The Greatest Music Producer You’ve Never Heard of Is . . . Tom Wilson
Tom Wilson was born on March 25, 1931, and grew up in a mixed neighborhood just east of Baylor University. Music was a constant presence in the Wilson family. They attended New Hope Baptist Church, the oldest black church in town, whose most famous member was Jules Bledsoe, who sang “Old Man River” on Broadway in 1927 and became the first black opera star. Wilson’s father directed one of New Hope’s three choirs, including leading a performance at a Texas Centennial celebration in 1936, when Tom Jr. was five. His grandfather owned a rug laundry, where he hosted Saturday afternoon jam sessions. Tom learned to play the trombone at segregated Moore High School.
After Wilson graduated from Moore, he moved to Nashville and spent a year at Fisk University before transferring to Harvard. After graduating cum laude in 1954, he borrowed $900 and started his own label, Transition Records. It was a new era in jazz, and Wilson wanted to release some of the sounds he was hearing. One of his first signings was the pioneer bebop trumpeter Donald Byrd, whom he recorded with pianist Horace Silver and drummer Art Blakey. Wilson went to Chicago to record an album by avant-garde pianist and bandleader Sun Ra, who at that point had made only a couple of 45’s. Wilson also recorded 23-year-old post-bop pianist Cecil Taylor, putting out
Jazz Advance, which "The Penguin Guide to Jazz" calls “one of the most extraordinary debuts in jazz.” Wilson—who by now was married with a couple of kids—wasn’t just a producer, he was a small businessman who took photographs, designed album covers, and wrote liner notes. He was DIY before DIY was cool.
In four years Wilson produced 22 albums (including an unreleased one featuring John Coltrane), but he ran into financial struggles and was forced to fold the label. He was offered a job as a jazz A&R (Artists and Repertoire) representative at United Artists in New York, the first in a series of similar jobs for other labels like Savoy Records and Audio Fidelity Records. He finally landed as a staff producer at Columbia Records in 1963, becoming the first African American to hold the position there. His first significant job at Columbia was to finish an album by a young folk singer named Bob Dylan, who had done an album of mostly covers and was now halfway through a second album of mostly originals. “He was such an ebullient spirit,” remembered singer and songwriter Van Dyke Parks, whom Wilson signed around this time. “Charismatic, statuesque, and curiously empowering for those in his orbit.” At first Wilson wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of working with someone like Dylan. “I didn’t even particularly like folk music,” he later told Melody Maker. “I’d been recording Sun Ra and John Coltrane, and I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. This guy played like the dumb guys. But then these words came out.” He told Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, that they should put a band behind him—“you might have a white Ray Charles”—but Dylan was comfortable doing things solo.
The scruffy 20-year-old clicked with the well-dressed 30-year-old, and they developed a good working relationship, doing two more acoustic albums (
The Times They Are a-Changin’ and
Another Side of Bob Dylan) before Wilson helped usher in the modern age in 1965 with
Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan’s half-electric, half-acoustic tour de force. The year before, Wilson had overdubbed a band onto three of Dylan’s older songs, including “House of the Rising Sun,” but the sound didn’t work. On
Bringing It All Back Home, Wilson got it right, bringing in a band of electric guitarists, a couple of bassists (including Bill Lee, director Spike Lee’s father), and a drummer. The result was Dylan’s first modern masterpiece, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” whose frantic, lurching bluesy vibe would set the tone for the rest of the sixties. You can actually hear Wilson at the beginning of another song on the album, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” in which Dylan makes a false start, stops, starts laughing, and is joined by a laughing Wilson; after a few seconds you can hear Wilson say, “Wait a minute now. Okay, take two.” Then the band kicks in. As a listener, it sounds like you’ve been let in on a secret: Oh, so
that’s the way they make records.
Wilson signed or produced others at Columbia, including Tim Hardin, Pete Seeger, and Dion. His biggest hit, though, came in a bizarre, roundabout fashion when he recorded a young duo called Simon and Garfunkel. At first the result was a mopey acoustic album called
Wednesday Morning 3 AM that sold terribly. Garfunkel went back to school while Simon moved to England. But in the meantime, a song from the album, “The Sounds of Silence,” was receiving airplay in Florida and Boston, and Wilson sensed an opportunity. He knew what a good rock band could do to a song and brought in some musicians—including a couple he had used to back up Dylan—to do overdubs. Columbia released the new version as a single—and it became a hit, climbing to number one by the end of 1965. Simon and Garfunkel reunited, folk rock was born, and Wilson was now a kingmaker.
In early 1966 Wilson left Columbia and took a job as head of A&R at Verve/MGM records. One of the first groups he signed was the Mothers of Invention, a gang of weirdos led by Frank Zappa who were fusing blues and psychedelia, jazz and noise, rock and the absurd into something altogether new. Wilson liked their sound so much that he demanded $21,000 from the label to make
Freak Out!, the band’s first album (which was actually two LPs), a staggering sum in the mid-sixties. “Tom Wilson was a great guy,” Zappa later said. “He had vision, you know? And he really stood by us.” Wilson wound up producing their second album too.
Around this time he was also trying to figure out how to sign the Velvet Underground. He’d seen them play in a New York club and liked their provocative mix of melody and noise. He had even talked with band members Lou Reed and John Cale about recording for Columbia a year before. Wilson convinced the band to sign to Verve, because, in guitarist Sterling Morrison’s words, he said that “at Verve we could do anything we wanted. And he was right.” The band had already recorded most of its debut album,
The Velvet Underground and Nico, and after signing with Wilson, MGM gave band members money to re-record three songs, including “Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin,” and “Venus in Furs.” In addition, Wilson took them into the studio and recorded the album’s sublime opener, “Sunday Morning.” Wilson was in the studio for the entirety of the band’s second album, the chaotic masterpiece
White Light/White Heat, in 1967, where he sat back and let the band do what it did best. John Cale later said to the authors of Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story, “The band never again had as good a producer as Tom Wilson.”
