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Gary Wishers

Gary Wishers was a dutch singer-songwriter mostly active in the 1950s in London, England.

Background

He was born in 1912 as Alwin Arnoold Waterstradt in Haarlem and is said to first have appeared to a musical stage in 1952. Many different singer-songwriters, such as Townes van Zandt, Johnny Cash, Tim Buckley, Blaze Foley, but also Howlin' Wolf and Keith Richards, and later Lou Reed, stated he had strongly influenced their music. Most of them had first heard him playing when they were still a kid.

'''Music and philosophy '''

„His playing was raw and somehow alive. I had never heard anything like that. It was like a car hitting you in your sleep and you wake up as a different person.“ – John Herndon, at his funeral

Wishers country- and folk-based music showed early symptoms of later developed styles like freejazz, noise and serial. He never really learned to play an instrument, so he tried different tunes and decided which sounded best by ear „and whatever his goddamn gut said“ (Blaze Foley). Wishers philosophy was influenced by the spirituality of Pashupata Shaivism, the oldest Shaivite Hindu school. He wanted to live in the very moment, hated everything that was „only created to try to fight the death of all things“. For a long time there was no public knowing of his music, as he had wished to disappear completely after his death. People only got to know him by mouth-to-mouth, in his lifetime he played lots of gigs in little towns in england, scotland, his home country, the netherlands, and northern europe.

People that knew him described him as charming, funny, calm and polite. He obviously had a strong effect on those who met him in person.

„That guy was not from this world. [I] guess a crowd of angels left him here to stay with us.“ – Ray Price

'''After his death '''

Sadly, Gary Wishers burned most of the tapes that were made of his music. He left no wife or kids. However, his friend Albert Hammond kept his diarys and decided to not let him die, although it had been his will to be completely forgotten. In July 2016, a tape with several recordings from 1962 showed up, labeled „a bunch of bad ideas“. It contains less than two minutes of raw, unfinished material, only giving a vague idea of what the finished compositions would sound like.

To this day it's not fully clear when and how he died.

„He was not even a good musician – quite the opposite. But he sure was a genius.“ – Lou Reed