by Tommy James
We were still doing teen magazine promotions, “Win a Date with Tommy,” that kind of thing. But at the same time, we wanted underground airplay. We wanted to be taken seriously, and the only way to do that was to get on FM radio. Being pop was starting to become just a little bit uncool. I think a lot of the “pop” acts started feeling that way. You were always trying to prove you had hair in all the right places. It was as if your voice hadn’t changed yet so everybody started growing mustaches and stopped cutting their hair. It was important to start looking scruffy. The scruffier the better. When the Beatles came out with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that iced it. That was the dividing line. But it was also true that not all the kids were ready for the new sounds like acid rock and hard blues—rock and the psychedelic stuff.
This music scared the shit out of me. It was radically different from what we were doing. It was intimidating, and we weren’t sure we were going to be able to fit in. AM radio played our records alongside the more avant-garde stuff and they didn’t seem to notice the difference, but I did. When I heard “Gettin’ Together” next to “White Room” by Cream, I knew the formula was changing. Absurdly, while this great change in musical styles was occurring, bubblegum music was also being invented.
In its own weird way, bubblegum was a kind of prepunk rock and roll. That summer, every time I went up to see Morris there were two guys sitting in the waiting room: Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz. They were two young record producers who were trying to get Morris to invest in them, and for whatever reason Morris was avoiding them. I would pass these guys, say hello, and walk right into Morris’s office as usual. I think it may have annoyed them. But I never made an appointment to see Morris. Unless the doors were closed and Morris was meeting with “the boys,” his office was my office. After about six months of getting the cold shoulder from Morris, Kasenetz and Katz signed with Laurie Records and grabbed a jingles singer named Joey Levine to do lead vocals. Jeff and Jerry went on to make their prefab rock and roll. The term Bubblegum was used to describe one of their first groups, the 1910 Fruitgum Co. It was cute and accurate, and we didn’t pay too much attention to it until it became clear they were bastardizing the intro of “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Mirage,” causing us to get stuck with the label too. Then we started to resent it, as if we had created it. No one ever called “I Think We’re Alone Now” bubblegum before that.
Most people today will deny liking it, but it sold like crazy, so somebody must have been buying it. Jeff and Jerry went on to create Ohio Express and their many offshoots, like the Archies, who actually were cartoon characters. Jeff and Jerry made a fortune but for some reason Morris could not have cared less that he let them slip away. Maybe he felt he didn’t need another writing team that he wasn’t going to pay anyway.
Throughout the summer, we played other gigs beyond the bus-stop tour with Sam the Sham. One show was in Phoenix at a band shell in the city park. We hadn’t been to Phoenix before and we didn’t know what to expect from a Phoenix crowd. One of the subtle things you pick up from traveling the country is the difference in the fans from region to region. In the sixties, the fans down South tended to be rowdier than the fans in the Northeast. The girls in the Midwest did a lot more screaming, and California was a mixed bag depending on what city and venue you played. We would often make little changes in our show depending on where we were playing and the size of the crowd. Sometimes we even dressed differently depending on what part of the country we were in. Part of the reason was that the crowds we were drawing had a lot of kids but also a lot of people over thirty. Things are more homogenized now, but back then, the country still hadn’t made up its mind about rock and roll.
When we arrived in Phoenix, it was the middle of the afternoon, a beautiful sunny day. The only thing we were really told about the show was that the crowd would be huge and that it would likely be a very young audience, everything that rock and roll is supposed to be: summer, a lot of high school kids, and school’s out. Our limo was met at one of the entrances of a perimeter that was so far away from the stage you could hardly see it. We had to leave the limo and get into a Brinks armored truck. As we started to move through the crowd we could hear and feel banging on the side of the truck. It took about twenty minutes to get backstage. I didn’t know if we were the first act, the middle act, or what. Everything was very disjointed. The promoters slapped us on the back and within minutes we were on stage in this incredible band shell. Our instruments were already there. The band plugged in their guitars and we opened with “In the Midnight Hour.” The roar of the crowd was awesome. There were thousands of kids moving back and forth and forward and backward. The whole crowd was in motion and the sound was intense, louder than we were.
We followed up with “Say I Am” and “It’s Only Love.” While we were playing, I was trying to make sense of the crowd. I couldn’t tell whether they were standing on the ground or on seats. The whole crowd was moving as one. There were people who had climbed up trees and lightposts. As we started “I Think We’re Alone Now,” the crowd suddenly began to surge forward. It happened so fast it was like a tidal wave. The security was pushed back toward the stage, the concrete barricades were pushed over, and there was a gigantic crush of people against the stage and the screaming I could hear was different from anything I had ever heard before. You could see it in the faces of the kids right up front who were getting crushed. And the crowd wouldn’t or couldn’t stop surging. There was nowhere else to go except onto the stage.
We made it through one verse of “I Think We’re Alone Now” and began to look for help from security, the police, the promoter, anybody. It was like being attacked. Suddenly someone stopped the show and we were hustled offstage so fast we didn’t have time to think, except that we knew people were following us onstage from the crowd. We ran into the armored car and someone slammed the door closed. As we started to move out, the banging against the Brinks car was so furious that we kept moving from side to side to try to keep the crowd from tipping it over. When we finally reached the perimeter again, we jumped back into the limo and took off down the street. We felt like we were on the lam. When we got back to the hotel we went up to our rooms and started laughing. We had been through some crazy gigs but nothing like this one. A few hours later we were told that two girls had died that afternoon during our set. They had been crushed to death by the crowd. Dozens more were injured. There was nothing anyone could say or do, but we kept the faces of those girls in our minds for months, at first so happy, and then so terrified and confused, just before we were pulled off the stage.
While we were out on the summer tour, I was constantly coming back to New York to work on what would be the Gettin’ Together album. While I was away, Bo and Ritchie did the final mix for the single, which I wasn’t crazy about, but it got great airplay and became our seventh gold record. But things had definitely changed. Ronnie wanted to get married, so I called Diane up on the phone and told her I wanted a divorce. Diane didn’t put up a fight. My son was about two years old. It was one of the worst things I ever did. I was thinking only of myself. I married Ronnie in Miami and met her family, including her uncle Red Pollack, who ran the Newport Hotel. The Newport was connected with the Jewish Mob and Santo Trafficante. I didn’t quite put together who all these characters were until later, but it was overwhelming. I was like a Mob magnet. If I’d known everything, I might have been more concerned about my relationship with Ronnie than I was, but her immediate family had nothing to do with the Mob. Red was a nice man who treated me well and asked me if I would play at his hotel, which we did many times. The Newport was a gorgeous, swinging place right on the ocean, and a lot of big names came through there. Red was a very fancy, sharp businessman who worked with some of the same people who helped set Morris up in business before he established himself in New York. It was here where he likely first met Morris Gurlak. Gurlak had been Morris Levy’s partner from the beginning. He was a soft-spoken gentleman who had a fatherl
y demeanor, and Morris Levy was very deferential to him, very sweet. Together, they created M & M concessions, which originally handled hatcheck and darkroom business. Back then, all the nightclubs would take pictures of the guests, and by the end of the night they would have them printed fast and fitted into a flimsy cardboard frame for sale, as a memento of your wonderful night at Birdland or the Embers or the Hot Spot, or wherever. That was where Morris got his start. Eventually they wound up owning not only the concessions but the nightclubs themselves.
Ronnie’s father worked for the post office and would send returned samples from the drug companies up to Ronnie; samples of everything—antibiotics, pimple medication, whatever came through. Massive amounts of pharmaceuticals were sent through the mails back then to doctors all over the country, and Ronnie’s dad would put together a kind of care package of undeliverable samples and send it up to New York. It was all very innocent. He thought he was helping by saving the kids (us) some money. We always had samples of the latest cold remedies and headache and flu medications. One of the packages had Dexedrine and Dexamyl and probably Eskatrol in it. I asked Ronnie one day what they were, and she said, “Oh, they’re diet pills, they help you lose weight. They also make you stay up forever.” So I took one and went to the studio and I felt beautiful. End of story. I loved it. And I had a cornucopia of choices sent to me every month by my innocent and well-meaning father-in-law, who thought he was doing me and his little girl a favor.
When we got back to New York, we moved into a bigger apartment in the same building, 888 Eighth Avenue. Ronnie redecorated the whole place and started educating me in many ways. She gave me a more sophisticated sense of myself. But as sophisticated and cool as I thought I was, there was always a nagging sense of guilt about what I had done to Diane and Brian. I sent money home all the time. I would go there when I could. When I was going out west or coming back from the West I would try to stop by. I would bring Brian expensive but ludicrous gifts for a child his age, like a reel-to-reel tape recorder. They were silly things that I used to try to make up for all the time I was not spending with him. He would come up to New York a couple of times a year and I would go back just as irregularly. These were crucial years that I should have spent with him and I didn’t. I was too busy becoming Tommy James.
The first week of August 1968, Morris was already bugging me about getting the next single in the can. One afternoon, I went over to Bo’s apartment unexpectedly and caught him getting high as usual. He answered the door, invited me in, and immediately started talking about Morris. “He’s fuckin’ me, Tommy. Every time I ask him for my royalties I get some lame excuse. Morris is never going to pay me.” While he was on his tirade, I saw a demo lying on top of his piano. I went over to look at it and it said, “Get Out Now—Bobby Bloom—Regent Sound Studios.” I asked Bo what this was and he said, “Just something I’m working on.” “Can I hear it?” I said. He got really uptight and said again, “It’s just a thing I’m working on.” “Well, let’s hear it.” So he played it, and it was a great little record, commercial as hell, and whoever Bobby Bloom was, he had a killer voice. I knew I had walked back into my “Gettin’ Together” nightmare and caught Bo giving another of the songs that should have been mine to somebody else. I said, “You know, Morris is busting my ass to get the next single done.” “Fuck Morris.” I said, “Can I do this song?” He said, “I don’t know.” I asked him where he came off giving another artist his best stuff, when I was the one who made him a hit writer. He said, “Fuck, now I got to deal with you too, right?” I said, “You don’t have to deal with me at all.” But I knew Bo had a point, and I understood his predicament and even sympathized with him. The real point was that none of this would have been happening in the first place if Morris would have played straight. But I was not going to let that jeopardize my career.
I walked out and went right over to Roulette to see Morris. “Well, it’s happened again,” I said. “Bo’s done a great record with somebody that should have been ours. It’s called ‘Get Out Now’ and I want to do it.” At which point Morris called Bo and said, “Get the fuck up here.” I knew how that was going to play out so I left. I also knew that things were going to come to a head between me and Bo.
While Bo and Ritchie were putting the track together for “Get Out Now,” I had to go out on the road and do a couple of dates. When I got back about a week later, Ritchie asked me if we could go into the studio the following night to do the vocals. I said sure, and the next night I headed for Allegro.
When I walked in, I saw the control booth filled with people. I said, “Ritchie, what’s going on?” He said, “Bo brought a bunch of his friends down.” I said, “I don’t want all these people here while I’m doing a vocal.” Ritchie calmed me down and I tried to make the best of it. They were some of Bo’s musician friends and their girlfriends. Bruce and Ritchie both knew I was really upset. A recording session is a very intimate thing. There are always mistakes, flubs, missed notes, and many retakes before the record is just the way you want it, but we went ahead anyway. I listened to the basic track that Bo had put together with the musicians during the week and I went over the lyrics with Ritchie.
Even though it was tense in the room, I started out on the first verse. Before I was through, Bo hit the talkback button and said, “No, no, you’re singing too hard. Sing the verses a little softer.” At that point I was starting to get angry. Bo was obviously showing off for his friends and the whole damn thing was becoming so disrespectful I could hardly keep from yelling. We started again, but about twenty seconds into the vocal, Bo hit the talkback button again and hollered, “I can’t believe how fuckin’ stupid you are.” There was silence for a second and then he said, “I said it’s got to be softer, softer.” I looked at him and I couldn’t even move for a second, I was so enraged. I felt myself getting ready to explode. I slowly took off the headset, put it on the music stand, and walked into the control room.
Bo had on a Nehru shirt with a high collar and beads. I grabbed the neck of his shirt with my left hand, tore off his fuckin’ love beads with my right—they went bouncing all over the floor—bent him over his chair, got in his face, and told him, “You open your fuckin’ mouth to me again, you mangy little cocksucker, and I’m going to split your fuckin’ face open right in front of your fuckin’ friends.”
He just gurgled a little. He didn’t say a word. When I let him go, he fell off his chair and hit the floor and didn’t move. I grabbed my briefcase and jacket and walked out. Needless to say, the session was over. I walked home feeling really bad and I knew that was the end with me and Bo. There was no way that we would ever work together again.
A couple of weeks later, Ritchie and I went into the studio and finished the record. It charted for us, but it was the most joyless hit I ever had.
By now the IRS had literally set up shop at Roulette. Morris was so contemptuous of them that he actually gave them their own office down the hall from Normand Kurtz. We were all on a first-name basis. They came virtually every day, dealing mostly with Howard Fisher, who would always politely provide them with some set of books, which they would dutifully examine on their fishing expedition. Their confusion and dismay was always intensified when one of “the boys,” Morris’s non-music-business-related associates, came up for a chat.
Billboard magazine had its year-end awards and I was voted Male Artist of the Year. I was honestly surprised because the Shondells and I were never considered heavy or hard rock, but also because Morris had a real hatred for Billboard, and I couldn’t blame him. The three big trade papers were Record World, Cash Box, and Billboard. Billboard was always the most difficult to deal with. Cash Box had a slant toward retail. It focused on the money generated from records. Record World had a slant toward radio airplay. Billboard claimed to be in the middle. The problem with that was that when you put out a record, things back then happened fast.
In six weeks, you needed a new record, that’s how quickly the turnover was if you
wanted to stay constantly on the charts. If you put out a record and it generated some excitement, it immediately went on the radio. That would be reflected in Record World. But it would take two or three weeks after you heard a song on the radio before the sales figures would start to hit and the stores would report it. That was when your record would start charting in Cash Box. So there was a lag time between those two trade papers. Billboard claimed to chart records in between radio play and sales. But you would always be two to three weeks further ahead in radio airplay than you were in sales. You might start out in the Top 20 in airplay. Then if the record was a hit it would usually climb very fast, which meant you might be number one in Record World but only number twenty in Cash Box. Billboard took the average of the two, and listed you as number ten in their paper. That sounded okay, and you might eventually go to number one in Cash Box and Record World, but you would have to stay that way for three weeks to get a number one in Billboard. There was always a controversy about Billboard’s top five lists, because the whole industry was screaming at them over the discrepancies and nobody as loudly and as rudely as Morris. He was always on the phone with the editor. “We went number one in both trade papers and you got us at number six, fuck you and your charts.” That was a phone call that happened often. And now, because the other trade papers collapsed over the years, Billboard, by attrition, became the keeper of the flame. When young researchers and historians go back to check the archives for a record’s history, they inevitably get a skewed sense of how popular it really was.