“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones
Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything, makes the case for 1966 being at least the most eclectic year in American pop music history. In contrast with Brownstein, Jones builds his argument not around a musical superstar but around a record producer most people have never heard of.
Tom Wilson was born in Waco, went to Fisk and then to Harvard, where he read economics, ran a show on the college radio station and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label and produced a remarkably eclectic group of musicians including Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. Then he went to Columbia and was handed a young folk singer, a complete unknown. The rest is musical history.
Wilson was not only the man who encouraged Dylan to go electric, but the man who transformed Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence into a worldwide hit. He signed Frank Zappa presuming he was getting a white R&B band. He produced the Velvet Underground and wrote Sunday Morning for Nico. He was Black, six foot four, impeccably dressed, and drove an Aston Martin. As cool as 007. Certainly with more musical taste.
“Everything is everything” was Wilson’s mantra. He meant it as an embrace of radical eclecticism, a refusal to commit to a single genre. Steven Jones dedicates 1966, that most eclectic of years, to this remarkable record producer. Where have you gone, Tom Wilson? A musical nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Five Takeaways
• The Man Who Isn’t Quite in the Movie. Jones found Wilson through the first record he ever bought — a Batman album, aged seven. Harvard economics, then Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra.
• Everything Is Everything. Wilson’s catchphrase, already in Black vernacular — you can hear Marvin Gaye say it at the start of What’s Going On. For him it meant a refusal of genre.
• What He Actually Did. Electric Dylan. The Sound of Silence overdubbed and released without telling Simon or Garfunkel. Sunday Morning written for Nico. And Zappa, signed by mistake.
• A Year of Contradictions. The most plastic moment of the decade and its most inventive at once: Batman, Warhol everywhere, the Monkees manufactured for television — and everybody saying authentic.
• What Wilson Knew. He worked the whole ecosystem: the clubs, the studio, the record. Which is close to how hip-hop has always worked, and how home recording works now.
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Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: 1966 against 1974
00:02:23 Not a barstool debate
00:03:56 A Batman record, bought with pocket money
00:04:27 Waco, Fisk, Harvard — and Transition Records
00:06:43 Wilson in A Complete Unknown
00:07:41 A Black producer in a white industry
00:08:54 Everything is everything
00:10:05 From the Nation of Islam to Lauryn Hill
00:11:57 Masekela, Dylan, the Velvet Underground
00:14:33 Did the artists reinvent him, or he them?
00:16:47 The Sound of Silence, overdubbed
00:17:16 Playing the politics of the record business
00:18:51 Judas, and whose fault it was
00:19:34 Zappa, the Aston Martin and the Bond effect
00:21:33 Was there garbage too?
00:23:49 How Wilson died, and the Record Plant
00:24:54 Was 1966 the peak?
00:25:19 Radio formats, FM and the commercial engine
00:26:49 Warhol everywhere, and the Monkees
00:29:12 LBJ, Vietnam and the age of innocence
00:29:51 Tarantino, Manson and the end of the sixties
00:32:06 The Panthers, and Wilson’s politics
00:33:06 The taxi driver on a New York street
00:35:49 What 2026 can learn from 1966
00:38:45 Has pop music lost its po