Zebra Trucks: Re: The strange world of Gary Wilson

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 9:00 AM, matt love <mattlove1@gmail.com> wrote:

The cognoscenti at KAOS loved Gary Wilson. They brought him to Evergreen for a show in 1981.. Locals Steve Fisk, Steve Peters, Phil Hertz, and I forget the bassist learned his material and acted as his backup band. They put on a killer show after one rehearsal. Wilson came out wrapped up in bandages from head to foot like a mummy. He gradually unwound his costume through the course of the show.

I didn't know Wilson was obscure, I thought he was famous. It's funny what getting "discovered" by somebody like Beck will do for you... your life and career is rewritten to start the moment they first heard you.

It's nice that Cobain gave Meat Puppets, Young Marble Giants, Daniel Johnston a wider audience... but he wasn't such a fearless sonic explorer, he was just listening to what we were playing, making notes on names to drop later so people would think he was cool. He probably little guessed that he would get all the credit, but I'm sure it delighted him when it happened. He was calculating that way (rewriting his life story so that his first concert was Black Flag, not Sammy Hagar, for example), his diaries reveal how much contempt he had for everybody around him as he pretended he liked them... he had no intent to give anybody else any credit for anything, unless it burnished his reputation for people to see a connection (Leadbelly, for example).

But I'm doing an Abe Simpson here, I'll stop.

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 6:41 AM, Telstar <> wrote:

"When I first heard You Think You Really Know Me, the rescued-from-oblivion
record by Gary Wilson, I thought it must be the work of some New York
downtown hipster who palled around with Arto Lindsay, lived in a ratty loft,
and eventually got rediscovered by Thurston Moore.

Wrong on all fronts - although that last part is closest, as Wilson's music
did get enough grapevine exposure to earn a Beck shoutout in "Where It's
At." The 1977 LP, which was issued on CD by the short-lived Motel Records
in 2002, came to that label's (and Beck's) attention via a record collector
whose claim to fame was playing the kid who visits the cockpit in the 1980
comedy Airplane! - and that's not the weirdest part of the Gary Wilson
story."

http://sacurrent.com/music/story.asp?id=68975

Al

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