I’m fascinated by the career of lesser-known music producer Tom Wilson. One reason Wilson is so fascinating is the fact that he played a central role in the development of crucial musical movements of the 1960′s, but even today’s most informed music maniacs offer only blank stares at the mention of his name.

That’s why I was so excited when I saw this Daily Beast article which is the longest, most informative piece I’ve ever read about the man. Here’s the gist…

After tenures at United Artists and Audio Fidelity, Wilson was hired as a staff producer for Columbia in 1963.

“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.

In the summer of 1965, Wilson produced Dylan’s latest creation, a sneering anthem that would become one of the ‘60s defining songs, the opus “Like a Rolling Stone.” With that single, Dylan’s transformation into bonafide rock star was complete; but it would be the last track Wilson would record with Dylan. The notoriously headstrong star became frustrated with Wilson’s hands-on approach to producing, culminating in a heated exchange in the studio over Al Kooper’s organ-playing. Wilson was replaced with Bob Johnston when recording on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album was resumed.

But 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.

Being named the East Coast A&R Director for Verve Records in late 1965, Wilson produced tracks for the Velvet Underground on their classic debut The Velvet Underground and Nico, though his heavy-handedness again caused some concern after he remixed the group’s “Sunday Morning” without their consent. Wilson also had an eye for talent and a knack for spotting diamonds in the rough; he was instrumental in signing jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention—a group that most labels considered too “out there” even for the psychedelic 60s.

The end of Wilson’s life is as mysterious as his career. He died at the young age of 47 and is buried in Texas, his home state. Of course that’s one of the reasons why his story is so compelling — every now and then I find another nugget that helps to piece together my understanding of the man and his work. In addition to the Daily Beast piece, I also found this 1967 interview between Wilson and Lou Reed discussing the origins of The Velvet Underground…

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On August 1, 1966 Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin with a cache of rifles, handguns, shotguns and ammunition. In 96 minutes he shot 45 people and killed 16. It was the biggest mass-shooting in the U.S. at that time.

At the age of 12 Whitman had been the youngest Eagle Scout in the U.S. and he lead a troop of Boy Scouts at the Catholic Church where he was an altar boy. Whitman was an exceptional young man who would routinely bested his friends and won small wagers in various feats of strength and carried himself with the bravado of a young man who knew he was exceptional. Under the tutelage of his overbearing father, Charles became an expert marksman who could “shoot the eye out of a squirrel at 50 yards” before reaching his teens.

Whitman’s story begins in an abusive home where violence and love combined in a wicked alchemy that exploded on that day in 1966. Here is a Discovery Channel documentary about a gifted kid, a brutal father and a one-time exceptional U.S. Marine whose exceptional talents and intelligence were subsumed in a torrent of precision violence that culminated in the end of his life and the birth of his infamy.

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Was casting about for some weirdness to post here when I got into a quick chat with Chris Charbonneau on Facebook. A few quick clicks around on his page uncovered a paranormal phenomenon that I wasn’t familiar with: It’s a story about America’s haunted history of racism and violence that may have resulted in an actual haunting at an abandoned bridge in Texas involving a mysterious tragedy that took place one dark night back in 1967.

Here’s the back story from the Goatman’s Bridge site…

Goatman’s Bridge Hunting the Goat Man
November 15th 1967: police discover an abandoned car beside Old Alton Bridge, five miles south of Denton, Texas. A rash of mysterious disappearances are becoming alarmingly routine on a chilling stretch of road that is known by locals as “the Goatman’s bridge.”

Constructed in 1884, the bridge connected Lewisville to Alton. The turn of the century brought a black goat farmer and his family to a residence just North of the bridge, and a few short years later, Oscar Washburn was known as a dependable, honest businessman. North Texans endearingly began to call him the Goat man. But the success of a black man was still unwelcome, and Klansmen in the local government turned to violence after he displayed a sign on Alton Bridge: “this way to the Goat man’s”

One night in August 1938, with their headlights off, Klansmen crossed the bridge, dragged the Goat man from his family, and lynched him over the side. Peering over into the water, his murderers saw a rope, but not his body. In a panic, the Klansman returned to the Washburn residence, and killed his family in cold blood.

Since the disappearance of the Goat man there have been many strange sightings on and near Old Alton Bridge. Some say his spirit still haunts these woods. Locals tell the story and follow it with a warning: those who cross the bridge with no headlights will be met on the other side by the Goat man.

Here’s a short documentary about the Old Alton Bridge and the spirit of the centaur that guards it…

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This spring we’re celebrating the 23rd birthday of Richard Linklater’s counterculture classic, Slacker.

Capturing the way-out fringe of his Austin, Texas neighborhood, Linklater put himself on the map with this rolling conversation of a film that’s as subtly sophisticated as it is endearingly odd, smartly self-conscious and deeply human.

Here’s some nice words on the film from the Indie Beat site:

Although festival masterminds and film critics like Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby found something intriguing and exciting in the film Slacker, slacker as a word was seen as something of a negative in the media of that time. As such Slacker was labeled as a film for and about ‘Generation X’, which is in large measure amusing for Linklater himself was at the tail end of the baby boomers. Linklater himself would later say in the commentary for the Criterion edition of the film that he used the word in an affection manner, and never felt that the denizens of his film were lazy or apathetic people, they just chose to strike out on very non-traditional paths compared to most of the population. Indeed if one looks at the film today its wandering philosophical debutants of Austin’s counter culture (equally grunge and folk or metal as coming from no scene at all) feel just as fresh and exciting, if not possibly more so considering the backdoor compliance to consumerism that befalls the current hipster. Composed in what almost feels like one long, fluid take, the camera bobbing along the river that is the collective unconsciousness of Austinites, Slacker is visually impressive for its acute simplicity and preciseness. To this day, Linklater’s technique is never showy nor flashy (even in his far-out animated projects), but to call his images dull is the ultimate misstep in how to look at his pictures. Like Nouvelle Vague-er Eric Rohmer, there is a no-nonsense nature to Linklater’s compositions, as if he is making sure there is enough space for his characters and all their multicolored thoughts and feelings to fit on screen with enough space left over for us to stand side by side with them. His images account for the existential in a way that is rarely abstract, surreal or fantastic. So yes, while they may appear to be more or less practical in nature, that should not mean we are taking them in without wonder. Linklater is a craftsman who builds minimalist structures which house complex constructs, often on the everyday, if strange, beguiling and even miraculous nature of life itself.

Here’s the film…

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