Everything Is Everything: Steven E. Jones on Tom Wilson & the Magic of 1966

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everyone. Back in 2021, actually, in the depths of COVID, I had Ron Brownstein, one of America's leading political commentators on the show, to talk about, why, in his view at least, 1974 might have been the greatest year in American cultural history, certainly in the twentieth century, how it transformed pop culture and politics. He had a book back then called Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics. Brownstein, of course, is based in Los Angeles. Title of his book is taken from Jackson Browne's wonderful, song, 1972 song as that happens, Rock Me on the Water. Not everyone, of course, agrees that 1974 was the most remarkable year in American cultural history. There are some, for example, who would argue that it was 1966. I remember '66 because that was the year that England won the World Cup. But, for others, it represents another glorious, perhaps magical year in American cultural history, especially musical history. And that is indeed the subject of a new book by my guest today, Steven E. Jones, who has a new book out called Everything Is Everything: Tom Wilson and the Pop Music in 1966 [as spoken: Tom Wilson and Pop Music in 1966]. Steven is joining us from Florida. Steven, congratulations on the book. I don't wanna get into a pissing contest between years, Steven, but how would you compare and contrast 1966 and 1974?

00:02:23 Steven E. Jones: Thanks. First of all, thanks for having me on, Andrew. I actually think 1974 is a highly significant year. I think these things are figures by which we understand history. So it depends on your point of focus. If you're looking at particular kind of pop music phenomena that I was interested in, I think 1966 is crucial. But, so I'm not interested in the pissing contest either. In fact, one of the things I say at the beginning of the book is I'm not interested in any barstool debates about who was the greatest lead guitarist, for example, or what the greatest album of the year was or anything like that. I just find this year fascinating, and, it's part of a tangled web of associations that I sort of stumbled into over the course of my lifetime. And it finally came to a head and, when I began to work on this book.

00:03:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And your book is in some ways more surprising bra— than Brownstein's. I mean, they're both very good books. Brownstein builds his narrative around very well known cultural characters like, Jack Nicholson. Your book, Everything Is Everything, is built around something— somebody that most people won't have heard of, a record producer, music producer called Tom Wilson. So you build the narrative of a— of the year around this remarkable character who most people don't know about or have forgotten. Tell me about Tom Wilson and why you chose him as the entry point to 1966.

00:03:56 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. You have the, biography up there, and I'll get to that in a second. But I wanna say first that I started this project because of the first album I ever bought with my own money, in 1966. I had allowance money, and I spent it on the dollar on a Batman record. That was the year the TV show Batman premiered, and everything was Batman everywhere. And—

00:04:20 Andrew Keen: How old were you? I don't want to—

00:04:22 Steven E. Jones: That would have made me about— that would have made me about seven.

00:04:26 Andrew Keen: Yeah, okay.

00:04:27 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. And I can remember being in the supermarket and asking my mom and then spending my allowance money on it. And, it wasn't what she expected. It wasn't what I expected, but I was excited by it. She was a little bit, I think, put off when she finally heard it because it was this amazing sort of raunchy dance record when I got it home and played it on my little turntable, and I loved it. It was only much later that I along with everybody else learned that crazy album was produced by Tom Wilson this figure you mentioned this record producer that nobody at the time knew much about. And it was thanks to, Irwin Chusid, a musicologist and a DJ who put up a website about Tom Wilson that I think a lot of people began to learn about this. And the WFMU website had a section on this Batman record. So I learned that this album that I still had in my collection from the first album I ever bought, was a production of this amazing, record producer, Tom Wilson. He was born in Waco, Texas, and, went to Fisk University briefly and then on to Harvard where he studied economics, but he spent a lot of time on music while he was there. He worked for the college radio station, WHRB, for example, had a show there and learned the ins and outs of the radio studio. And then he also, founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. The first move in his astounding career when it came to jazz music. So he went on then from there when he— soon as he graduated, he started his own record label and produced first or significant early works by important jazz artists. He produced people like John Coltrane, but also, you know, experimentalists like Cecil Taylor and the great Sun Ra. And then after the record label, went out of business, he went on to his career as a record producer in a number of positions. But pretty quickly in the sixties found himself at Columbia Records and then found himself producing a young folk singer, on the verge of experimenting.

00:06:40 Andrew Keen: We know his name. In fact—

00:06:41 Steven E. Jones: And that's—that's Dylan. Yeah.

00:06:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. That's, of course, Bob Dylan. And, I actually realized before looking at your book and doing a little bit of research for this show that, Tom Wilson was featured in A Complete Unknown, the movie about Dylan's early career, that was made a couple of years ago.

00:07:01 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. Can I say? I mean, I think featured might be too strong a word.

00:07:04 Andrew Keen: [unclear] appeared.

00:07:06 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. Briefly appeared. I mean, I think that— and the thing I object to, as I say in the book, I mean, I really enjoyed the movie. But I think that the brief appearance of Wilson in the recording studio makes it seem as if he were the engineer instead of the producer in charge of the sessions. There's a kind of a decision that the director or the actors made or the script made, which is, you know, is fine. But it— to me, it's clear from everything I've read and stories I've heard and recordings that have been made that instead he was a kind of commanding presence in the studio.

00:07:41 Andrew Keen: Steven, let's go back to Wilson, born in Texas. I mean, for people not watching, he's an African American. Go to look at his page on Wikipedia. It's fairly self evident. Given, obviously, the history of America— of race in America, particularly in the nineteen sixties, particularly in Texas, is this significant?

00:08:05 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. No. I mean, it remained— of course, I mean, I think, any, black person in the sixties would say it has to be significant. But, yeah, it was clearly significant historically. He was in an industry that was predominantly white, as most, were at the time, but he found himself, very quickly with a lot of leverage and in command of a stable of artists and producing significant influential albums. So, he was a kind of anomaly in some ways, but also, you know, I think a kind of, he moved and worked at various borders, including race, but also, you know, when it came to genre and to style music and to, culture.

00:08:54 Andrew Keen: In other words, everything is everything when it comes—

00:08:56 Steven E. Jones: Well, that's right. I mean, I think his— the tie— the title of the book is taken from him. It's his favorite catchphrase, and you hear it especially in the audio recordings of his radio program, that he distributed interestingly enough on 12-inch vinyl discs to DJs around the country to be played straight to air from the disc. And he interviews guests and so on. This was by— this was a promotional show sponsored by MGM/Verve for whom he worked at the time as an A&R executive, artists and repertoire executive. But, you know, on the show, he repeatedly says, this is what I mean by everything is everything or this music proves that everything is everything. And I've noticed this phrase over and over again listening to these recordings especially and interviews he gave as well. And there's an interview in 1967 where he says that— he suggests that this everything is everything is a kind of music and that it's an— a kind of meta music, a kind of meta genre, an eclectic kind of amalgam of various styles that he thinks rock music is mutating into, at that point in the mid to late—

00:10:05 Andrew Keen: Is there any connection between the Lauryn Hill, 1999 song Everything Is Everything or, the Diana Ross album? I'm guessing there's some sort of connection. To prepare for this, I was actually listening to the Hill song, which sounds really good, very contemporary.

00:10:24 Steven E. Jones: Oh, she always does. Yeah. No. I— and I saw her in New York a few years back still singing strong, and that— No, it's a terrific— It's a terrific song. But actually the phrase is part of black culture already in the mid sixties. You see it in some of the literature of the Nation of Islam even, for example, but you also hear it in a number of musical situations if you listen closely at the beginning of Marvin Gaye's, you know, What's Going On, you can hear there's a lot of chatter in the studio as the music builds and you hear him say everything is everything. It also shows up in a song by Eric Burdon and the Animals, maybe influenced by Tom Wilson who was producing them at the time. And then it finds its way, you know, not just in the Lauryn Hill song, but then into, you know, more contemporary samples and later versions. So, yeah, it's— it does show up everywhere where it suggests a kind of— sometimes it is what it is, a kind of acceptance of the inevitability of things. It suggests in other context, you know, this was the mid sixties, a kind of oneness with everything, but I think for Wilson it was a kind of celebration of a radical eclecticism. He said over and over again that, you know, it was important that you would get outside of narrow definitions of genre and that the most significant kind of music always borrowed and mixed and it— He's— he had a running joke that he thought of himself as the folk-rock czar, you know, for a while, because— [unclear]

00:11:57 Andrew Keen: How he had— Given this eclecticism, how he worked with artists as diverse as the South African trumpeter, Hugh Masekela to, of course, Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Velvet Underground. I mean, the list is astonishingly eclectic.

00:12:16 Steven E. Jones: Absolutely. And in fact, the list itself on different levels then, everything is everything in different ways. So it— the list of artists and albums is that way. But even within the albums, there's always a kind of mix of genres and intended audiences, I think, and the things he produced. And if there wasn't, he pushed the artist in that direction sometimes. So that you mentioned the Velvet Underground, for example, he's responsible for coming in a little late to the process, when, the band had already recorded most of the tunes in one version, he rerecorded several key tunes, key tracks, and then he added the track Sunday Morning and recorded that from scratch because he wanted something with that sound, and I think he was looking for something that might be a hit, off of that strange underground record. And that vocal was intended for Nico, a singer that he championed in the band even while the band was resisting her and eventually pushed her out. And then he went on to, produce her first solo album, Chelsea Girl, just after she left the band in 1967. So that even within an album, you see him sort of experimenting with these mixtures and genre combinations. But it started, in his career, even— at first, I thought it started with folk-rock, you know, because he's one of the people credited with sort of coming up with— or the Byrds earlier on—Terry Melcher had done this. But if you go further back even before his experiments with Dylan adding electric instruments to Dylan's folk music or Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence, which he also added electric instruments to and transformed that into a massive hit. Before that, when he started Transition Records, there's a new, essay that's just come out by Wolfram Knauer that shows that a part of his idea for Transition Records was to include multiple subgenres, even some that seem outside of jazz, even though it was technically a jazz label. And there were codes in the, written for the albums that they— that he meant to produce that suggest a range of genres, including, for example, mood music, you know, which we don't think of as sitting alongside serious jazz recordings.

00:14:33 Andrew Keen: Such a good, legacy. Yeah. Was he particularly attract— I mean, Dylan, of course, went from being a complete unknown in eight years to when, Brownstein's writing his book to Blood on the Tracks, which he made in 1974, came out in 1975. Remarkable journey. Same with Simon and Garfunkel. He worked with Simon and Garfunkel. Of course, by 1968, they were already writing Mrs. Robinson, which was deeply nostalgic, speaks of where it had gone. Joe DiMaggio. Was he attracted or did it go both ways? What kind of— Were certain artists like Dylan, for example, who were so into perpetual reinvention, were they attracted by Wilson, or was it vice versa? Did they learn how to reinvent themselves through Wilson?

00:15:27 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. I think they were— in Dylan's case, they were assigned to one another, and it didn't— their, partnership didn't last that long. There was some friction at the label and— but, so, but everyone who worked with Wilson, almost without exception, has very good things to say about their time working with him. Velvet Underground says that they never had a better producer, and Bob Dylan said, well, if Tom Wilson did have something, he had a sound in mind when it came to transforming his music into electric music. So there was something going on there in their collaboration for sure. But I think, you know, in terms of the transformations, it's interesting to think of somebody like, Paul Simon, you know, who whom he knew whom Wilson knew as a part of this folk duo to begin with and recorded on his experimental budget, for Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. And then went on to help produce The Sound of Silence as I've said, which went nowhere really except in college radio until they began discussing what they could do with it. Simon and Garfunkel had split up by then, at least temporarily, and Wilson went into the studio and hired session musicians and added electric instruments and then rereleased it, and it became a huge international hit. But Paul Simon, you know, would go on—

00:16:47 Andrew Keen: To Masekela. I mean he—

00:16:49 Steven E. Jones: To work with Masekela and his touring with South African musicians. Yeah, so that he already had an interest in— I mean, some of this—world music wasn't yet a term, but some of the— what Wilson is reaching toward in his discussion of these meta genre everything, is what we would recognize as a—

00:17:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe world music, which is a terrible, terrible term, should be renamed everything.

00:17:15 Steven E. Jones: Exactly.

00:17:16 Andrew Keen: What about his career itself? Did he get— you know, we all know Columbia Records now through John Hammond, of course, a remarkable character. I'm not sure how many books have been written about him. Maybe not enough. I'd love to read some books on Hammond. Did he play the politics of the studio? He went from Columbia to Verve, MGM. Was he a casualty of the politics of the record business, which tended to be rather cruel?

00:17:44 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. No. I think, in fact, he was always sort of floating at the top of the scrum. I mean, he seemed to know what was going on most of the time. And, one example is that he— when he was at Columbia and working with Dylan, he was the one who said, you know, he didn't like folk music really. And then he said he wasn't particularly interested in hearing, he implied, white— young white musicians trying to sing like a traditional blues, for instance, or but— like Robert Johnson. But he said when he heard Dylan and the lyrics that came out, that was another story. And he said, you know, he— so he wanted to work with him, and it was probably his intense work with him in the studio and so on that brought Dylan to the point, where he could, do what he did with his career in the mid sixties. I mean, it certainly helped that those records, have reached such wide audience and were so controversial. I mean, I say that when Dylan was booed, you know, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England, some of that was Tom Wilson's fault. He had pushed him in the direction of this kind of, well, I—

00:18:51 Andrew Keen: [unclear] a very cool fault. It was a in a way. I mean, I think ultimately for Dylan, it was the best thing they could ever do.

00:18:58 Steven E. Jones: Absolutely. But, you know, you get called Judas and so on, and you could see it in the documentaries, that, you know, Dont Look Back and so on. It took a toll. It was a tough time for Dylan. But it was— and Wilson shows up in that documentary as well. You know? Just—

00:19:14 Andrew Keen: That's another remarkable document from the period. Yeah. He— there were other characters. You mentioned Velvet Underground. Frank Zappa, another truly legend of legends. I mean, he seemed to attract these legendary characters of one kind or another? Was he— he must have been a fairly mellow guy.

00:19:34 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. No. He seems to have been. I mean, he's slow. You hear his voice on the recordings. He's slow talking. He was six-four, you know, and, elegantly dressed always, and people always comment on his wardrobe and his Aston Martin that he drove, and—

00:19:48 Andrew Keen: Oh, yeah. Aston Martin. So I bet he was popular with—

00:19:53 Steven E. Jones: I think he was. And, you know, there was a kind of a Bond effect, I think, that was going on part of the time, but he was a stylish— But what I mean is that I think his interest in people like Zappa— you know, there was a mutual respect there that is very clear when you read what Zappa has to say about Wilson. He discovered the Mothers of Invention playing at the Whisky a Go Go and brought them over and signed them quickly to MGM/Verve. In fact, there's a joke story that Zappa liked to tell, that Tom Wilson only heard them playing Trouble Every Day, which, you know, sounds like a traditional R&B song, and thought he was hiring a white R&B band, that he was signing a white R&B band, when in fact they got into the studio and began to play very strange things like, you know, Who Are the Brain Police? And, Zappa had to get on the phone and convince the record company to keep this strange band. But he clearly supported the Mothers of Invention. He supported, got funding for, and then produced one of the first double albums in rock, you know, Freak Out! in 1966, and gave Zappa a enormous amount of artistic freedom in the studio to conduct and to write and arrange and as well as to then play, these, interestingly, you know, speaking of genre hybrids, it was combining doo-wop and psychedelic rock and twentieth century avant-garde music by composers like Stravinsky and Varèse and bringing freaks in off the streets. They've called themselves that, you know, the freak scene in LA. He would bring these, people in that he knew, to play instruments and to make animal noises and to chant and—

00:21:33 Andrew Keen: Right. I mean, that sounds— it's innovative, but, you know, there's innovation, and then there's stuff that claims to be innovative that isn't. I recently saw, Oliver Stone's, 1991 movie, The Doors, which is also— about another— about a very prominent band, mid sixties band.

00:21:54 Steven E. Jones: Right.

00:21:54 Andrew Keen: And what struck me about that movie, and I don't think it's an anti Doors movie, is how intellectually limited The Doors were and how in terms of legacy, I'm not entirely convinced that they're particularly good musicians or what they've left is of any value. I'm assuming in '66, Steven, given the euphoria of the year, there was also a lot of garbage around.

00:22:23 Steven E. Jones: Oh, sure. I mean, you know, as ever, but I think especially in times of great foment like that. I mean, and let's face it. This was also, '67 was the summer of love, but all that, activity built in '66 that then was branded as the summer of love in '67. So, you know, everybody was, in— especially out on the West Coast, but also in New York. You know? There was a lot— there were a lot of drugs. There was a lot of— you know, LSD was legal for the first part of the year and was being distributed, rapidly, in the club— in the clubs. And big— the ballroom scene sort of began to happen, the Fillmore and the [unclear]. People were going to these big shows that were in effect happenings with loud music, and the band like the Blues Project that Tom Wilson produced played these shows out in California. There was traffic back and forth even though they were really a New York–based band and I think there was, you know, there was a lot of stuff around the edges. There was a lot going on. And for— I mean, think of a band like the Grateful Dead that started out as a kind of jam band for these scenes playing with Ken Kesey's group and playing for these, ballroom, shows. And then, gradually, you know, improved and became this— became what they became. But, there were, yeah, there were, Ken Kesey's Pranksters themselves played instruments. You know? Not very well.

00:23:49 Andrew Keen: [unclear] himself. He died young. He died in 1978.

00:23:53 Steven E. Jones: Yeah.

00:23:54 Andrew Keen: Was his life cut short by maybe overindulgence in certain substances, or—

00:24:00 Steven E. Jones: No. I don't think so. He had, it's— I think it's been said by somebody he'd, had, Marfan syndrome and had a heart attack as a result. So, he was 47, when he died in '78. And, it looks, you know, it's just that the heart attacks happen. And he was in the midst of all kinds of creative work still. He had done all sorts of things since this period that I write about. You know, it's not really the purview of the book, but I do allude to some of them. For instance, he cofounded, he was one of the investors that helped cofound the Record Plant recording studios in New York first and then out in California that became the center of a lot of seventies rock, speaking of Jackson Browne and those— and people out on the West Coast.

00:24:47 Andrew Keen: So it's all lost really broadly in cultural terms. Let's go back to 1966.

00:24:53 Steven E. Jones: Okay.

00:24:54 Andrew Keen: How would— I mean, aside from Wilson, I mean, this idea of everything is everything, is that how we should remember this period as this year as one of remarkable musical innovation, maybe the climax of pop musical, innovation, in the period after that? You know, it goes downhill to Altamont and then everything else.

00:25:19 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. I don't know that. I mean, I'm not comfortable with that kind of narrative quite. I think it's if you zoom in, what you see instead are a lot of sort of, responses to immediate, changes. So, for instance, I see this flowering of genres as both a creative thing, but also as a kind of crassly commercial thing, of course. There was an attempt to capture as many markets as possible, and radio formats were beginning to differentiate themselves and multiply. FM radio came along as a so called underground alternative and playing album format rock by the seventies, especially. But it— so there was a need for different kinds of musics to fill these different formats to sell music to different segments of the audience. So some of that was going on. But, also, I think, you know, the creativity, did happen and was in part of response to all of that. So I— part of the— part of what interested me about this period, this year in particular, is the contradictions, that— so that for instance, it was the most plastic pop art, you know, superficial cultural moment of the sixties in some ways, with Warhol's involvement with the underground is just to— with the Velvet Underground is just a reminder that he was everywhere that year. He was also—

00:26:42 Andrew Keen: He pops up in, not in a particularly, impressive way in the [unclear]. Yeah.

00:26:49 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. Well, he was everywhere. And he— but he was also at the premiere party for the Batman, you know, movie. I'm sorry, TV show. And he also, you know, was in a magazine, a photo spread with Nico dressed as Batman and Robin. Well, he was dressed as Robin and Nico was dressed as Batman. And he made his own underground film, Batman Dracula. So he— from the beginning of the year when Batman debuted to near the end, you know, he was— his own club, the Dom, was the center, of activity for the Velvet Underground. So there was this kind of sense. And we forget now, I think, because of the canonization of Warhol and that movement, Lichtenstein and other artists from that period that at the time, a lot of it was dismissed not just in a vulgar way as being, you know, incomprehensible, but people thought of it as putting them on. There was a kind of sense that it wasn't serious, that it was always camp. And I and so the connection to Batman makes sense in that way, too. You know, it was a put on, was a kind of parody of superheroes and so I think that in that year with all that going on and then the Monkees come at the end of the year as this other strange phenomenon of this manufactured band, you know, that then— There's a show about the kind of the American Beatles turned out to be totally TV manufactured, that's— That's the atmosphere in which everybody was looking for something authentic. They use the term over and over again and people were looking in the roots of folk music and especially the African American tradition of gospel and folk and blues. But then also, you know, even once that began to mutate into psychedelia, then people were looking inside and looking for an authentic self that could emerge with a hope or something.

00:28:40 Andrew Keen: Eventually, it all comes back to, maybe Jim Morrison, who—

00:28:45 Steven E. Jones: Well, the LA scene was— you know, he was— and I was gonna say, yeah, I was gonna say that the thing to me, his style, his vocal style, for instance, I like to put alongside Eric Burdon's. I mean, I think they were similarly over the top in some ways, but I much prefer Burdon's kind of, voice, in every sense, not just technically, but I think his expression of the blues and so on. I much prefer to—

00:29:12 Andrew Keen: No. I agree. Steven, what about the political dimension here? Of course, '66, Vietnam was already becoming headline news. On the other hand, LBJ was president. It wasn't a year marked by the bloody assassinations of 1968 of, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Can we ascribe the sort of dreamy innovation, the positive quality of, 1966, the fact that it was still, in some ways, at least an age of innocence, which was blown up by 1968?

00:29:51 Steven E. Jones: No. I think that's probably right. One of the films that I use as a device for understanding this history, is Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. You know? Where he does this. In fact, he deliberately pits Paul Revere and the Raiders music against Charles Manson's obsession with the Beatles' White Album as a way to suggest that by the time of the murders, the Sharon Tate murder, that something had fundamentally changed. And Tarantino is always nostalgic for mid sixties, you know, in essence. But also, you know, for go-go boots and so on. I mean, that's part of what that film is about is that shift from mid sixties to late sixties, when it comes to culture.

00:30:40 Andrew Keen: When was Sharon Tate murdered?

00:30:43 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. Late— much later. '69. We're talking about— so that this is the end of the sixties, another end of the sixties story. So you have the you have— you mentioned Altamont, you know, and then the other, end of the sixties are the Manson murders. But what's interesting is that in Tarantino's film, he has, he acts as if the Batman TV show is still on the air even though it had been off the air at that point for, you know, over a year, and he has some of the actors, you know, looking for roles on the show and then he plays a little clip at the end of radio, commercial, promotional, for the Batman TV show as if it were still on the air. So he— it's— I don't think that's just his nostalgia for Batman. I think there's a deliberate kind of— In the same way he rewrites the ending of the story when it came to the murders. I think he's rewriting the cultural moment by mashing together, mid sixties music with that— with late sixties.

00:31:41 Andrew Keen: And the films were really important. I've already mentioned, Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson, of course, that was, is always associated with the 1967 movie, The Graduate. But The Graduate. You know, within a year or two, there was so much pessimism, almost an apocalyptic feeling that took over from '66. It's astonishing how quickly things change.

00:32:06 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. No. I think you're right. And I think the, you know, the politics and the assassinations are a big part of it. I mean, we haven't mentioned it, but 1966 was the year of the rise of the Black Panther Party. And it wasn't long before murders and, you know, the—

00:32:19 Andrew Keen: What was Wilson, as an African American? What was his politics, and what was his take on the rise of that and MLK and all the rest of it?

00:32:28 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. He was a kind of political moderate. He was, he's— people like to point out that he was the head of the Young Republicans at college. But, you know, his family, I've been in touch with his son, for instance, and others who say that was true. This was the fifties we're talking about when he was in college, and that actually by the sixties, he had sort of shifted.

00:32:50 Andrew Keen: Right. And let's be clear. I mean, in the fifties, being, in the Young Republicans as a black man was much more understandable than today.

00:32:56 Steven E. Jones: Absolutely.

00:32:57 Andrew Keen: The history of white racism in the Democratic Party. I mean, Jackie Robinson was, at some point, an associate of Richard Nixon. So—

00:33:06 Steven E. Jones: Yeah. There was a it was there was a cultural, motive as well as a political one, and it's complicated in ways that I think we have to understand. But, also, you know, he'd, clearly, his— it's been— his family has made it clear that, this— the rise of the civil rights movement, and you mentioned LBJ earlier, was a change for Wilson and— as he shifted. But he always remained, in some place— Like Frank Zappa, you know, he was skeptical of political dogma, remain— saw himself as a kind of, I think, as a kind of moderate in that way. But he was always adamantly opposed to racism, and there's actually a story, at the— in the book with in some— it's outside 1966. But in 1968, the New York Times featured, Wilson on the magazine, in a cover story, where he was celebrated as, epitome of the hip, stylish record producer and, with a stable of artists and all kinds of projects underway, you know, and, but the story ends with an anecdote. The reporter is with him when he sees a taxi driver pass a black man on the street in New York, and Wilson races to catch the taxi driver and gives him the dressing down and says it at one point. He said even the reporter says he cuffed him. You know, it even gets physical, when the guy, for not picking up this black man, on the street. So he, you know, is sometimes with— usually with sardonic dark humor, he always— in fact, there's a— well, Hugh Masekela is a good example. If we've got a minute to say something about that, it's his— as a South African musician, he was exiled by the apartheid regime, you know, faced that kind of dangerous racism in his country, came to New York to study music, played the clubs where Tom Wilson heard him, and eventually produced him. And, Masekela himself, he notes that he was inspired by, the movie Young Man with a Horn. It's a very strange film that inspired you because it's about an alcoholic trumpeter who dies in the streets. [ed.: The trumpeter dies at the end of Dorothy Baker's 1938 novel; in the 1950 film he survives.] But he— still, he was inspired as a young man to play trumpet as a result of that movie. He came to America and always saw himself as a kind of, a representative of a larger African diaspora when it came to music. He played, you know, he played what he deliberately, defined as a combination of township music and American jazz in various styles and eras. And it was that mixture that gave his music the sound that it had.

00:35:49 Andrew Keen: Finally, Steven, let's fast forward to today. We've done many shows with many different cultural critics like yourself about the scarcity of innovation these days when it comes to music and much of popular culture. I'm not sure where you stand on that. But what can we learn today as— especially young, innovative, creative types in the music business, especially, about Tom Wilson and pop music in 1966? As, you know, to borrow the language of Mrs. Robinson, a lot of people have wondered where America has gone these days, and often, you know, America's thought of in terms of its cultural product. We can't, of course, go back to 1966. It was a unique year in every sense and produced by many years before and after. But what can we learn about 2026 from your book about 1966, sixty years ago?

00:36:54 Steven E. Jones: I'd say, first of all, I've kind of, I remained, kind of optimist when it comes to these things. I mean, I try to listen to contemporary music with open ears, and there's a lot going on. And a lot of it's really innovative. And, also, you know, I think production is now in the era of— we've moved now beyond the era of Pro Tools to much more interesting kinds of things going on in people's, home recordings, and then— and they're working with innovative producers sometimes. And, of course, in hip-hop, producing and recording and performing are all part of one, mix, really. So I think that's one of the things you can learn is that something that Wilson was on to early on, people sometimes say, well, he was a hands off producer. Well, he was an A&R executive. He saw himself as fomenting, you know, as encouraging, artists and in their creativity and their repertoires. And that was part of what he did not just produce records. He worked with engineers and he did work on production. But, it— the production was part was just one piece of a larger puzzle that started with developing— discovering talent with appreciating— He went to clubs all the time to hear new acts, and for him, it was an ecosystem, even when he started his own label, before that, when he started the Harvard New Jazz Society. He always saw it as a kind of combination of what happened in the studio, what happened in performance space, and what happened on record. So I think that's— That's a little like what might be possible today. There is a kind of sense that the artists who are successful now are ex— I mean, you know, they have to do this, but they're sort of exploiting that kind of larger ecosystem of different ways of approaching creativity and performance.

00:38:45 Andrew Keen: What about the political dimension? Old friend of the show is, Jonathan Taplin. He was Bob Dylan's tour manager, then was, the producer of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. He always argues, and he's bit— he's written books about it, lots of articles. He writes for Rolling Stone these days that, the political dimension of popular culture is missing. Do— Is there some truth to that from your book? Everything Is—

00:39:16 Steven E. Jones: No. No. I think that's right, but I think you can't. I mean, it's hard to sort of blame, pop artists rather than all the rest of us. You know? The political dimension is missing or is actually sort of splintered or fractured, for a number of us, isn't it, in contemporary life? It's a kind of larger problem than just pop music. So I think, you know, political engagement is something that, people who lived through the sixties look back on, nostalgically. And I don't think it was because it was an easier time. I just think it was a different time and that, so I think, yeah, I do think, that— I don't think it's missing from the music so much as it's as opportunities for engagement have become complicated and are missing from, everyday life for a large number of people.

00:40:05 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The book is already out. Everything Is Everything. Tom Wilson and the music of 1968. It's not '68. 1966. Tom Wilson, a fascinating character many people won't know of. So opens a wonderful conversation about Wilson, his role in 1966, and how we can make sense of it through this character. Steven Jones, wonderful to talk to you, and I'm gonna go out now and try and emulate, Tom Wilson and buy an Aston Martin.

00:40:40 Steven E. Jones: And get you some Wayfarers as well. You have to wear the Wayfarers. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for having me on. It's been good talking to you.