Tom Wilson, RIP

New website a out him from Irwin Chusid, launched today, the anniversary of his passing.
http://www.producertomwilson.com/

quite a discography

Figured you would be impressed.

Wilson's so funny (finding Dylan funny) on this:

http://grooveshark.com/s/I+ll+Keep+It+With+Mine+number+1+Mono+Mix+With+Intro/4LsXRs?src=5

(I always wonder: was he just enjoying the moment, or did he feel great knowing he was part of making history?)

There's this. Marshall Crenshaw is making a documentary about Wilson.

So how much of the first Velvet Underground album did Wilson produce?

Good question. Didn't they claim he was always on the phone talking to his lady friends? Or was that some other famous band and some other famous album.

Well certainly Warhol didnt produce it?

Right, I have no doubt he did work some magic

He meaning Tom W.

I have a feeling that if we can somehow summon tylerw to thread...

Didn't they claim he was always on the phone talking to his lady friends?

I think that was Zappa that said that. Tom Wilson is, of course, on the cover of "We're Only In It For the Money", bottom left, Hendrix is bottom right.

I have a feeling that if we can somehow summon tylerw to thread...

xpost (double haha)

Here he is interviewing Lou Reed in December 1967:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Cyw9yhkMs

... thought I'd get that in before Tyler does.

Feel like he must have already posted that on another thread.

OK. According to Richie Unterberger, Norman Dolph and John Licata produced most of the first VU album. He says Wilson did "Heroin," "Waiting for the Man" and "Venus in Furs." And "Sunday Morning." But other sources list the producer for the first three as Warhol, who used Dolph and Licata to actually record the music. Paul Morrissey was around for most of the initial recording, and Warhol showed up sometimes. Wilson mixed and edited the final product, apparently.
Bob Johnston claims that he mixed--made sense of--the "wild" recording of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," the last song Wilson did for Dylan, who apparently didn't like working with Wilson very much.

Crenshaw talking a bit about the planned doc and Wilson

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/marshall-crenshaw-pays-homage-to-late-producer-tom-wilson/2016/08/10/b0ef4e00-5d85-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html

Irwin said he put the site up in the hopes that an author or a filmmaker would pick up on the story and do something with it. After 10 days or so, I realized I was seeing the movie in my mind, and this notion I should go forward and make the documentary myself just lodged itself in my brain.

Q: He also put the drums and rock guitars on Simon & Garfunkel’s failed folk album to make it a hit, right?

A: Yeah. From what I’ve learned, there would have been no Simon & Garfunkel without Tom Wilson. It goes deeper than Wilson putting the electric instruments on “Sound of Silence.” When the first Simon & Garfunkel album was finished, Wilson was debating whether to call them Landis & Garfunkel because Paul Simon had made some records under the name Jerry Landis. He really enabled them all the way.

Same thing with the Velvet Underground, whose entire experience of record companies was Wilson. They also sought him out. They wanted him to work with them, so it was like no Wilson, no Velvet Underground records.

I feel like I uncovered an important detail of the "Sound of Silence" overdub that I have finally started to be semi-public with and perhaps will post more here soon.

Also this write-up is good: https://www.newsounds.org/story/case-disappearing-record-producer/

!

Do you really wanna know?

Anyway, my contention is that some of the guys doing the overdubbing were doing the first takes, although not the release take, of another famous song that day, in the same studio.

Reports of a burst of Wednesday Morning, 3 AM sales in Dallas that February didn’t impress anyone in the label’s New York headquarters; nor did early news of the Miami outbreak in early May. Instead, they told Southeast region distributor Mark Weiner to forget about that folk music flop and spend his time on records that actually had a chance. But Weiner wouldn’t shut up about it. As he knew, the trigger in Dallas and in Miami was “The Sound of Silence.” It was a very simple calculus. Once a radio station started playing the song, listeners rushed out to buy the album. Yet there was no “Silence” single on the market. The big execs still didn’t believe it, but when Weiner saw Wilson at a company meeting, he gave him a crucial suggestion. Instead of releasing the original “Silence” as a single, they should get some electric guitars and drums on the track and make a folk-rock record out of it. That got Wilson’s attention.

At a Dylan recording session a few weeks later, Wilson asked a few of the musicians to stay late to help him on another small project. He played them the original acoustic recording of “The Sound of Silence” and gave them a little while to figure out parts for electric guitar, electric piano, bass, and drums. Once they had the feel, it took only a few tries to get it onto tape.

Carlin, Peter Ames. Homeward Bound (pp. 119-120). Henry Holt and Co.

Do you know what Dylan recording session that was?

The dates line up...

...and the players line up, so...

So this is Al Kooper and Bloomfield and Bobby Gregg?

That’s a pretty solid day on the job

No. on the first two, yes on the third.

Hmmm

It's a trick question, in a way.

There were two days of sessions for that other song, you see.

Stumped. Some here disputing that date in the first place (?)

https://www.forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-sound-of-silence-a-timeline.756190/page-4

Ah, thanks, great work! They may well be right. I had exactlythe same feeling about the date. I saw it on Wikipedia and circulated around but found no original interview. Maybe somebody had the same theory I did and reverse engineered the date. The thing that never made sense is that players didn't line up.

It's not really *that* less cool that some days intervened...still p wild that these things were happening in the same building w Wilson's intuition and some happy accidents

otm

So anyway, the first unsuccessful day of recording of "Like a Rolling Stone" was June 15th, 1965. On that day, Al Gorgoni, who had also played on Bringing It All Back Home was on the session, as was Bobby Gregg, although Al was not there for the recording of the released version on the next day. Al has gone on record is saying he and Vinnie Bell played on the "The Sound of Silence" overdub, and Vinnie Bell has stated that he played on it as well. There is conflicting web information about who the rhythm section was Bobby Gregg and Bob Bushnell vs Buddy Saltzman and Joseph "Joe Mack" Macho, Jr. or some cross section thereof.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/who-plays-bass-sounds-of-silence.145605/

Right, it's not like it's a 180 degree falsehood. It's kind of a near miss that could have happened, a scene the screenwiters compressed for The Tom Wilson Story.

https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockguitarists/home/the-pantheon/somewhat-appreciated-items-2/al-gorgoni
This guy has Joe Mack and Buddy Saltzman.

Seems like the Wikipedia page went through some edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AThe_Sound_of_Silence

Thank you for going down this rabbit hole with me, guys.

The other thing is, most of the studios were pretty close together so one might not have to go far from one gig to another. Not only that, the guitarists banded together into something called the Manhattan Guitar Club so that they could share amps and keep them in locked rooms at each studio that they all had the keys to.

https://wallyrichardson.com/2014/02/10/manhattan-guitar-club-1969/

I’d like to poll that roster

Or maybe the keys were in the amp!

https://reverb.com/item/16520302-1960-s-ampeg-manhattan-guitar-club-amp-switch-key-rare

What to do if you didn’t have a key.
https://www.vintageguitar.com/24625/buzz-feiten/

Anyway, if that story in Homeward Bound is true, then because of the timing of when Tom Wilson was producing Dylan and the presence of Al Gorgoni, then that is the only date and session it could be. But that story doesn’t have to be true.

I’d like to poll that roster

https://enochlight.wordpress.com/interviews/33-2/

If you weren’t a member of The Manhattan Guitar Club, you’d have to slip the second engineer a joint. He’d unlock the amp, and you’d do the session. Those amps sounded fantastic.

fantastic

Another list: https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/quiz-what-do-these-guitar-players-have-in-common.1857795/

Okay this is particularly good for at least two, no three, reasons.
https://njjs.org/files/2018/4604%20web%20archive%20files/4604_JerseyJazzFullIssue.pdf

1) There is discussion about a present day gig of MGC member Gene Bertoncini.
2) Bill Crow tells the "jazz guitar famous" episode involving Segovia.
3) At the bottom of the roster the text says

Emergency Ignition Key Available At Jim and Andys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB15UFO5ebA&ab_channel=Netflix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB15UFO5ebA&ab_channel=Netflix

I just quit

What happened?

Bill Crow's column also mentions Bill Wurtzel, who I consider an honorary member of that club. Which I will get into on the new thread, if I ever start it!

Oh, I see. No, not that.

A guy on the other forum also drank the June 15th Kool-Aid. http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/dylan-blonde-on-blonde-that-thin-wild-mercury-sound-daryl-sanders-book-oct-2018.781426/page-7

Somebody else gave me a citation on the SoS/LaRS connection saying it didn’t go down that way.

Check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKFejT3wLTE

DO U SEE?