In 1977, Gary Wilson self-released the album, You Think You Really Know Me. It’s a totally unique and strange LP that mixes confessional songwriting, synth pop, funk, and lounge music. Gary also crafted a singular visual image (see above, for example), as well as a matchless live act. Gary Wilson and the Blind Dates gigs, which frequently took place at CBGB, stunned cool New York audiences with performances that incorporated milk, flour, duct tape, cellophane, and fake blood.
 

 
About fifteen years ago, I interviewed Gary Wilson, and in addition to covering the YTYRKM period, we got into other topics, including his early interest in music, which began at age ten.

When I was twelve years old, I joined various local garage bands, playing Farfisa organ. I ended up in the band called Lord Fuzz. We were very good. We played every weekend at local teen centers (there were more places for teen bands to play back then). Our parents would drive us to the gigs. Lord Fuzz cut a record when we were thirteen years old. I wrote the songs.

Those tracks, “Move On” and “The Freak,” were recorded by Lord Fuzz at a small studio in Binghamton, New York in 1967. “Move On” is an accomplished, driving garage rocker with hints of psych, while “The Freak” is five minutes of delirious avant-rock that, instrumentally, resembles early Velvet Underground. The songs were pressed onto at least one acetate disc, but nothing more came of the material.

The singer of Lord Fuzz eventually quit, and Gary took over, embracing the experimental direction of “The Freak.” The group called it a day in 1968. In 2016, Cleopatra Records issued the Lord Fuzz recordings.
 

 
Released in a limited edition of 300 copies, 1967 Rare Acetate offers a glimpse into the young mind of Gary Wilson. As of this writing, the vinyl single is, surprisingly, still available, though it appears just a dozen or so copies remain. Get yours via Bandcamp.
 

 
The 2005 documentary, You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story, flies under the radar these days, but it’s really good—definitely worth your time if you’re a Wilson fan or a curious newbie. Stream it for cheap on Amazon.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Stream the new Gary Wilson LP and download ‘I Really Dig Your Smile’ for free on Dangerous Minds

 
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.”
 
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