New, free (legal!) download of ‘The Dream World of Dion McGregor’

I noted in my last blog entry on the strange phenomenon that was, and is, Dion McGregor that it is surprising (and welcome) to find that there is new material available from the renowned “sleep talker.” Now the friendly folks at Torpor Vigil Records have made the long out-of-print 1964 LP by McGregor, The Dream World of Dion McGregor — yes, the one with the Edward Gorey cover — available as a high-quality, totally remastered, legal download. For free, even!

Many audio and video rereleases use the phrase “remastered,” but in this case the folks at TV went back to the original tapes of McGregor’s monologues made by his roommate Michael Barr back in the Sixties to obtain better-sounding versions of the material on the LP. So this isn’t just a digital rendering of the original record, this is a clearer version of the material (specific notes about the process are available at the download page).

McGregor, for those who are unaware, was a songwriter (now deceased) who has acquired a cult not for any of his music, but for the bizarre and dark monologues he delivered in his sleep. The situations he would craft are disturbing (the best example is the piece about people in a swimming pool that is slowly getting hotter and hotter) but his “concerned observer” narration is what sells the pieces.

I discussed in my last post how I had a problem with the notion that McGregor was fully asleep; arguments to shore up that position, provided by Torpor Vigil founder Steve Venright, are in that blog entry. In the time since, I came across a very interesting NPR discussion about McGregor’s monologues, in which two experts on sleep discussed what state he might have been in — one of the two maintains he was “sleep talking from a sort of atypical REM stage.”

Whatever the hell he was doing, McGregor produced surreal and grimly funny material that was not his forte in the waking world (it’s even more bizarre to consider the fact that he had this stuff locked up inside his mind and never became a humor writer of any kind). The first LP was a distillation of the “best” (at that point) of McGregor’s monologues, replete with the traffic sounds of midtown Manhattan in the background.

Dion in a 1972 de Rome film.

There definitely would seem to be a documentary in all this, and yet there may never be one, due to the fact that most people who knew McGregor have died. The most recent was his roommate before Barr, the pioneering experimental gay porn filmmaker Peter de Rome, who is the subject of the new documentary Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn — which I can heartily recommend for those interested in experimental filmmaking, gay porn, portraits of eccentric and endearing artists, and those who love seeing vintage footage of NYC in the Sixties.

In any case, although I don’t think there is a McGregor monologue that directly concerns the Yuletide season, this free, vastly improved digital version is a very nice Xmas gift for the listener who likes strange and dark humor. There is ample information on the download page concerning the other McGregor albums, which are all available on CD. As for explaining what it was that McGregor was doing, nothing beats just sampling the monologues, which can be done directly on the page.

Sweet Dreams!

Review: A new album by ‘sleeptalker’ Dion McGregor

It’s no surprise when a music label comes up with a live recording of a major deceased comedian. The fact that we can now hear more from renowned “sleeptalker” (read: monologist) Dion McGregor is indeed a surprise, though, and a very pleasant one at that. If you’ve never heard of McGregor (who died in 1994), I wrote a sort of “101” intro to him here. The short version of the story is that he was a songwriter and playwright whose music never made him famous, but his penchant for talking in his sleep did.

Legend has it that McGregor’s roommate Michael Barr was so amazed by the crazed, imaginative monologues that Dion was dispensing while asleep that he began to record them. He taped hours of these monologues, known as “somniloquies,” and the result was an uncategorizable 1964 Decca LP called The Dream World of Dion McGregor (He Talks in His Sleep) and a book of “transcripts” of the dreams (also 1964), with memorable illustrations by Edward Gorey.

As I noted in my last post about McGregor, I was very surprised to find that additional CDs of previously unheard dreams had been released in 1999 (Dion McGregor Dreams Again) and 2004 (The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor). The new release is called Dreaming Like Mad and has been released by Torpor Vigil Records.

McGregor’s monologues range from playful and silly to delightfully grim and even “sick” (in the manner of what was called in the Fifties “sick humor” — foremost practitioner: Lenny Bruce, namechecked in one dream here by Dion). McGregor is the monologist equivalent of Charles Addams, sketching outlandish first-person scenarios in which something unusual is happening and our narrator is either accepting it as commonplace or growing steadily more uneasy, until his voice begins to rise and he starts signaling the end of the piece (in keeping with the “sleeptalk” mythology, this would be the point where Dion would awaken, or fall out of bed).

There are 15 tracks on Dreaming Like Mad. All are great, but a third of the entries are exemplary slice of weirdness. The opening track sets the mood with Dion explaining how he and his friends have disappeared into the Sunday New York Times. As is common with McGregor’s dreams, this surreal transformation is recorded in a deadpan fashion. Take a listen to this strange odyssey for free, courtesy of Torpor Vigil Records.

A more “adult” dream finds Dion talking about a woman whose face is located near her “snatch” — her obvious dream man being a guy whose face is located in his crotch as well. Perhaps the most fitting entry has a quartet tossing a disembodied head from person to person. McGregor’s funniest monologues are always delivered with both an urgency and a sense of childlike innocence, making the dark aspects even more ghoulish.

The piece that has the most urgency to it is Dion’s invitation to join the “TYN” club. He implores a friend to come to a demonstration at the New York Herald Tribune where everyone will thumb their noses (thus the “TYN”) at dour film critic Judith Crist.

“There are big lists all made up, controversial people. Everybody knows about TYN! You get your pin, you get a placard…. [The police] threatened to put us in jail — we said ‘Come right ahead.’ We thumbed our noses. ‘TYN to you too, police!’ That’s right… Oh well, I don’t know — it doesn’t accomplish any good…” Dion then reveals that the club had a dilemma: one of the members wanted to thumb his nose at Lenny Bruce. But since Lenny founded the club, they just can’t do that (although they’re not racist — Eartha Kitt is also on their list for a thumbing).

One of the finest nightmare scenarios on the album is a refined gathering of couples. McGregor often “dreamed” deranged versions of very straight suburban scenarios (Dion, for the record, was gay). Cocktails or a meal are not the reason for this get-together, though — this is an “execution party,” in which guests are drilled with a machine gun and their bodies placed in piles. Always thinking of orderliness (even while asleep?), Dion cautions a woman guest to calm down or “we’ll throw your body on the female pile!”

Three things distinguish McGregor’s oddball humor. The first is the fact that his monologues are delivered in a NYC apartment late at night — there’s no audience, no laugh track, no “professional” aspect to his performances. The second thing that makes McGregor unique is his conversational tone, which makes it seems like the pieces are organically growing as they continue. The last striking thing about his “somniloquies” is the fact that these recordings serve as a peculiar portal to the past. Whether he’s awake or asleep (more on that below), we’re hearing a man in his apartment in the Sixties (his roommate recorded him from 1961-‘67) spinning these tales as street sounds intrude on a regular basis.

As I mentioned in my last entry on McGregor, the people who knew him firmly maintained that Dion was doing these monologues while he was sound asleep. I find this extremely hard to believe, since his dreams are not only uncannily linear (albeit wild, bizarre, surreal, and grim) but they also explore the situation at hand from every possible angle (as an author or comedian would, for maximum results).

Some of his dreams simply trail off and some end with his trademark strangled scream — which his neighbors must’ve loved in the late-evening hours — but some actually do have punchlines. A few of his monologues also have the gradual revelation of some pivotal piece of information, as with the revelation that “TYN” stands for “thumb your nose.”

I will admit that there is one thing that supports the notion that he really was sleeping — the fact that he seemed unable to write this kind of material in his “waking life.” My contention that McGregor’s dreams seem pre-scripted (or at least pre-structured) is perhaps a reflection of my own inability to have a linear, “conceptual” dream that comes anywhere near the twisted poetry that Dion came up with. (His name, btw, was short for “Dionysus” — it wasn’t pronounced like Mr. DiMucci.)

As I wrote this piece, I received a note from Steve Venright of Torpor Vigil, which I will quote from here to offer the other side of the story. After noting that McGregor’s previous roommate Carleton Carpenter (yes, this guy) was bothered by Dion talking in his sleep, Steve notes “I have no reason… to disbelieve the lovable Michael Barr when he told me, and many others before, that the first recording he made of Dion was without his friend's awareness, and that Dion was truly surprised the next morning when he heard the extent to which he somniloquized. The dream tapes became a lifelong obsession for Barr.

“Some of the unreleased recordings in the archive are absolutely not the sounds of someone attempting to convey convincingly a narrative. They're mumbled, moaned, delirious-sounding. They're not the ones that make it onto track lists. Despite my own certainty that Dion was not in a waking state or even merely in a ‘trance oratory’ state, I welcome discussion on the matter of just where these emanations came from. It does seem impossible that so many literary devices would be at play when someone's not consciously producing the plot — but that, to me, is part of the absolute wonder of these recordings and of the McGregor phenomenon.”

Whether McGregor’s dream-monologues represented an unconscious form of “automatic writing,” or his friends and he created a fanciful “package” for his ideas, doesn’t really matter in the long run. What matters is that McGregor was a very creative humorist whose visions of urban life and casual morbidity are unforgettable. Steve V. has noted to me in correspondence that there are stil many more unheard “somniloquies.” If they’re all as good as the items on Dreaming Like Mad, that’s nothing to thumb your nose at.
*****

The fine folks at Torpor Vigil (order the album from their website) have made three of the tracks from Dreaming Like Mad available here for free.

A trippy remix of snippets of McGregor audio has been posted to promote the new album:

And the whole first album — which is now priced at 500 dollars on Amazon (the Gorey-illustrated book is only a mere 100 bucks-plus) — can heard here, thanks to a helpful fan.

Heavily recommended weirdness: Dion McGregor

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 World 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 World 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 World 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?



Retrieve the albums at Egg City.