written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

read part 1 of this article HERE

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THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME

Because of Wilson’s enormous reach, his overwhelming body of work, I am trying to limit this exploration to the more well-known songs and albums Wilson produced.  What is miraculous is that several recordings Tom Wilson commandeered are included in Congress’ National Recording Registry, so why the radio silence on the man who helped redefine the mid-sixties radio sound for America is all the more galling. I would be as brazen as saying that Wilson had as much of an impact on pop music’s sound as Phil Spector did.  If not more -- since a great deal of Wilson’s pop music producing was figuring out how to enable a great deal of poetic lyrics and urgency through melodies initially not even conceived for the airwaves. In the mid-sixties, after the British invasion and the Motown revolution battled out how to create the most interesting pop sonics -- Wilson helped re-contextualize the sound of guitars on pop records.  The acoustic along with an electric, the vamping of jangling electric guitars over keyboards...The architecture of mid-sixties American rock is all there in Like a Rolling Stone and Sound of Silence.  A self-described “psychoanalyst with rhythm” he rabidly did whatever he could for artists and ideas that aroused the hairs on the back of his neck. His talent for being a musical consiglieri or “midwife” for rock and rollers struggling to give birth cannot be overstated.

 As of today, December 1, 2021, Tom Wilson is still not honored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And I don’t recall Dave Chappelle bringing this up when he recently inducted Jay-Z (That would have been a controversial act!) Our country foolishly believes that the reckoning of America’s despicable past can be resolved by patronization, diversity, inclusion, and - at times - the removal of certain statues.  It is also troubling when energy goes into pretending something didn’t happen or fumbling for an award and recognition from the same people who profited from the people responsible for the heinous situation to begin with.

 The question here is a disturbing one:

Why fight for inclusion into what is already a venal world, replete with smoke and mirrors and - for all its supposed noble intentions - a world authored and imagined by Rolling Stone magazine that is nothing but the Mount Rushmore of rock music with the faces of white nobles, lest they are feeling generous and include the Afro-Indian footprints left behind by Hendrix. They would attempt to do so, think twice and then replace Hendrix’s face - gorgeously looming over his left hand with a guitar pick - with Eric Clapton’s. (Napoleon had nothing on the Rock & Roll critical establishment.)

 That Wilson is not included in the Hall of Fame doesn’t shock me at all - what scares me is when filmmakers treat a musical surgeon like Tom Wilson as a fleeting aberration or “a cat who was just there when the wheel went ‘round” as Todd Haynes’ documentary on the Velvet Underground suggests,  

ROCK AND ROLL ON FILM

A lifelong fan of rock & roll and its cinematic expression, the genesis for this entire article was an hour into Todd Haynes’ dreary Velvet Underground documentary.  In all of 15 seconds the impact and legacy of Wilson’s work with the Velvet Underground is declared and then muted.  The band’s multi-instrumentalist John Cale states in the movie: “We got Tom Wilson, who produced Dylan, and things started happening.  Norm Dolph gave Andy $1500...and we were chasing something.” That’s it. What?  Wait, what does that even mean - “chasing something.” 

No context, just an excitable snippet from Cale’s interview and in less than half a minute one of the greatest rock producers is reduced to a manic burp. 

This is not Cale’s fault, mind you, who has always been transparent and vocal about the Velvet Underground’s trajectory and Wilson’s contributions to their first two albums.   How is this even possible?  Isn’t Haynes embarrassed by this very perfunctory passive-aggressive mention and glaring omission of HOW Wilson came to produce the Velvet Underground?  How the hell did a BLACK MAN FROM WACO TEXAS WHO REVOLUTIONIZED FOLK ROCK PRODUCE THE ULTIMATE, DECADENT, PRE-PUNK NEW YORK ROCK BAND IN 1966?

Haynes gives him twenty seconds.  Mind you, this is a feature film by one of our most lauded contemporary filmmakers, a Queer renegade himself, and a passionate “student of film.”  Well, like most students who hate the teacher cause he does know something -- Haynes simply does what most insecure white filmmakers do which is to regard the Black artistic influence in this case as being marginal, almost declaring that this Upper-East-Side-amphetamine fueled-grunge barreling-poetic-garage band would have “made it” anyway. 

The official log-line (promotional description) for the film is:

“The Velvet Underground creates a new sound that changes the world of music, cementing its place as one of rock 'n' roll's most revered bands.”

A new sound.  Yes.  Hmm.  And so how did that come about?  Songwriter Lou Reed and avant-garde John Cale worked intensely developing on the Velvets’ conceptual sound, along with guitarist Morrison and Tucker (one of rock’s underrated drummers herself!) -- endowing popular music with an edge and a mood unlike anything before. Their live jams were one thing, but recordings?  Lou Reed always maintained that the band was one entity in person and another on record. A live group has to be translated somehow. How to transfer the soul of a performance band to recorded data is the producer’s trade, his magic.  John Cale always maintained Wilson loved their dissonant sound and wanted to find a way to capture it on vinyl.  He had no intention of changing them aesthetically.   The trick was how to capture their terrorizing New York louche on tape.  Shouldn’t the documentary have dealt with that just a little? 

That’s not the way to treat a maverick of the sixties sonic revolution. A cultural translator of sorts who sometimes understood the artist’s possibilities aesthetically better than the artist did. The conductor who led two of the most iconic bands of the 1960’s and opposite poles of the counterculture - (they hated each other!) The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa’s The Mothers of Invention - on either coast in 1967 offering America’s only rock band competition to the sonic experimentation of the Beatles. 

With the fiscal clout, spiritual blessings, and incredible cheerleading of pop artist and consumer provocateur Andy Warhol - it was this creative mind who rallied for a band that gave us the most dangerous songs, and albums of the 1960s, their aggressive off-the-cuff sound infusing the musical aesthetics of punk by a decade (the spiritual and theatrical element of punk has already given birth from the campy mania of Little Richard. A Black man pounding the piano, shrieking into a microphone and wearing eye-liner?  That’s punk rock folks.)  And yet, like Richard, the spiritual father of both Jimi Hendrix and Prince, who remains, sadly, an afterthought in rock’s immovable history (even though he taught Paul McCartney how to “scream like a white lady in Church”),  Tom Wilson is dismissed and gets barely 20 seconds in Haynes’ movie. 

It’s not that Tom Wilson’s contribution isn’t explored in the documentary, it’s not about him, it’s about the Velvet Underground.  But one couldn’t possibly honor the Velvets without bowing to the producer who advocated and believed in them.  That would be like discussing the Beatles albums without referencing George Martin!  Andy Warhol was listed as producer on the album only because he was funding them and lending his name for marketing purposes.  He may have been a creative inspiration, but he had neither say or hand in the actual recording, performing, or mixing of the album.  Outside of John Cale and Lou Reed’s requests or directions, Wilson made those decisions. Someone has to! The problem with where we are at with rock and roll history and royalty is that Wilson is still under- acknowledged and completely whitewashed from pop history. Todd Haynes didn’t create this problem. He is just another accomplice in the popular ruling class’ maintenance that Blacks in rock and roll are freak occurrences and if they have influence or made contributions, these are just mere one-offs or the result of simply following someone else’s order. And if they are not - well, their importance can be...erased.

So let me sum up what Haynes, out of some morbid decision, refuses to do:

Contextualize:

●      the impact of The Velvet Underground’s debut 1967 album (with German chanteuse, Nico) which David Fricke wrote “remains a marvel of ferocious eloquence, crude expansive majesty, and subversive accomplishment,” (1995 boxed set liner notes) features rock’s darkest and most sublime from “Heroin” to “Venus In Fears” to Nico’s dirge-like incantations in “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”  With Sterling Morrison’s driving guitar and Maureen Tucker’s haunting throbbing tom-toms, the band sounded the way lead singer Lou Reed wrote -- a glorious celebration of NYC’s underbelly and the counter-Hippies.  The band’s exquisite soft-rock pop number, “Sunday Morning” which lent the album its only commercial track was written and recorded at Wilson’s insistence to counter the dark rawness that pervaded the band’s intimidating sound.

●      The Velvet’s second album - produced entirely by Wilson (Andy Warhol’s name is not credited).  This sophomore record is perhaps the most influential record on the punk rock movement. Ever.   White Light/White Heat is an album that celebrates distortion, the lives of transvestites, and the incredible concrete sharpness that New York punk would be known for.  

 What I just achieved in those two bullet points above is all Haynes had to put forth.  He didn’t want to.

 Because Wilson was such a ladies man, he is often negated by these white suburban hipsters as being a kind of Black “player” just looking for chicks to ball or an imposing personality who was just that: A personality.  That’s another white man euphemism. When you’re difficult and talented as hell, they’ll hate you for sure.  But tall, dark and handsome - and visionary? Shoot, they’ll make sure you never eat if they get frightened.  Or start imagining their lives - wives - as being threatened by such sophistication.  “The wily Negro,” as Wendell Harris brilliantly surmises in Chameleon Street.

While innately appreciating the melodic and traditional possibilities, Wilson had a radical ear and penchant for the strange. He must have sensed the impulse to abscond with tradition when producing the earliest incarnation of Sun Ra, who became one of the ultimate madmen of modern music and a prophet of resistance.  Anyone who even spent more than a few days with Sun Ra creating music was probably prepared for anything after that.  Others may not have seen where the Arkestra was going to go, but I am sure Wilson sensed that Sun Ra’s Arkestra would - like E.T. -  try to “get back home.”   The Black radical imagination and speculative imagination has been healthy amongst Black Americans since the 1800’s according to Afro-Futurist expert and film programmer Floyd Webb.  That radical sounds, a doorway into heaven or hell, yesterday or tomorrow - could be appreciated by an arranger or producer of modern pop music before it was hip to be “far out” was astounding, especially for the well-kept son of an insurance salesmen and librarian, who was not a formal music composer -- but one who possessed enough arranging vision that he could, seemingly, complement and enable any musical composition he connected to.

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Born in Waco, Texas in 1931, Wilson attended Harvard, where he studied economics after attending Fisk University. It was in Massachusetts that the young Republican (he became a Democrat when Kennedy ran for President) formed his own record label with the equivalent of about $5,000 today.  His Transition label was formed with the intent of recording the most progressive jazz at that time in 1955. Wilson has the honor and legacy in fact, alone, for just producing both Sun Ra’s and Cecil Taylor’s first studio album.  Wilson always credited the Harvard New Jazz Society and the WHRB radio station with being the prime influence in helping him achieve success as a music producer.

He was a force to contend with: an Ivy League Black hipster coming out of the gate with his own label, joining the staff of musical behemoths such as Columbia Records, with a keen ear for rock, jazz, and folk despite his initial disinterest in it.

Wilson produced Simon and Garfunkel’s debut - Wednesday Morning 3AM, in March 1964, literally in the midst of Beatlemania.

The album was a critical engagement, but a commercial failure.  However, Wilson knows that “Sound of Silence” - a stirring song with a stripped-down vocal performance - could be a phenomenal rock and roll record and commercial hit with the right backing. After the original “unplugged” folk version is released, Wilson does some ruminating.

Inspired after cutting Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” earlier that summer of 1965 (released a month later), he remixes and overdubs electric instruments and drums onto Silence (with the same musicians he employed on Dylan’s Rolling Stone, mind you) and releases the single in September.  Simon and Garfunkel had no knowledge of Wilson’s decision, Simon is initially incensed...then realizes within months that Simon & Garfunkel are on the charts, competing against the Beatles.  Obscurity is gone. History was written.  If that isn’t enough to give you chills you are not human. It gets better: film director Mike Nichols used the song - both versions - in his 1967 watershed The Graduate.  

That Paul Simon, one never associated with being coy about musical influences - especially music within the Black diaspora - has never directly discussed Wilson, the man who essentially made Simon & Garfunkel, is curious.  You would think of all producers in America he would happily discuss Wilson. What holds him back?  Whereas Dylan has proudly acknowledged and celebrated Wilson’s contributions, Lou Reed has dismissed Wilson, there is very little he has ever said about him.  What is documented, however, is Reed’s pathological self-hatred and innate racism (referring to Dylan as a “pretentious kike” and Donna Summer as “Nigger music”, etc) as evidenced in Howard Sounes’ biography, The Life of Lou Reed: Notes from the Velvet Underground. Reed’s self-satisfying middle-class racism  dressed up as “rebellion” is on par with Joni Mitchell’s elaborate “blackface tourism,” legendary rock critic Lester Bangs’ punk-rock Norman Mailerism (their “White Negro” obsessions), Eric Clapton’s public racist rant in 1976 where he defiled the Black and the brown, inciting support for UK Fascist Enoch Powell or Elvis Costello’s argument with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett in 1979, where for some ungodly reason he shouted that “James Brown is a jive-arsed nigger” and “Ray Charles is a blind, ignorant nigger.”  Make no mistake about it: Hitler didn’t die in his bunker in 1945. He lives on in so many white rock and roll sentiments your head would spin if I added to the litany of human rights transgressions committed not by Henry Kissinger - but those who have made up a healthy portion of rock and roll’s pantheon. (Speaking of Kissinger:  look up Paul Simon’s connection to him and his bizarre political stands during apartheid, disturbingly recounted here by the E Street Band’s Steven Van Zandt.  It is more proof that racism warps not only legislation and the political decisions of America, but its cultural, moral and artistic ones as well.)

An affirming indication of Tom Wilson’s influence and impression on the free-thinking Jewish musical-philosophers of his time like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon is coolly rendered, with more finesse than the actual movie I am afraid to say, in Raoul Peck’ 2017 feature-film Young Karl Marx. Best known for his James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, the powerful drama Lumumba, about the Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba, and the recent HBO docuseries on colonialism Exterminate all the Brutes, the Haitian filmmaker employs “Like a Rolling Stone'' at the end of his own film on Karl Marx, during the closing credits.  It is a masterful choice: he parallels his own contribution to cinema with Wilson’s contribution to music:  both Black men helped usher in a Jewish outsider into the public consciousness. That’s a fierce alignment.  And a remarkable use of the song!  I am not equating Dylan to Marx or Peck to Wilson, it is beyond that.  In these dual examples, Black men with agency were enabling the visions bound up in the mind of two different white Jewish men.  That in itself is a movie premise.

The Outlaw Jews of Rock: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, & Lou Reed.  The triumvirate were arguably the best American rock songwriters of the sixties (alongside Smokey Robinson, Brian Wilson, Carole King, Otis Redding, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and Norman Whitfield) and all three’s pivotal recordings were produced by Tom Wilson.

“Like a Rolling Stone” is “about” a care-free member of the privileged class hitting rock bottom, being dispossessed, with no lighthouse to get back home.  He, or she, or it - are reaping what they have sowed. No salvation. It is a karmic wheel stating:  he that is first shall be last.  And it abounds in terror, lessons, and shifts from mockery of, preaching to, and exorcising all that stems from the gentry’s smug sense of life.  What better rock song for a nod at the spirit of what Marxism hopes to imbue the working man to make real?   Peck’s use of the Bob Dylan-Tom Wilson recording is more revealing than perhaps anyone else’s use of Dylan’s music in contemporary cinema.  This bold stroke gives Martin Scorsese a run for his money. Scorsese's a Dylan fan and like Haynes - willfully neglectful of Wilson’s contributions to music in his own documentary on Dylan,  No Direction Home.  I am shocked no other critics or writers have observed this coup I bring up in the last minutes of Peck’s film about Karl Marx’s union with Friedrich Engels. But works done by black artists, popular or not, do not receive thorough or respectful examinations.  Their works, decisions, choices - especially in pop - are discussed and rated like a High School teacher’s report card:  they make sure you are checking all the boxes and then they do.  God forbid any real sense of thought went into connections or interpretations.  “Like a Rolling Stone,” Greil Marcus wrote “...is a rewrite of the world itself.”  Damn.  But they will say I am clutching at straws in a drink that doesn’t exist.  I will say the drink exists but it never needed straws - as it was devoured, not sipped.  Art can be administered, but rarely served. Its creator erased, but never destroyed.

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Not Your Pre-Viet Nam War Black Republican Sideshow?

But Tom Wilson’s Waco, Texas is not David Koresh’s or the FBI’s

I am the original - Invisible? - Marginal Man

I am the dis-missed

Black Rock Coalition’s Mantra

If they did it to Christ they can do it to you.

Pretending I was not in the room before you

or someone less dangerous entered

Not about better or not; it's about the act of honoring artists dead and alive, those who sparked the fire, and those who live NOW with the embers in full glow.

I wear the disregard the establishment had for me with a badge of honor.

While it could be a creed for all artists out of step with their times, if not slightly before it, these words, co-written by R’aad, the guitarist I mentioned earlier who committed suicide - were invoked at the end of my punk-rock poetry band’s performance Gentrified Minds in 2012.  It was dedicated to Tom Wilson, who, even in his own death, seemed to have caused a cryptic rupture, as if the last three years of his life had to be erased:  his gravestone incorrectly reads “1975.”  He died of a heart-attack in 1978.  He was not even 50 years old.  He was buried next to his parents, not unaware I am sure in this life or beyond, of what their son accomplished on this planet.

Brilliant and singular Black and brown cats are whited out every day. From aviator engineers supported by Howards Hughes (!) like Frank Mann, to people you take for granted, thinking that no one will ever debate facts of the matter. 

Documentary filmmakers, specifically, aware of their cultural power, zeitgeist cache, and influence on the educated elite – often wrestle with how much they want to document (as journalists) or advocate for (as activists) and how their findings can sometimes corroborate or destroy the accepted facts or well-maintained lies of an issue.  Sometimes they just casually reveal what people have tried to ignore or choose to not want to admit.  And while mainstream “bio-pics” don’t ever seem to give justice to the person being demonstratively mythologized, vital documentaries about unique human beings or unreconciled aspects of culture always have more promise of cutting through.  I am encouraged to note that there are artists, musicologists, and cultural historians keenly interested in Tom Wilson’s legacy and have been for years.  Texas Monthly published a wonderful article by Michael Hall in 2014 who hipped me to musician Marshall Crenshaw’s passion project - a feature documentary on Tom Wilson. Crenshaw has worked ceaselessly with his director Sacha Jenkins and editor Donna McLeer collating footage, archival material, audio, and interviews for the past several years to get at the heart of who Tom Wilson is, what his midas touch was all about.  The project shows great promise and will definitely be on The Luminal’s radar.

Also, in 2020, Zach Burke presented an in-depth podcast series on Tom Wilson as part of his Rogue Media Network. Crenshaw did a special episode last year to commemorate what would have been Wilson’s 91st birthday. Crenshaw, Burke, Hall, - bound together by Irwin Chusid’s anchoring website are disciples sharing, with the passion of prophets,  the impact and importance of Wilson.  Their contributions in this great fight are important to acknowledge. I applaud their scholarship and the insights they have brought into the labyrinthine autopsy on Wilson's life-work. 

 The rock and roll establishment should pay more attention to them and the truths they are setting forth. In particular, Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, should be enabling these independent efforts. We don’t have enough literature or films that chart the work and the creative decisions of our serious Black American artists who pull the strings, conduct, and sometimes helm the ship themselves when no one is looking.  They do this for the art, their collaborators, clients, themselves.  Without flash, ostentation, or a need to wave their hands in the air so that the helicopters can see them.  Sometimes, the best coaches are the ones who never acknowledge the press or yell at the players.  We are still catching up to these types of creative minds. We need more cinema in general that considers all of this. 

With that said, I do thoroughly respect the way Peter Jackson allows the work and contribution of Billy Preston to the Beatles music in 1969 to be on full display in his documentary.  However, explicitness means nothing in this society as far as championing the humanity or the cultural contributions of Black people. Forget about philosophy and science:  pop art is the problem - rock & roll and movies, perhaps the white man’s last sigh, will always guard the castle.  In a hundred years some gorgon will figure out how to remove Billy Preston from the Let it Be album altogether. Just you wait. We are not out of the woods yet.

The record is skipping.  Goodnight.

“Tom was a jazz guy, produced a lot of jazz records, including Sun Ra…Tom was Harvard-educated but he was street-wise too. When I met him he was mostly into off-beat jazz but he had a sincere enthusiasm for anything I wanted to do and he brought in musicians [Bobby Gregg and Paul Griffin]...that had insight into what I was about. I think working with me opened up Tom’s world too, because after working with me he started recording groups like the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention.  Tom was a genuinely good guy and he was very supportive.”

-        Bob Dylan’s website, 2017

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Being that this is primarily a Black film publication, I have focused primarily on Wilson’s revolutionary contributions solely to rock and roll through a radical lens intersecting race, art, and American politics as well as how filmmakers, specifically, have interpreted or used the work he had a hand in creating.  I have mentioned Wilson’s work with Sun Ra for greater context musically, but for practical reasons had no time to mine the music he did with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, the Animals, the jazz he did with Donald Byrd or John Coltrane, Pete Seeger’s live performances…the list is endless.  What I conclude about Wilson’s style as a producer is that he seemed to always be able to find the melodic within the dissonant, find ways of relaying softness, even beauty, within sounds or voices that on the surface eclipse all traditional notions of elegance and the converse is also true: where the beauty was - he could gently give it some edges. By rounding out things or sharpening them, one is constantly preparing the future – but also for the conduits to our souls: encouraging us, when he is successful, to hear what we may have never considered without his ears. 

For an overview of some of the music Tom Wilson produced, I suggest listening to the Spotify playlist Tom Wilson and highly suggest Irwin Chusid’s website https://www.producertomwilson.com/ for additional information, facts and titles of works produced by Wilson.

Additional links to note:

Rolling Stone magazine:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/remembering-bob-dylan-and-velvet-undergrounds-pioneering-producer-43187/

Hall’s 2014 article:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-greatest-music-producer-youve-never-heard-of-is/

 All Don Hunstein photos © Sony Music Entertainment

 Phyllis Smith photos courtesy Phyllis Smith