You Think You Really Know Me
Directed by Michael Wolk
Reviewed by Jose Fritz
I have trouble imagining the music of my youth being converted to classics and nostalgic standards. The image of bloated, tattooed adults shilling box sets of indie rock on infomercials gives me pause. But then I recall the story of Gary Wilson, and I know there’s still hope.
The cover picture stays with me: a round-faced young man with a spotty beard, wearing a black 1950s suit and a pair of white plastic women’s sunglasses. The back story can remain dilatory for a moment and we’ll just splice into the reel at the climax. We can interpolate afterwards.
In 1977, after a false start at Bearsville Studios in upstate New York, Gary wrapped some tin foil around his head and went into his parent’s basement with a Teac 3340. It’s not possible to know his state of mind then as his own explanations are short on detail. Something happened down there in the dark surrounded by concrete. He was bored with the future, disenchanted with the past. He emerged, naked as a babe, and wrapped in speaker wire and duct tape clutching a stack of 7-inch master reels tightly to his chest. The reels became You Think You Really Know Me, his first LP. Only 600 were pressed. He had already played in working bands and proved his worth as musical technician, a later-day Nicholas Slonimsky, both skilled and eccentric. But now he’d birthed a gold brick, the first album in the history of art-rock.
This album presents itself as the work of a Zappaesque madman. The opening tape noises, twitchy curls of wire bouncing off table tops, and guitar noise never coalesce into songs; they instead adorn songs, interrupt songs. It preludes and presents songs. They convey an idea, a complete transfiguration of pop music. That’s art rock. In the late 1960s some albums are parsed erroneously from acid rock, proto-punk and psychedelia into the art rock movement: Iron Butterfly, Steve Miller and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. The true beginning is You Think You Really Know Me. All music is art: art rock is the union of the expected auditory media with any other, albeit gustatory, visual, olfactory, etc. It’s the last stop between rock and performance art.
But Gary comports himself not as an outpatient, but as the world’s oldest teenager, usurping the title from Dick Clark. He’s still renascent and nursing old wounds. He lives without a phone in obscure seclusion in southern California. Even if he were struck dead before Motel Records revived his career, he’d still rate a footnote in music history for the few and the worthy. So the DVD, beyond all the back-story and archival footage, fills in the gaps. Beyond that, it also includes that first album, and without it the story would be lacking. To hear that swirling mess of jazz chords and synth punk keyboards pantomimes everything that the spliced together 9mm footage spells out. The two together tell the story of Gary Wilson and until you partake, you don’t really know him.
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