The results are by turns hilarious, baffling, nutty and terrifying. Both died quick commercial deaths, and our hero was all but forgotten (aside from penning one hit for Barbra Streisand).Īs fate would have it, however, both acclaimed musician John Zorn and underground music archivist extraordinaire Phil Milstein are fans of the original album, and the two conspired to release this follow-up, culled from Barr's hundreds of hours of original tapes. In January 1964, just a month before the Beatles (whom Decca passed on) conquered America, The Dream World of Dion McGregor was released, and the book version followed that spring. Barr set about recording his roomie nightly and managed to peddle the results to both Decca Records and Random House Books.
Barr soon discovered McGregor's uncanny habit of narrating his dreams aloud in his sleep - not just muttering incoherently, but clearly speaking fully formed, five- to ten-minute-long crazed monologues. Is this the ultimate home recording? Back in the magical early '60s, an odd couple of aspiring songwriters, Dion McGregor and Mike Barr, shared an apartment on the Upper East Side. Production companies: Norte Productions, S.E.L.Dion McGregor Dreams Again: Press Clippings Dangerfield.” There’s enough dissonance that the dream world and real world of somniloquies forever remain separate realms, although the film ultimately goes very far - perhaps farther than most movies – to try and bridge the gap between the two. What we’re seeing and what we’re hearing never quite match, as the camera constantly roves over blurred bodies while McGregor says stuff like: “I don’t want to see your ass, Mrs.
There’s something vaguely Lynchian about getting into a person’s head like that, and the array of abstract imagery recalls late Lynch movies like Inland Empire, as well as the films of Philippe Grandrieux (especially the recent Despite the Night) and the paintings of Francis Bacon. And in several sitcom-esque sexcapades, he refers to the “platinum bush” of an older woman in a robe, a calendar whose days include “suck Monday” and “tit Tuesday,” and to a vehicle that he calls the “f- wagon.” In another he performs a surgical procedure on himself, removing his own spleen. McGregor’s rants are like a cross between the somnambulist poems of Robert Desnos and the standup of Lenny Bruce, and you can see why his roommate wanted to record them: In one dream he describes a “midget city” in hilarious detail.
As ominous as that sounds, the dreams are so amusingly surreal that somniloquies winds up turning into a sort of avant-garde comedy.
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