Sep. 17, 2022
This is kind of a long story, with a big chunk of personal history leading up to the main event. So bear with me here.
I arrived in Olympia, Washington in September 1979. I had ostensibly come to study music composition at The Evergreen State College, but the deeper truth was that I was fleeing the sunny paradise of suburban southern California, where I had been raised but didn’t feel I quite belonged. I needed to evolve beyond my own half-formed identity, which at that point was not working for me. I went to Evergreen not so much because I cared about going to college, but because I was hoping to become someone else, and this seemed like a good place to do that. I landed in Olympia under somewhat random circumstances, but felt at home there almost immediately. The first time I walked through the dreary streets of downtown, with its vacant storefronts, dive bars, and rundown SRO apartment buildings, I remember thinking: My parents will never want to come here!
As I settled into my new surroundings and my new life, I soon found my way to the college radio station, brilliantly named KAOS-FM, after the enemy spy organization on the TV show Get Smart. I was drawn in by a flyer advertising an opening for the volunteer position of Music Director. I felt confident that my experience working in record stores and my fairly broad musical interests would qualify me for the job. As it turned out there wasn’t any competition, and after a cursory interview I was hired. There was no money, but at least I could milk the gig for some college credit and maybe some free records.
Not too long before my arrival, KAOS had undergone a regime change, and the dust hadn’t entirely settled yet. A major point of contention was the recently imposed “green line” policy. A green line on the spine of the record indicated it was on an independent label, and a red line indicated that it was on a major label, or a major’s subsidiary. The policy stated that all programs should include at least 80% independent label releases. You might expect the students at an experimental liberal arts college to embrace this radical anti-corporate stance, but in fact it was quite controversial and was denounced by many as a form of censorship. But in the larger indie music community beyond Olympia, it was legendary.
This revolutionary scheme was devised by my predecessors George Romansic and John Foster. John was leaving the MD post to devote himself full time to publishing OP Magazine, probably the first publication in the US devoted exclusively to independent music of all kinds. During my job interview, John had briefed me about the station’s mission of privileging lesser-known music. To be honest, the major/independent label dichotomy hadn’t occurred to me as being much of an issue. Like most people, I assumed that most artists released records independently simply as a step toward someday being signed to a major label. But as John explained it to me, the political logic made sense. Releasing your own records was about reclaiming the means of production, maintaining creative control over your work, and keeping a larger portion of the profits. It was not about waiting for a huge multinational corporation to grant you permission or legitimacy. Our mission was to support this autonomous, decentralized spirit.
The nexus of KAOS and OP Magazine was a beautiful thing. Far from feeling isolated in a provincial backwater, it felt like we were at the center of the underground music universe. Not only were we being exposed to tons of music of all kinds and from many places, but connections were formed with other similar outposts of DIY culture across the country and around the world: Portland (Oregon), Washington (DC), Lawrence (Kansas), Athens (Georgia), Chapel Hill (North Carolina), but also Glasgow, Sydney, Manchester, and Osaka. It was, as the venerable media theorist Tony Schwartz called one of his Folkways LPs, “the world in our mailbox.”
Most of the records that came our way were by artists working in recognizable styles, but occasionally things would come in that were in a world of their own, sonic oddities that expressed a completely eccentric approach, even within an established genre. Of course it was cool to get all that stuff from Rough Trade or SST or Dischord, but the real prizes were by obscure lone weirdos like Jandek, Loren Mazzacane Connors, or Gary Wilson, who had to release their records themselves because nobody else would. I eventually crossed paths with all three of those artists, but Gary was the first.
Gary Wilson was sort of a hero at KAOS, exactly the kind of maladjusted outsider we were inclined to champion. He came from Endicott, a small town in upstate New York of around 14,000 people (in 1980) considered to be the birthplace of IBM. Before that, it was known for the mass production of shoes. Gary had been something of a musical prodigy as a kid, and studied briefly with John Cage as a teenager. He then led a psychedelic garage band called Lord Fuzz. (They recorded a single in 1967, but it wasn't released until 2016.) His official first release was the Gary Wilson Trio's LP Another Galaxy, in 1974. It's a substantial debut, a mixture of wah-wah-driven jazz-funk fusion a la electric Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock, totally abstract experimentalism, free jazz blowing, and a brief tender ballad. His 1975 instrumental single Dreams + Soul Travel was in a similar jazz-funk vein, the addition of synthesizers only slightly hinting at what was to come.
By the release of You Think You Really Know Me? in 1977, Gary had reinvented himself as some unholy mutation of Wayne Newton and ? & the Mysterians, with nods to Frank Zappa, surf music, and maybe Steely Dan. Jazzy chords and tight, funky grooves, catchy hooks, cheesy keyboards, fuzz guitars. The lyrics, absent on his earlier releases, portrayed a perpetually adolescent and possibly suicidal loser and/or creepy potential stalker, still obsessing over all the girls who had rejected him in high school and with fetishes for mirrors, chrome, etc. The front cover shows him as a geeky guy with slicked-back hair wearing a sport coat with no lapels (?), skinny necktie, goony white sunglasses. The back cover photos are darker, with Gary wearing only sunglasses, white BVDs and socks, wrapped in a pile of tangled recording tape and splayed on the floor of his parents' basement, where the album was recorded on a 4-track deck. Gary's new thing was so thoroughly not-punk that it was ultra-punk by default. The fact that it was hard to know where the line was between the persona and the "real Gary" – assuming there was a line – just made it that much more intriguing.
In 1978 Gary moved to San Diego and released a single with new band the Blind Dates, In the Midnight Hour (not the Wilson Pickett classic) + When I Spoke of Love, which played up the funky grooves even more. The 1980 Forgotten Lovers EP solidified the formula. The songs all had just enough of a surface relationship to pop music that it almost seemed like he was serious about trying to make it. But the twisted lyrics and scary persona made that seem unlikely. In 1980, MCP Records released the Invasion of Privacy double 7", on which Gary reworked four of his earlier songs, recorded in a real studio and aimed at a bigger market. In some ways the new versions were more dramatic and definitely more "professional" sounding, but it's still hard to imagine them really connecting with a mainstream audience in 1980.
Gary's move to San Diego may not have panned out as he'd hoped, but it was what finally led to our paths intersecting. On a trip to visit my parents in Orange County in 1981, I arranged to drive an hour south to interview Gary for OP Magazine. He was living in a small apartment with his artist girlfriend Bernie Allen (RIP) and a pet ferret and working in a porno book shop to pay the bills, augmented by the occasional gig playing covers in a lounge band. Not surprisingly, Gary was somewhat shy/enigmatic (the sunglasses stayed on the whole time) but friendly enough, and the interview went pretty smoothly. As I was leaving, I casually mentioned that if he ever wanted to come play in the Northwest I could put together a band to back him up. It seemed like a long shot, but why not throw it out there?
And then it actually happened. I don't remember if Gary followed up on it or if I did, but somehow the plan was hatched. I set up a KAOS benefit show at Evergreen in Olympia, and DJ Stephen Rabow set up a KRAB-FM benefit at the Hall of Fame in Seattle. The band was to be dubbed The Unloved Ones, with myself on guitar and my Tiny Holes bandmates Steve Fisk on keyboards and Phil Hertz on drums. Our bassist Paul Tyson had left town by then, so we recruited Steve Suski to play bass. Three Steves in one band! Gary sent us a cassette tape of the set list and we worked up versions of all the songs on our own. Then he and Bernie showed up a day or two before the first gig and we ran the set with him a few times. They stayed at the band’s house and were pleasant guests.
The shows themselves were kind of a blur. The sets were arranged with no breaks between songs, so once it started we just powered through and hoped it didn't all fall apart. Of course, within the first few minutes of the first show I broke a guitar string, but I soldiered on. No time to put on a new string! But Gary was the real wild card. I had naively assumed he would just come out and sing the songs with us. We did not expect him to come on stage wearing a hospital gown, wrapped in bandages like a mummy. Nor did we realize that before the first song was over he would hit the floor and remain there for the rest of the set, rolling around in a goopy puddle made by a carton of milk and a bag of flour that Bernie poured over him. But like a true showman, he never stopped singing, never missed a beat. Bernie said we did OK, but she wished we would have been wrapped in bandages or something. I guess we looked too normal for her, but stage attire had never been discussed before the show. There are cassette recordings of those shows. I haven't heard them in many years, and I expect I'd find my own playing somewhat embarrassing. But it's a fun memory.
Clockwise from top: Steve Fisk, Philip Hertz, Steve Suski, me with broken guitar string. (photos: David Rauh)
Gary continued working in obscurity for years, a cult artist’s cult artist. But then a funny thing happened in 1996 that turned things around for him. The pop star Beck name-checked Gary in his big hit Where It’s At, which led to him being rediscovered by a younger generation who were curious about who this guy was. Some fans who ran a label reissued You Think You Really Know Me? and made a documentary about the saga of trying to track down this mysterious “forgotten” artist (they should have asked us, we could have saved them some time and trouble). Since then Gary's become pals with Questlove and been featured on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
Gary is still releasing new albums, and still out there touring with a new version of the Blind Dates. I saw them in Seattle a few years ago, and stood right in front of the stage. The band was tight, always seemingly on the verge of self-destructing but holding it together. Gary was wearing a crazy wig, a lady’s pink housecoat over a black plastic garbage bag for a shirt, yellow latex kitchen gloves, and of course sunglasses. He spent much of the time on the floor, singing intimately to a disembodied mannequin head. A total showbiz pro.
Gary Wilson at Chop Suey in Seattle, 2015 (photo: SP)