Dreamin’

The Zoo Crew has got a deep cut spinning for the Zoo Freaks tonight, and it is one of those records that only shows up if somebody in the room still believes in the long album side. “Dreamin’” is track three on Orion the Hunter’s one and only album, the self-titled 1984 release on Portrait. The band never got a second chapter, so this song has spent forty years living in the crates of people who bought the record for the radio hit and stayed for the rest of the side. Over at THE ZOO that is exactly the kind of record we like to pull out, the one that did not get worn out on the request line and still sounds like a Saturday night in a club that sold more posters than tickets.

The writers on “Dreamin’” are Barry Goudreau and Fran Cosmo, the guitarist and the singer who built the band in the first place. It runs a little past five minutes, sits in a minor key, and moves at a mid-tempo that gives Cosmo room to climb. The lyric is not a love song in the usual sense. It talks about an act of love as a luxury, a suit that belongs to somebody else, a road of seven thousand miles, soldier talk and a uniform, a rag doll who keeps him warm, a salute and the old line “go west young man,” a hollow man running toward a distant land of sand, a glass house with chrome furniture. Nobody from the band ever sat down and decoded it in an interview, and that is part of why it sticks. It feels like a dream somebody wrote down before the coffee kicked in, half personal and half movie still. Fans who still pull the vinyl out tend to name it as the one that stays in the head after “So You Ran” has already been the single.

The album itself landed in May 1984 and climbed to number 57 on the Billboard album chart. The single that got the push was “So You Ran,” which reached the top ten at rock radio and number 58 on the Hot 100. “Dreamin’” never got that kind of campaign. AllMusic’s review of the record still listed it alongside “Fast Talk” and “I Call It Love” as one of the professional rock tunes on a set that sounded a little cold and a little of its time, the way a lot of mid-eighties records do once the drum machines and the big reverbs settle in. European collectors who have written about the album for years tend to go further and call “Dreamin’” the bombastic favorite, the track that actually hangs around after the rest of the side fades. A 2012 Rock Candy remaster and an earlier Razor and Tie reissue kept the record in print for people who missed it the first time, and the original pressing has quietly turned into a collector’s item for anybody hunting Boston family records.

The story of how the band got there is the real radio tale. Boston had put out Don’t Look Back in 1978 and then gone quiet while Tom Scholz worked toward what would become Third Stage in 1986. Goudreau, who had played guitar on the first two Boston albums, used the opening Scholz offered after the second tour and cut a solo record in 1980. That is where he met Fran Cosmo, introduced through a crew member. Cosmo wrote and sang on that solo album. The label ads for the solo record rubbed Scholz the wrong way, the working relationship broke, and by early 1980 Goudreau was out of Boston. A few years later he and Cosmo hitched up again. They brought in Bruce Smith, a bass player Cosmo had already been working with, and Michael DeRosier, the drummer Goudreau had met on the road when Boston shared bills with Heart. Keyboard player Brian Maes joined when it was time to tour. They started under the name Orion. Orion Pictures leaned on them, and the name became Orion the Hunter.

Goudreau has told that stretch of the story in his own words on the Engine Room site. They cut the record for CBS, co-produced with Lennie Petze, the Epic man who had been in the room when Boston got signed. They got a video on MTV for the single, and in the summer of 1984 they opened for Aerosmith on the Back in the Saddle tour. Brad Delp, still the voice most people associated with Boston, co-wrote songs and sang backgrounds on several tracks, especially the ballad “Joanne.” Studio notes credit extra hands on keyboards and Simmons programming, which is why the drums have that bright eighties snap. A newspaper review out of Saginaw during the Aerosmith run praised the band’s musical virtuosity, Cosmo’s lead vocals, and DeRosier’s drumming. Fans who caught the early set in places like St. Louis have said for years that the opening act sounded tighter than the headliner that night. The follow-up never came. The band folded, and Goudreau later said they simply did not get the success they expected when it was time for another record.

Cosmo’s path after that is the twist. The sky-high voice on “Dreamin’” and “So You Ran” is the same voice Tom Scholz later brought into Boston when Brad Delp was not available for Walk On. Cosmo sang most of that album, shared the stage with Delp on later tours, and stayed in the Boston lineup through the nineties and into the next decade. Goudreau went on to RTZ with Delp, then to the Delp and Goudreau record, and now to Barry Goudreau’s Engine Room, where Maes is still beside him and the old Orion songs still turn up in the set. DeRosier went back to the session and band world he already knew from Heart. One album, one tour, and a singer who ended up in the band the guitarist had left. That is a pretty good plot for a record that most stations never played past the single.

If you want the story from the man who wrote the guitar parts, the place to go is Barry Goudreau’s Engine Room, where the biography walks through the Boston years, the solo album, the Orion the Hunter record for CBS, and the Aerosmith tour. The same camp keeps an official Facebook page at Barry Goudreau’s Engine Room on Facebook, where throwback posts still talk about that 1984 run and the reviews from the road. There is also Barry Goudreau on Facebook, the Instagram account at Barry Goudreau on Instagram, and the X account at Barry Goudreau on X, which lists Orion the Hunter right in the bio next to Boston and RTZ. The band itself never kept a living official page after the split, and Cosmo’s old site no longer carries the record, so these are the working doors. For the fans who still treat the album like a lost Boston cousin, the archive at thirdstage.ca lays out the lineup and the track list, with “Dreamin’” sitting right there at number three between “So You Ran” and “Dark and Stormy.”

So that is the cut. A song written by the guitarist who helped build Boston and the singer who would later stand in that same spotlight, recorded in the long quiet between two Boston albums, played on a tour in front of Aerosmith, and then left alone on side one while the single did the talking. The Zoo Crew will let it ride. Zoo Freaks, turn it up.