In a pivotal scene in the critically acclaimed new film A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan, Dylan and an assembled group of band members are in the studio about to record "Like a Rolling Stone," the song that defines Dylan's career. The producer of the track is Tom Wilson, who is credited with helping both Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel make the transition from folk to rock and thus to international stardom.
The title, A Complete Unknown, is from a line in that famous song, which shows up in Rolling Stone's most recent ranking of greatest rock songs of all time at No. 4. Being a complete unknown has not applied to Dylan for many decades, but it is still sadly applicable to Tom Wilson.
A 2014 article in Texas Monthly called Wilson "the greatest music producer you've never heard of" and argued for his inclusion in the Rock Hall of Fame. In a Variety article from 2021, the film producer and Grammy-winning artist Greg Richling said, "Tom Wilson's many accomplishments as a music producer should have made him a household name with famed producers such as George Martin, Quincy Jones, and Jerry Wexler." Wilson and Jones were among the first Black producers to produce white musicians in 1963.
Wilson is a Texan, a native of Waco, where he attended one of the oldest Black churches in the city, New Hope Baptist Church, where musical greatness ran deep. New Hope's most famous member was Jules Bledsoe, who sang "Ol' Man River" on Broadway in 1927 and is widely recognized as one of the first Black opera stars.
Wilson began his college education at Fisk University before graduating from Harvard. In 1954, just after completing his Harvard education, he borrowed money to start his own jazz label and then eventually moved on to Columbia Records, where he produced Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, among other rock greats.
The same year that he produced "Like a Rolling Stone," he also produced and then redid Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence." As an acoustic-folk song, it had gained only a modest audience. After that recording, the duo split but Wilson kept working on their music. He took the original acoustic track and, without their knowledge, overdubbed electric instruments, turning it into a No. 1 hit. The success led Simon and Garfunkel to reunite.
Dylan would go on to unrivaled attention, including the current film, while, by the early 1970s, Wilson had virtually disappeared. He died in 1978 at the age of 47 of a heart attack and is buried in Waco.
If their legacies seem to be polar opposites, they shared numerous similarities.
They both had broad musical tastes. Dylan's work included folk, rock and Black gospel music among other genres, while Wilson produced jazz and a wide range of rock music.
Both had exacting musical standards and could be ruthless in their assessments. Dylan's caustic judgments are well known. For his part, Wilson confessed to being initially skeptical of Dylan. "I didn't even particularly like folk music," he later said in an interview with Melody Maker. "I'd been recording ... John Coltrane, and I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. This guy played like the dumb guys. But then these words came out."
What is perhaps most striking in their similarities is their artistic and ideological independence. A Complete Unknown builds up to one of the defining moments from the 1960s, when Dylan, who had become the voice of the civil rights movement (he had performed at the March on Washington in 1963), went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, seeming to have abandoned both folk music and social justice. Neither was true as folk would continue to inform his sound and civil rights would appear as an ongoing theme in his music. Dylan was simply asserting his independence.
Wilson's musical independence led to conflicts with Dylan and to their splitting not long after the completion of "Like a Rolling Stone." As for his ideological independence, Wilson was president of the Young Republicans Club at Harvard — not a political alignment shared widely among the 1960s music set.
Most of all, they both made great music. In fact, what they made together is some of the greatest music of the 20th century.
To me, the best outcome from the film and this latest chapter in Dylan's celebrity would be if it renders Tom Wilson no longer a complete unknown.