Me, the Mob, and the Music

by Tommy James

  Christmas of that year, Morris threw a huge party at the Roundtable, which was his club. The Roundtable was a big place with a three-tiered layout that gave it a sunken aspect, as if you were watching a show at a theater. The top tiers were a kind of semicircle with tables looking down on the main floor, where the stage was. You walked in on the upper level and walked down to ringside. The booths were big and round and the stage itself was a huge O. Morris had reserved the whole club for this party, and Ronnie and I had the best seats at Morris’s table, just to the right of the stage. It had a lavish Moroccan décor to go with the belly dancers and the food. Morris Gurlak was there greeting everyone and by mid-afternoon everybody from Roulette was settling in. Howard Fisher and Red Schwartz were there. Normand Kurtz, the in-house lawyer; Nate McCalla, his bodyguard and partner at Calla Records; and Jerry Schiffron. George Goldner was there; all the wives and girlfriends were there; and Morris was in great spirits. It had been a sensational year for Roulette, and Morris made every effort to impress. He seemed to have taken great care in presenting a kind of show for us. When the belly dancers came out, he would laugh and say, “Watch this… watch what she does here.” And the girl would twirl something on her left breast and Morris would be pleased. The food and booze were incredible and never stopped coming. People from the record industry stopped by. This was a celebration of pride in what Roulette had accomplished and Morris wanted the entire industry to see. I felt great because I was at the center of it. The Shondells and I were now the premiere act in the Roulette stable. All the other pop acts, all the other Latin and jazz acts now paled in comparison. In fact, Tito Puente and Joe Cuba, both Roulette acts on Morris’s Latin label, Tico, were on stage performing for us. Joe Cuba did a hit he had called “Bang! Bang!” and another called “Push, Push, Push.” J. J. Jackson stopped by and did his smash “But It’s Alright.” J.J. was signed to Calla Records and was Nate McCalla’s biggest success. Then the Shondells and I got up to perform. We did an abbreviated set, playing all of our gold records up to then. As a special surprise, we did a song I used to do back in Niles with the Tornadoes. I would often take two songs that I liked that had the same kind of feel and glue them together to make a tight little medley. One of my favorites was “Little Latin Lupe Lu” and “Killer Joe.” I had this in mind because Morris loved Latin music. I figured we were never going to record the thing because Morris didn’t own the publishing, but I wanted to do it as a kind of Christmas present for Morris. We started to play and Joe Cuba’s band picked up on it right away. All of a sudden I had a six-piece horn section cranking out notes like a chorus. Tito Puente joined in on his steel drums. People got out of their seats and started dancing around the tables in a conga line. When we finished, we got a standing ovation.

  Even beyond the fame and adulation, the screaming crowds and the gold records, this party was the fulfillment of everything I had ever wanted. This was my world, and if I wasn’t the king, I was sitting next to the king. I was at the king’s table.

  At some point that night, Morris and Nate took me into the men’s room and Nate pulled out a vial of crystal meth. I was dumbfounded because up until that time and even afterward, I never knew Morris to use drugs at all except perhaps an occasional joint. Drugs at Roulette were strictly forbidden, especially considering Morris’s associates and the Treasury boys always snooping around. Nate pulled out a silver spoon and he and Morris stuffed their noses with this stuff like they were born to it. They offered me some but I did not join in because I was already doing enough pills to blow the top of my head off and I had been washing them down with booze. They had what looked like a pound of the stuff and they were flying. It was very uncharacteristic of Morris but this was his empire and he was judge, jury, and law. When we got back to the tables everyone was hugging and kissing everyone else. I knew Nate was high because he became very emotional as Ronnie and I got ready to leave. He grabbed both of us in headlocks, one under each arm, squeezed us, and kept saying over and over, “You guys are the best.” “God bless you.” Nate would normally never be that effusive in a million years.

  I was absorbed in the success and the glamour and celebrity of it all. But it was more than just being a star. I had found a new family and it was Roulette. I was like a lion cub in the den. I might get growled at and slapped occasionally, and I could feed only when the leader of the pride let me, but I was safe and secure. I had a new wife, I was artist of the year, and everything was beautiful. And these were all my new best friends whose sole mission was to promote me, sell me, help my career, and look out for me. I felt warm and protected. There were Morris and Nate. There was Red, whom I loved. There was Howard, who never wrote the royalty checks I was supposed to receive, and Karin, who never signed those checks, and Morris, who never authorized them. But I didn’t care. This was my family. And here were all the other members of the family. Here was Tommy Eboli, alias Tommy Ryan, who was the head of his own family and loved my music. Here was Dominick Cirillo, alias Quiet Dom, who always kept Karin company when “the boys” were in discussion in Morris’s office. Here was Vinnie Gigante, alias “The Chin.” And there was Tommy Vastola, alias Sonny Vastola, alias Corky Vastola, alias Gaetano Vastola, alias whatever. Everybody proud and happy. Everybody glad to see me. Everybody looking out for me and watching me.

  Oh, I had a new family, all right… Oh brother, did I ever.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mony Mony

  After the incredible year we had in ’67, by almost every standard we were an astonishing success. In fewer than two years we had nine hit singles, five smash albums including our first Greatest Hits album, plus Billboard’s coveted Artist of the Year award. We were playing dream gigs all over the country to packed arenas and baseball stadiums, and we had a constant barrage of radio airplay. But as usual, being Roulette artists meant not being paid, and it was becoming a tormenting issue. It wasn’t just me, everybody connected with the Shondells was trapped in Morris’s demented financial black hole. And yet, in a way, the whole Roulette payment debacle started to become my responsibility. Everyone would come to me because they were too afraid to confront Morris. I was becoming the shop steward for most of our team—the band, photographers, publicity people, art designers, sometimes even the studio. The joke about “the quietest place on the planet” being accounts payable at Roulette was no longer very funny. I would get reasonable pleas from our crew for payment that I would pass on to Morris. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it.” But nothing would happen and the demands would eventually grow into fury and frustration because Morris would parade around Roulette as if nothing was wrong. What made matters worse was that Red and Karin were always clueing me in about Morris’s stately living; his luxury Manhattan penthouse, his condominium in Florida, his mansion in New Jersey where he lived with his fourth wife, Nome, plus a newly acquired dairy farm in Ghent, New York. Then there was Morris’s endless supply of special girlfriends and his passion for gambling and prostitutes. He had plenty of money for all that but never a dime for all the people who made it happen, especially me.

  It wasn’t that I was living in poverty. We were making great money from radio airplay and concerts. Lately we were doing commercials for product lines like Real Girl Cosmetics and HIS clothes. We also had an arrangement with Philco doing “hip-pocket records,” miniature 45s about as big as a modern-day CD, which needed a special player, also made by Philco. But there were always lean periods and those were the times I had to ask Morris for an advance. I never made an appointment for these encounters so I could catch him off guard. But I seldom fooled him for long. He knew what I was there for.

  I can still see him puffing on his Pall Malls, no smile, waiting for me to make my move. It was almost like we were stalking each other. He would grunt, “How ya doin’?” and I would start out very cheery, tell him some news about what record we planned to put out next. Usually I had a tape of the next single and then I would pounce. “Morris, can I get an advance?” But Morris could play this game
better than anybody and any threat to his power was immediately squashed. There were times when he would say in his gruffest voice, “Not now. See me next week.” And you had to slink away. If he was feeling generous he would yell for Karin or Howard Fisher and have a check cut. “The kid needs ten grand,” like he was doing you a favor. But it was not a business negotiation, it was psychological warfare. Morris had to first make you understand that he knew he owed you the money, and that you were not going to get it if he didn’t feel like giving it. With me, he knew when to throw a bone, but there was never any doubt who was in control, and he made me aware of this a hundred times, that I was not going to be treated like a respected artist, like a human being. A few thousand here, a few thousand there; that was the closest I ever got to royalties.

  If I got the advance, I’d usually walk out feeling grateful for having money in my pocket… until I realized how much the son of a bitch really owed me. In the beginning I actually fell for the line he would always spew about studio costs. “You’re spendin’ a fuckin’ fortune in the studio.” “You’re putting me in the fuckin’ poorhouse.” Right, you don’t sell twenty million albums and singles in eighteen months and still lose money for the record company, especially when Morris got all the publishing rights.

  The walks home after my confrontations with Morris were a shrink’s dream. I would run the scene over and over in my mind and become more and more enraged. How I would have to go into his inner sanctum and fall on my knees and then have to listen to his bullshit, and how he would take an almost demonic glee in making me sweat and beg. His method was to use all the power of his office, his Mob connections, his reputation for brutality, but even more than that, his pathological need for money, especially other people’s money. Power and money were what his psyche, his soul, was made of. His peculiar dementia was that he had to make you understand at a visceral level that he was prepared to blow everything to hell, destroy the very thing that was making him his millions, unless you submitted to his will.

  And how could I stop him? How could anyone stop or control him? All the lawyers I hired were either bought off or scared off. Everything in my life and my career was tied up in this guy. And it was slowly taking its effect on the Shondells and Ronnie because it was slowly taking an effect on me. I was becoming a stranger to myself. I didn’t realize the extent of it at the time, but Morris was infecting me somehow. His rages were slowly becoming my rages. It didn’t happen overnight, it was more insidious than that. It crept up inside me and I was helping feed that beast with all the drugs and booze. At first, popping pills was fun, it was part of the scene, part of the creative process. It kept me awake so I could finish a recording session or a show. But now it was getting uglier. I was becoming dark, and making people afraid of me, which in a twisted way I felt I had the right to do because it was being done to me. I felt tortured and trapped. I had never dealt with someone that I needed so much from on the one hand and at the same time was like a schoolyard bully I couldn’t get away from. I also knew that somehow, somewhere, sometime there was going to be a confrontation. I knew that Morris and I were eventually going to go head to head and all this rancor was going to spill out. In a sense, a strange but unmistakable part of his sick theater was that Morris was almost daring me to do just that. There was no other way Morris could have a relationship with anybody except the guys who were even more psychopathic than him. The guys who hung out at Roulette. The guys who were his partners and protectors.

  In February 1968, Bo had his own confrontation with Morris. Even after everything that had happened between us, I felt sorry for Bo because I knew how things would end up. Simply put, he hadn’t been paid a dime since he started at Roulette. Morris owed both him and Ritchie a fortune in royalties as producers and writers going back to “I Think We’re Alone Now.” In his own twisted logic, Morris took the attitude that if it wasn’t for him, Bo wouldn’t have anything. “I gave you Tommy James. I can take Tommy James away.” The way Morris treated Bo crystallized his psychotic need for control and his pleasure in vengeance. He’d rather jeopardize all the future hits that Bo might have produced for me and him than pay Bo the tiniest portion of what he legitimately owed him. He told Bo that if he left, he, Morris, would make sure he’d never have another hit. “I’ll fucking see to that.” And he never did.

  So Bo went over to Laurie Records and Kazenetz and Katz. He got some kind of position over there as a producer. He still couldn’t take writing credits because the publishing still belonged to Artie Ripp and Kama Sutra. So Ritchie went too. He felt that he owed Bo that and maybe he could straddle the fence between me and Kazenetz and Katz. In the meantime, Morris went a little crazy trying to find me a producer. I talked with Wes Farrell, who was already a legend, and Joe Wissert, who was producing the Turtles, plus some others, but there was really nobody I wanted. I felt I was ready to start producing my own records, and I had something specific in mind.

  Early in 1968, I went into Century Sound Studios, which was Brooks Arthur’s studio, and started putting a track together. I liked Century Sound because it had a lot of history. It was where most of the Phil Spector stuff was recorded. My home base studio, Allegro, was closed for one of its periodic upgrades. I wanted to make a party rock song, a throwback almost to the great Gary (U.S.) Bonds and Mitch Ryder records I loved so much. A throwback like “California Sun,” which drove me crazy back in Niles so long ago and was written by that great songwriting team Henry Glover and Morris Levy. This was the beginning of what would eventually become “Mony Mony,” although at the time, we had no name for the thing. We did not even have much of a song.

  It began life as a simple rhythm track: with Pete Lucia on drums, a friend of his named John Andiolorro on bass, and me on guitar. We had more of an idea than we had a song, and that is where it began: a beat; a groove; just three or four chords and we were going to write the song around the track. I knew I was going to slice and splice it later on, but that first night, for our purposes, I liked what we had.

  After about three weeks, Allegro Studios finally reopened, and by this time, Ritchie Cordell had come back. He didn’t like it with Kasenetz and Katz. He had a problem with Jeff and Jerry. “They don’t fucking get it. They’re a couple of slave drivers.” Bo was still over there but Ritchie had had enough. Ritchie was too much of a free spirit to be corralled in the semicorporate world of prefabricated bubblegum on demand. I was glad to have him back.

  We took the track I had on tape from Century Sound and went to work in earnest. We sort of did sound surgery on the thing, rewriting it technically. The song was literally sliced, diced, and glued back together. We had it in a hundred pieces and then put it back together the way we wanted it. In the reassembling, we created an actual melody with a verse and hook. By this time, we had been adding snippets of guitar, organ, piano, and lots of background noise. On any night, we would add a harmonica part, two hollers, and three screams. I think everyone I knew in New York was on this record doing something. We finally reached a point where we had glued enough track together to write the song.

  The night before we were supposed to finish the record, Ritchie and I went up to my apartment, popped two Desbutals each, and started writing the lyrics.

  “Here she come now sayin’—blah blah—blah blah.”

  “Wake me, shake me—blah blah—blah blah.”

  “Shoot ’em down, turn around—blah blah—blah blah.”

  We had all the nonsensical one-liners you could ever want but we still could not come up with a damn title. We knew we needed a two-syllable girl’s name but every real name sounded stupid. We had to make up a rock and roll name like Sloopy or Bony Moronie. By about midnight, Ritchie and I were spent and we took a break. We threw down our guitars and went out on the terrace. We lit up our cigarettes, leaned on the railing, and looked out at the Manhattan night sky. All of a sudden, my eyes fell on a building across the street, a couple of blocks down. It was the Mutual of New York Insurance Company building. There w
as a neon sign on top of it with the logo on it: MONY. It had a dollar sign in the middle of the O, and the time and the weather underneath. And it kept flashing MONY MONY MONY. I slapped Ritchie on the arm and said, “Look.” We started laughing. I said, “Is that God winking at you, or what?” Ritchie just said, “Unbelievable.” There was our name. And it was a good thing too. We were under so much pressure to come up with something, if I had been looking in the other direction we would have called the song the Taft Hotel.

  In the end, out of deference to Ritchie, I didn’t take credit for coproducing the record. As far as the writing credits went, I put Ritchie’s name on it because he helped with the words. Of course, whenever you put Ritchie’s name on something it meant you were putting Bo’s name on as well. Then Bobby Bloom came in.

  Back in the sixties, everyone was a talent scout, and Bo and Ritchie had discovered this kid Bobby Bloom, who eventually had hits like “Montego Bay.” He was very talented, and Bo and Ritchie wanted to produce him, so he was always hanging around. He came to some of my sessions and soon he was doing little things. He ended up doing the “OOO I love ya, Mony Mo Mo Mony” part. So I put his name on the credits too. Within a week, I was already working on what I wanted to be the follow-up to “Mony Mony,” which as it turned out became the next hit single, called “Do Something to Me.”