There were a lot of Dream bands in the nineteen-eighties. By that, I don’t mean dream pop, although I suppose that’s true too. I’m referring to bands that actually used the word in their names. Perusing the D section of the music library of any respectable college radio station would turn up the Dream Syndicate and Dream Academy (and by the early nineties, the Dream Warriors). A little more concerted digging yielded Eleventh Dream Day. The really well-stocked stations might have even had a record or two from the Revolving Paint Dream. With all this, it’s no wonder there was a band named Reckless Sleepers. (Rimshot.) As someone with a painful affinity for themed sets, I played the Dream bands together often. When I did, one of the songs that I was sure to send skipping across the airwaves was “Rough Night in Jericho.”

Dreams So Real was one of the many bands to emerge out of Athens, Georgia in the eighties. Excited by the distinctively different sounds but similar success of the B-52’s and R.E.M., labels went flocking to the college town, snapping up every band they could find. Dreams So Real, as all bands should, began when the various members met in a local record store. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck produced their first single and debut album. After that first full-length, they were snapped up by Arista Records, a label that never quite seemed to know what to do with college rock bands once they got them. The band’s first release for the major was Rough Night in Jericho, for which they traded Buck for Bill Drescher, the regular producer for, of all people, Rick Springfield. The change was apparent as the whole record sounds incredibly slicked up.

Though I knew I was supposed to have an instinctual aversion to such polished material, I loved the title cut and lead single. I think, like quite a few tracks I clung to when I was first entering college, it was the way it resided in the zone right between my old classic rock favorites and the sparer stuff I was growing to value more. It might have been a gateway song, but that doesn’t mean I cast it aside when the transition was complete (or as close to complete as that sort of transition can ever be). I kept right on playing it throughout my radio tenure, whether it was in the midst of a Dream set or not.

Dreams So Real, “Rough Night in Jericho”

(Disclaimer: It looks to me like the Dreams So Real catalog is out of print, although a digital purchase of the album in question is available, but we all know how likely that is to provide due compensation to the artist given the accounting chicanery routinely practiced by the major labels. And it damn well won’t put biscuits on the table of the proprietor of your favorite local, independently owned record store. Still, in this age of government saber-rattling, I’m well aware that this song officially and unquestionably belongs to someone else. Should I be contacted by one of those individuals or corporations that can make a viable claim on the track, and should that individual or corporation request or demand it’s removal from the interweb, then this individual who is not a corporation at all will gladly and promptly comply.)