They may seem like the typical simiesos chest blows of the musical journalist determined to celebrate a finding: legendary producer today forgotten, facilitator of masterpieces, mysterious man of the rock of the rock of the prodigious decade, blah blah blah … it turns out that this character deliberately avoided its mythification, may not even value its work. Unlike a Phil Spector, there are no books on Tom Wilson’s musical career, he has not yet been subject to documentaries. It is also true that he did not have a unique sound: complicit of avant -garde jazz, defining folk-rockpart of different proposals.
At Harvard University, Wilson used his contacts and lip to get the financing of a stamp consecrated to “advanced jazz”, Transition Records. Indeed, there Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra debuted and even dealt with John Coltrane; As it was to fear, the accounts did not come out. It lasted two years, from 1955 to 1957, and Wilson extracted professional lessons. From then on, it worked as a template producer, for established records.
Another teaching: the convenience of entering the pop business. Sunly for a Texan black, in 1964 he was in the whitest and most Anglo -Saxon company, Columbia Records, in charge of the folk recordings of the Irish Condy Brothers or a rising singer -songwriter, Bob Dylan. He wanted to recover the rock pulse from his beginnings and Wilson knew how to wrap him with a band of effective musicians in the album Bringing It All Back Home and in the cataclysmic subject Like a Rolling Stone. That same year, added electric background to The Sounds of Silenceby Simon & Garfunkel. It is supposed to notify the artists, who decided not to protest when, by surprise, they were seen in No. 1 of the American lists.
With that curriculum – and also presented a respected radio program – he got a better contract with MGM, a powerful record that needed renewal. He worked with artists from the house as Animals or The Blues Project. As Cazatalentos, it was eclectic: he signed bands as incompatible with each other as the New Yorkers The Velvet Underground and the Californians The Mothers of Invention. With the latter he demonstrated waist: he believed they were a simple group of blues-rock, But its leader, Frank Zappa, wanted to break molds.
Flexibility and perhaps some neglect. Witnesses of his 1967-1968 sessions speak of an imperturbable producer, who let him do while reading the Wall Street Journal Or he talked to his bag agent. It happens that the most exotic of Tom Wilson was not the color of his skin in the pale world of rock. His ideology was shocking in such a medium cool: Republican since his student years, he did not hide that he loved to speculate his money.
And he used to win in the parquet. In the seventies, he abandoned the first fighting line, he disregarded the war between ambitious artists and cautious labels. He managed musical businesses, invested at the Record Plant studio. I suspect that he did not believe that his previous tasks were something relevant. Such was my experience: through the New York office of CBS, I got his address. I wrote him extolling his greatness and asking some questions about his work as a producer. He did not respond and I could not insist: a heart attack knocked him down in 1978.