(Plexifilm, 74 Minutes)

www.plexifilm.com

Gary Wilson’s one album, You Think You Really Know Me, was released in 1977 and made it into the hands of a very small circle of musical explorers. When it was reissued a quarter century later, filmmaker Michael Wolk set out to examine the album and its creator’s curious journeys.

Wilson hailed from Endicott, NY, a small city that by the seventies could claim little more than being close to Binghamton, NY, another municipality in decline. Sometime after his self-released album went more or less nowhere, Wilson moved to San Diego, managing to find aspects of this sunny California area that were most like his crumbling hometown, eventually working as a night shift manager of an adult book store. Motel Records, a small but adventurous label in Los Angeles, decided to issue the album on CD and spent the better of a year tracking Wilson down. Wolk’s documentary follows Wilson’s reunion with his band, the Blind Dates, as they played a sold out show in NYC and then at a theater in Endicott. And the music? it’s a mix of tongue-in-cheek funk, Zappa-esque experimentation and lyrics which mix odes to unattainable women and horror films, all presented with the costumed antics of bored young (now decidedly middle-aged) men in a dying city.

Special Features: 39 minutes of DVD content, including short films from the seventies featuring Wilson; bonus CD of the original 1977 LP. DAVID GREENBERGER