Audio Autopsy, 1968 & Beyond: Dreams of the Everyday Songwriter, Novelist, & Playwright: Chris Gantry

Later a peyote enthusiast, friend of Johnny Cash & Shel Silverstein, this award-winning playwright wrote the lilting MOR hit, "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife," which Glen Campbell took to #32 in '68

He may not have invented the phrase, “Renaissance Man,” but Chris Gantry (above) certainly seems to have perfected (if not enthusiastically embraced) it.

Nearing 80 (which he’ll turn three days before 2023), Gantry was born into his Polish family as Christopher Cedzich in the New York City borough of Queens in 1942.

He moved to Nashville in 1963, after three years at Bethel College in McKenzie, Tennessee. He wrote “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife” in 1966 at age 23. Recording the first-ever version of it in January 1968, it was released that April as the lead track on his Introspection album on independent Monument Records, three years before the label signed a 5-year distribution deal with CBS Records.

Gantry, gracing the cover of a recent “Nashville Scene” magazine cover📸Nashville Scene

Incredibly generalized bios describe Gantry as a “songwriter known for his involvement in the outlaw country genre,” but try telling that to Wayne Newton and Glen Campbell back in the day! Newton’s cover was released concurrently with Campbell’s, and in the race to the top, Newton faltered, stalling at #60.

Both middle-of-the-road (MOR) mainstays recorded Gantry’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,” a song about as far from both “outlaw” and “country” as “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”!

Plus, it was the FRONT ROW & BACKSTAGE dive into Brian Wilson’s and Russ Titelman’s 1964 “Guess I’m Dumb” by Glen Campbell which set about reader interest in the song Glen took to #32 on Billboard’s US Top 100 chart (#3 on country, and #6 on the Easy Listening chart) four years later!

“In this song,” asserts Songfacts, “Campbell sings about a woman who was a beauty in her youth, when lots of men vied for her attention. Now she is older, and staring at the wrinkles on her face, she thinks about those days and wonders how her life could have turned out differently.

“When we get to the chorus, we learn that the singer is her husband - the man for whom she ‘gave up the good life.’ She is but an everyday housewife, wearing a housedress and living a mundane life. The days when she turned heads are long behind her.”

And, from the ladies’ perspective, Arlene Harden in August 1968, as the one who “gave up the life she once knew,” in the fourth-ever recorded version, following Gantry, Campbell, and Newton:

Pleasantly swaying and waltz-like with swirling strings, Al DeLory produced and arranged the Campbell sessions, and is responsible for the two dynamic modulations heard toward the song’s end. This arrangement element was surprisingly not replicated by many (if any) who followed, including the Newton cover and Arlene Harden’s!

Counting Gantry’s initial effort, a total of ten recordings of “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife” were released in 1968 alone, two more than the total number of covers released from 1969 to date (not counting instrumentals)!

No stranger to Glen, keyboardist and arranger DeLory spent several years in the early- and mid-’60s joining the guitar-toting Campbell playing countless L.A. studio sessions, including Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” sides and, like Campbell, on the Beach Boys’ landmark Pet Sounds album (it’s DeLory’s piano you hear on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”).

Key Wrecking Crew players on a ’60s session: (l-r) Don Randi, Leon Russell, Al DeLory (foreground). Anybody think, with unison, layered pianos, this ISN’T a GoldStar/Phil Spector session?

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“I didn’t want to stay Mr. ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’ for the rest of my life.”--Chris Gantry

“So I changed, and I got a lot of slack for it,” Gantry told Bandcamp’s Jim Allen in 2017. I sang those songs when I was on the road with Kris [Kristofferson]. I was his opening act, and I would do all that wacky s*** opening for Kris.

“By 1973, Gantry was befriended by Johnny Cash, who’d recorded Gantry’s ‘Allegheny’ [on his 1973 album, Johnny Cash and His Woman, arranged and conducted by Bill Walker, who also played keyboards], and brought him on his TV show to sing it himself” [March 17, 1971, likely the time Johnny and conductor/arranger, Walker, decided to record it on a Cash album at a later date]:

Bill Walker was music director of those Cash TV specials into the mid-’70s, when he left TV, and began Nashville’s Con Brio Records, home for several years to Dale McBride, whose song and son, Terry, can be heard on a recent GROW BIGGER EARS Suburban Cowboy Playlist, here:

GROW BIGGER EARS #6: The "Audio Autopsy" Suburban Cowboy Playlist: Wang Dang Sweet Tune Twang🎸

“Cash offered his fellow maverick refuge on a number of levels: ‘I had just been busted for growing pot on my farm,’ remembers Gantry, ‘which back then, was like a federal offense. And John called me up and said, ‘Just come out and live at the house until s*** blows over.’”

“Cash also signed Gantry to his publishing company,” per Bandcamp, “and while he was staying with him, he gave Gantry free reign to make his next record at his House of Cash home studio.

“But a crucial inspiration for the album came from outside of Nashville: ‘Right before I signed with Johnny, I went to Mexico,’ explained Gantry, ‘and met up with a guy I had met some years before down there, and we ended up in a peyote ritual down in Oaxaca.

‘Coming out of that peyote experience, I wrote three songs down there that were on this Cash album. One was ‘The Lizard,’ one was ‘Different,’ and the other was ‘Away Away.’ I came back to Nashville with those three songs and everything else just fell out of that.’”

Upon hearing the finished tapes, Cash confronted Gantry: “Chris, June and I listened to your record last night, and I don’t think even the drug people are gonna understand it!”

But, Gantry was undeterred: “I liked what he said, because it just let me know that I had achieved what I set out to do,” he said. “I was trying to defy genre, to create a genre.”

Unsurprisingly, the album found no takers among the mid-’70s Nashville-based labels. “It was pretty far out there,” Gantry recounted. “Nobody would do anything for that. And then right after that, John sold his company and all that stuff got lost, including some of his stuff.”

Chris Gantry at the House of Cash, recorded through parts of 1973 and ‘74, was never released….until 2017, over 40 years later.

Bandcamp: “Ready to try something different, Gantry moved to Key West for six years, pursuing prose as a novelist and playwright, winning the Tennessee Williams playwriting contest, and hanging out with songwriter and author Shel Silverstein and celebrated novelist Thomas McGuane.”

In search of the ever-elusive muse, four songwriters take a wrong turn and end up facing north on Nashville’s east-west Four-Forty Parkway: (l-r) Shel Silverstein, Bob Beckham (music publisher for Monument Records’ adjunct publishing arm, Combine Music Group), pre-beard Kris Kristofferson, and Chris Gantry, 1970.

“He eventually returned to Nashville and resumed his music career, but the Cash sessions were basically forgotten.

“‘It got lost for 45 years,’ Gantry said. “‘I had no idea where it was, until I got a call from John Carter Cash, Johnny’s son. He told me, ‘Chris, we’re looking around here and we found some tapes of yours with your name on it.’ They sent them to me and I sent them to [reissue producer] Jerry DeCicca” [for 2017 release on Chicago’s Drag City Records]:

Gantry, on the Cash sessions: “My feeling is that I outlasted the 45 years that it took for this record to find ears that liked it and saw value in it.”

“It's the idea that you’re in the ‘music business’ that screws everything up. Take care of the song and the rest will take care of itself.”--Chris Gantry, 2014