Gary Wilson Interviewed

Gary Wilson
No Boundaries, No Bars, No Nothing

By Steven Hanna

I went because of the bit about the pornographic bookstore.

There was a buzz a while ago about a show at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood. “You gotta go,” someone told me, “because this is Gary Wilson’s first show here in twenty years.” I grimaced and pointed out that maybe there was a reason for that. “No, no,” I was told, somewhat sharply, “this guy’s record is amazing. It’s called You Think You Really Know Me, and he recorded it in his parents’ basement in the late ’70s. Apparently he toured the hell out of it, but it went nowhere, so he packed it in. But it’s been changing hands on the record collector circuit for years and years now. I hear Beck’s a big fan. Anyway, they just reissued the album on CD, but it took them months to find this guy so he could sign off on it, I hear, and when they finally did find him, he was working in a porno shop in San Diego.” And for some reason, that was all it took.

Onstage at the Knitting Factory, Wilson was backed by a crack band, the Blind Dates, and played songs that sounded something like the Talking Heads as fronted by a leering, teenybopper version of Tom Jones. Oh, and every few minutes a stagehand would walk out and dump packages of baking flour over his head. Ghostly white and caked in the stuff, Wilson would grab the microphone desperately at peak moments in his songs, and little white puffs would rise around his hands. I was duly impressed. So this is the guy Beck was talking about in “Where It’s At,” when he sang “Passing the dutchie from coast to coast/Like my man Gary Wilson, who rocks the most.”

Gary Wilson sat down with me in his San Diego apartment on February 15, 2003 to talk about his career, the development of his style, New Age music, and, uh, pornography. We started out by discussing Forgotten Lovers, his collection of ’70s-era singles and outtakes, released by Motel Records in ’03. (Editor’s Note: a new Wilson CD, Mary Had Brown Hair, and 12” LP, Newark Valley, are due this year from Stones Throw—stonesthrow.com).

Steven Hanna: So "Forgotten Lovers" disc is really great, and it seems to be getting pretty good press.

Gary Wilson: I guess the official release was January 14, and it’s picking up some momentum. I’ve been watching how it’s doing on the computer. I’ve been stuck in the analog stage for so long, but I got into the digital realm about five months ago, and bought a computer, finally.

Steve: You didn’t have a computer before that?

Gary: No, even though I used to work for IBM. I finally bought one, though, and so I’m kind of watching, and seeing what’s happening with it. The different radio stations, and what playlists it’s making. It’s beginning to pick up a little bit. It’s good.

Steve: Which songs seem to be picking up?

Gary: They’re playing different ones. “Forgotten Lovers,” or “When I Spoke Of Love.” People seem to like “Another Galaxy.” That was the first album I made, actually, an instrumental album, and that was a cut from there.

Steve: Is it funny to hear that really early stuff?

Gary: Well, I always like to say I was still trying to find who I was at the time, but you go through certain things when you’re young until you finally hit a point where you can say “Okay, I’m Gary Wilson, and I am who I am.” It took a while. Well, not a long time, but…

Steve: Tell me about those “certain things.” You grew up in Endicott, in upstate New York. How did a nice kid like you get to be making music like this?

Gary: I’d been doing demos all my life, since I was in sixth grade. My father was kind of a musician, working at IBM during the day, and being a musician at night. He would play in these lounges, and he had this one gig for, like, 20 years, or 25 years, in this one lounge for like four nights a week. And so he always had tape recording equipment. So I’d been making demos, and taking tapes to places like ESP Records, all these different New York City labels. But I wasn’t getting much action, really. I was playing in different things. I was playing classical music on the side, and I was in a garage band on the side. We had a good band, and we were playing every week.

Steve: Was this Dr. Zork (early Wilson band Dr. Zork and the Warts), or…

Gary: Well, it was called Lord Fuzz, at the time. Dr. Zork sort of came right after Lord Fuzz. It was the transformation of Lord Fuzz. Lord Fuzz started around seventh, eighth grade, when I was playing organ. The organ I still have out on my porch, actually. And we were, you know…our parents would have to take us to the gigs every week. We were, like, psychedelic. In the ’60s, everything was kind of psychedelic. And we were good.

Steve: What sorts of stuff did you play? Your music must have sounded very different back then.

Gary: Well, were doing a lot of covers. We used to do, you know, Tommy James and the Shondells, Rolling Stones tunes from Between the Buttons, or Jimi Hendrix stuff. Maybe a couple of things from the Cream. I think the one I used to like was “Live For Today.” I can’t think who did that (the Grass Roots), but that was a cool one.

Steve: So you were your basic teenage rock and rollers.

Gary: At the time, that’s what you did. But we’d play every week, so our parents would have to take us to the gigs, so that was always fun. You know, when I look back on it, some of those were the best times, with music, for me. Because there was a genuine, real love for the music, and nothing else, no business, nothing else. It was just a pure, real pureness.

Steve: What did your parents think of this? You said your dad was a musician, so I assume he understood, but was your mom equally supportive?

Gary: I think she was encouraging in her own way about it. My father, what he would do, is he worked at IBM in the daytime, and then he’d go play at night. And he’d be gone, working four or five nights a week in the hotel lounges, and my mother would stay home, and all my friends would gather into the cellar, and, you know, that’s where we would hang out and record and stuff. And my mother would be upstairs, maybe, with a couple of my cousins or something, so I guess she kind of liked the thought of us doing stuff in the basement. She came to my early shows, even when I would do things at my high school and stuff. Not so much the rock and roll part of it, even though she used to take us to all the Lord Fuzz gigs, but she would be more inclined to come to my classical, avant-garde kind of shows. My father was basically the musician, but my mother, by not really stopping me, allowed me to do it, and I think she was happy that I kind of went in my own direction.

Steve: How did your dad feel about your going in your own direction? Playing covers of “Purple Haze” is a little different from what he was doing in hotel lounges, I’m guessing.

Gary: He was… I’m not going to say he was conservative, but you know… I think he played with Nat King Cole, a couple gigs, and he was kind of a conservative bass player. But he wanted me to see different types of music, I guess. I think my father used to be a little surprised, because I always went into the more experimental end of things. He never said, “Don’t do it, Gary,” because he was a musician himself, but…

Steve: You were experimental in your Lord Fuzz shows, or…

Gary: I was still playing in a classical thing on the side, at the time. Things were still evolving, and then I became interested in John Cage. I don’t know if you’ve heard any of his music.

Steve: I’m familiar. How did you get interested in him? He’s a little far afield from the psychedelic scene.

Gary: Well, you see, my father used to wake me up when I was in sixth grade, seventh grade. We had cable in upstate New York, cable to New York City, way way way back in the ’60s, actually, which is funny when I think about it. So we were picking up New York City stations, even upstate. And they would have these, like, cultural programs on, early in the morning, with cutting edge politicians, poets, artists, musicians. So my father would wake me up periodically, to, uh…

Steve: What a cool dad.

Gary: Yeah, so I said, you know, “Gee, I like that music a little bit.” So I kept going into that kind of music, more and more. My original idol was Dion, of Dion and the Belmonts, and that was in fourth grade. And when the Beatles came out, I said, “Ah, to hell with the Beatles,” but then by sixth grade I went to see the Beatles [at Shea Stadium in ’65—SH], and by seventh grade everybody was into that whole thing. And then, in seventh grade I got kind of into different experimental rock bands. Of course the Mothers of Invention, the Fugs, and different people like that.

Steve: I’d heard you met John Cage when you were a kid. How did that come about?

Gary: It was ’cause I was playing in the orchestra, the youth symphony, playing cello and bass. We used to get performances at school of my music. Chamber music, and avant-garde classical music. And my teacher, somehow, maybe she suggested that I write a letter, and get a hold of Cage, ’cause he was out of New York, supposedly.

Steve: So you just did.

Gary: So I looked him up in the phone book, New York City station, and there he was. John Cage. There was a bunch of Cages, but somehow I got to where he was, and he said, “Well, okay, send me the music, if you want.” And he gave me an address to send it, and about a week or two later he called back, and said he’d like to meet me. And so then my mother, actually, had to take me up there. It was, like I said, tenth grade or something, and my mother took me up to his place.

Steve: What year was this?

Gary: Oh, it was 1968, or ’67 maybe, and I think it was in Haverstraw, outside of New York City, and we got lost. And we’re there in the middle of the woods, out in the middle of nowhere, so I called John Cage from a phone booth, and he came and picked me up in his car, and drove me to his house. My mother waited in town, I remember. So we drove off in, uh, he had a Thunderbird at the time.

Steve: And he just took you to his house?

Gary: Yeah, we went to his house, and he hardly had any furniture in his house. He lived in a community that was all cutting-edge poets, architects, artists...and they all lived in this community, and he just had, like, a Buddha doll in one corner, and maybe a hammock stretched across the room in another room. Very little furniture.

Steve: I guess he had a sort of minimalist rep to live up to.

Gary: Exactly. And we went over my music, and he told me, you know… He’d look at my scores, and he’d say, you know, “Gary, what does this mean?” And I’d say, “Well, that’s a slide on the violin, you move up and down the strings like this.” And he said, “You can’t write it like that, you’ve got to write it like this.” And he’d correct my stuff, and tell me who to listen to, and then we did that for about three days, actually. I’d go up there, and we’d go over my music.

Steve: You did that for three days?

Gary: You know, I look back on it now, and I tell people, and it’s like, “Jesus…” It’s funny, because, you know, grad students from Julliard, or, some of these fine universities would love to have a one-on-one with this guy, just for ten minutes, and I’m a tenth grader and he invited me to his house for three days.

Steve: That must have been huge for you. I mean, even if all he was doing was correcting notation in your scores, that’s got to completely intensify your commitment to the music.

Gary: Well, he was my biggest influence, I think. Not even so much his music. I mean, I loved his music, and there’s one album…if anybody wants to listen to an album by John Cage, it’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, with David Tudor on piano. Make sure it’s the one with David Tudor on piano. And that was the whole changing point in my career.

Steve: Tenth grade?

Gary: That one album. When I heard that one, I was probably in eighth grade or something, and I totally…I had never heard anything like that. I’d been listening to, maybe, Edgard Varese, or Shaun Berger, or, you know, those twelve-tone guys. Eerie or weird music. Along with Cage. And that particular piece, I had never heard anything like that before, never. And I totally switched into a different frame of mind or something.

Steve: So he had changed everything for you even before this time you met him? It wasn’t some wise words he said up there in that empty house that became a turning point in your career?

Gary: Well, I still remember in the trip in the car, he told me something. He said, “Gary, I never made it, financially, till I hit 50.” It took him that long until where he was receiving grants, and other stuff. But like I said, it wasn’t even his music. It was just this idea that one should walk his own path, that one should not be concerned about what other people think, or other influences, or this and that. I kind of kept that, I think, in my brain, somehow. Plus, I liked Dion and the Belmonts. (laughs)

Steve: Right, but that seems like a different side of things.

Gary: Well, in a sense, but I look back at my music, and I was a big fan of Dion, Bobby Rydell, Fabian, and some of these guys. And I always felt, in the extreme avant-garde, what it needed was a Bobby Rydell, or a Dion, in front of a John Cage performance. That’s, somehow, how I would almost describe myself. The extreme avant-garde leaps, for people, may be a little, uh…it goes out of reach of most people, but you put a teen element in it, maybe you put somebody who sings teen songs within that mix of avant-garde extremism, and they’re a great combination. So I don’t know if I thought that’s what I was going for, but somehow it blended into that, ’cause of my teenage interest in Dion, and this teen element of the early Beatles, and all this other stuff, but also liking avant-garde stuff, and somehow it all melded, or molded together.

Steve: Well, sitting here now, in 2003, you make a pretty good argument for the strengths of the teen-pop-singer-fronting-John-Cage kind of thing. But surely you hadn’t articulated it to this point back then. When you went back to your band, with your high school friends, after this John Cage encounter, what did they say? Certainly they didn’t want to play John Cage stuff. Or did they?

Gary: Again, when I took over Lord Fuzz, right about then is when it became Dr. Zork and the Warts, and it became a thing… it’s always hard to get people to play avant-garde stuff. I guess, most guys, they think it’s ugly music, or out-of-tune music. One time, the New York Philharmonic did a John Cage performance, with Leonard Bernstein conducting, and the orchestra revolted, and actually put their instruments down and walked off, because they refused to do the Cage stuff. He had, like, contact mikes on all the instruments, and he probably was running them through all sorts of distortion, and I guess Bernstein had to scold the orchestra…

Steve: Did you get a similar revolt from the Warts?

Gary: Well, I guess, some of them. But some of the guys stuck with me, like, uh, Carmen Petrino. He’s still one of my best friends. He was at the Knitting Factory, that guy who came out with the flour. He gets right into the spirit of it, with the flour. I’ve known him since fourth grade. Anyway, he went in my direction, and some of the guys didn’t. But Dr. Zork and the Warts took on a whole different thing. It became pretty much all my music at that point. We used to do, you know, real, uh, avant-garde stuff, combining everything…

Steve: Would you say that’s the first of your stuff that felt like a precursor to You Think You Really Know Me?

Gary: Probably. Working its way up, but not quite. It was really an earlier period for me, and, uh, you know…we’d come out in, like, refrigerator boxes. We’d pile in the refrigerator box, and the audience was getting pissed off more and more at us, and they’d be pelting the boxes. And we’d have tapes going, loops, and all that stuff, and we’d break out of the box. And everybody, by that time, hated us, and they were always cursing us out. So we were always running into all kinds of conflict. That was part of it. Being influenced by Cage, in a sense, I always thrived on that. Many a time we had to have, like, police escorts from the clubs, ’cause everybody wanted to kill us.

Steve: And you were high school kids. With policemen holding back enraged fans. This is sort of like the anti-Hard Day’s Night.

Gary: It’s funny, some of the places, back in those days. The teen center that Lord Fuzz used to play a lot, and actually Dr. Zork and the Warts, was a place called the WJ Teener, which was right next to our high school, and it was run by the chief of police. He was running this psychedelic hall. So he would kind of keep his eye on everything, and if anything was going to break out, he’d have to get you home. After a while, though, they wouldn’t want you to play there anymore. Different clubs had different rules. Thank God, you know, we weren’t really hurt in a lot of the ordeals, but, you know, [it was] very close.

Steve: Your high school years sound a bit more colorful than mine were.

Gary: Well, but eventually you move along. I got to a point where I started kind of saying, “Why am I using the name Dr. Zork and the Warts? I’m Gary Wilson.” And that became part of it, too. I started saying, “Why am I hiding behind a name? Let’s just go by Gary Wilson.” So then I took that transformation…

Steve: What made you think that? What was the day where you finally said…

Gary: Gosh, you know, I can’t tell you for sure, what the day was. It was probably when I was getting, probably close to twenty, I guess. It just all made sense to me. Everything before was building up to this momentum, and then, when I finally purchased this machine (he points to a large, dusty reel-to-reel TEAC tape machine on his dresser), things all of a sudden took a change, and then I started making tapes like “Sea Cruise” or “Chrome Lover.” Those were, like, ’75, pre-You Think You Really Know Me, the beginning. And that was probably the era when I could finally really stamp my name on something, and say, “I’m confident enough to say this is me.”

Steve: So now we’re finally at the point, post-high school, still living with your parents, where you get down to recording You Think You Really Know Me. Tell me about what went into the record. Did you have it, sort of, mapped out in your head, or…

Gary: Those songs were…when I purchased this TEAC machine, that opened up a lot of avenues, because the sound quality got much better. Earlier, I was using two-track machines, quarter-track machines with just two channels, and I’d have to ping-pong ’em all over the place. Then I got into a four-channel decoder, which never worked well. Then I got the TEAC, and then all of a sudden the quality was there. I did a group of demos on the album, originally. “I Wanna Take You on a Sea Cruise” was part of that, originally, but I also had, like, the original “6.4 = Make Out.” And “You Think You Really Know Me” is actually like a twenty-five-minute piece, not just a three-minute little thing. So I was getting kind of an idea of what it was gonna be. So I just had to figure out the songs, which ones to throw out, which ones to add.

Steve: So you sit down, and you’re finally going to make an album, in your parents’ basement there. You mentioned that you finally felt like you could record it as Gary Wilson. Was this self-confidence reflected in the way you approached the recording? Was it more of a you-alone-in-the-basement kind of thing?

Gary: Oh, no. We had friends who were photographers, and everybody was taking pictures, and things were building, and we were doing avant-garde theater, and shows. I was doing art shows, and painting. Things were happening, paintings were happening, and things were beginning to get more and more, uh, weirder and weirder, sort of…

Steve: Avant-garde theater?

Gary: The time was kind of an odd one. You’re out of high school, and sometimes you see a lot of your friends going away, or leaving a small town, off to college and so forth. And you’re kind of in this state of limbo. It was a neat period, too, in the ’70s, and I was trying to find myself, in a certain way. I remember going to, like, Ramada Inns, and at that time disco was big, and they had dress codes, and I’d go all sharply dressed so I could get through. But then I’d head for the bathroom, and shut the stall, and turn my jacket inside out and put a turban on, or something, and then come walking out. And I’d stand down there, in the disco, and everybody would think, “Oh, well, he must have passed the dress code to get in, so I guess he must be all right.” I used to try experiments, in a way to humor myself, by myself, since sometimes I was by myself. So I’d go on these adventures.

Steve: And meanwhile you’re recording in the basement.

Gary: Well, my mother would be having coffee upstairs, or she liked to go play bingo a lot, so she’d be off until ten or eleven, and we’d gather down there for a while.

Steve: What did the basement look like?

Gary: I kind of wish it had carpeting, but it was, kind of, a cement floor. The walls you probably saw on the cover of You Think You Really Know Me. It was never really finished as a basement. It had kind of a cement feel down there. And it was my little getaway, I guess you can call it, and it seems like we had some kind of washer down in the basement, a clothes washer. And basically it was my hangout, and I had a setup, with all my desks, and recording equipment, drums and everything. I used to do a lot of painting, sometimes, back in those days, too. I’d do very avant-garde paintings, kind of like Robert Rauschenberg. In that vein. So a lot of time there was paint spattered all over the floor, but luckily my parents didn’t get too upset about that. A little paint on the washing machine didn’t get them too uptight.

Steve: And you’re painting or taking pictures down there, and taping songs. And all this became You Think You Really Know Me. And yet the record doesn’t always sound like a big party, like you’re describing. It veers between the dark and the upbeat.

Gary: Kind of. My mother died, a year prior to that, so there was a lot of dreariness, and being in the snow, and in the cold, and it just kind of turned into You Think You Really Know Me, once I had an idea of what I wanted, and what I was going for. And I listened to the music over and over again throughout stuff. And I actually cut the tape, and spliced, and… I put a lot of love, and blood, into it.

Steve: Well, all right, let me ask you this, and I apologize if this comes out wrong. This is being recorded in your parents’ basement, right? Not to sound critical of the material, which I love, but there’s a lot of stuff that, uh, I don’t know how I would feel about playing it for my folks. I mean, “Sea Cruise” is about as misogynistic a song as…you know what I mean? I don’t mean to…

Gary: It’s funny, now you mention that. Like, the pictures on the back of You Think You Really Know Me (the CD reissue, in particular, is full of period photos of Gary, many of them featuring him in his underwear, wrapped up in recording cable and duct-tape—SH). I’d bring them out, when I was like twenty, maybe. My aunts or my relatives would come over and I’d show them these pictures. And my father would get mad at me, and say, “Put those pictures away! What are you showing them for?” Me in underwear… He didn’t want to see his kid all wrapped up in tape or something, so he’d get mad at me about that. But he was a musician, so he wasn’t too bad about that. I really went into my father’s footsteps. As soon as I got out of high school, I started playing clubs too, and that was what he did, so I…

Steve: You were doing lounge stuff?

Gary: Yeah. So I was always aware of, you know, Gershwin, or Burt Bacharach. Playing, like, four or five hours. I still do that now.

Steve: You were doing this at the same time as you were going out to Inns with turbans on your head?

Gary: I still have a certain appreciation for certain music. I can sort of understand what it’s about, from doing it all my life, and playing in lounges and stuff. It all molded together, is what I’m trying to say. I used to tell my girlfriend, when I was young, that I’d like to see Tony Bennett with a sack of flour thrown on his head. And I turned into that, in a way (laughs).

Steve: Well, since you bring it up, can I ask what the deal is with the flour? Or is that a question I shouldn’t ask?

Gary: Well, you know, it all came about when, again, I was into real extreme avant-garde shows, when I was a teenager. We used to use chocolate milk, and milk, and flour, and all this other stuff, so the whole place, the equipment, and everything, was wrecked with milk and flour and stuff. I’ve eliminated the milk now.

Steve: Any idea why you were throwing it around in the first place?

Gary: Maybe it’s the essence of life, huh? Milk? Or maybe snow? I don’t know what it makes me think of. But I had to be careful sometimes. One time, we did that, and they wouldn’t let us onstage. I’m waiting to go out, all covered in flour, and they refused to let me on. All of my band members were all covered in flour, standing to the side, and they’re like, “What the fuck is this?”

Steve: I imagine that’s a tough question to answer, under those circumstances.

Gary: Yeah. They get mad, these sound guys, ’cause they don’t want it on their microphones. That’s what they get pissed about. They don’t want to see you throwing flour on their monitors, after they’ve spent thousands of bucks on this equipment. So I sort of understand, and that’s why I’ve kind of eliminated the milk and stuff. And you don’t want to get electrocuted.

Steve: These shows were worlds away from your Bacharach gigs.

Gary: One time we did a thing in Binghamton, in the park, and I was totally covered in chocolate milk, and we had trombones all clogged with flour, drums knocked over, everything, and I had to go play in a steak house 4 hours later. So I had to bathe, and put a tuxedo on, and go play Burt Bacharach. It was a good balance. I’d be all covered in milk, and then I’d have to go play in this nice steak house, and nobody in either band knew about each other. So I always liked being kind of musically balanced in that way.

Steve: So you finish this record, and you press it yourself. And then what? You did gigs to push it, at CBGB’s in New York, I’m told…

Gary: That was cool, yeah. New York was always pretty receptive. They were a little more open to what I was doing up there. Still, you were playing in some of these places that were real hardcore punk rock scenes, and they would throw me in the middle of it, and sometimes they’d get mad at me about that.

Steve: But no one was interested in picking you up.

Gary: There was always the hope that you’d get a record label going at that time--somebody would catch you at one of these clubs. And a lot of times they came close, but it just never quite materialized.

Steve: So you moved west.

Gary: Yeah, I came out here in ’78. Originally, I came to Hollywood, and I stayed at the Tropicana Motel. I don’t think it’s even there anymore, on Santa Monica Boulevard (a favored haunt for musicians, including Tom Waits, the hotel was located on the west end of the Sunset Strip near the Whisky until the late ‘90s), and I stayed there, and tried to take my tapes to different places. I had certain contacts from New York that told me to look up these people at Elektra/Asylum, or Elektra Records. I was going to different labels, trying to shop it around, but I wasn’t getting any bites, really. So after a while you kind of succumb to it. But then I moved down here. The Blind Dates were from Endicott, and we went to high school together, and they moved down here prior to me, and I ended up getting together with them. And we did a few shows together.

Steve: You traveled around, doing gigs, or were they mostly San Diego shows?

Gary: We went up to Olympia, went up to Seattle, went up to some of these places, did a few concerts here and there. It was getting harder and harder to book shows. We went back to New York in ’79 to CBGB’s for the final…

Steve: The final hurrah?

Gary: Well, once in a while we would do a reunion, you know, down here. Bernadette, my girlfriend, actually, was a grad student at UCSD, so we were able to do many experimental art shows at her school, and public access shows, so I was still doing very avant-garde, extreme music, but the band…after a while, you just say, “What can I do?” It’s hard to keep the guys together, ’cause you’re not getting the work.

Steve: So your rock and roll career, so to speak, just sort of faded away.

Gary: In a way. I mean, it never did have a really high profile, but it took even a lower profile than being already pretty underground. Certain stations would play me, like KAOS in Olympia, and WCUW in Worcester. And I did a few interviews.

Steve: So you had little pockets of support, but…well, it wasn’t so much a decision to pack it in, as it was just sort of a gradual…

Gary: There was no decision to do it. But I never really stopped playing. I always stayed in a lounge band, just to keep working, for extra money. I always do that stuff.

Steve: But there was also the porn thing.

Gary: Well, that was…it was kind of an easy job for me. I’m not one of those guys who, you know, boasts about being into porno or something. At this point in my life, I’m not even pondering that sort of thing. It was flexible for what I was doing, ’cause I play in this lounge act on the side, so they were flexible with the schedules, and they kind of left me alone to do whatever I want to do, without pressuring me in the job. So it’s kind of a… Even though it has its own pressures, being in the adult industry. But my boss is kind of like a real good friend of mine, kind of a fan of mine, so he lets me…

Steve: Your boss at the porn store digs your music?

Gary: He’s, uh, you know…when I got into the X-rated thing, the guy got me from the normal theater. I worked at a United Artists theater for, like, five years or something. We did a few shows, at maybe, San Diego State down here, or something. We were, at the time, doing Gary Wilson and the Blind Dates. And I guess he was going to film school at the time. And he took over this large theater that was showing kind of X-rated stuff, and I was working for the UA theater, and they were looking for somebody. It’s not that I’m into the goddamn porno world. My girlfriend, she gets pissed off at me. She left me twice, ’cause I went into that. But, oh geez…it’s got more of a, I’m not gonna say a rock and roll attitude, but…

Steve: It’s just a, you take the money, and people go into the booth, and do their…

Gary: Yeah, basically, we got girls in booths. So they put money in, tokens or something, and the glass goes up, and some girl shakes her rump behind the glass. And I work the graveyards there, so I was kind of, especially once the chicks leave…they leave, you know, two or three in the morning, and then I’m kind of left there all by myself. And I kind of like that. I like to work in a place where nobody’s around. After three the place empties out, and then I’m in a booth that they built. They built a bulletproof booth. So I’m in this bulletproof booth so I don’t have to worry about anybody robbing me in there.

Steve: Robbing you?

Gary: Some nights, you get some guy who’s ready to fight you. I had a couple guys, before they put the bulletproof in, who dived over the thing at me, and next thing, I’m punching ’em down to get ’em off. That’s the worst part of the thing, ’cause sometimes guys are drunk, and they want to come in, and when you’ve got chicks involved, then it’s, uh…nude girls and booze doesn’t seem to sometimes mix.

Steve: And you wonder why your girlfriend doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the gig.

Gary: Yeah, she kicked me out twice for working there, and I said, “It’s not like I bring porno home.” It’s just easy for me. But it’s winding down to an end. I’m only doing a couple days there now.

Steve: But I’ve gotten ahead of myself a little. It’s this next part of the story that I find particularly--I don’t know if “compelling” is the right word, but,I have a lot of friends who love making music, and are sticking with it, but they’re approaching 30 now, and I assume they’re reckoning with the possibility that it’s not gonna happen for them professionally. And you’re a guy who reckoned with that, and I assume decided that it wasn’t gonna happen, and then it did. And not even ’cause you kept working at making it happen, but because…

Gary: It finally just kind of came out of left field. I mean, I’ve been…the Residents, now they used to correspond with me, back in ’77 or ’78, and they were always encouraging me. And through the years, I would get a letter from people here and there, and there were still a certain amount of people who were still, kind of, with me in a way. But it definitely didn’t explode until, I think, ’97 was the big time, or ’98, when Beck was doing the…some people from Olympia phoned me, and said they went to a Beck show, and they saw him doing “6.4” or something. And I said, “Wow.” I said, “Jesus, he’s got enough of his own music, what’s he doing mine for?” You know, I’m flattered he does it…so then they were telling me this and that, and I said, “Oh.” I believed ’em, I guess, but I still was kind of, you know, I don’t what to think. And then all of a sudden, I was watching the, uh, I think it was the ’97 MTV Video Music Awards, and Beck had won like six awards or something. And he came out, and that Lodger guy, whatever his name is--

Steve: Kurt Loder.

Gary:--interviewed him, and he mentioned my songs, a couple of my songs. And I’m getting ready to go to the store that I work at, at midnight, and it’s like eleven at night, and “Holy Christ, the guy must really be playing it.” He mentioned, like, “6.4” and “I Wanna Lose Control,” or something. So then things sort of quieted a little bit from then…

Steve: So you never even tried to contact Beck? You didn’t think, “Oh, this is my big chance” or something?

Gary: Sure, it occurred to me, but he’s kind of a hard guy to get a hold of, and, you know, I didn’t even have a computer for a while, and things kind of… I didn’t have the means to track him down. I’m surprised he didn’t try to get a hold of me.

Steve: Did you mention to anyone in your band, or whatever, that “I hear Beck’s doing my song”? I mean, I would be proud of that…

Gary: You know, you talk to some people about it, but you wonder half the time if they believe you. And I didn’t even find out about “Where It’s At,” the lyrics, until somebody sent me the lyric sheet. And that was like eight months ago, or nine months ago, and it was like, “Geez, Gary, you’re in this lyric.” I always thought that was the best Beck tune anyway, or one of the better ones, “Where It’s At.” I’d listened to that so many times, and I never even detected my name in there (laughs).

Steve: Little did you know. Did other people know about this stuff you’d done back in the ’70s? Friends, co-workers?

Gary: Well, of course my immediate friends kind of, I kept them in the loop on certain things. Because, you know, we had certain, certain magazines that used to write things about us periodically, but it was very underground. So of course I kept certain guys in the loop. Vince Rossi, you know (Vince is an original member of the Blind Dates, and turned out to be the only person Motel Records could find who knew where Gary was nowadays—SH), he was instrumental in bringing Motel Records into the picture. Somebody up in L.A. gave it to them…

Steve: I heard it was Ross Harris, but…

Gary: Yeah, Ross. He played at the Knitting Factory last summer, he played keyboards. He was a cool guy. Have you ever met him? He’s, uh, he was in Airplane! Remember that movie? He was the little boy that would go into the cockpit. So he gave it to Motel, and they couldn’t find me, I guess, and to make a long story short, Vince ended up playing with me in New York City. We even went back to my hometown in October, to do two concerts.

Steve: That must have been great.

Gary: Oh, it was. It was insane. I’m from a small town anyway, and then we had one theater, and they converted that theater into a performing arts center. And when I was a kid, like in seventh grade, that’s where I hung out, for all the horror movies. And I got to actually go into the bowels of the theater, so to speak, into the basement, down in the furnace room, and we had these two big shows, and it was cool. All the people from my past came, like, people that are 90 years old, and it was like I was walking among the people of my past. It was great. That’s kind of a moving thing, in a sense, going back home after… I hadn’t been back home in twenty-five years. My teachers were showing up.

Steve: Had your old teachers heard the record?

Gary: I guess. Everybody started hearing about it, and even my teachers…my teacher from eighth grade, this one teacher, used to let me come up before the class, and give a ten minute poetry recital, and he let me hang my pictures all over his room, and then the next thing, he’s showing up for my show.

Steve: Your eighth grade teacher was spinning “Chromium Bitch” in his living room.

Gary: Yeah, it’s a beautiful thing, in one way.

Steve: And I heard you got to see your dad for the first time, in, like…

Gary: I hadn’t seen him in maybe 25 years. We’d talk on, you know, Christmas, and his birthday, and certain holidays. But yeah, we just…I never got back there, so it was nice getting back there to see him. It was real cool.

Steve: It’s interesting to me that the moral of your story is not at all “Stick with it. Don’t give up.” It’s more like, “Give up if you want, so long as you did something great first. It’ll be appreciated eventually…”

Gary: Well, that’s what you really want. If you can actually get something that has lasting value…an album is a piece of art, in a sense, and you want something that’s gonna have some kind of lasting value, and that’s what you hope your music can do. Everyone… No one can follow the same story, is what I’m trying to say. People find success, sometimes, and this, like, came out of left field. I least expected this to really make a turnaround, after all these years. And it was a pleasant surprise, is what I’m saying, and that’s what you hope your art can do.

Steve: You hope it will survive. And yet I’m told that you don’t have an original copy of You Think You Really Know Me?

Gary: No, I actually don’t. What happened is, what I used to do a lot of times in performances, which I wish I didn’t, now, I used to break the record onstage. I’d take my albums and break ’em in half, up there, and I used to do that. So a lot of them kind of went down the tubes that way. It seems like somebody up at Motel Records might have a copy of the original one, but I just, you know…when I went back to my father’s house, we might have found one up there. I told a friend to hold onto it, ’cause I didn’t want to lose that one.

Steve: God forbid you get in a breaking mood with that one around.

Gary: They’re very rare now, I guess.

Steve: So can we hope to see you live again sometime soon? The Knitting Factory was great, but a one-off wasn’t nearly enough…

Gary: Yeah, I’d love to do some shows. I’m not that much into traveling, at my age, but…

Steve: We’d love to see you. Will we hear any new material when we do?

Gary: I’m always kind of working on stuff.

Steve: More of the teen-fronting-John-Cage kind of thing?

Gary: Yeah, we’re still in the same vein. Personally, I think it’s better than my old stuff.

Steve: Can’t wait to hear it. Last question, I guess. I appreciate your taking so much time. But can you give me some idea of what you’re listening to nowadays?

Gary: Well, mostly myself, but…(laughs) seems like lately I’ve been mostly listening to myself. But I like classical music mostly. Debussy, Ravel, some of the English kind of impressionists. I’m half-English, half-Italian, so I like some of the English music, and stuff, but…

Steve: So the rock scene right now, doesn’t really…

Gary: I’m out of the loop, and I’m not too sure who’s doing what. I mean, I’m sure there are a lot of guys who are doing great music out there. But you know, it gets to a point where you’re kind of more concerned about what you’re doing, and everybody else is, okay. Background. I like classical, you know. At work I listen to some opera. We got that digital cable at work, so sometimes I put on the New Age stuff. I always tell people, it makes me think of death, when I listen to it. It’s like, your steps to death, ’cause they’ve got all these drones…

Steve: Is that a compliment?