Like many musicians, Gary Wilson will always remember the first time he heard himself referred to in a high-profile setting. It came at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards when Beck cited one of his songs.
"They interviewed him as he was walking out and he started talking about [Wilson's song] '6.4,' " says Wilson, who remembers being stunned as he watched the telecast.
This landmark moment came a full 22 years after Wilson's lone album was released.
The very embodiment of obscurity, "You Think You Really Know Me" was a strange, sinister mix of art-pop and avant-garde strangeness veering between Steely Dan subversion and John Cage abstraction. It was recorded by Wilson in his parents' Endicott, N.Y., basement and released without the help of a label. He printed only about 2,500 copies, reaching an audience seemingly limited to college radio programmers, who gave the record what little airplay it got, and members of the art-weirdness group the Residents, who for a time kept up an encouraging correspondence with him.
Today, not only does the album boast Beck's endorsement, but it was also reissued earlier this year by the New York independent label Motel Records, drawing rave reviews and sales already approaching 10,000 copies. In his first show in more than 20 years, in May at Joe's Pub in New York, Wilson delivered his music and performance art (fondling a mannequin, getting pelted with flour) to a rabidly enthusiastic audience. He'll repeat the exercise Friday at the Knitting Factory Hollywood.
Is the new attention belated vindication for his distinctive musical vision?
"Maybe that's reading a little more into it," says a sanguine Wilson, 48, who's been living a low-key life in San Diego for more than 20 years. "I'm flattered everyone likes it now. It's a great joy for it to come around again."
Wilson hadn't exactly been looking for a comeback. After a fruitless late-'70s move to the West Coast to try to stir label interest, he turned away from the music business, settling in San Diego and starting a series of jobs--deli server, theater usher, and, currently, keyboardist in an Italian restaurant lounge band and weekend night-shift clerk at an adult book store.
