The Man Who Could Beat Spector: The Curious Case of Tom Wilson (pt. 1)
The producer responsible for the greatest rock & roll single is still a mystery nearly six decades later…
Producer Tom Wilson at Motown, mid-seventies. Photo uncredited.
Words by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
The music producer who led at least one genius songwriter, (it takes genius to recognize genius!) and some of the greatest recording artists to the threshold of their imagination; the visionary who steered folk into the center lane of pop, overseeing Bob Dylan and Paul Simon’s traumatic metamorphosis into rock & roll - was a Black Republican man from Waco, Texas with an ear to the ground and a hand on the heart - counting the beats in between the imagination and the mind. His name was Tom Wilson. So why don’t you know who he is? (You know the answer.)
Mysteries are important. Without them the brain cannot feel itself. Problems create work for the brain, sometimes death. Mysteries keep us searching. Like love. And like love, they are rarely understood. Even when solved.
American record-music producer Tom Wilson was one of those mysteries. But he was a created mystery that could be a more palatable way the “show-biz folks” - a euphemism for the well-heeled gangsters who control Black peoples’ position in the halls of western culture - could regard a lone Black man as “too extraordinary.” The establishment doesn’t fear uprisings. They fear brilliant individuals they have no control over. Wilson was both feared and repressed. A mystery to us now as a result of his enormously impactful sonic abilities. A mystery to us now as a result of erasure. In another world that is considered homicide. Not merely a crime, but a sin.
God, stand up for the Erased.
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INVISIBLE OR FORSAKEN?
Ignore: Refuse to take notice of.
Invisible: Incapable of being seen.
Recording history: “Like a Rolling Stone” session, June 1965. L-R: Engineer Roy Halee, Tom Wilson, tape operator Pete Dauria (in the back), manager Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan.
There’s an obsession that our current age has with the idea of wanting to be seen and to be acknowledged by the white establishment, furthering the colonized mind’s definition of success or importance: are you on the culture’s radar? Meaning are you in good graces with the white people who decide what is or what is not important? The current trend amongst millennial activists and “creatives” (an abysmal term) is to register within the cornea - the retina - of a white racist world, they want to be seen by the same people who stepped on them.
I’ve always had a problem with this.
We want to be recognized by the proprietors of cultural lynching (and that’s being generous) the racism that exists squarely in the arts, academia, athletics, and entertainment. It then extends into activism, science, etc.
The legacy of racism in rock and roll automatically implicates Elvis Presley -- he stole from Blacks, all the easy cliches. (Who, in pop music, didn’t steal from Blacks?) And the famous Elvis quote as published by Ebony magazine: “Black people can do nothing but shine my shoes and buy my records” has been deemed fraudulent. I’m sure white folks around him, his own handlers even, may have thought or said just that -- by association he is definitely guilty. By that rationale, then, most of us are. We’re all willing executioners. Especially when it’s my own reflection’s throat I’m being taunted to slice. The culture is in the head of the body.
Moving aside from the six degrees of separation, anyone who believed that Blacks were racing to buy Elvis Presley records is seriously deluded. I have no interest in discussing Elvis but I don’t think he committed any greater transgression than Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones are far more conscientiously racist than Elvis could ever have been. Read the lyrics again to “Brown Sugar” and don’t accept that this is satire or irony or a kind of “protest” against rape and slavery. (Who’s blood flowed at Altamont? Not the descendants of the Daughters of Confederacy!) But that is for another discussion. And another rabbit hole.
In green: Black 18-year-old Meredith Hunter moments before his murder at Rolling Stones 1969 Altamont Concert; he had been stabbed to death and stampeded by Hell’s Angels who were “providing security” for the Rolling Stones. The Stones were singing “Sympathy for the Devil” as Hunter was killed; supposedly, the Stones were not unaware until after the fact. To this day, the Stones, who have amassed a fortune from their interpretations of blues music have never addressed the racism of that incident. [Blurry still from the Maysles’ 1970 documentary of the concert “Gimme Shelter”]
(Check out Lawrence Grobel’s interviews “Conversations with Marlon Brando,” in which Brando winces when Grobel brings up the Rolling Stones; declaring that the Stones aren’t “rock” and that he loved rock music “when the blacks had it” back in the 1950’s.”)
“It’s not that I am invisible to whites. It’s that I am seen quite clearly,” R’aad, a friend wrote to me in 1998, a year prior to his suicide. He was a Black guitarist who went insane at the music industry’s insistence that he “do hip hop and leave guitars to white boys in Michigan.” Cleverly, he retorted: “But all the white boys in Michigan want to be Black. Especially the ones in Detroit!” With a gentle nod later to the proto-punk band Death (the brilliant Hackney brothers), he had a sad but peaceful exit. But this was not before he had to decide whether or not he could contend with people instructing him who he was and what he should play, especially patronizing white liberals, who were not as talented or intelligent about music as he was.
Black Artists who have suffered erasure from the Rock Establishment at various parts of their lives/careers:
(L-R) Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy; Swinging-sixties English-West Indian band The Equals, the psychedelic The Chambers Brothers, English quartet Noir, punks Pure Hell, DC’s contribution to the counterculture, Bad Brains, and the legendary proto-punk band, Death (Hackney Brothers)
Usually when Blacks excel at something that the formal structure of the white ruling class’ system cannot understand, whites issue a nervous laugh brushing off the towering achievement or accomplishment to “luck” or some kind of “latent savage power” that is less about ability and technique than racial proclivity.
To this day, what Paul Robeson suffered through in the modern theater (“Blacks are incapable of learning theatrical technique, they’re not intellectual,” etc.) has become standard thinking concerning individuals as diverse as the sister pawning poems on a napkin in the subway to the nearly astrological genius of Tom Wilson. These types of individuals pose threats to any order that cannot “figure them out.” Author Henry Dumas (killed by cops in the subway) to legendary independent filmmaker Fronza Woods, take your pick. And since they were not weaned on the porridge of “white anointment” or paternalistic mentorship of white power brokers, they are regarded as a menace. For one reason only: they cannot fathom what we did, when we did it, and how good we looked doing it all at the same time. And how dare we possess the class to not complain when abandoned or left out of their books.
Like the Motown bass player on dozens of your favorite recordings: you know his work, you just didn’t know his name. (Paul McCartney himself didn’t learn James Jamerson’s name until the late 1980s!)
Here’s a brief overview of Tom Wilson’s producing triumphs:
● Jazz musician Sun Ra’s first two albums - Sun Ra was arguably the first “self proclaimed” avant-garde futurist artist, declaring his work and ideas not of this world (His band was called “the Arkestra” for goodness sake -- beyond radical for 1957); his Black consciousness and profound acumen for music inspired the architects of bebop to the psychedelic age.
● Cecil Taylor’s debut album -- with hints as to the “free jazz” radical sounds and tones Taylor would take to the piano a little later on.
● Most of Bob Dylan’s second folk album, then third, fourth and fifth studio albums wholly - including the righteously vitriolic protest song “Masters of War” to Dylan’s first rock and roll album,1964’s Bringing it all Back Home where he began shedding his “folk” image, before realizing his magnum opus, “Like a Rolling Stone” -- rock’s great cubistic moment. It was the American response to the British invasion of the Beatles Merseyside sound. And it cemented American rock as a peculiar and dazzling blend of blues, country and urgent lyrics that was almost sacred, if not dangerous.
● Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 debut album and their haunting “Sound of Silence” song which would be their generational declaration and pop intro to the rest of the world. (Mike Nichols couldn’t get the record out of his head when preparing for “The Graduate”). Ironically before Wilson remixed the single in summer of 1965 Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had no intention of remaining a duo, possibly abandoning music altogether.
● The Velvet Underground’s first two albums - the first credited with Andy Warhol (who else has that dubious honor?) - and the second entirely his own, which has become the architect of the punk-art-rock-sound.
● Frank Zappa’s band, Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! Album (which inspired the Beatles as they were developing Sgt. Pepper)
Wilson with Velvet Underground founders John Cale and Lou Reed, after signing them to Verve in 1966: The ultimate maverick producing the ultimate anti-Beatles, Motown and Dylan band...while incorporating aesthetics of all those artists into the menace that became punk and glam rock’s messiah.
The critics or writers who have fawned over any one of the artists listed above or the music they made -- know exactly who he is. And some of them were enormously influential. Power may not necessarily come out of the barrel of a gun, sometimes all it takes is a typewriter and a phone call.
He definitely had his finger on the pulse of something, no? When asked if Tom Wilson did, in fact, bear responsibility for Bob Dylan going electric and attaining his rock sound, Dylan conceded “He did to a certain extent. That is true. He did. He had a sound in mind.” Again, the keyword is sound. Floored by Dylan’s songwriting in 1962- and those haunting masterful lyrics - Wilson even told Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager, supposedly suspicious of Wilson’s talent, that if he could find the right musical arrangements or backing, Dylan would be a “white Ray Charles, with a message.”
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I am not the only one who is aware of Wilson’s enormous influence and contribution. The dawn of his public recognition in the music trades was percolating by the late sixties. Certainly since Dylan’s own 1969 acknowledgment of Wilson’s contribution (in an interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner), the elephant in the room was referenced. However, Rolling Stone never did a full issue devoted to him. Why? That’s obscene! And post-1970 the establishment must have been at pains to figure out what to do, how to “keep him dead.” Because the dead - no matter who they are - majestic elephants and mysterious geniuses - are not a threat. So, when the person’s contributions have re-entered consciousness, the revenge is to at least minimize their contribution.
The past decade alone, however, has seen numerous articles and even musicologist Irwin Chusid’s wonderful 2013 website devoted to the man’s accomplishments. And yet knowing his work and its various dimensions, there is a loneliness regarding Wilson and his cryptically overwhelming influence. You feel as if you have encountered a secret that everyone knows, but none dare to admit. And you have. Conspiracies begin to formulate in your head. And you realize, well just cause ya ain’t paranoid don’t mean no one’s not after ya, right?
Ishmael Reed often iterates that Black people have to be paranoid to survive. Nothing prepares one for the atrocious behavior of those who “cover up” the crime of dwindling and exiling an artist’s influence, contributions, and impression left behind. Especially if the distinct forensics are cultural landmarks recognized by everyone. The only thing that should recede as you age is your hairline. Recognition of your contributions should advance.
With Pianist Wynton Kelly and saxophonist Eddie Harris, circa 1964 [Photo: Don Hunstein]
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Orson Welles’ 1973 devil-may-care classic F For Fake is a cinematic essay that spoke to the power of art in culture and how the work itself may be more important than the identity of its creators.
Feeling that the beauty of the famous Chartres Cathedral in northern France and its unknown artisans and architects epitomized this sentiment, Orson Welles wrote and delivered one of the greatest eulogies ever:
“Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it’s without a signature. Chartres: A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man…but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life. We’re going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much."
Can you hear the church bells peal?
Any maligned or unacknowledged artist is sad, but it is not catastrophic when the name or history of the person has not been notated or recorded due to the winds of time or ravaged memories. It’s only when a person from an oppressed group gets eradicated from the conquerors’-initiated chain of custody, their contributions trivialized, their brilliance downplayed -- all due to their ancestry. What’s in a name? Everything. And nothing.
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Tom Wilson is not invisible. You can’t erase something that’s not there. The circumstances surrounding The Beatles’ Let it Be recording sessions in January 1969 has been masterfully de-mystified by Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary. One could only speculate what was occurring in Studio A at Columbia Records, June 15, 1965 in NYC as Dylan and Wilson hoped that the birth of Dylan’s new sound would arrive unscathed.
The insanity (and sheer racism) to declare that Blacks have no authority in rock and roll despite the fact that everyone knows Blacks created it is not limited to the lie that Jimi Hendrix was a one-off but prevalent in the overall mythology and creation of the rock rebellion and the birth of its vinyl expression. White rock conservators simply cannot admit that the music they so cherish and love would be nothing without Black artists. In the future they will become like acting conservatories are today: maintained by delusional white people pining for the halcyon days of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, hanging on to the last semblance of power they have in some way. Classical drama teachers are not unlike the hallucinatory French colonialists in Apocalypse Now, ignorant of colonialism's end. They must hang on, “One day...the South is gonna rise again.” (Sorry, wrong continent). Didn’t Francis Ford Coppola once state that the filmmaker is the last “dictator” on the planet? It’s an interesting word to use and a very insightful remark. What power is the filmmaker in fear of losing?
The work Black artists create is often and has always, unfortunately, been arrested and homogenized, becoming the frame everybody has entered into - in which they define themselves. The majority of the western world seeks to be a picture in that frame, the rest of us abscond from being framed at all! Rock & roll is mirror, church, and analyst's office. Creatures from all walks of life use it to define who or what they are. Regardless if they are converts to the music or not.
That Tom Wilson entered the pop music industry and brought his own perceptions and ideas that may or may not have been - in part - genetically instilled in him by birth (if trauma can be passed down and shared throughout the tribe why not exultation?) is not the point. It’s that Wilson carried his own unshakeable approach to this music and recording its sound.
The rise of the recording artist and the engineering of songs became a whole new, exclusive, elite art form -- very much on par with the role of the film director, 1920s onward. To be a filmmaker or music producer was once an extremely elite position held by - usually very - learned wealthy white men with a knack for the visual or aural; the dramatic and the musical. Any Black person who held those positions, professionally, prior to 1970 was not only a curiosity but tough as nails. (And no, there were no safe spaces to flee to back then.) Like in finance or medicine Blacks who could call shots in culture had to be confident in addition to being highly talented individuals.
So confident you knew you were better than Beethoven simply because the rock prophet himself, Chuck Berry, told him to roll over, get out the driver’s seat, he was taking over--akin to saying: “White world, your time is up.” He’d rather ask for forgiveness, then permission. As John McTernan wrote in 2017 after Berry’s death at 90: “...watch (Chuck) Berry in 1958 playing ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and you see a man who knows he has invented the modern world and loves it.
Chuck Berry - the King of Rock & Roll, circa 1980.
Black lives matter if only because we’re the foundation of all that’s affirming in an inter-racial Western culture. We’ve always mattered to ourselves so “BLM” is freakish in conjunction with the past. It helps the “woke” generation hopefully to seem themselves today, but I often wonder if by being worried about the oppressor’s gaze so much -- we forget ourselves or our neighbors who are being kicked. They don’t have a need to profess to their rapists that they matter. They don’t care what they think anymore than the Aztecs cared about Cortes. Black people have always outraged and stumped their oppressors because for some reason they always regarded themselves as “special.” Chuck Berry KNEW he mattered. He didn’t wait to have someone tell him so. The militancy of rock & roll is astounding. Up to Tupac Shakur, we were dangerous and interesting, at least culturally. The problem was the white establishment not being comfortable with this. Remember how Tommy Hilfiger and Donna Karan were perplexed how Black kids in ghettos could relate to the style and patterns of these designers for the Manhattan elite? When you are not “figured out” or under the thumb of white rule, you become a target. Anomalies to the Colonialist rule book signal a red flag and one that moves closer to Defcon 1.
The question is not how or why we do what we do to survive or bury our own or “move on” as they tell the Indian or the newly dispossessed who found their spirits smashed aside a rock in North America—but who white people would be if they didn’t have the mercy and urgency of rock & roll bestowed upon them, soothing the savage inside. Our guitar & voices exceeded the tug of Hitler on white people’s hearts & reshaped consciousness more than cubism. If Beckett, Braque and Picasso were the lions of twentieth century art, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Charlie Parker were its panthers. And if all art breaks down into its own family tree, where would the record producer exist? Like the filmmaker, he is perhaps the most unrecognized contributor to the ritual and soundtrack of our lives. Phil Spector gave you your first kiss, Wilson led you through the divorce. He gave you the sound of existential crisis or the fear of confronting your boss on Monday morning. Razor sharp, a new angular world-view...Spector gave baby-boomers their adolescence, Wilson gave them adulthood. Both gave a whole new sense of freedom.
Berry Gordy. Terry Melcher. Nile Rodgers. Tony Visconti. Phil Spector. George Martin. Paul Rothchild. Quincy Jones. Jerry Wexler. Norman Whitfield. Bob Johnston. Rick Rubin. Dr. Dre. Just a few of the greatest pop music producers ever. But let’s go further.
The same way some of our greatest Hollywood directors had an antagonistic relationship with the brass, some of our most creative professional music producers have been idiosyncratic towards “professional careerism” and were wholly outside the box as well. From Brian Eno to Public Enemy’s The Bomb Squad.
The best music producers are ultimate insiders or ultimate outsiders. Rarely is there an in-between.
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Why haven’t there been anthropological digs into the annals of Wilson’s recording successes, analysis or positing ideas about “why he did this” or “dubbed in that instrument,” or how he might have concluded that Bob Dylan’s voice needed a bed of clamorous sound beneath him in order to bring his “rock” voice to the fore? Why are the punks not debating over whether “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is the first “punk rock” song proper or what kind of brilliance Wilson heard in the early flashes of Sun Ra’s melodic sketches? What is that “formless hunch” as stage director Peter Brook describes it - or zedekoah - that contributes to taking a risk on an artist’s sound or idea?
STAY TUNED for Part II soon…
The Luminal Theater does not own or has licensed any of the images used in this thought piece and is only using them for educational and illuminative purposes.