GARY WILSON - You Think You Really Know Me LP

Gold foil cover.

Highly recommended.

Wilson's monumental second LP, but the first he recorded as a vocalist, hewing to his own bizarre vision -- a syncretic home-recorded collision of romance, new wave cocktail jazz, heartbreak, disco porn-soundtrack music, and experimental tape manipulation.

Yes, it was a time and a place this was being created. The time was 1977 and the place was a basement in Endicott, New York. It was in his father's basement and he was the musical prodigy at his high school. He could play anything, but on here it was miles from what anybody thought he would make. This album is the way it is because normality is not a figure present in Gary Wilson's mind. Growing up seeing The Beatles play at Shea Stadium in 1964 and meeting John Cage, why not make something the world has never seen before? Why not make the most insane, intense yet still passionate and groovy music your ears can endure?

Well, Gary really didn't make this for the world but decades later, people are starting to get it, sort of.

This album is total genius. Perverse and piss-taking loungey synth stylings with adolescent lyrics about "chicks," that are hilarious and slightly creepy at the same time.

Some of this really reminds of what Ween would do 13 years later. The title track really sounds like those avant garde home tape experiments they did on the first few albums. The ending even has a weird goofy voice that sounds exactly like Dean Ween! It makes things even more frightening.