Me, the Mob, and the Music

by Tommy James

  We put together a very lame thirty-minute set with “Hanky Panky” as the featured song, and that Saturday morning we all met at Douglas’s studio and drove to Pittsburgh. I tried as best as I could to explain to Diane what was going on, but it was the same one-liner over and over: “I’m sorry, but I have to leave.” By 9:00 that night we were playing the first of Mack’s dance clubs, the Bethel Park Arena. We moved on to a place called the Blue Fox, and then played still another set at a club called the White Elephant. Each place held about two thousand kids and each was a madhouse. Several thousand people had to be turned away. The screaming was so deafening we could hardly hear ourselves play, which was probably a good thing. Each thirty-minute set turned into one long, extended play of “Hanky Panky” with a rock and roll standard thrown somewhere in the middle. I think we played “Money.”

  The first time I heard the screaming, I thought the Beatles had come in the back door. I could not get used to the fact that they were screaming for us. I had to sign autographs for the first time. I had fun debating whether I should put a twirl or an arc over the T. But it was truly unreal, because after years of hard work I was an overnight success, except that just beyond the city limits nobody knew my name. Mack was bright eyed and grinning. We drew the biggest crowds he had ever had. “Tommy,” he said, “I’m coming to Niles next week and the two of us are flying to New York. We are going to sell ‘Hanky Panky’ to a major label.” Jack Douglas thought that was great. Since Mack had many New York contacts, Douglas pretty much turned the operation over to him.

  The following Tuesday night, Mack picked me up at the Indiana Café and we drove to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where we caught an early-morning flight to New York. During the flight Mack said, “Tommy, you have the chance of a lifetime. If we play this right, you could be a genuine superstar.” The two of us landed at Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday May 4, 1966. I had just turned nineteen.

  I had never been to New York before and that is just the way I looked and felt. Until then, Manhattan had been little more than a revolving set gleaned from all the New York movies I had ever seen, which was perfect because I felt like I was in a movie. The noise was glaring and almost boastful. It was chaos in motion but always with a purpose. I thought Chicago was a big city, but you could have set Chicago down in the middle of Manhattan and it would have gotten lost in Central Park. I looked down the streets and gaped like I was at the bottom of a canyon that stretched forever in both directions. I never felt so important and insignificant at the same time.

  The first thing we did was check into the City Squire Hotel at Fifty-first Street and Seventh Avenue. Mack got us two-bedroom suites with a connecting living room for meetings. We went first class all the way. I looked out my hotel window at all the taxis, thousands of them, like a yellow plague. I thought, “Who takes all these cabs?” But we had to hurry. Mack had filled the whole afternoon with appointments.

  First we went to Universal Talent Agency on Fifty-seventh Street to meet a friend of Mack’s named Chuck Rubin. Rubin booked most of the acts that played in Mack’s clubs in Pittsburgh. He was very knowledgeable and knew the ropes in the New York music scene. Rubin told us that “Hanky Panky” was listed this week as a “Regional Breakout” in all three trade papers, Billboard, Record World, and Cash Box. The word had already hit the streets. Rubin told us it was the perfect time to go looking for a deal. The three of us then began visiting the record companies, which were all only a few blocks apart.

  Columbia Records, on Fifty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, was, at the time, the biggest label, and by far the most corporate. It was like walking into an insurance company. Everyone was very polite, formal, and dressed impeccably. They all knew the story of “Hanky Panky” breaking out of Pittsburgh. They just had not heard the record. We actually had two versions now; the original Snap recording and the bootleg version, which had been sped up slightly in deference to Mack, who wanted a more frantic tempo for his dancers to “frug” to. Everyone seemed to like the fast version best. We played “Hanky Panky” for all the executives, including Ron Alexenburg of Epic Records, which was one of Columbia’s big subsidiaries. Everybody wanted to do a deal. Alexenburg let us use the Columbia facilities to make tape copies so he could pass them around. I’ll never forget walking into Columbia’s Studio B that morning and seeing the Lovin’ Spoonful in the middle of a session, working on an arrangement. It blew me away. The Spoonful were not signed with Columbia. They were only renting time at the recording studio. The Spoonful were actually signed with a new record company called Kama Sutra, and that was our next stop.

  Kama Sutra was headquartered at 1650 Broadway, which was a notorious music business address. The first thing you noticed coming off the elevator was the pungent smell of marijuana. I did not know about pot firsthand yet, but it is a one-of-a-kind smell and it hit me like a brick. The receptionist whisked us right in to Artie Ripp. He was the head of Kama Sutra and he was holding court. Everybody in the room had long hair, blue jeans, beads, and headbands. And these guys were the executives. There was thick green carpeting with blue and gold stripes that went straight up the wall. There was fractured, indirect lighting shooting up behind a wraparound desk that looked like a Babylonian throne. The whole place smelled like dope. I was impressed.

  “Hey,” said Artie in a very laid-back drawl. “It’s the ‘Hanky Panky’ man. Let’s hear what you got.” Rubin and Mack did the same song and dance they had done at Columbia. As the Kama Sutra people listened to the record, Rubin filled them in on all the details. “Record came out of nowhere.… Number one in Pittsburgh.… Biggest single sales ever… eighty thousand copies…” Our presentation was a polished and well-rehearsed act.

  I say “our” presentation but it was really the Rubin and Mack show. I felt like a little kid in a room full of grown-ups. It was my record but everyone else was doing the talking. In fact, after “How do you do” I don’t think I said two words. I kept being referred to as “the kid.” The funny thing was that all these guys talked the same. Whether they wore Brooks Brothers suits or denims and sandals, they all had the same patter. Between being exhausted and fascinated by the whole crazy thing, I was satisfied to sit back and watch it all happen.

  “Hey, man,” said Artie. “That’s a number one record. What kind of deal you looking for?” But Rubin, who was now thoroughly enjoying himself, stayed coy. “We’re making the rounds, gentlemen, and we’ll get back to you.” And off we went to do it all again with George Goldner at Red Bird Records.

  Meeting George Goldner was a thrill. He was a legend in the business, and I had read his name hundreds of times over the years on various 45s and in the trade papers. Goldner had started Gee, End, Rama, and Gone Records. He had discovered Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Shangri-Las, the Dixie Cups, and a hundred other groups. And he loved “Hanky Panky” too. He also asked a lot of questions no one else bothered to ask, like “What do I have planned as a follow-up? Who owns the publishing? How much do you think it would cost to make an album?” I was slowly reaching the stage where I could not think at all. I had been up for forty-eight hours and I had to get some rest. We left Goldner and Red Bird and I went back to the City Squire and fell into a blissful sleep while Mack and Rubin continued the quest. They went to RCA, Laurie, Atlantic, and Roulette. They got a yes from every company except Roulette, whose president was out of town until that evening so they simply left a copy of the record with his secretary.

  The next morning, a frantic phone call from Chuck Rubin got us out of bed in a hurry. He told us that every record company we had gone to see yesterday, the ones that had been so eager to sign us to a deal, had inexplicably called him up to tell him they were going to pass on the record. One of them, Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records, admitted that he had received a call from Morris Levy, the president of Roulette, who informed him, “This is my fucking record! Leave it alone.”

  Red Schwartz, Roulette’s national promotion man, had li
stened to the record and when Morris Levy came back, he made sure Morris listened too. They both went wild for the record. Morris was on a first-name basis with everyone in the music business and, as we later discovered, called each executive the following morning and made it clear that “Hanky Panky” would be better off at Roulette. No one disagreed. We had heard rumors about Morris Levy and Roulette—how the company was “connected” and how Morris was known as the Godfather of the music business—but the events of that morning were stunning and, frankly, a little scary. Mack and Rubin even suggested that I not attend the initial meeting at Roulette so they could straighten everything out.

  About two hours later, they came back to the hotel and they were both ecstatic. All the apprehension of the morning was gone. They told me that Morris was a good man. That he needed a hit. He hadn’t had a hit since the Essex’s “Easier Said Than Done.” “Tommy,” Rubin said, “Morris wants what we all want, which is to make ‘Hanky Panky’ a hit nationally. And nobody knows better how to score hit singles than Morris Levy and Roulette.” I was apparently being informed that Rubin and Mack had cut a deal.

  Rubin said, “Listen, you’ve got to meet Morris in a couple of hours and sign contracts. They want to know what the name of the group is going to be. They definitely want your name out front, so…”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you want to change your name?”

  “Huh?”

  “How do you want your name to read? Do you want Tommy Jackson, Jimmy Jackson, Tony Jones, John Smith, what?”

  Now, I had actually been toying with the idea of changing my last name to one syllable. I wanted something easy to remember but I wanted to keep my first name and my initials. I fumbled for a second and then said the first J name that popped into my head. “Uh… Tommy… uh… James.”

  “So that’s it then, Tommy James and the Shondells?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.”

  * * *

  And that is how I got my new name. It was a twenty-second baptism. I had changed my entire personhood in the time it takes to light a cigarette. If I had second thoughts, it was too late now. Rubin was out the door.

  Roulette Records was just off Broadway about two blocks from the City Squire. Mack and Rubin and I made a regal procession as we walked into the offices sharply at 3:00 P.M. There was a small reception area with a switchboard. I remember thinking it was not nearly as plush as some of the other companies we had seen the day before. Inside the main reception area, there were about a dozen small offices down a long, L-shaped hallway. The sound of phones ringing came out of every office. There was always a phone ringing in between scattered, echoing conversations, and people were constantly moving in and out of the offices. It had an immediate, visceral excitement that reminded me of being out on a New York street. As you walked down the hallway different kinds of music—Latin, rock and roll, jazz—came pouring out of every door. The walls were lined with framed gold records by pop artists like Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen, Joey Dee & the Starliters, Jimmie Rodgers, and jazz greats like Pearl Bailey, Joe Williams, and Count Basie. At the end of the hallway was a large suite with a separate receptionist. Mr. Levy was written in raised metal script on a mahogany door. This was obviously the end of the journey.

  As we entered Morris’s office, he was behind the desk just finishing a phone call. The voice was as New York as you could get. It was abrupt, gruff, and very guttural, from the pit of his stomach. “Okay, bubbe, talk to ya latah.” We shook hands and he said, “Hey, kid, how you doin’?”—of course I was the kid again. The room was full of middle-aged men, and one by one I was introduced to them. Red Schwartz was there. The jazz great Henry Glover, who was head of A&R, was there. Murray the K, the legendary disc jockey, was there, but what was most surprising was George Goldner, who had met me the day before, said yes, and then passed on “Hanky Panky.” What the hell was going on?

  And there was Morris. Morris Levy looked like the pictures I had seen of Frank Fabiano Sr.’s old boss Al Capone, except that Morris was bigger and scarier. He was thirty-nine years old but he looked much older. He was very imposing and he talked and laughed in a style that commanded attention and even a kind of reverence. But there was something very likable about him. He was an average dresser, not flashy, slightly balding, six foot three, and about 230 pounds. He did not have to be at the head of the table or behind his desk for someone to know that he was the man in the room who ran the operation. I could not take my eyes off him.

  After the introductions were over, I thought I would be told how all this was going to work. I expected them to tell me what the formula was for being a rock star. Instead, the conversation immediately turned absurd as Morris looked at me and said, “Okay, kid, what’s next?” It took a minute for me to grasp that these music legends were actually asking me what the next move was. They were treating me like I was one of them, like I knew what I was doing. I had started thinking about what to do next only after my meeting with George Goldner the day before.

  I stammered. “Well,” I said, “I’m… ah… working on some new stuff for a follow-up… some new songs.” This immediately evoked some fast praise from the chorus.

  “See that, Moshe, this kid’s thinking.”

  “How do you like that? He’s already working on a follow-up.”

  “I told you he was a smart kid, Moshe.”

  Just then, in the middle of the meeting, two guys who were almost as big as Morris came into the office. They were out of breath. “Morris, we got to talk with you.”

  Morris excused himself and walked out into the hallway. Even though they were trying to be quiet, I could hear every word clearly. Evidently, they had just beaten up some guy in New Jersey with baseball bats who they believed was bootlegging their records. They were giving Morris the details. Everybody in the room was trying to pretend they could not hear. Red Schwartz smiled sweetly at me and began to ask deflecting questions. “So, Tommy, is this your first time in New York?”

  Then the three men walked back into the office as though nothing had happened and Morris introduced me to them. One was a big guy with an Italian accent named Don and the other was an even bigger black guy named Nate McCalla, who I later learned was the president of Calla Records down the hall. “This is Tommy James. New kid. Just signed him.” Wonderful, I thought while we all shook hands. What am I supposed to say now? How did your beating go? Was this a business beating? Morris must have sensed my discomfort because he walked behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Relax, kid,” he said with a gruff laugh that somehow smoothed into a gentle growl. He rubbed my shoulders and leaned against my ear and said, “I hope you’re ready, kid, because you’re about to go on one hell of a ride.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Say I Am

  After the meeting at Roulette, we walked back to the City Squire. Bob Mack and Chuck Rubin, who had been all business up until now, suddenly relaxed. They were laughing and poking each other like schoolkids who had pulled a fast one on the teacher. The pressure was finally off. We had a deal. As we strolled down Broadway, I could not get Morris’s parting words out of my head. “You’re about to go on one hell of a ride.” What did that mean for me? What did that mean for Diane and my son? But the day was beautiful, the sun just beginning to set, and the air was cool. Suddenly New York felt a whole lot friendlier than it had twenty-four hours ago. I was beginning to feel like this was my town.

  Even though I felt on top of the world, I was still only nineteen years old. Except for this fluky record I made when I was sixteen, and the contract I had just signed without benefit of attorney or clergy, every other aspect of my new career was being handled by a bunch of middle-aged men I barely knew. I also had no idea what they were going to want from me.

  When we got back to the City Squire, Mack and Rubin told me they would stay in New York for a few more days and work out the details. They told me I could go home. “Go home?” I said. “How do I do that?” “Simple,�
� said Rubin a little impatiently. “Go downstairs, grab a cab to the Port Authority, and catch a shuttle to Newark Airport.”

  “Great,” I said. “What’s a Port Authority?”

  When I finally decoded what Rubin meant, I managed to get to the airport and book a flight home. I stayed in Niles for a few days to be with Diane and Brian but my heart was in New York. And there was still this crazy problem that hadn’t been resolved. Tommy James and the Shondells were a group of one. I needed to find a band, fast.

  When Mack, who was acting as my manager, got back to Pittsburgh, he called me and wanted me to fly out there over the weekend to check out a group who might be “good Shondells.” They were a local Pittsburgh band that played at his dance clubs. He also told me that he had stumbled across another obscure 45 in the same lucky used-record bin where he found “Hanky Panky.” “It’s the B side of an old single by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs called ‘Say I Am.’ Sounds like it could be a good follow-up to ‘Hanky Panky.’” Two days later, I flew out to Pittsburgh.

  I met Mack’s band and jammed with them a little bit. It was okay, but I did not feel any magic. That night, the guitar player took me to a little club on the outskirts of Pittsburgh called the Thunderbird Lounge. The house band was a local five-piece group called the Raconteurs, and they knocked me out. These guys looked and played great, sang like birds, and the crowd loved them. When their set was over, I was introduced to them. They knew who I was because they had seen me on the Clark Race show when I had first come to Pittsburgh. They learned “Hanky Panky” right away and it was their most requested song. We hit it off immediately.

  They asked if they could introduce me from the stage and if I would sit in with them. During their next set, they announced that Tommy James, lead singer from the Shondells, was in the audience. They brought me up on stage and we did “Hanky Panky” and a few other songs. It was like we had rehearsed them for weeks. The crowd cheered and screamed. It was a natural. I knew I wanted this band.