by Tommy James
When I went up to deliver “Mony” to Roulette, we were all excited about it. The first person I played it for was Morris. “Is that the next single?” He liked it but he wasn’t thrilled with it. He felt that it was too much of a throwback to the early sixties. It didn’t sound like Tommy James. He wanted to put out a record that sounded more like “I Think We’re Alone Now” because it had done so well. He wanted to put out a song called “One Two Three And I Fell,” which was the last record Bo Gentry had been involved with. But Kasenetz and Katz were busy bastardizing the “I Think We’re Alone Now” sound with acts like the 1910 Fruitgum Co. and Ohio Express. In a kind of reverse logic, the critics were calling “I Think We’re Alone Now” the precursor to bubblegum. I didn’t want any part of it. Morris saw things differently.
Morris thought and reacted to music like the common man. He couldn’t tell you how to make a hit but he knew one when he heard it, and that’s not as elementary as it sounds. His gift was being able to market the stuff. Nobody was better at marketing rock and roll than Morris Levy. He was a natural-born salesman and he instinctively knew what would make money. He was very singles oriented. He was not an intellectual. He was also a bully, so whatever he couldn’t do in a businesslike way, he would grab you by the collar and threaten you. That’s how he closed the deal. He knew what he wanted and he wanted to make money. Morris played this role as a gangster and he was very convincing. Morris was also very good at knowing what he wasn’t particularly good at. If you had a better idea than he did, he would say, “Run with it.” His ego was not about creativity. It could have been records, it could have been lightbulbs. To him it was just another commodity. And I think because he approached music that way, he understood the business better than anybody in the industry. This was one of those times. “Okay,” said Morris. “Go with it.”
Morris was not one to show up at the studio. But every once in a while he would be with someone he wanted to impress and he would stop by. I would show him a good time, order some Cokes and pizza. The night we were doing “Mony Mony,” I had the studio filled with people. Not Morris’s people, my own people. I had every secretary at 1560 Broadway down in the basement screaming on the record. I left word with Beverly, the receptionist, “I don’t care who comes here, nobody gets in.” So Morris picked that night to bring some of his friends in. He told the receptionist, “You tell Tommy, Morris Levy’s here.” Beverly said, “I’m sorry but I have orders. Nobody gets into a Tommy James session.” Beverly was about four feet ten inches with a beehive hairdo and had a voice like a Queens debutante and a perfectly high-pitched nasal whine that could drive you nuts if you weren’t in the mood. This was in front of Morris’s friends. He finally got Beverly to call me. “There’s a guy out here named Morris somebody and…” I said, “Oh my God, put him on the phone.” I started groveling immediately. He had been humiliated in front of his friends.
My life at that time was in high gear. I became friends with Terry Knight from Terry Knight and the Pack, which later became Grand Funk Railroad. Terry used to be the lead singer but stepped down to become their producer and manager. Terry Knight’s manager was Ed McMahon, who lived at Tower 53, a new building that had gone up on Fifty-third Street between Sixth and Seventh. Terry took me up to meet Ed and we spent a good part of the afternoon with him. I mentioned that I was going to be out in L.A. to do the Hollywood Bowl. He said we should meet up. Ed McMahon was sort of courting the youth vote at that time. I told him I would be staying at the Century Plaza and we would meet up after the show.
That afternoon before the Hollywood Bowl, I met Mike Curb, who was my age, twenty-one, but was president of the MGM film studio. It was a few weeks before 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. He later became lieutenant governor of California under Jerry Brown. The Cowsills, who were managed by my agent, Lenny Stogel, were on the MGM label so we all got the cook’s tour of the studio by Curb himself, who was very cool. He was very reserved and conservative and for a year or so had been quietly buying up MGM stock until he had amassed 51 percent of it. When Polygram/Deutsche Grammophon wanted to acquire MGM, much to the surprise of everyone, including the stockholders, Curb had the majority share and made a fortune in the buyout. I was very impressed. I was impressed by anyone who was actually being paid for their work.
After we performed at the Hollywood Bowl with the Rascals, I went back to the Century Plaza, where we were staying, and because I was still flying from my pills, I called Capitol Records and booked time at one of their recording studios. I had taken a tape of “Do Something to Me” with me to L.A. and finished a rough mix of the song that night. I don’t know where I found the nerve, but I charged the entire session to Mike Curb. When I got back late to my hotel, the front desk clerk was all atwitter. Ed McMahon had dropped by my hotel with Frank Sinatra, and I’d missed him because I was so high I forgot about our date. I never could get with him again to make my apologies. I can just hear Sinatra mumbling, “Fucking kids,” while he cooled his heels in the lobby waiting for Tommy James, who had stiffed him.
Morris was in high gear too. He had found a very lucrative niche in the cutout business. He had helped create two of the giants of that side industry of the record business, K-tel and Adam VIII. They would take records that were recent hits and put them out on compilation albums called cutouts. The problem was that Morris would go a step further and put hits that were currently on the charts out on the compilations, which was ridiculous from the artist’s point of view because it devalued the existing record, already a hit single, by about 90 percent. It became worth a dime instead of a dollar. The reason Morris would do this to his own product was because, down to his very core, his essence, he was a pirate. He could not not be a pirate, even if it wound up hurting him, and me. He had businesses with Tommy Ryan and his childhood friend Sonny Vastola where counterfeits were manufactured and stored. A bootlegger, in the record business, is like somebody printing money. Bootlegging not only devalues your product, but it also floods the market with more product so each unit becomes worth less and less. If a record store is not buying your product from a reputable distributor, somebody else is making the money under the table, tax-free. Small businesses were forced to take Morris’s counterfeits or else they would likely have their stores burned down. Of course, if Morris found out that you were bootlegging his product, he had a way of taking care of that. Usually with baseball bats and Nate McCalla. After 1967, nobody bootlegged Morris’s records except Morris.
In 1968, Roulette moved from 1631 Broadway to 17 West Sixtieth Street, next to Atlantic Records and right by Columbus Circle. Roulette was expanding but it did not change the personality of the company. Every time the possibility arose of Morris going corporate, he nixed it; he would have been accountable. Many major labels including CBS and RCA wanted to distribute Roulette. Morris would never permit it. He would have had to honestly account to artists and pay them.
The office move triggered many audits. I don’t know why. It might have been unintentional or coincidental, but it did. It got the government’s attention. For the next two years, there was an even bigger stream of auditors, accountants, and IRS agents. To Morris, this was like a bug in his ear. “Get with Howard,” he would snarl, and off they would go to examine still another set of books. Of course, no one ever talked out of school. It was the Roulette family’s little secret.
It was a closed group of people. Roulette ran very efficiently because it had a dictator. Dictatorships always run smoothly. Whenever a major distributor wanted to talk to Morris, his standard line was “I don’t have partners.” When Normand Kurtz, the in-house lawyer, put together a nice overseas distribution deal, he expected to be included in the arrangement. “Fuck you, I don’t have partners.” Of course, Morris did have partners, lots of them. His partner for life was Morris Gurlak, the father figure who started him in business and continued in the hatcheck and darkroom concessions, in the restaurants and clubs that they owned together. He was a partner with Tommy Eboli
in the cutout business. He was a partner with Alan Freed when Freed came to town and expected to take over the New York radio and concert business. He was a partner with George Goldner.
In some ways, having a guy like Morris in control was a great safety net. It was wonderful because nobody messed with you. You didn’t make much money, but nobody messed with you. I had the run of Roulette and anything Roulette was involved in. And Morris trusted me with big budgets, my own career, and business decisions involving master recordings of other artists that he was thinking of buying in order to secure the publishing. “Is this a hit?” And Morris fascinated me as no other person had before. Sometimes I would sit with him for hours talking and asking him questions about the music business, politics, philosophy. I even talked to him about Jesus or something that had a spiritual connotation to it and that would always get a good laugh, “That’s great, that’s a good one,” like I had just told him a joke.
Morris was the kind of guy who would trust you once and if it worked, he might trust you again. But the Roulette Regulars were different. They were the big boys and their business was big business. And everybody had his role. Howard received the monies, Nate collected what was owed, and the flow of Genovese crime capos in and out of the office was astonishing, each with his own private deal controlled or financed by Morris. Morris had his own private back exit accessible through a secret door in his office, in case he ever needed a quick escape.
One reason I knew I was unique in Morris’s world was because he never really signed another rock act. There were occasional new acts like the Three Degrees, but most of it was fluff. If I was with a Columbia or an RCA, I could have easily had a couple of hits and then got lost in the shuffle. At Roulette, I was the golden boy. Whatever I wanted, except my money, I got. In Morris’s world, the artist was always in debt against the studio and recording costs, and no matter how many records you sold, you never seemed to make a dent in that. I could not even get the gold records I had been awarded. I used to get drunk or high and steal them off the wall. Morris would come into Roulette and see the gaps on the walls and yell, “Where the fuck are my gold records?” The secretaries would say, “I thought I saw Tommy James walking out with them.” “That fuckin’ kid.”
In 1968, I had a falling out with Lenny Stogel, my manager. I just didn’t like the way things were going. He had a secretary that I really liked named Joanne Adler, and frankly I wanted to start my own management company and I knew I could with Joanne. Morris gave me an office for a production and management company. When Lenny was out of town, I got all my books, records, and photos, and told Morris to inform Lenny he was out, which he did, and I never heard another word from Lenny. If I had done it myself he would have sued the hell out of me.
“The kid’s with me now.” That was that.
Joanne let everyone know that I had my own management company and that was where you were to call if you wanted Tommy James. The phone rang off the hook. We got more calls then Roulette did, and that was saying something. Interviews, concert dates, and publicity appearances. The only person I had to answer to was Morris, my fairy godfather, and he let me do anything I wanted to do.
It felt like a family but it functioned well on a business level. I was still on pills but back then diet pills were not considered dope. It was what was prescribed by your doctor when you needed a boost. It was medicine, it was diets. One of the residual effects was that you didn’t sleep for four months, but so what? I got the job done. My entire universe had become reduced to about ten square blocks. My apartment, the studio, Roulette. Red had made me the darling of radio. He constantly worked the phones. “Tommy’s coming out with a new album, a new record, and a new sound.” Whatever it took. And radio was playing my album cuts as well as my singles.
I tried to get back to see my family and I managed to do so about four times a year, but it was lame. Brian would be sent up to visit me in New York City, but it was so unnatural. The life I was living was great for a twenty-one-year-old who was in the record business but it was no kind of world for a child. I would be buried in the studio all night, doing interviews and organizing logistics for my gigs, and I would bring my three-year-old son into this lunacy. I had become a Christian but I really wasn’t living my faith. Of course, spirituality back then often meant another toke on your pipe. I was living in Tommy’s theme park rather than living a normal life.
The only person who ever tried to put brakes on me was Morris. Morris had been aware for some time that the band and I were popping uppers. The night Frankie Lymon died, Morris made one of his rare trips into the studio. Morris and George Goldner had signed Frankie and the Teenagers years ago, and they had the monster hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” Frankie had stayed with Roulette but had become a drug addict. Morris watched as Frankie’s career declined and his life fell apart.
One night, in the studio, Morris took one look at the ashtray on the console filled with crushed diet pills that I was getting ready to snort and took me off into a corner. That’s when he told me that Frankie had died of a drug overdose. “This is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t stop taking those fucking pills. Every time I talked to this kid he was high.” He meant Frankie. “Knock it the fuck off.” And then, as an afterthought, “You know, if you die, the price of your catalog is going to go through the roof.” It was still another side of Morris. He cared and he was looking out for his property.
I didn’t need Frankie Lymon to get me thinking about drugs. I had something much closer to home. That summer, I got word that Craig Villeneuve, my original keyboard player, had overdosed and died.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Crimson and Clover
At the same time as “Mony Mony” was out and climbing the charts, March 1968, Bobby Kennedy declared his candidacy for president. I was actually very happy about that because I had always been a big Kennedy fan and it was always my view that the sixties were all about trying to get that Kennedy feeling back again after it was crushed in 1963. To me, it was more about that than about rebellion against the war and all the suspicion that began to infect America. It seemed like no matter what rock you lifted there were maggots underneath. When Bobby finally announced, it was tremendous. Lyndon Johnson virtually conceded defeat by refusing to run for reelection.
Everybody I knew seemed to feel that way but we never thought we would actually become involved in the political process. “Mony Mony” was huge in America but it was even bigger in Britain. “Mony” was one of the biggest records Britain ever experienced. Morris had put together a string of foreign deals, most of them in Europe, with an outfit called Major/Minor. Normand Kurtz handled the arrangements.
In early May, we got a call from the Democratic National Committee in Washington asking us if we would be interested in getting involved in a political rally. Roulette took the call and passed it on to Lenny Stogel, who was still with me at the time: “The Democrats want you to do a campaign rally in Union Square Park.” Union Square was at Seventeenth and Broadway at the beginning of lower Manhattan, and a popular spot for rallies and protests. Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy were scheduled to speak. We were shocked but rather proud that either party would think we could motivate a political campaign. We were not what you would call outspoken, but we accepted without hesitation. If they wanted us, we were happy to get involved.
On the day of the rally, which was midweek, we took three limousines and drove to the park. Lenny and his entire staff went with us and lots of people from Roulette, including Red Schwartz. It was a beautiful spring day and all the flowers in the park were in bloom and the breeze was balmy and sweet. There were thousands of people crammed into the park, standing on benches, sitting on tree limbs, huddled around the statues, and a few thousand more had spilled out into the surrounding streets, which had been blocked off. There was a makeshift stage and in front of it were lots of very longhaired protesters who had taken over that space. They carried signs that were mostly anti-Johnson and anti-Humphrey. H
umphrey was seen as the establishment candidate early on and was attached to Johnson at the hip. For better or for worse, he refused to directly repudiate Johnson’s foreign policy, which was not making him many friends. After all, it was the Democrats who had made a mess of the war, and all the goodwill that Lyndon Johnson had after JFK was murdered had evaporated long ago. When we took the stage, these belligerent kids up front, carrying signs that read DUMP THE HUMP, started yelling at us: “Sellout! Sellout!” We were kind of upset by that but there was so much anger registered against Democrats, that anybody supporting the party in any way was considered a sellout.
Mayor Lindsay, Bella Abzug, and other local politicians were making speeches. We arrived in the afternoon. The newspaper press and television reporters were everywhere and at one point the police even threatened to charge the protesters. There were a lot of strong, silent guys with dark glasses talking into their cuff links. It got a little scary once or twice. But we played, and everybody seemed to settle down, listen to the speeches, and generally enjoy themselves. We had a recording session later that night, so we did not stay to hear the real stars.
Afterward, we were thanked by representatives from the Democratic Party. They said we had done a great show and asked if we would be interested in appearing at any more rallies. We said sure. That was enough to put us on a short list of entertainers who were willing to get involved in the presidential race. No one called for a couple of weeks and we forgot about it. But eventually someone did call and asked if we would appear at the upcoming California primary, which was to be held the first week of June. Would we consider playing at the Ambassador Hotel? We wanted to very much but we had already committed to playing the World Teen Fair in Dallas on June 3. We regretfully declined because the dates were just too close together.