When they found him in 2001, he was working the graveyard shift at an adult bookstore and playing keyboards in a four-piece during his regular nightly gig at the Rancho Bernardino Lounge. His bandmates at the time had no idea who he really was, and why should they? At just over 50, his graying, thinning hair pulled back in a ponytail and his rounded features growing softer by the day, Gary Wilson looked like he could have been anyone: a retired music teacher, a local businessman, an average Joe. He did not look like a patron saint of indie rock.
Adrian Milan and Christina Bates were the ones on his tail. They ran Motel Records then, a small indie based out of Manhattan, and they were looking for Wilson because their friend Ross Harris had played them his self-released 1977 LP, You Think You Really Know Me, an extremely rare album of which there existed only 600 copies. "Gary Wilson had totally blown our minds," Bates and Milan relate in the liner notes to Motel's rereleased 2002 version. "From that moment on we felt other people should experience this music. With missionary zeal, we put all other projects on the back burner to devote all our time and resources to locating the enigmatic Gary Wilson."
It was not an easy task. As depicted in the documentary You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story (currently making its rounds on the festival circuit and screening this Friday, April 22, at the Bottom of the Hill, as part of Gary Wilson's first-ever San Francisco performance), Milan and Bates took to the phones and to the Web, but had no luck. They hired private detectives to seek Wilson out. Eventually their search led them to a tiny town in upstate New York called Endicott, where, it turns out, Wilson had recorded his masterpiece in the dank, musty cellar of his parents' small suburban home. In Endicott they found Vince Rossi, an original member of Gary Wilson & the Blind Dates. Rossi agreed to pass along a letter to his estranged friend, because Wilson had long ago disconnected his phone. A few weeks later Milan and Bates got a response, and a few months after that they gave You Think You Really Know Me its first proper release.
"That was quite a roller coaster ride," Wilson says about his re-emergence, which, in addition to the rerelease, has entailed two sold-out shows at the swanky Joe's Pub in New York City, a smattering of festival appearances, and two additional albums -- Forgotten Lovers (Motel), another rerelease of odds and ends; and last year's Mary Had Brown Hair(Stone's Throw), a collection of new recordings. "I didn't anticipate [the record] doing what it did. That was very exciting," he says, speaking from his tiny apartment in San Diego, the city he's been living in for the past 15 years.
According to legend, Beck was among the few to hear Ross Harris' copy of You Think You Really Know Me, after which he was inspired to go into the studio and record Odelay, on which, for the song "Where It's At," he gives Wilson a shout-out: "Passing the dutchie from coast to coast/ Like my man Gary Wilson." The similarities between the two artists are not hard to find: Both gleefully trample any borders between genres, mashing up funk, soul, pop, rock, and folk into their own distinct sounds. Turns out Wilson did it first, but his was a case of bad timing.
Wilson's primary influence was the experimental composer John Cage. When he was 16 he sent Cage copies of sheet music that he had written. Impressed, Cage invited Wilson to his home in upstate New York for two days of mano a mano powwows. The talks, combined with Wilson's continued experimentations with his New York band, led to an original aesthetic, one that combined his arty pomo sensibility with his sincere love of pop music.
"I had always been doing avant-garde things," Wilson explains, "but I always figured there has to be one more step beyond total chaos, something in front of a John Cage performance, something in front of very avant-garde things, putting Fabian or putting Dion or Bobby Rydell, some of these teen idols at the time, and throwing them in front of a real John Cage thing, something to bring it into context for, you know, people to relate to."
Casting himself as the teen idol, Wilson sang adolescent songs about girls and hooking up. "Six point four/ Equals make out/ That's what I'm gonna do with you tonight," he croons on the standout "6.4=Makeout" as his band vamps an eerie Age of Aquarius backdrop. Wilson is being ironic, spoofing the concept of the make-out song while indulging it at the same time. But you wouldn't expect '70s suburbanites at a rock show to get that. You might, however, expect them to get violent when the whole thing dissolved into feedback and noise and Wilson desperately yelping, "She's a real groovy girl/ And she's got red lips/ She's so real/ Can't you hear me GOD?/ She's REAL!" Usually during that part of the performance the singer would be covered in flour and red paint and flopping around the stage as the bar owner called the cops.
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