For any Tom Wilson aficionado, their introduction to the man was likely seeing his name printed on their favorite album sleeve. Others might have caught a glimpse of Wilson in grainy black and white footage, working with their favorite musician. For the curious, information on Wilson might have been found in a few wistful recollections from an iconic performer, often buried toward the end of a long interview. Until now, Wilson’s life and accomplishments had drifted into a limbo of forgotten liner notes. Parisian publisher and filmmaker Anaïs Ngbanzo has rectified this with Everybody’s Head Is Open to Sound: Writings on Tom Wilson — a collection of essays that provides a pithy and overdue portrait of one of America’s most influential but enigmatic musical figures.
Born in 1931, the African American Wilson grew up in the segregated South of Waco, Texas. After graduating from Harvard University with a degree in economics, Wilson made a name for himself with his modestly successful jazz label, Transition Records. He was inspired by the artistic potential of 33 rpm records, which had more playing time than the old 78 shellac discs or 45 singles, allowing him to capture the longer improvisational performances crucial to the more outré jazz he admired. At Transition, he produced over a dozen records, including the debuts of Sun Ra, Donald Byrd, and Cecil Taylor. With a reputation as a talented promoter and producer, Wilson was hired as an A&R man for Columbia Records, and produced pivotal albums by Bob Dylan, which would be followed in an astonishingly few years by a panoply of breakthrough artists at other labels. Ngbanzo wisely recruited different writers to handle the numerous genres Wilson mastered over the course of his career. Richie Unterberger’s chapter, “The Columbia Years,” attempts to piece together Wilson’s influence on Dylan’s pivotal shift from folk to electric rock and roll. At Columbia, Wilson was assigned to produce Dylan in the summer of 1964. The resulting album, Another Side of Bob Dylan — Wilson came up with the title — marked a transition from folk standards and protest songs to more personal and original lyrics. Shortly thereafter, Dylan charged Wilson with assembling his first backing band. Wilson, giddy at the potential he saw in “a white Ray Charles with a message,” produced Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, followed by Highway 61 Revisited, which included the high-octane single, “Like a Rolling Stone.” That genre-melting, six-minute song was so unprecedented in its sound and length that Wilson spread it over two sides of the promotional single to entice radio airplay. Unterberger admits that although he was forced to rely on speculation and secondhand accounts for the details, the anecdotes all trend in a similar direction: Wilson was shepherding Dylan both sonically and professionally through a singular moment of artistic growth.
Throughout the 1960s, Wilson continued to help capture musicians’ sonic and conceptual ambitions in the medium of rock ’n’ roll. He produced iconic records by the Animals, the Blues Project, and — at the behest of the label — added electrified instrumentation to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” As his stature within the music industry grew, Wilson used his position to surface radical and subversive artists of the emerging counterculture — culminating in signing and producing the debuts and early records of the Velvet Underground, Nico (both with the Velvets and solo), and Frank Zappa’s the Mothers of Invention, for Verve/MGM.
“I haven’t felt comfortable in a studio since I worked with Tom Wilson,” Bob Dylan said in a 1978 interview.
Wolfram Knauer’s essays, “Tom Wilson and Jazz Part I” and “Part II,” dedicated to Wilson’s formative years founding his own jazz label, are particularly revelatory, as they set the blueprint for his subsequent success. Knauer writes, “Wilson saw jazz as communal music and the producer as documentarian, perhaps even as enabler of new communities.” Wilson’s zeal for capturing free jazz on records led to his deep conviction in the value of improvisation and a willingness to let artists fulfill their most uncompromising vision. A frequent hallmark of Tom Wilson’s later rock albums’ production was allowing his artists to fill a whole side of their LP with a single improvisation, such as the Velvet Underground’s Sister Ray, or an experimental song-suite, like the Mothers of Invention’s “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.” This successful management of artistic innovation while considering practicalities made Wilson an ideal intermediary between artist, label, and audience.
By the time he was hired as an A&R man at Columbia, Wilson had keenly recognized that the younger generations had shifted their attention from jazz to rock. After hearing Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention perform “Trouble Every Day,” their song about the Watts Riot of 1965, Wilson was ecstatic at signing what he called “the ugliest White blues band in all of Southern California.”
Rockers like the Mothers and Dylan brought new dynamics, as Unterberger elaborates: “The artist was not only exerting more of a voice in the studio, but becoming a collaborator rather than an employee, even starting to instruct the producer, rather than taking the producer’s instruction.” Pacôme Thiellement notes in his essay “‘A Great Guy’: Tom Wilson for Frank Zappa” that Wilson is listed twice on Zappa’s album sleeve, both as producer and as an influence. This level of reverence and gratitude is echoed by every artist quoted in the book.
Throughout the various essays, Wilson consistently emerges as a charismatic, relaxed, affable, and funny presence in the studio. “I haven’t felt comfortable in a studio since I worked with Tom Wilson,” Bob Dylan said in a 1978 interview. Everybody’s Head Is Open to Sound recounts similar reminisces from the likes of Zappa, John Cale, Lou Reed, and Jackson Browne. The collection ends with a 1968 New York Times magazine cover story on Wilson, in which writer Ann Geracimos describes him as “always genial, graceful, and gives the impression, on the surface, of being entirely relaxed.” These noticeable parallels to Barack Obama are made explicit by Thiellement, who paraphrases a Frank Zappa interview in 1968, where Zappa “seems to think that Wilson should make a presidential bid in 1972 — that the U.S. population was ready to vote for a Black man.”
This makes Wilson’s early death all the more frustrating (he died in 1978, at age 47, of a heart attack). What other talent might Wilson have discovered? How high would he have risen in the music industry, or perhaps even politics? Would Wilson have focused on realizing his own creative projects? As Ngbanzo unearths, Wilson developed plans for a Stanley Kubrick–directed rhythm and blues opera that “wove together Plato’s allegory of Atlantis with African American history.”
Wilson’s taste for substances and womanizing are peppered throughout the essays, yet any connection to how they might have impacted his creative life or perhaps even his health are left unexplored. Ngbanzo is clear about her intentions to “avoid the conventional biography format and instead … focus on Wilson’s achievements.” But this avoidance of the thornier qualities of Wilson’s can leave a reader inferring the worst about his dwindling productivity and early death, in the 1970s.
While Everybody’s Head might occasionally veer into hagiography by omission, Wilson’s pivotal role in midwifing the music and careers of some of the most iconic, influential, and difficult artists of his era is undeniable. Ngbanzo’s collection scrapes up every available detail in an attempt to flesh out Wilson’s enigmatic presence, though those details are scant compared to the voluminous information available on Wilson’s discography. Yet the book makes a compelling case that this is a byproduct of his temperate demeanor and professionalism, not of any insignificance. All of the essays reinforce Wilson’s passion for new music and the technology required to capture it. This, coupled with a seeming imperviousness to the pressures of the music business, helped expand the heads of perhaps every musician, artist, and record buyer during his lifetime, and ours. While recording Dylan, Wilson summarized his ethos, “You have to learn to be as free on this side of the glass as he is out there.” ❖
Billy Jacobs is a painter living and working in New York City. A self-described Tom Wilson aficionado, Jacobs’ paintings often depict the forgotten, obscure, or undervalued figures of American social and political history.