set himself up as the uninvited houseguest of yet another friend, this one a multitalented, semi-famous entertainer named Carleton Carpenter, who has just been granted his release from an MGM acting contract. McGregor and Carpenter have recently begun writing songs together, McGregor handling the words and Carpenter the music. McGregor, known to his friends as an "inveterate freeloader," an "international freebie," and "the man who came to dinner," has made a temporary home for himself on a slide-out ottoman in Carpenter's living room.
Despite the extravagant street noises intruding into their apartment, and despite the fact that the living room was a long hallway away from Carpenter's bedroom, midnight mutterings were heard. But McGregor's utterances were not yet the clear, spoken-aloud dreams of the sort that comprise this album - the true epiphany was yet to come. McGregor himself would later tell a radio audience (appropriately, in the middle of the night) that he'd been talking in his sleep since he was five years old, but we can presume that back then, too, his talent was not a very well-defined one.
In the late summer or early autumn of 1955, Carpenter's actual roommate returned to New York and McGregor was forced to find another couch to call home. He hiked the few blocks to 961 1st AVENUE (photo courtesy Ellery Eskelin), a nondescript five-storey walkup near the corner of 53rd Street, where another new songwriting partner of his named MICHAEL BARR had an apartment on the second floor. McGregor's sleeptalking was still a very occasional and unremarkable thing, and during this period Barr never even got to hear any of it. McGregor eventually moved (or was moved) up three flights to the apartment of yet another friend, Peter de Rome, a British writer and filmmaker (and later a prominent director of gay erotic films), where he lasted for a year or so as a resident of de Rome's couch.
It was during this year -- 1960, give or take a few months -- that McGregor's sleeptalking finally blossomed, and was ready to be recognized as the rare and marvelous beast that it was. Not having to hear his somniloquies himself, McGregor wasn't especially moved one way or another by them, but de Rome was intrigued. According to the introductory notes McGregor wrote to the book version of The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, de Rome "tried taking the dreams down in longhand, but the words came faster than he could write. I had a good laugh about it and then forgot it." But when de Rome told Barr about the sleeptalking, Barr immediately recognized that he had stumbled onto something special. Barr, a budding composer whose hobby was tape-recording the audio portions of movie musicals off late-night TV, was eager to turn his microphone on McGregor's dreams. McGregor, on the other hand, was not quite so eager to have his dreams turned upon, but for the historical record -- as well as for a more-or-less permanent address -- he would endure. All that he hoped to directly gain from having his dreams recorded were ideas for potential song lyrics. McGregor moved back to the spare twin bed in Barr's living room, where his exceptional talent would be voluminously documented over the course of the next seven years.
Barr's fascination with making these tapes quickly grew to an obsession. The somniloquies would typically arrive just prior to McGregor's awakening, not every morning like clockwork but rather, as if to keep Barr on his toes, four or five days per week. To compensate for their inconstancy, he would sometimes emit more than one dream in a day, amounting to as many as seven separate somniloquies in a single session.
By the time McGregor began speaking each morning, Barr would already be up and waiting for him, the microphone of his second-hand Pentron reel-to-reel recorder (soon upgraded to an Ampex) resting on a pink table behind and slightly above the sleeper's head, his own breath at half-speed in anticipation of the weirdness that was about to arise. The phone would be taken off the hook so its ring -- you never know when someone might need to call you at 6 a.m. -- would not interfere with the dream, nor with the taping of it. The tape deck itself rested in the hallway near Barr's bedroom, the better to smother his face in his pillow to stifle waves of laughter from leaking onto the tape.
By Barr's estimate, he eventually recorded over 500 of his roommate's somniloquies. McGregor complained (lightheartedly, one assumes) in the book's introduction about "the miles of tape that have taken over the apartment." In reality, the 7" reels were stored neatly in their boxes, the boxes stacked in bookshelves along the walls of the living room -- but there were a lot of boxes.
As the collection of tape reels grew, Barr began playing them for some of their friends in New York's theatrical whirl. They eventually reached the ears of producer and talent agent Jules Green, a co-creator of The Tonight Show and manager of Steve Allen, still a hot property at the time. At that point, things quickly moved into high gear. Green was struck by the alien notion of a man who dreams out loud, and by the compounded strangeness of being able to eavesdrop on those dreams. He approached Milt Gabler, A&R director of Decca Records, to suggest that Decca release an audio verité album of the best of the somniloquy tapes.
Gabler was a savvy industry insider with an ear for unique material. He had been the founder of Commodore Records, the world's first independent jazz label, which in 1939 released Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit," a song that directly and chillingly addressed the topic of racial lynchings in the South. "Strange Fruit" was so withering that Billie's contracted label, Columbia, had shied away from releasing it. Gabler jumped at the opportunity, and his release of "Strange Fruit" put Commodore on the map. The song's impact remains powerful enough that it merited a full-length article in the September 1998 issue of Vanity Fair, a rare achievement for a single song.
In 1954, by then a member of Decca's A&R staff, Gabler produced a New Jersey-based hillbilly combo doing their best imitation of a rhythm and blues number. The band was Bill Haley & The Comets, the song was "Rock Around The Clock," and alongside a few of Elvis Presley's early RCA releases it ignited the rocknroll era.
To finally make the point, Milt Gabler was a truly wild cat, who decided to release THE DREAM WORLD OF DION McGREGOR (HE TALKS IN HIS SLEEP) (left: album cover), "because I was a nut!" Gabler had no expectation nor even reasonable hope that such a strange album might do any significant business. "I knew it wouldn't be a gigantic seller," he says today, "but I thought I should do it just to show that some people talk in their sleep. This guy told complete stories and that's what I wanted to prove." Gabler adds, as if the point weren't inherently clear, "I did it because it was different." The album of ten dream-tapes was released in January of 1964.
Green also played the tapes for Bernard Geis, a respected book publisher whose imprint was distributed by Random House. Unlike Gabler, Geis was looking for sales. "I thought it might catch on as a novelty," he remembers. "I thought it was quite an unusual book and took a flyer on it." On May 27, 1964, Bernard Geis Associates published THE DREAM WORLD OF DION McGREGOR (right: book cover), a collection of transcriptions of 70 of McGregor's somniloquies.
To render the gorgeous three-color (red, black and a near-golden yellow) cover illustration and the 30 black-and-white line drawings inside, Geis hired Edward Gorey, a high school classmate of his wife's who was just beginning his rise to fame as an illustrator of the whimsical and the macabre. The album jacket used virtually the same cover art as the book, but because of its different shape had to be redrawn from scratch. Gorey lettered both covers by hand, but the album bore a subtitle, (He Talks In His Sleep), that was not conferred to the book. The reason for this difference is uncertain, but it was probably just a matter of space. At a glance, however, it's hard to tell the two covers apart.
The releases were given sparse promotion. On the same day Bernard Geis Associates published The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, they also released a biography of Jean Harlow that was a tie-in to a big-budget movie starring the bombshell Carroll Baker. The Harlow book (which, by perverse irony, included several stills supplied by McGregor) got the lion's share of the company's publicity muscle, but a wee bit still managed to spill over onto their quirky little sleeptalking volume. A bookstore devoted an entire Fifth Avenue window to a display of both the album and the book. The New York Times ran a small ad. In a clever endorsement concept, McGregor was scheduled to appear at a trade show booth sponsored by the Simmons Mattress company, but that fell through. Some television appearances were planned, but they too never came to pass. The few press reviews that trickled in were mixed -- one particularly glowing one in a Tampa newspaper, of all unexpected places, seemed to get it.
The one thing that does remain is a tape of an overnight radio program which aired on July 8, 1964, hosted by bizarro New York talkmaster LONG JOHN NEBEL. Over the course of a midnight-to-5 a.m. roundtable discussion, Nebel subjected McGregor to the taunts of his gang of smug know-it-alls, who alternately play along with and patronize our sleeptalker. But McGregor emerged imperturbed. His wall of defense was erected automatically by the fact that he was never "into" the sleeptalking nearly as much as Barr was, and so he wryly agreed with Nebel's goons that these releases were indeed fairly ridiculous. His bemused detachment allowed him to maintain dignity in the face of a barrage of misdirected spitballs. In typical fashion, Nebel even produced a hypnotist, who brought McGregor under for a while. He elicited snatches of two dreams, one a repeat of a portion of "Peony" (a dream about "a Chinese-Austrian dwarf" which appears both in the book and on the first album), the other a recreation of McGregor's failed attempt to levitate two tables and a roomful of friends. It was the levitation portion that finally impressed the panel, although it's hard to tell whether they were responding more to the dream they heard or to McGregor's telling them, after coming out of the state and hearing a playback of it, that the events he dreamt of actually happened. [transcript]
The album and the book both stiffed. Geis recalls, "I don't think we sold more than six, seven thousand copies," out of an initial press run of ten thousand. The remains were remaindered. Gabler (who really does speak in exclamation points) doesn't recall any numbers on the record, but it still stands out in his memory as "one of the biggest flops I ever put out!" He seemed more proud of the fact than distressed by it.
W ITH McGREGOR'S COOPERATION and Green's supervision, Barr had pulled off a most subversive stunt: he had taken a set of utterly anti-commercial tape recordings and had snookered two major publishing firms into releasing versions of them. Although still as fascinated as ever by their haunting occurrence, there was little more to be accomplished by his taping of further dreams. In 1967 McGregor finally got a place of his own, on E. 3rd Street in a building directly across from the Hell's Angels' stomping ground. He referred to the place as Fear Village, and so naturally didn't spend a whole lot of time there, but he wasn't spending many nights at Barr's apartment anymore, either. Mike Barr was finally forced to hit the Stop button on his tapings of the somniloquies of Dion McGregor.
To this day, though, Michael Barr refers to those tapes as "the paramount thing in my life." Early on, Barr and McGregor started thinking of them as the basis for a musical they would write. They even had a serious nibble towards getting a show produced, but, in a fashion that would repeat itself over and over again in McGregor's professional life, nothing came of it. But it is an idea which Barr has continued to develop over the years. He has finally completed a musical version of The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, which will interweave the original dream-tapes with his own songs and those he and McGregor wrote together. He is currently shopping around a demo tape in the hopes of finding a producer." - Phil Milstein
Download his three albums
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