feature: “the black man behind bob dylan”

Behind every great musician is often a great producer working tirelessly behind the scenes – most of whom never get the public recognition they deserve. This could be said of the late Tom Wilson, the African-American producer behind some of Bob Dylan’s most iconic songs. The Daily Beast recently profiled the record producer, check it out here (excerpts below),

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

“I didn’t even particularly like folk music,” Wilson said in an interview with Melody Maker in 1976. “I’d been recording Sun Ra and Coltrane, and I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. This guy played like the dumb guys. But then these words came out. I was flabbergasted. I said to Albert Grossman, who was in the studio, ‘If you put some background to this you might have a white Ray Charles with a message.’”

 
Wilson began producing Dylan, the folk sensation who’d become a mainstream star on the heels of his lauded second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, in 1963. Their first album together was Dylan’s first LP of all-original compositions, The Times They Are A-Changin’. Wilson became Dylan’s producer for the next three albums, helming the records that would shift Dylan’s sound and image tremendously; as the singer-songwriter evolved from folkie protest singer to abstract hipster poet rocker.

There was much more to Tom Wilson’s legacy than Bob Dylan classics. Shortly after meeting Dylan, Wilson started session work with Simon & Garfunkel, as the duo was readying their debut album. Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was a commercial failure, but after the acoustic ballad “The Sound of Silence” began getting widespread airplay, Wilson remixed the folk-pop tune with rock instrumentation—in the spirit of The Byrds’ hit “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Using the backing musicians that had played on “Like a Rolling Stone” earlier in the day, Wilson added rock instrumentation to “The Sound of Silence,” and the remixed song was released as an official single. His assertiveness may have sometimes led to annoyance (as it did with Dylan), but it oftentimes paid off. Simon & Garfunkel had no idea the song had been remixed until after the single had been released, but almost a year after Wednesday Morning’s release, “The Sound of Silence” became the No. 1 song in America.

While many praise Wilson’s openness in working with so many white rock artists, some believed that Wilson was conflicted about race. He was often in the company of mostly white friends and associates, with an associate declaring in a 1968 interview with the New York Times that, “Tom plays at being a spade, actually he’s more white, and some of the Negroes in the business don’t like him.” In that same article, Wilson sounded less sure of his position amongst white people. “If there’s a race war,” Wilson said at the time. “I might join. It depends where I am at the time.”

Friends claimed that in the ‘70s as the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements waned, Wilson became bitter towards the struggle and felt that black people weren’t moving forward because of past bitterness. He’d been executive assistant to the New York State Commission for Human Rights, but according to The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Wilson’s friend Carol Browning said that Wilson couldn’t relate to black disillusionment in the 1970s. “Tom felt let down by blacks,” she said. “He felt that after the civil rights successes of the ’50s and ’60s, blacks should stop complaining and get on with it. He felt they caused many of their own problems by carrying such large chips on their shoulders.”