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Artist
Gandalf the Grey
12+ albums
psychedelicfolkpsychedelic folkfolk rockPsychedelic Rock
about
Gandalf The Grey was the name used in the 1970s and 1980s by American psych-folk musician Chris Wilson from Glen Cove, Long Island. Singer-songwriter Wilson was right in the midst of the hippie influx that poured into the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early and mid-'60s. Not long after moving to New York City in 1966, he was befriended by Columbia Records executive Bob Hughes, whose partner Nicholas DeMartino would soon become Wilson's manager and greatest advocate. (DeMartino, incidentally, was also manager for an agit-rock band by the name of Elephant's Memory, and had an integral role in pairing the outfit with John Lennon and Yoko Ono after the couple moved to New York in the early '70s.) Wilson, in fact, was the first artist signed to the recently formed Hughes and DeMartino company, Diamond Productions. Still just a teenager, he was also added to the Columbia roster. With and without his band the Other Half, he began to make the rounds of the coffee house circuit, often playing at Manny Roth's Café Wha and hobnobbing with such future stars as Bill Cosby, Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. Naïve, spirituality-minded, and, unlike the other members in the group, drug-free, he was even billed in a TV Guide piece as the "square hippy." Wilson would move into the relatively straight world of television production in the next decade, but throughout the late '60s and early '70s, he continued to write and perform his songs around New York with frequency a
