i still dream of orgonon

Kate Bush bought the book knowing nothing about it, which she has said she had never done before — it was just calling her from the shelf. Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams is a son’s account of growing up at Orgonon, his father’s 175-acre place in Rangeley, Maine, where the two of them pointed a machine at the sky and tried to pull rain down out of it. The father was Wilhelm Reich, convicted of contempt in 1956 and dead in a federal prison by the following November. The song is the boy, grown up, still on the hill.

Bush wrote and arranged it on a Fairlight, and by her own account the middle would not hold: “That did all fall apart over a period of about ten bars — the drummer would stop and then the strings would just sorta start wiggling around and talking.” Her repair was to run a steam engine over the seam. Del Palmer supplied the steam. “And we got a whistle on the Fairlight for the ‘poop poop’.” What sits on top of it is the string figure — the Medici Sextet, arranged by Dave Lawson — sawing away like a machine somebody left running, while the grown Peter insists, from somewhere well past the ending, I just know that something good is gonna happen.

She wanted the video to be a piece of film rather than a promotional clip, and got one. Donald Sutherland was in London; Bush found out which hotel from Julie Christie’s hairdresser, turned up at his room to ask him herself, and he played Wilhelm Reich for nothing because a visa problem made paying him impossible. Julian Doyle directed, Bush played the boy, and the crew stood Sutherland on a box to widen a height difference that was already a foot. The cloudbuster was built by people who had worked on the creature in Alien, out of cardboard and hardboard, and it was not waterproof. Give it the whole film — ten days of shooting, four of them on a hillside in Oxfordshire — and let the song come up underneath.