Lucid flashbacks
This month’s triumphant scream from the bargain bin, Moogy sampladelia from a Delaware basement.
Dreamies Auralgraphic Entertainment STONE THEATRE PRODUCTIONS, 1973
IN 1973, 29-year-old sales and marketing nine-to-fiver Bill Holt had a premature mid-life crisis. “After 10 years working in the corporate world, I thought, I’ll either spend the rest of my life with a cookie-cutter lifestyle or I’m going to become one of these fearless free spirits around me,” he says. “Even if I failed, I could say I followed my heart.”
Forty-six years later, Holt calls in from his holiday home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to recount this fearless leap of faith, embodied by an astonishing DIY work he titled Auralgraphic Entertainment, released in 1973 on his own Stone Theatre Productions label. It comprised two 26-minute sides, selfproduced in Holt’s basement, using a Moog Sonic Six, Ovation acoustic guitar, a home-modified drum machine and two tape recorders. Lennon-esque vocals and samples from vinyl, TV and radio appear and depart throughout, creating a beautifully phantasmagorical audio-collage which soothes and unsettles in equal measure. Even today, Auralgraphic Entertainment sounds uncannily contemporary, akin to psych voyagers Neutral Milk Hotel and Flaming Lips. “Friends did say at the time that it was 20 years ahead of its time,” says Holt.
Growing up in Springfield, Pennsylvania, the teenage Holt had fallen for Elvis Presley, then The Beatles and Bob Dylan. He never made his own music, though he enjoyed building radios and appreciated good stereo systems and tape recorders. “Then,” he reflects, “I was overtaken by events.” Married at 19, he became a father soon after. Yet while working for manufacturing and technology giant 3M, he stayed connected with currents in music. “I’d immerse myself in albums like Abbey Road, which flowed from one song to another,” he recalls. “I became fascinated by how you could really lose yourself in music. I wanted to take things further and see if I could create a dreamlike state that took you away to another world, like a book or a movie.”
The evocation of dreams wasn’t Holt’s only motive. “The psychic trauma that inspired Dreamies began with President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963,” he says. “My friends got drafted to Vietnam while I was exempt as a newly minted husband and father. The Cold War, riots, armed military patrols, hippies: Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, Martin Luther King. I thought, what if I can reach these people who immerse themselves in psychedelia and get high, and while they’re dreaming, make them think of more than sex, drugs and rock’n’roll?”
Holt titled his two extended pieces Program Ten and Program Eleven, in homage to The Beatles’ Revolution 9. Program Ten began with a clip from a space-race speech by John F Kennedy underpinned by chirruping crickets, and segued into what Holt refers to as Sunday Morning Song, a hauntingly soporific melody which recurs as commentary from a Muhammad Ali fight, smashing glass, combat sounds from Vietnam and a snippet of The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love tune in and out. A second sequence he calls The User reflects what the producer calls, “my frustration. But it’s not an angry record, or hostile.”
Though Program Eleven opened with a ‘Lucy In The Sky With Syd Barrett’-like piece that Holt dubs Going For A Ride, the album’s second side was more fractured and meandering, as if he was slowly disintegrating in his underground studio, buried under layers of edits. “I knew what I was doing at the time,” he says. “But I look back and think, how did I do that?”
Using his sales and marketing experience, he named the project Dreamies, a full 15 years before discovering Isaac Asimov had used the same word in his 1955 short story Dreaming Is A Private Thing. The album’s sleeve, meanwhile, parodied the box of the US breakfast cereal Total and featured the tag line, “An incredible mental experience” (a sticker also declared, “100% Recommended For A Beautiful Electric Journey Into Your Imagination”). Holt commissioned a local vinyl factory to press 2,000 copies; the owners, brothers Morris and Larry Ballen, found Holt a distributor, and he placed mail order ads in Rolling Stone. The first pressing never sold out. Holt had followed his heart but he’d also failed to break through. “I wanted to make a living for my family,” he says. “By 1975, I was totally broke.”
Holt’s engineering skills came to the rescue. A business manufacturing home alarm systems was successful enough for Holt to sell it in 1991 and semi-retire. Making music had been forgotten in the interim, and when his Moog fell into disrepair, he threw it away. Yet the internet’s ability to reanimate dormant esoterica spread Auralgraphic Entertainment’s unique appeal to a new generation of admirers. In 2006, Holt issued a remastered version (splitting Program Ten and Eleven into 13 segments). The same year he released a new album, Program Twelve (The End Is Near). “The world was in turmoil again, because of 9/11,” he says. “I felt I had something to say.” He has since released music and videos online, and is planning one more Dreamies album.
“I expect to spend my golden years drawn into this vortex of insanity that has overtaken the US,” he says of the Trump era, “whilst making nice, mellow music.”
“The psychic trauma that inspired Dreamies began with President Kennedy’s assassination...” BILL HOLT