Tom Wilson (March 25, 1931 – September 6, 1978) was an American record producer best known for his work in the 1960s with Bob Dylan, the Mothers of Invention, Simon and Garfunkel, the Velvet Underground, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Eddie Harris, Nico, Eric Burdon & the Animals, the Blues Project, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and others. (More from Wikipedia)
At any rate, another producer was brought in to help out – an unlikely though inspired choice as it turned out. As described in Wikipedia: "Because of [Albert] Grossman's hostility to [John] Hammond, Columbia paired Dylan with a young, African-American jazz producer, Tom Wilson. Wilson recalled: 'I didn't even particularly like folk music. I'd been recording Sun Ra and [John] Coltrane. . . . I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. [Dylan] played like the dumb guys, but then these words came out. I was flabbergasted.'
"At a recording session on April 24, [1963,] produced by [Tom] Wilson, Dylan recorded five new compositions: 'Girl from the North Country', 'Masters of War, 'Talkin' World War III Blues', 'Bob Dylan's Dream', and 'Walls of Red Wing'. 'Walls of Red Wing' was ultimately rejected, but the other four were included in a revised album sequence."
Besides the work on Freewheelin', Tom Wilson wound up producing many of the albums that make up the heart of Bob Dylan's early career: The Times They Are A-Changin', Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Bringing it All Back Home.
As it turned out, the early recording sessions that produced the classic "Like a Rolling Stone" recording were the only ones for Highway 61 Revisited that producer Tom Wilson worked on; Bob Johnston handled most of those duties, and he also went on to produce what many believe to be Bob Dylan's magnum opus: Blonde on Blonde.
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Meanwhile, during March 1964, Tom Wilson was the producer for the first album by Simon and Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Like Bob Dylan's first album, it was a fairly conventional folk album with numerous traditional folk songs and cover songs, including "The Times They Are A-Changin'"; there were only four songs that had been written by Paul Simon.
Wikipedia describes what happened next: "On June 15, 1965, immediately after the recording session of 'Like a Rolling Stone', [Tom] Wilson took the original acoustically instrumented track of Simon and Garfunkel's 1964 version, and overdubbed the recording with electric guitar (played by Al Gorgoni and Vinnie Bell), electric bass (Joe Mack), and drums (Buddy Saltzman), and released it as a single without consulting [Paul] Simon or [Art] Garfunkel. The lack of consultation with Simon and Garfunkel on Wilson's re-mix was because, although still contracted to Columbia Records at the time, the musical duo at that time was no longer a 'working entity'. Roy Halee was the recording engineer, who in spirit with the success of the Byrds and their success formula in folk rock, introduced an echo chamber effect into the song. Al Gorgoni later would reflect that this echo effect worked well on the finished recording, but would dislike the electric guitar work they technically superimposed on the original acoustic piece."
For the flip side of the single, Tom Wilson added a song that Simon and Garfunkel had recorded a few months earlier when they were trying for a more "contemporary" sound. "We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'" wasn't anything like the serious-natured hit song on the "A" side; when the Sounds of Silence album was rushed to the stores after the success of the newly electrified single, the liner notes about this song said simply: "Just for fun".
(June 2013/2)
