San Diego Reader

GARY WILSON – RETURN OF A LOCAL CULT HERO

"You don't remember who I am, do you?" Gary Wilson asked me via e-mail. I'd been interviewing the indie-rock pioneer about his rediscovery since being name-checked in Beck's "Where It's At" ------

"Passin' the dutchie from coast to coast/ like my man Gary Wilson rocks the most."

When an e-mail from Wilson mentioned "Don't you remember lending me that article you wrote about [TV show] Thriller?", I realized that I'd known and hung out with Gary Wilson for years.

Wilson was employed at the same local strip club where my housemate at the time ("Savannah") worked. I used to hang around the place to talk with him about music and vintage TV shows we both loved, particularly the aforementioned Thriller series. He may have mentioned he used to be in a band.

But I didn't know he was THE Gary Wilson, whose homemade '70s records are being reissued to such acclaim.

  A recent documentary film, You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story, details the life of the eccentric indie-punk pioneer, best known for his highly sought 1977 LP You Think You Really Know Me. The album was recorded in the basement of his parents' house, and only a few hundred copies were pressed -- many of them smashed over Wilson's head at shows.

  “I originally pressed 300 copies in 1977 and then pressed another 300 in 1979,” Wilson tells me. “I only have one copy left. When I went back home [to film scenes for the documentary], I did find the original lyric sheets for YTYRKM, but no more copies of the records. I found copies of my first album, Another Galaxy."

  Even many devotional Wilson fans (and their numbers are legion, growing every day) often aren’t aware that You Think You Really Know Me wasn’t his first homemade album. “Another Galaxy was self-released in 1974,” Wilson tells me. “This was an instrumental album consisting of four extended selections. Gary Iacovelli, who was later featured on some of the songs from You Think You Really Know Me, played drums.”

  Highly influenced by avant-garde performer John Cage, Wilson says "I feel [Cage] is the most important composer of our time. Mr. Cage was my idol when I was growing up. When I was 12 and 13 I was listening to Edgar Varèse, [Alban] Berg, [Arnold] Schoenberg, other 12-tone music. I thought that that music sounded cool and weird. I went to the local university record library and listened to the album that I consider the most important album in my life. It was called Concert for Piano and Orchestra by John Cage, with David Tudor on piano. When I heard this record, my ears and thoughts expanded. I started to go for the most extreme avant-garde music and art I could find."

  Born in upstate New York in 1953, Wilson grew up admiring Dion and the Belmonts, even copying Dion’s piled and styled hairdo (which once got him beat up by neighborhood bullies). After seeing the Beatles play Shea Stadium, the multi-instrumentalist joined his first band, Lord Fuzz, a teen group who’d released a single and opened for the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

He was still living in the small town of Endicott, New York, at the time. After he founded his own offbeat group, “Gigs for an experimental rock band were hard to come by. One time, I booked a gig at the local American Legion for my band. The place was filled with senior citizens expecting a waltz or a polka. I arrived with tape recorders and things to make noise with. I had contact microphones, highly amplified, hooked up to various objects, and the Blind Dates would scratch these objects against one another. This produced a horrible screeching sound. The tapes and the feedback along with an amplified saxophone produced a highly chaotic show. The Blind Dates were all wrapped up together in duct tape and covered with flour and paint."

"After about 20 minutes we finished our first 'song.' The manager of the American Legion came up to us in shock and said, 'What the hell was that?' I asked him if he wanted us to continue. He told us to get the hell out of the place. Sometimes I would book my band into the wrong venue, just for my own enjoyment."

  In 1978, Wilson moved to San Diego, in hopes of furthering his thus-far DIY music career. "Some of the original Blind Dates -- Joey Lunga, Butch Bottino, and Dave Haney -- had moved from Endicott [New York] to San Diego a few years before me. I ended up moving into a house with them, and we were able to practice and put the group back together." (Gary and the Blind Dates in San Diego - note Gary's Turtles-style Coral Sitar/guitar; shortly after this pic was taken, the axe was stolen from the Blind Dates' house on Wabash Street)

Gary Wilson and the Blind Dates performed all over San Diego in makeup, led séances from the stage, and were known to wear beekeeper's hats or sheets of plastic held together by duct tape. Club operators at long-gone area venues like the Roxy in PB, the Skeleton Club(s) downtown, and Straita Head Sound often booted him over the messes.

“I have a fond memory of total chaos onstage, and someone from Straighta Head Sound yelling to Joey [Lunga, keyboardist] to please not throw the TV set off the stage,” Wilson recalls. “Joey, who is a big guy, picked the TV up over his head and threw it on the floor below the stage. The television set shattered into a thousand pieces. It was a great ending to our show. The stage hand was horrified.”

  In late 1979, Gary Wilson and the Blind Dates played CBGBs and Max's Kansas City in NY, among some other east coast dates. Six of the shows were recorded for a possible live album. "At the time," says Wilson, "I had two-track master tapes recorded right off the board at CBGBs. I lost these tapes. Hope to find them at some point."

Around the same time, local music paper Kicks were running constant ads for Wilson's new album, produced my Michael Coyne. "Michael Coyne produced and put up the money for Invasion Of Privacy," recalls Wilson. "Michael was in negotiations with Capitol Records and would guarantee me to Capitol Records. He then got popped in Lima, Peru and spent years in Peru's jail. He lost everything."

  On February 1, 1980, Wilson played downtown's Skeleton Club, with recently-reunited locals Four Eyes also on the bill. "Gary Wilson had tape and stuff wrapped around him and there's flour being thrown all over during his performances," recalls Mark DeCerbo of Four Eyes. "I'm sure the crowd there that night had never seen anything like it in their lives.... Gary would run through the crowd like a maniac and out of the club and disappear. We would see him back at the house after the gig, and he'd be sitting there in the dark."

Some of the Blind Dates would go on to play with Four Eyes. "Our equipment was broken down and ragged and literally held together by duct tape," recalls Wilson today. "Something caught on fire onstage; I think it was caused by a power cord from one of our amps. After our performance, there was a tremendous amount of flour all over the stage and the club's equipment. It looked like a snowstorm hit the place.... I can't remember being paid for the gig. The owner probably got mad at us and docked us our pay."

  Gary Wilson and the Blind Dates eventually split, and Wilson disappeared from the public eye. Mostly ---- In the early ‘90s, You Think You Really Know Me was reissued by Cry Baby Records, an offshoot of Philadelphia Record Exchange.

  “They were fans of the original 1977 pressing and thought it would be good to re release the record,” according to Wilson. “I said sure, and sent them the tape and the photos. They sent me a 50% advance and then, after they pressed it, sent me the other 50%. They also changed the cover of the original '77 pressing from black and white to a negative red. As I recall, we had to have the Cry Baby reissue remastered, because the speed of the reissue was different then the original. Since I recorded it on my home equipment, their tape machines didn't match mine. I guess the times and circumstances (lack of publicity, etc.) were not quite right, and the Cry Baby reissue never went anyplace. I think they pressed 1000 copies.”

Around the same time, Wilson was the anonymous keyboardist for a local lounge act called Company East, fronted by Donnie Finnell – not even his bandmates knew he was THE Gary Wilson. With a monthly gig at the Rancho Bernadino Inn, the group was pretty sedate, though Wilson recounts one incident that harkened back to those crazy old sets with the Blind Dates.

“It was New Year's Eve, early 1990s, at a private party held at the house of the president of a big company. The band was finishing up our last few songs for the evening when all of a sudden there was a loud noise and commotion in the other room...a fight had started and guests started running out of the room screaming. They were covered in blood and their tuxedoes and gowns were ripped and destroyed. Two of the guests went through the picture window and were rolling around on the lawn. Glass everywhere...we continued to play for another five minutes. I remember breaking down the equipment as fast as we could."

Years later, after Sub Pop Records cited Gary Wilson as an indie inspiration, Beck made him immortal by mentioning his name in 1996's "Where It's At" ("Passin' the dutchie from coast to coast/ like my man Gary Wilson rocks the most").

New York's Motel Records decided they wanted to rerelease Wilson's seminal YTYRKM LP, and they hired a private detective to find the long-vanished, reclusive rock pioneer.

He was rediscovered working at the local porn shop and strip club where I used to chat him up while dropping off or picking up Savannah. In short order came the reissue, new records, sold out concerts, and glowing reviews all over the globe touting this most unlikely comeback success story.

  In addition to the rerelease of You Think You Really Know Me, Wilson's more obscure tracks - recorded locally in the early '80s - have been reissued on the Motel CD Forgotten Lovers.

  Stones Throw Records released an album of new music entitled Mary Had Brown Hair. A video was shot for the single "Linda Wants to Be Alone."

All of a sudden, Wilson is earning tons of glowing mainstream press, in the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. 20 years after his final show as Gary Wilson, he returned to the stage on May 16, 2002, with two sold-out concerts at Joe’s Pub in New York City.

The reclusive legend is usually backed in concert by Blind Dates Joey Lunga (keyboards), Butch Bottino (bass), Dave Haney (drums), and Ian (guitar). A couple of hugely successful reunion shows have been staged here in San Diego. “Had a good time at the Casbah last night,” he emailed me after one show. “The flour was flowing freely.” “Motel Records threw a big party for me at Chateau Marmont in 2002,” he says. “I was playing at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood and I had a chance to stay there…they had a good review in the Village Voice of my 2002 show at New York's Joe's Pub.” He still seems genuinely astonished by things like this.

  Gary Wilson’s music is now spreading so far and wide that one of his songs was included on the Adult Swim Cartoon Network CD Chrome Children, also on the Stones Throw label. “It's funny,” he emailed, “they are using an instrumental, ‘Dreams,’ that I put out as a single when I was 17.”

Continuing the DIY work ethic even into the new millennium, Wilson’s CDs often include homespun photography and artwork by his long-time girlfriend, Bernadette Allen, who also shoots video footage screened behind Wilson in concert. She’s known Wilson long enough to have seen him promoting the original 1977 album at Max's Kansas City in New York. Here’s her surreal video “When I Think of Gary Wilson”:

(Concert shots 4-28-08) On Thursday, July 10 of this year (’08), You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story screened in LA at the Silent Movie Theater, in conjunction with the Don't Knock The Rock Film And Music Festival. The gig was to promote the documentary’s DVD release by Plexifilm. “I will be doing a performance after the screening,” Wilson emailed at the time. "The back up band is Ross Harris on electronics, Patti Wilson on backing vocals, Ariel Pink on bass, Adrian Milan on drums, Adam on keyboards, and Grady on guitar. Should be a wild show.”

After the show, he wrote to say “We played on the rooftop of the venue...It was a warm night, so it worked out well. We went on about 12:45 a.m. I'm surprised the cops didn't stop us, but that's good.”

  A few days later, Wilson’s new CD Lisa Wants to Talk to You was released by Human Ear music. “It’s all-new material,” he says, “recorded in my home studio, no computer.” Besides Beck and myself, others who cite themselves as Gary Wilson fans include the Roots, Questlove, and Simpsons creator Matt Groening.

  You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story, was reviewed in the New York Times: "Mr. Wilson's magnetism has lost some of its valence when you see the experimental films he and his friends made in their youth.... His ponytailed locks are thinner and grayer, and his antics seem twitchier and creepier....Indie-rock enthusiasts will find much to appreciate, however, in a film whose soundtrack is more enjoyable than its narrative. Gary Wilson and the Blind Dates, as his band was known, come off as pioneers of the suburban underground. They do for used record stores what R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar do for used comic book stores."

Footage of Wilson in the 74-minute documentary includes interviews conducted while he worked behind bulletproof plastic in the San Diego porn shop (see above pic).

  You can checkout Gary Wilson at www.myspace.com/garywilson64 and at www.sixpointfour.com. GARY WILSON’S FIVE FAVORITE RECORDS

1 - Dion, "Runaround Sue" or "Lovers Who Wander" ("Either single. Dion was my idol when I was nine...my mother would wake up in the morning and curl my hair [like Dion's] before I went to school.")

2 - The Fugs, Tenderness Junction ("I saw the Fugs at Cornell University right after they released it...one of the first real underground bands.")

3 - Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, We're Only in It for the Money or Absolutely Free ("I saw Frank Zappa many times. I still like the early recordings better than later records.")

4 - Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica ("A great recording. When I was 16 years old I saw [Beefheart] for the first time in Ithaca, New York. I saw him about four times.")

5 - The Rolling Stones, Between the Buttons ("I was a fan when they still had the late Brian Jones playing with them.")

FAVORITE TV SHOWS

1 - Boris Karloff's Thriller ("Aired in the early '60s -- fantastic. I have a collection of episodes on VHS that I watch over and over, to the dismay of my current girlfriend, Bernadette.")

2 - The Twilight Zone ("Rod Serling is from the same [New York state] area that I'm from.")

3 - The Outer Limits ("The television shows have to be the original black-and-white episodes or I can't watch them.")

FAVORITE MOVIES

1 - Carnival of Souls, 1962 ("I must have watched my VHS copy a thousand times. Just recently [got] the director's cut on DVD.")

2 - The Mask, 1961 ("When the character in the film puts on an ancient mask, the audience simultaneously puts on a pair of 3-D glasses. This opens the audience up to the world that the character in the film is seeing.")

FILM TRAILER “YOU THINK YOU REALLY KNOW ME: THE GARY WILSON STORY”

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CHRISTMAS MEMORIES

There’s not a lot I remember about my childhood.

The few patient souls who’ve gotten close enough to me to at least feign an interest in my past accuse me of being evasive when asked about growing up. The conversation never gets much further than me shrugging my shoulders and saying “I don’t remember.” I’ve even been asked a few times to write about coming of age in the unfathomably celebrated seventies --- I respond with the selfsame shrug.

Not that I had a particularly traumatizing or depressing family life. I just sort of rushed my way through childhood, and came out of it without having paid much attention along the way. I wasn’t any more stoned or stupid than my contemporaries. We all did the same disco-fied stuff, and all dressed just as ridiculously, with those damned bellbottoms always getting caught in the bike chain. I just failed to take notes, and now it’s all a fuzzy haze.

I do remember Christmas, though.

Most of my Christmas memories begin with what was on television at the time. I’m guessing I was about six when I first saw “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” --- that Christmas, I got school supplies for the first time (pencils, paper and a plastic pocket protector == ugghh!). I think I related to Hermy The Elf, the guy who wanted to do something a little different from all the other elves.

Okay, maybe I never wanted to be a dentist, but I sure as hell sometimes felt like I was shipwrecked on the Island Of Misfit Toys.

One of the gifts I remember most from that year was a torpedo sandwich sized paper bag with green and red stripes, full of rock candy (crystallized sugar), the biggest pile of the disgusting and wonderful stuff I’d ever seen all at once.

I think I was about eight before I fully realized that Santa Claus was not the focal point around which Christmas revolved. Okay, maybe I was a little slow, or perhaps I was just too charged up from rock candy to think straight. I mean, sure I’d heard about manger, about the inn being full and the pregnant virgin sleeping with the donkeys. But Santa’s PR people did SUCH a superior job of marketing their guy, placing him on every street corner, in every mall and on all of the network TV shows.

Except this one TV show that somberly showed me what the “Christ” is Christmas” stood for. If you’re 25 to 50 years old, you know where I’m going with this…..

“A Charlie Brown Christmas” didn’t have a Santa. What it had was a suicidal depressed bald boy, an eight year old practicing psychiatrist, a droopy little tree that toppled under weight of a single ornament - and a simple, stirring speech by Linus. I was as moved as a rugrat can be when he put down his security blanket and gave his speech about the inspirational life of a great man - not the one who plays with elves, but the other legend loosely based on an admirable real-life guy.

It wasn’t always the Christmas-themed shows which made the most indelible impression on me, though. When I was nine, they were showing “The War Of The Worlds” on Christmas Eve. Being a total book nerd, I loved the H.G. Wells novel, plus I had the Mercury Theater radio show on LP, but I’d never seen the movie. I was spellbound as the mechanical eyeballs probed the debris of a ruined building, looking for more humans to fry. I was holding an apple in one hand while I watched and, for some reason, I’d been able to get my hands on a sharp knife, which I intended to use to cut the apple in half.

This endeavor, however, requires one to pay attention to where the apple stops and the hand starts.

I was so busy staring at the TV that I didn’t notice how deeply I’d cut into my hand, until after Gene Barry had safely circumvented all of the alien tentacles. I’d had stitches before (several times in fact), so I didn’t mind getting my palm sewed up on Christmas Eve - I was bitterly bummed about missing the end of the movie, though. This being years before video, it took quite awhile before I ever got to see the whole thing. Spaceships on tripods still make me think of candy canes and blood (I’ll bet a shrink would find that delightful).

Then there was “Robinson Crusoe On Mars.” Not exactly Frosty the Snowman. But they showed it on Christmas Eve, and really late, like from nine until eleven. This was the latest that my folks had ever let my brother and I stay up on the big night. And, make no mistake, despite the goofy title, it’s a pretty fine little film (actually one of the most expensive of its era), even to a finicky, precocious little showbiz critic like me.

I empathized with the main character’s loneliness. Though I ostensibly had a brother, he was five years older and we spent little time together. The family had made several moves - I’d been to three schools in three years and hadn’t ever had friends for more than a short period of time. I read, I watched TV, I went to the movies and read comic books, and none of those things brought me into contact with other kids. I did them all alone.

If I sound like I was a dreamer, I suppose I was. The first time I remember ever having a lucid dream was that night, right after Robinson Crusoe...I cast myself in an extension of the film, essentially crafting my own sequel with me in the lead. I knew that I was a dreaming, and so I could make anything happen.

I found myself, in dreams, holding a limitless palette on which I could paint any picture I could imagine.

The Christmas I seem to remember best is 1969. Mainly because it was my family’s most documented holiday ever. The old Brownie camera was popping off constantly, since both my grandmother and my uncle were at the house as well, making it the closest thing to a big Sanford holiday gathering that we’d had in…well, ever. There are so many pictures of us opening our gifts, playing with them, eating, running around, mugging for the camera, and the pictures help bring my memory into focus. I was 9 years old.

The theme was definitely the space age. Americans had just recently landed on the moon and I’d been there too, thanks to TV. That’s where I first heard of Kennedy Space center, and there under the tree was a tin toy version of the Center spilling out of a brightly wrapped package. Swinging gates, barracks, rocket launch pads that fired off plastic ships with a rubber band switch - coolness!

I also got a radar-shaped fan that controlled the flight of a ship on a rubber balloon (you could actually fly and land the thing with surprising precision), and a battery powered laughing robot that sells for hundreds of dollars now since so few survived (mine was done in by the kick of a nasty neighbor). There was also a camouflage colored pup tent, a battery powered helicopter that made far too much noise in a small house and, so help me, a little army suit including a net covered combat helmet. There are actual pictures of me wearing this, destined to end up on TMZ some day after I become famous or notorious for lord knows what act of inspiration or insanity.

One of my presents was a really cheap fake beard and mustache. My uncle Lyman said I looked like Groucho Marx, and this confused me to no end. Groucho had a painted-on mustache and big eyebrows, not a full furry beard. I thought I looked more like Burl Ives and sang an obsequious version of “Silver And Gold” that no doubt perplexed everyone (what kind of whacked nine year-old does Burl Ives impressions, anyway?), though the whole family was kind enough to clap. Me and my brother sure got a lot of booty, and that’s the barometer of a successful Christmas to a kid that age.

By the next Christmas, I’d made one of those leaps ahead toward adulthood and wasn’t at all interested in toys. I wanted records, comics, books, psychedelic posters and lights - and I think that was the year I got a drum kit. Just a little three piece prop with a saucer sized cymbal and a drum pedal shaped like a foot. Temporary madness on my parents’ part, to be sure.

If they thought my Burl Ives was dreadful, they must’ve been thrilled by my Ringo! They set the drums up in the upstairs hall, in the center of the house between all the bedrooms, and so the percussion would emanate throughout the whole place. I’m told I also made a lot of vocal noise, which could well have been singing though (shoulder shrug) I don’t remember. I might’ve been rocking out to “Joy To The World” (the Three Dog Night hit, not the holiday hymn).

I was into rock, and I was into the counterculture. I may not have actually smoked pot or had sex or flipped off a pig yet, but I’d been reading all about all that stuff in subversive magazines like Mad, National Lampoon, Playboy and several other publications that probably shouldn’t have been so easy for me to get my hands on. Among the albums I asked for were two I’d seen advertised in Nat Lampoon - both comedy albums, and both of a decidedly adult nature. These were the days before the PMRC put warning stickers on albums with questionable content.

It was like Tipper Gore’s worst nightmare when, on Christmas day, I went to play my Chris Rush album in the family living room, which at that moment was stuffed to the rafters with relatives.

The standup comic’s routine played in the background while my family went about their business, picking up boxes and papers and such. Nobody really seemed to notice what he was saying until Rush got to “Jesus in a dope bust.”

“What’re you doin’ here, Jesus?”

“Preaching that all men should love one another.”

“Oh, one of those gay activists, huh? In the wagon, tinkerbell!”

When I put on the National Lampoon album, it opened with a long passage that sounds like a stream of water splashing on something, and then a guy who announces that he’s urinating on a briefcase. That’s about when the record player got shut down. I got to keep the records, though.

The Beatles provided the soundtrack to my next Christmas. To someone much younger or older than myself, it’s hard to explain just how much the band meant to and influenced so many of us. I was just putting together a collection of all their albums as they were breaking up, and that’s all we talked about among my friends. I got some Beatles stuff under the tree, and some very Lennon clothes and shades. A neat foldout turntable stereo that I used for several years, too.

There were several more memorable Christmases with my family, but then I was off on my own, 3,000 miles away in California, when the holidays rolled around. The early December death of John Lennon in1980 forever affected my ability to be joyous during the holidays. Until…

I fell incurably in love with a wonderful girl named Heather, and her birthday is in early December. Since I felt so grateful for her having arrived in the world, this became my favorite and most celebrated holiday of the year. Christmas itself became kind of the end of her extended birthday bash. It was always fun and adventurous as well, in part since we both became vegetarians early in our relationship. Heather makes amazing meatless holiday spreads, sometimes spending days on what is essentially edible art.

Ever suspicious of blind tradition, I loved having such untraditional meals, and sharing them with an equally untraditional friend. Some years, we had our Christmas meals in offbeat restaurants instead of cooking at home, as well as driving around residential neighborhoods and checking out the light displays.

Unfortunately, like when Lennon walked away from Yoko for a “lost year,” I eventually chose to be separated from the love of my own life (regretfully, as I should have known). Since our split, I no longer find myself feeling upbeat about the prospects for a happy Christmas.

But there’s always next year.

No doubt, on this Christmas Eve, I’ll dream once again about that most influential of dreamers, John Lennon, as I’ve done every Christmas since 1980. As I said in a Reader essay awhile back, part of the reason I sleep so late on Christmas morning is that I’m reluctant to say goodbye yet again. I’m desperate to hold onto the dream, to keep my hands wrapped around an elusive wisp of magic, for just…one…more…minute.

‘Cause, if magic’s gonna happen, it’s probably gonna happen at Christmas.

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Like this blog? Here are some related links:

OVERHEARD IN SAN DIEGO - Several years' worth of this comic strip, which debuted in the Reader in 1996: http://www.sandiegoreader.com/photos/galleries/overheard-san-diego/

FAMOUS FORMER NEIGHBORS - Over 100 comic strips online, with mini-bios of famous San Diegans: http://www.sandiegoreader.com/photos/galleries/famous-former-neighbors/

SAN DIEGO READER MUSIC MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/sandiegoreadermusic

JAY ALLEN SANFORD MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/jayallensanford