by Tommy James
The next day, I told Mack that if he could get them, I wanted the Raconteurs. Mack knew who they were and said he would try to work it out. He set up a meeting in his office later that afternoon. When he got the guys together, he explained that I wanted them to be the new Shondells. Mack wanted to know if they would mind having their lives turned upside down. It would mean touring, recording, possibly fame and fortune. He needed a firm commitment. They said, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Presto, I had Shondells and we were in business.
Mack called Morris and told him the news. Morris said, “Get them up here. We got to do an album right away.” The next day we all went on a Shondell shopping binge to buy outfits for the band. We needed six of everything. We bought hip huggers, double-breasted sweaters and jackets, anything that was Mod, turtlenecks, dickeys, and what were then called Beatle boots, which we spray-painted gold. We were as ready for the big time as we knew how to be.
The following day, we flew from Pittsburgh to New York and headed to the City Squire, which was now becoming a base of operations and where I was on a first-name basis with everyone. After checking in, the first thing we had to do was meet at Roulette for publicity photos and shoot the album cover. The band and I made our entrance into Roulette with me in the lead and the guys following like ducklings behind. We wore gold double-breasted sweaters with white dickeys, but what turned everyone’s head was our gold boots. The secretaries followed us with their mouths open, which we took to mean, “Boy, you guys are cool.” We found out later that as soon as we went into Morris’s office and shut the door, they all fell off their chairs laughing at us.
The first thing Morris did was introduce us to our new press agent, a tiny, assertive, husky-voiced brunette named Connie DeNave, and an emaciated, shaggy-haired photographer who looked hipper and more like a musician than we did. We all went downstairs and piled into a stretch limousine and headed for Central Park, where we took the now classic Hanky Panky album cover posed like pigeons in a big tree by the lake. Connie schlepped us, that was the word, all over New York, taking hundreds of publicity shots in every conceivable setting from Yankee Stadium to Greenwich Village.
After the photo shoot, we all met back at the Weinerwald restaurant across from Roulette for dinner and our first real business meeting. Henry Glover, Red Schwartz, and Bob Mack were there with Red’s secretary, a very pretty girl named Ronnie, me and the Shondells, and Morris. We had the biggest table in the place. Henry had booked time at Bell Sound Studio for the following night and every night until we finished the album. I felt so excited but also content and very secure. Instead of managing every aspect of the band like I did back home, everything was being taken care of for me. All I had to concentrate on was the music, Morris would take care of everything else.
Bell Sound Studios was located on Fifty-fourth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. At the time, it was an independent state-of-the-art, four-track recording studio. All the major labels used it. Years later it would be revamped as the Hit Factory. Roulette’s in-house A&R man, Henry Glover, was our producer. Henry was a multitalented musician. He was a writer and arranger and had hits in the forties and fifties with jazz greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie, as well as more recent hits with Joey Dee and the Starliters. It was Henry who wrote “California Sun,” the Rivieras’ hit that got me so crazy back in high school.
The first night in the studio was a little chaotic. Except for the short set at the Thunderbird Lounge, the band and I had never played together. Nobody, including Henry, really knew what we were supposed to sound like, except that it should be something like the “Hanky Panky” record. Bob Mack brought his copy of “Say I Am” by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs and we put it on the studio turntable. None of us had heard it before. As we listened, we all started looking at one another as if to say, “What do you think? I don’t know, what do you think?”
It was a three-chord ditty reminiscent of “Hang On, Sloopy.” Not bad… not great… but not bad. It had room for a lot of guitar work. It had possibilities. And it had a real teen, pop dance feel to it. Mack may have been on to something. We played it three or four times and then started playing along with the record, note for note, until we finally turned off the record and it was just us. The engineer pushed the record button. We did about six takes and picked the one we liked best and that was that. When we heard the finished playback, we actually liked our version better than that of the Fireballs.
“Hanky Panky” had been out for only three weeks but it was already in the Top 30 on the charts. It was doing what everybody had predicted it would do, explode! We needed a good follow-up, fast, and now we had it. Finding “Say I Am” was a stroke of luck.
From that point on, the making of the Hanky Panky album turned into a two-week party. Once we had our follow-up in the can, all the pressure was off and everybody could relax. Red Schwartz brought the entire Roulette staff down to the studio. Ronnie and the rest of the secretaries came down with all the other executives except Morris. Everybody was clapping, singing along, or just hanging out in the control booths. We were the winning football team and they were the cheerleaders. You could tell that Roulette was hungry for a hit, and it felt good to know that we were it.
Over the next few nights, the album really began to take shape. The more the guys and I played together, the tighter the music got. I loved Joe Kessler’s guitar work. He played a Fender Jaguar through a souped-up Kustom amp, a real cheap amp actually, with a built-in vibrato unit. It sounded perfect for what we were doing. It sounded like he was tickling the strings rather than picking them. Ronnie Rossman played a Hammond B-3 organ and a second keyboard called a Chordovox, which was actually an electrified accordion on a stand that had an almost toylike quality to it. George Magura had an octave splitter that made his saxophone sound like an entire brass section, and Vinnie Pietropaoli was as good a rock drummer as I ever heard. I can still see him sitting in the drum bay surrounded sideways and top with baffles. But Mike Vale, the bass player, and I really hit it off. He became sort of second in command and middleman between me and the group. If there was a problem, Mike handled it. I played rhythm guitar and sang most of the leads. Mike had a good voice and sang lead on a couple of tracks.
The album became a mix of cover songs and originals. We did a song I wrote called “Don’t Throw Our Love Away,” plus a couple that the band had written by themselves: “The Lover” and “Soul Searchin’ Baby.” As we picked the cover songs, the album took on a real R&B feel. We did “I’ll Go Crazy” by James Brown, “Good Lovin’” by the Rascals, “I’m So Proud” by the Impressions, and “Cleo’s Mood” by Jr. Walker & the All Stars. We also did a song from Morris’s publishing company called “Lots of Pretty Girls,” which was destined to be the B side of “Say I Am” because, well, Morris owned it.
In spite of the rush job, the Hanky Panky album was not half-bad. The band and I recorded eleven songs, with the original “Hanky Panky” being the twelfth cut. The B side of the original single, Larry Coverdale’s instrumental “Thunderbolt,” was dropped from the album. While we all worked on the album at night, I spent most afternoons with Red Schwartz, who became my guru and mentor. He was the quintessential rock and roll promo man.
Red was in his mid-forties, tall and lean with Creamsicle-colored hair that had been red once upon a time. The life of the party, Red was extroverted and had a quick, snappy, East Coast banter as funny as any stand-up comic. Red was up on all the latest fads. He would work all day at Roulette in a business suit and then show up at some hip nightspot wearing a Nehru jacket and a gold medallion. Red wore his midlife crisis like his toupee; you hardly noticed it. Morris’s secretary, Karin, told me that she was with Red once on the beach and he took off his toupee for some reason. He went from forty to eighty years old in seconds flat.
By the time I met him, Red was already a legend in the business. Before coming to Roulette, he had been the only white DJ at an R&B radio station in Philadelphia. When Vee-Jay records ou
t of Chicago discovered Red was responsible for about 90 percent of their sales in Philly, they hired him as head of promotion. Red had hits with artists as varied as Jerry Butler and the 4 Seasons. He even signed the Beatles to their first American record deal before anybody had ever heard of them. Being with Red was like taking a crash course in professional schmoozing, and he had it down to a science. During those first few weeks, Red and I talked to virtually every major radio program director in the country. At Roulette, everybody from Morris on down constantly worked the phones. Karin’s job as Morris’s secretary was fending off anywhere from 100 to 150 calls a day by people intent on talking to Moshe. Red’s script was simple. He would get a DJ or program director on the phone and talk up “Hanky Panky.” Halfway through the conversation, Red would say, “Guess who just walked into my office? Tommy James!” And then he would hand me the phone. I would turn on the charm for a few minutes and hand it back to Red. We did this all day, every day, until the album was finished.
Once the album was done, a national tour was put together by a talent agency Morris had lined up for us: Associated Booking Corporation. At the time, ABC was as big as William Morris, and Sol Safian was one of their nimblest agents. Booking one-night stands is a nightmare of logistics, and Sol was the best one-nighter booking agent in the country, and he was our man. Our first date was a local gig in Yonkers, and Red came with us. We were slated to follow a little house band. They were just kids, and I remember bragging, “Red, we’re going to blow these guys right off the stage.” Red looked at me and said, “Calm down, kid. Five minutes ago you were those guys.”
Sol and ABC lined up a slew of dates starting in New England with the aim of working the entire country, one region at a time. Of course we were going to need a lot of cash for road expenses, travel, and such. Since we had yet to see anything resembling a paycheck, I was going to have to ask Morris for a serious cash advance. I called up Karin to make an appointment for the following afternoon. “Morris can see you at one o’clock. Make sure you’re on time.”
Since I had signed with Roulette, and considering how I had come to be here, I’d begun making inquiries about Morris to anybody who would talk to me. This is what I quickly learned. Morris was born in 1927 and grew up in the Bronx. He was a Jewish-Spanish mongrel with a touch of the poet in him—a very little touch, but a touch nonetheless. He was thrown out of fourth grade and sent to reform school for punching his teacher in the nose. He worked the rackets for the Mob while he was a teenager, and never lost their phone numbers. After a stint in the navy, he became a “darkroom boy,” working the photo concessions in a string of Mob-owned nightclubs all over New York and New Jersey until he was finally able to buy his own club, Birdland, which he transformed into the most famous jazz club in history. He started his own publishing company by getting George Shearing to write and give him publishing rights to a theme song for the club, “Lullaby of Birdland,” one of the most famous jazz songs in history. His publishing business soon became an empire. All this, before he reached the age of thirty.
In 1956, Morris formed an alliance with the record producer George Goldner to take advantage of the new and exploding rock and roll market and exploit Morris’s huge song catalog. Together, they became involved in a batch of new record labels, including Roulette, Gee, Gone, End, and Rama, and signed a phenomenally successful stable of acts that kept them in hit records for years. They included Jimmy Bowen, Buddy Knox, Jimmie Rodgers, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Flamingos, and the Chantels. He also created Tico Records to service the Latin market and later Calla Records for the R&B crowd, run by his friend, bodyguard, and enforcer Nate McCalla. Morris was one of the first entrepreneurs to market and sell rock and roll to teenagers. He seemed to have a knack for understanding hit singles and the new environment of Top 40 radio, which began in the mid-fifties.
Morris was also instrumental in bringing Alan Freed from Cleveland to New York, where he set Freed up at WINS radio. In a matter of months, Freed was the number one disc jockey in New York, and therefore in America. By bankrolling Goldner and Freed, Morris became the center of the music scene. At one point, Morris and Alan actually tried to copyright the term rock and roll, and they almost pulled it off. The saying was: George made them; Alan played them; Morris paid them… sometimes. That was the way the machine worked.
When the payola scandals hit in the late fifties, Morris and Alan were right in the thick of it. The spotlight was on two main targets: Dick Clark and Alan Freed. Dick Clark actually did have some investments in the music business, which he promptly sold, presenting himself as a clean straight guy, and got off the hook. Alan Freed was just the opposite. He was loud and pugnacious, and when Congress found out that Morris was not only the money behind the music, but also held the deeds to Freed’s homes, Alan took the fall. Already in bad health from a drinking problem, he died broke and broken, near penniless a few years later. Morris, on the other hand, thrived.
By the end of the 1950s, George Goldner’s horseracing fetish left him nearly broke. In order to keep his head above water, he sold his interests in everything to Morris for, shall we say, a song. Morris, who had a genius for exploiting the weaknesses in other people, was only too happy to oblige, and he became the sole owner of this musical empire.
Morris continued to sell millions of records in the sixties with acts like Joey Dee & the Starliters, the Cleftones, Lou Christie, the Essex, and the Hullaballoos. These were the records I sold every day at the Spin-It back in Niles. The 45 r.p.m. single was the fuel that drove the record business, and one thing Morris and Roulette did better than anyone else was sell singles. Chuck Rubin was right about that. Singles were Roulette’s bread and butter. Albums were an afterthought. There was no such thing as a concept album with Morris unless it was the cutout albums, the record industry’s version of the used-car business, which made him rich and was a concept that he invented. Otherwise, albums were what you sold after you sold the single. Morris Levy sold music by the pound.
All this was information that I found out through Red, Henry, Chuck Rubin, and Ronnie and some of the other secretaries. I still could not figure out who the other quiet, serious men were who visited Morris on a daily basis. The men who did not have an office. I tried to press Karin for information. Karin was every nineteen-year-old boy’s dream. She was a beautiful blond who ran the place with authority and charm. She answered to no one except Morris, and Morris kept her moving. His baritone would boom out into the waiting room, “Karin, get me coffee. Karin, get me Artie Ripp on the phone.” You could always tell what kind of mood Morris was in by his last phone call. When he was pleased or accessible it was “Okay, bubbe, you got it.” When he was angry it was “What the fuck are you guys trying to pull over there?” Lots of obscenities, but the real obscenity was in the style and tone more than in the words. Morris did not need four-letter words to scare you. Sometimes “C’mere” was enough. The place resounded with his voice and presence. The floor could rattle. And Morris was never at his best when he knew you wanted to talk money. As often happened, Tommy Eboli or Tommy Ryan was in with Morris.
“What’s his name,” I asked Karin. “Eboli or Ryan?”
“Both.”
“Yeah, but who is he?”
Karin, in a low voice, started to tell me a capsule version of Tommy’s career. It was like listening to reruns of the Untouchables. “Way back in the twenties there was a guy named Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, He was shot by Salvatore Maranzano. Then, I think Lucky Luciano shot Salvatore and had to go to prison, so Vito Genovese took over. Well, when he went to prison, Frank Costello took over, but Vito didn’t like that so they got Vinnie Gigante to bump off Frank but they just grazed him.”
“But if Vito was in jail, who arranged to have Frank Costello killed?” She just pointed her thumb at Morris’s door. “That’s why Tommy’s kind of running things now.” Not for the first time did I wonder, Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?
About one o’clock, Morris’s door opened and Tommy Eboli walked out. Quiet and serious as usual, he gave me a polite, almost friendly nod. “You can go in to see Morris now.” As I started walking in, I saw Eboli go behind Karin and gently rub her shoulders.
As I walked into the inner sanctum, I glanced at some of Morris’s favorite memorabilia on the walls. His portrait with his arm around Cardinal Spellman. The sign that read, “O Lord, Give Me a Bastard with Talent.” The various plaques he had received for humanitarian work he did for the United Jewish Appeal and other charities. It was more like having an audience than a meeting.
“C’mere, kid. Sit down. What do you need?” This was the first time I’d had to deal with Morris one on one. It was the beginning of an ongoing head game between us as to how much I was costing him versus how much I was making for him.
“Well,” I said. “We’re going on the road and we need some cash for expenses.”
“What?” Morris would start to get very rough, quickly. “Hotel bills, studio bills, you know how much you guys already cost me? Now you want more?” All through this chiding I could only sit and reflect. We had just released a hit single that was pretty certain to climb to number one. We had completed an album in less than two weeks that was almost guaranteed to go gold. And since I learned very quickly that most of the expenses were going to come out of my pocket against royalties, it was probably one of the cheapest albums ever made. And now, at his command, we were going out on a promotional tour to sell his records.
“What are you doing to me, kid?” The voice was relentless, booming on and on, rough and threatening. I held firm. It was sort of white-knuckle firm, like when you grip the armrest because you know the plane is going down. This was how you did business with Morris.