Being of the eternally curious persuasion, the joy of writing these blogs, apart from the often-wonderful feedback they get, is the fact that I can write about someone who intrigues me and learn as I do so. This week’s blog is such a case in point. I first saw Tom Wilson in the producer’s booth working on a Bob Dylan album and made a mental note to find out more. He then popped up again recently on a Velvet Underground doc. and that was a timely reminder he was due the Speakeasy treatment.

He was born Thomas Blanchard Wilson Jr. in March 1931 (some say 1933) in Waco Texas. Mother was Fannie and Father was Tomas Snr. a former principal at A. J. Moore High School. His grandfather was Bertrus T. Wilson, also a one-time headmaster at the school, who subsequently made his fortune with a rug laundry business.

A bright child, Tom was educated naturally enough at A.J. Moore and then at Fisk University, a private black school in Nashville. After a move to Boston, he enrolled at Harvard. A lover of music from a young age, he founded the Harvard Jazz Society and also worked at the local radio station WHRB. After graduating in 1954 with a degree in economics and political sciences, he started Transition Pre Recorded Tapes Inc. with the aim to produce live recordings of folk, jazz and classical musicians, many of whom he had discovered on his visits to various music venues throughout the area.

The first album he released on Transition in March 1955, was by Herb Pomeroy and recorded at The Stable, a venue which was part of the jazz club, The Jazz Workshop. Wilson also wrote the sleeve notes

‘In its earliest days, the Stable drew almost all its audience support from the musicians themselves. However, after two or three months of operation, manager Dick O’Donnell’s dark horse paid off. The crowds began to come, students from Harvard and Boston University, young and old fans from Roxbury, Newton, and Boston proper. A no-cover, no-minimum policy, half a buck drink, and a bandstand open to all competent performers, have made the Stable one of Boston’s most attractive music clubs.’

Wilson had developed a good eye for spotting talent before they went mainstream, such as Sun Ra who was unknown at the time of Wilson working with him on his first album, Jazz by Sun Ra. Then came Cecil Taylor’s debut Jazz Advance. Wilson was enjoying his work, but it wasn’t proving to be very rewarding, financially.

So, after releasing in excess of 30 albums, he sold most of Transition catalogue to Blue Note Records in 1959, and began work as the jazz A&R man at United Artists and there he had the opportunity to develop the careers of Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor.  Columbia Records then came calling in 1963, and he picked up a job as an in- house producer. One of his first assignments was with Bob Dylan, after his previous producer, the legend that was John Hammond, clashed repeatedly with Bob’s manager, Albert Grossman, and was replaced. Tom stepped in and finished off what was to become the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. 

Upon first meeting Dylan, Wilson had been immediately blown away by the lyrics of the young singer/songwriter and admitted later that at the time, he didn’t even like folk music. Working with Dylan had changed that. 

‘I was flabbergasted. I said to Albert Grossman, who was there in the studio, I said, ‘if you put some background to this you might have a white Ray Charles with a message.’

Bob and Tom then teamed up again in 1965 on Bringing It All Back Home, which contained songs like Subterranean Homesick Blues and Maggie’s Farm.

Dylan –  ‘He (Wilson) brought in musicians like Bobby Gregg and Paul Griffin to play with me, Those guys were first class, they had insight into what I was about. Most studio musicians had no idea, they hadn’t listened to folk music or blues or anything like that.’

Wilson – ‘My main difficulty has been pounding mike technique into him. He used to get excited and move around a lot and then lean in too far, so that the mike popped. Aside from that, my basic problem with him has been to create the kind of setting in which he’s relaxed. For instance, if that screen should bother him, I’d take it away, even if we have to lose a little quality in the sound. 

With Dylan, you have to take what you can get.’

They then began work on Highway 61 Revisited and in particular the song Like a Rolling Stone. Wilson being good friends with guitarist Al Kooper, had invited him in to be part of the session.

This from Al Kooper’s memoir ‘Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards’  – ‘Tom  had asked Kooper to maybe add some guitar. (but) With guitars were all covered, Kooper sat at the organ and opened up on a riff. 

‘Turn up the organ,” Dylan ordered Wilson during playback. ‘But he’s not an organ player, ‘Wilson replied. In Kooper’s memory, Dylan shot back ‘turn it up anyway,’

The organ riff that Kooper had laid down – almost as a case of ‘how about this?’ – fitted perfectly and instantly recognisable to this day.

Despite its later success as a single, Wilson and Dylan never worked together again after that day’s session. Dylan never fully explained the whys and wherefores of it all.

‘All I know is that I was out recording one day, and Tom had always been there — I had no reason to think he wasn’t going to be there — and I looked up one day and Bob (Johnson) was there.

Years later Dylan was asked to comment by Rolling Stone magazine on Wilson’s later assertion, that he gave Dylan the rock ‘n’ roll sound, Bob replied…

‘Did he say that? Well, if he said it . . . more power to him. He did to a certain extent. That is true. He did. He had a sound in mind.’

With it being time to move on,  Wilson worked with Simon and Garfunkel in late 1964 . He laid guitars and drums onto the existing acoustic recording of Sound of Silence and a number one record was the result.

‘I took Dylan’s backing band and went and overdubbed it, everything, on my own, cause they, Simon and Garfunkel, weren’t around – they’d taken off after the record hadn’t done anything.’

Tom Wilson was on the move again soon after, this time pitching up at MGM / Verve records and signed, somewhat surprisingly,  both The Mothers of Invention and the Velvet Underground. He would  also work later with Eric Burdon and The Animals.

‘After you’ve worked with an ‘Arkestra’ leader – Sun Ra – who claimed to be from Saturn,  Andy Warhol’s junkies aren’t going to freak you out.’

Frank Zappa, of the Mothers of Invention –
‘Tom Wilson was a great guy. He had a fascinating ability to read The Wall Street Journal, have a blonde sitting on his lap, and tell the engineer to add more compression to the vocal all at the same time. But by the time we started working on our third album, he was not talking to the engineer as much and talking to the blonde a little bit more, and so I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just let me produce this? I know you have other things on your mind.

We’re Only in It for the Money was the first album that I produced. He produced the first two, Freak Out and Absolutely Free.’

With the Velvet Underground, Tom officially produced the track Sunday Morning on their first album The Velvet Underground & Nico. Andy Warhol was named as producer, though and it has been long suspected Tom Wilson did much more than what he was credited for.

John Cale – ‘The band never again had as good a producer as Tom Wilson. Andy Warhol didn’t do anything.

By the time of the follow up White Light/White Heat, Tom was very firmly in the producer’s chair and for  Nico’s first solo album Chelsea Girl in 1967 too.

In 1968, Wilson had produced 8 of the top 100 albums in the previous 12 months with acts ranging from The Animals to The Blues Project to Hugh Masekela to Soft Machine to Dion and The Fraternity of Men. He then left MGM/Verve in 1969 to set up his own independent production and A&R company.

‘You know why I went independent? Because I got tired of making money for millionaires who didn’t even bother to send me a Christmas card. I discovered if you are honest, you get a lot further. A guy’s not going to respect you if you don’t fight for what you think you are worth. I’m expending all this effort so that I can sit back in old age, remembering how little I missed.’

Sadly within 10 years of saying that, he was dead. He died aged 47, from a fatal heart attack brought on by the inherited disorder Marfan Syndrome in 1978.

He was laid to rest at Doris Miller Memorial Park, named after the World War II hero who also attended A.J. Moore. He was  buried there next to his parents.

Jeff Gold, Warner Brothers – ‘It was unfathomable for an African-American guy at that time to sign acts like the Mothers and the Velvets and be Dylan’s producer. No one had done anything like that. And Tom did it again and again.’

Marshall Crenshaw, musician – ‘Tom Wilson is really a singular figure in popular music history who shifted the landscape in so many ways during his time. If you look at the bullet points of his legacy, it’s remarkable. The synergy between him and Bob Dylan – you can’t overstate how important that was to popular music in the 60s, which was a time when music really was a driver of social change. Releasing the first records by Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor on his label back in the 50s set off something that still resonates and reverberates. I think that Wilson’s agenda was to try and raise the consciousness of popular culture, and that we have to credit him in the here and now for doing that.’

Irwin Chisud, journalist – ‘Tom Wilson straddled the post-war racial divide in a singular way. He was ambitious. If there was an advantage in being ‘authentically’ black, he was a brother. If there was an advantage in being ‘inauthentically’ black (i.e., sympathetically white), he pivoted. If it would get him a gig, a client, a pay check, or laid, he had chameleonic superpowers. He kept people guessing. I suspect that he had, in his self-determinative way, transcended race, that ultimately, he wasn’t interested in being a musical Jackie Robinson as much as he was interested in being Tom Wilson. If race was an issue, it was your issue. If colour was a problem, it was your problem. If he didn’t cling to a community, not his concern. Tom had work to do, and no one – and no racial barrier – was going to get in his way.
A Black man in a predominantly white rock ‘n’ roll world, he challenged the status quo in every way possible, birthing some of the era’s most ground-breaking sounds.’

Last word to the man himself –  ‘I only think in terms of race when I come out of a big meeting and some guy making $30 a week in the stock room gets the cab that won’t stop for me.’

 

The Mumper of SE5

Read The Mumper’s other weekly musings on ‘The Speakeasy’ blog page

 

 

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