Enter to win a copy of Everything Is Everything: Tom Wilson And Pop Music In 1966

You might not immediately recognize the name Tom Wilson, but the record producer left his mark on the music of the 1960s. Wilson founded Transition Records, a short-lived label that nonetheless produced Sun Ra’s Jazz By Sun Ra, and went on to work at Savoy Records, where he reunited with Sun Ra. Wilson is also considered one of the “midwives” of folk rock; he produced Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, Another Side Of Bob Dylan, and Bringing It All Back Home, as well as the 1965 single, “Like A Rolling Stone,” among other classic albums. 

Wilson died young, well before his impact could be properly recognized, but cultural critic and author of The Old, Weird America and Deliver Me From Nowhere Steven E. Jones tells his story in Everything Is Everything: Tom Wilson And Pop Music In 1966, out September 28 via Stanford University Press. The A.V. Club is giving away two copies of Everything Is Everything. To enter for your chance to win, send an email to [email protected] with the subject line “Everything Is Everything” and your mailing address (U.S. and Canada only; no P.O. boxes, sorry) by 9pm ET on September 25. We’ll inform the winners by September 30. 

More on Everything Is Everything:

1966 was a transformative year in popular culture, and especially in popular music. At the center of these changes stood the profoundly influential, if subsequently unheralded, record producer, Tom Wilson. Everything Is Everything provides a long overdue testimonial, celebrating him as an avatar of the most important trend in pop music in 1966: an exploding eclecticism, accompanied by a sometimes desperate search for authenticity.

Wilson played a vital role in an array of landmark records: After producing Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel in the previous year, in 1966 alone Wilson produced albums from Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention, The Velvet Underground, Hugh Masekela, The Animals, and more. Wilson’s embrace of diverse musical genres was a response to the times, as was his engagement with the music industry as a whole. 

“The currents of popular music swirled into each other in 1966—shaped by the soft-spoken and untrammeled producer Tom Wilson. Jones’s Everything Is Everything offers an eye-opening and ear-opening tour of these forces at a pivotal experimental moment.”

—Sean Wilentz, author of Bob Dylan In America

Everything Is Everything (Image: Stanford University Press)

 

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