Gary Wilson’s You Think You Really Know Me was one of those touchstone weirdomusic releases that’s notable not just for being brilliant, but for being heard in its day by practically no one. A childhood music prodigy, Wilson spent his formative years playing in lounge bands, but his lounge music started getting weird when he had a close encounter with John Cage. Remarkably, the young Wilson was invited to spend a few days at Cage’s home, learning from the avant-garde composer. From a 2008 interview in the L.A. Record:
I spent a few days in John Cage’s house, as far as that goes. We went over my scores. He corrected what I had done or tried to tell me certain things, like that string players might not interpret this as what you think it is. He’s my hero since I was a kid. David Tudor, too. He used to be the most avant-garde piano player—the most extreme piano music. He would play with Cage a lot. Matter of fact, one of my favorite albums was this thing called Cartridge Music he did with Cage. As a teenager, I remember picturing these two grown men making the most horrendous noise—using contact mics on piano strings, and putting it through the cartridge of a turntable somehow so everything was so distorted. It was very thrilling.
At the age of 23, Wilson began recording the tracks that would become You Think You Really Know Me at the storied Bearsville Studios, from whence came classic records by Todd Rundgren, the Band, and NRBQ, among others, but only four songs in, he aborted the process, deciding he’d prefer to self-record at his parents’ home in Endicott, NY. The album is a deeply weird hodgepodge of whitely funky jazz organ playing, and singing that maintains a casual relationship with timing and tunefulness—if outsidery experiments are your zone, it’s kind of awesome. He vanity-pressed an edition of 300 copies in 1977, followed by another 300 in 1979, and that was that. Despite a reputation for utterly bizarre performances that had to be seen to be believed, Wilson was unable to get anywhere with his highly personal and idiosyncratic work, and at the dawn of the ‘80s, he not only withdrew from the music scene, he seemed to disappear altogether.
Somehow, from those tiny editions, enough of the right people heard You Think You Really Know Me that it grew a cult, and then, in the mid ‘90s, Wilson got name-checked on Odelay. Beck’s HUGE hit from that album, “Where It’s At,” includes the line “Passin’ the dutchie from coast to coast/Like my man Gary Wilson rock the most.” The hat-tip provoked interest in just who the hell “my man Gary Wilson” was, which led to a long and unsuccessful search by a private detective hired by Motel Records, who wished to reissue You Think You Really Know Me. In the early oughts, he was finally located in Southern California, playing keyboards in a lounge act, and the album was reissued to an acclaim that grew him from “tiny cult artist” to “significantly larger cult artist.”
Since his rediscovery, the still acutely weird, bewigged (dear God please tell me that’s a wig) Wilson has been the subject of the inevitable guy-who’s-been-rediscovered documentary (titled—did you not guess?—You Think You Really Know Me), and he’s been steadily releasing new music. His new album is Alone With Gary Wilson. It comes out at the end of this week, but you can stream the whole thing right here on DM. The track “I Really Dig Your Smile” is downloadable, and you’ll probably want to avail yourself of that freebie, as the keyboard playing on that song is completely sick.
Bonus! Here’s a half hour of Wilson interview and performance footage, part of brainwashed.com’s “The Eye” series. This is pretty bonkers.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Evil’: Aliens, synchronicity and world peace, the world catches up to the outsider sounds of Konrad