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

“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. In contrast with Brownstein, Jones builds his argument not around a Hollywood star 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 Bob 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 thinking 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. Cooler than 007.

 

“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, the last truly eclectic musical year, to this remarkable record producer. Where have you gone, Tom Wilson? A musical nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

 

Further Reading/Listening/Watching:

 

•       Everything Is Everything: Tom Wilson and Pop Music in 1966 by Steven E. Jones (Stanford University Press, September 29, 2026).

•       Rock Me on the Water: 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ron Brownstein, a previous guest on this show, and the rival candidate for the greatest year.

•       Irwin Chusid’s pioneering web archive on Tom Wilson, by way of WFMU — where Jones first discovered who had produced his Batman record.

•       Freak Out! (1966), The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and Chelsea Girl (1967) — three Wilson productions worth hearing in sequence.

•       Dont Look Back (1967), in which Wilson briefly appears, and A Complete Unknown (2024), in which he appears more briefly still.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Man Who Isn’t Quite in the Movie. Jones came to Tom Wilson through the first record he ever bought, aged seven, with his own pocket money: a Batman album, bought in a supermarket in 1966, which turned out at home to be a gloriously raunchy dance record and which his mother did not much care for. Only decades later, through the musicologist Irwin Chusid’s website, did he learn who had produced it. Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, spent a short time at Fisk and then went to Harvard, where he studied economics, presented a show on the college station WHRB a