When you drive your child to daycare through the remnants of a snowstorm, you drive more slowly, and therefore have a long and lazy window of scan time available to you. If you’re a sicko like me, you leave it on the Softies station that offers, in quick succession, “Dream Weaver,” “Heard It In a Love Song,” “Turn the Page,” and “Maggie May.”

The hits! They just kept coming! Ever the musical masochist, I couldn’t pry myself away from this tuneful train wreck. But I must admit, they had me at “Dream Weaver.”

This, for my entire growing up and really most of my adulthood, charted as Worst Song Ever. My reaction to it has always been a visceral one — I can remember rambling around my oversized bedroom as a teenager, just puttering around doing not much of anything, and suddenly rushing over to my skinny silver boombox to turn the dial and find another station when the first strains of the song wafted through the air. Even static was a better option.

I have no legitimate bone to pick with the song. It was just Hate from the get-go. I might have to soften a bit on that after learning today that ol’ Gary Wright played on All Things Must Pass and was a pal of George Harrison (and still is, apparently, pals with Ringo Starr). So he must have some talent and/or redeeming personal qualities.

As for his astral plane, however … he can keep it.

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