The 1976 Synth Album That Promised to Help Your Plants Grow:…

In 1973, Peter Tomp­kins and Christo­pher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants became a best­seller. Draw­ing from the results of sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies about whose replic­a­bil­i­ty we may now feel cer­tain doubts, the book sug­gest­ed that emo­tion, and indeed sen­tience, belong not just to humans and ani­mals, but also to, say, the pot­ted fern in your liv­ing room. Many of Tomp­kins and Bird’s read­ers must have owned such a plant, and prob­a­bly a vari­ety of oth­ers besides, giv­en the nine­teen-sev­en­ties’ fad for domes­tic veg­e­ta­tion. Though ridiculed in the major media, The Secret Life of Plants proved suf­fi­cient­ly in tune with its time to inspire a fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary film with a high-tech sound­track by none oth­er than Ste­vie Won­der.

Did Won­der ever hear the album Moth­er Earth­’s Plan­ta­sia? Sub­ti­tled Warm Earth Music for Plants… and the Peo­ple Who Love Them, the album also fea­tures elec­tron­ic com­po­si­tions — exclu­sive­ly elec­tron­ic com­po­si­tions, in fact, per­formed entire­ly with a Moog syn­the­siz­er. Its com­pos­er Mort Gar­son had been a ver­sa­tile pro­fes­sion­al in the world of what was then called “easy lis­ten­ing,” and worked on the writ­ing, arrange­ment, or pro­duc­tion of pop­u­lar songs like Bren­da Lee’s “Dyna­mite,” Ruby & The Roman­tics’ “Our Day Will Come,” The Sand­pipers’ “Guan­tanam­era,” and Bill With­ers’ “Three Nights and a Morn­ing.” Upon meet­ing Robert Moog him­self at a con­ven­tion in 1967, Gar­son seems to have under­gone a con­ver­sion, becom­ing one of the first com­posers to ded­i­cate him­self to explor­ing the musi­cal poten­tial of the then-nov­el syn­the­siz­er tech­nol­o­gy.

The music Gar­son went on to make with his Moog reflects the zeit­geist: there was Elec­tron­ic Hair Pieces, with ver­sions of num­bers from the musi­cal Hair, a series of twelve discs based on the signs of the zodi­ac, and even the score that accom­pa­nied the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing broad­cast. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to ear­ly elec­tron­ic music buffs is Black Mass, for which Gar­son took the pseu­do­nym Lucifer, and which ought to be worth adding to one’s library with Hal­loween com­ing up.

Moth­er Earth­’s Plan­ta­sia was released in 1976, three years before the Secret Life of Plants movie, though released may not be the right word: it could only be obtained free with pur­chase of either a house­plant from a shop called Moth­er Earth on Mel­rose Avenue in Los Ange­les or a Sim­mons mat­tress from Sears. As music YouTu­ber David Hart­ley explains in his lat­est video, Gar­son was asked to cre­ate an album of music con­ducive to plant growth by Moth­er Earth­’s own­ers, Lynn and Joel Rapp.

For decades there­after, Moth­er Earth­’s Plan­ta­sia could pre­sum­ably be encoun­tered by seri­ous crate-dig­gers: the Phar­cyde, for exam­ple, sam­pled one of its tracks on “Guestlist” in 2000. But it was only in the twen­ty-tens, after the estab­lish­ment of YouTube and its obscure-music-upload­ing cul­ture, that the album found an audi­ence appre­cia­tive enough to inspire a prop­er release. (Its redis­cov­ery played out sim­i­lar­ly to that of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love,” the gold­en tip of the Japan­ese city pop revival.) Its tracks even­tu­al­ly even appeared in ad cam­paigns for Tur­b­o­Tax and the French super­mar­ket chain Inter­marché. To lis­ten­ers today, they may sound uncan­ni­ly like video game music as it would take shape in the eight­ies, albeit with a soft-edged ana­log tex­ture. As far as whether it actu­al­ly helps plants grow, even Joel Rap­p’s lin­er notes can only man­age the promise that “it could­n’t pos­si­bly hurt.” But I can report that it does a decent job putting my infant twins to sleep.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Graph­ic Shows the House Plants That Nat­u­ral­ly Clean the Air in Your Home, Accord­ing to a NASA Study

Moog This!: Hear a Playlist Fea­tur­ing 36 Hours of Music Made with the Leg­endary Ana­log Syn­the­siz­er

Plants Emit High-Pitched Sounds When They Get Cut, or Stressed by Drought, a New Study Shows

Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Clas­si­cal Synth Record Intro­duced the World to the Moog

A Shaz­am for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Iden­ti­fy Plants, Ani­mals & Oth­er Denizens of the Nat­ur­al World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.