Me, the Mob, and the Music

by Tommy James

  The World Teen Fair was held at a gigantic complex like McCormick Place in Chicago and there were many acts playing simultaneously on different stages throughout the week. There were at least two dozen big-name acts that were all having hits at the time, like the Mamas and Papas and the Buckinghams, plus a lot of up-and-comers. During our stay in Dallas, I became friendly with a female reporter who worked for the Dallas Star, and wound up spending the night at her place. The next morning, she promised to take me to the airport, but since we had some time to kill, I begged her to drive me through Dealey Plaza and she did. A few months before, on a plane trip, I had sat next to one of Jim Garrison’s secretaries and found that he was reinvestigating the Kennedy assassination. She told me they had discovered Kennedy was shot from four, maybe five different directions, and I had to see this for myself.

  I was mesmerized, standing in the middle of this placid little corner of Dallas at the exact spot where JFK was killed. I could not believe how tiny the place was, as opposed to the expansiveness you sense from seeing it on television. There was the book depository, the grassy knoll and the fence, the bridge by the overpass, all the possible angles of opportunity, even the storm drain that might have been a factor. I stayed there until the cops finally came and chased us away, which apparently happened often. How could I not help thinking of Bobby and that we had been asked to play out there tonight?

  But I caught my plane and flew home, returning to the apartment near midnight, and I turned on the television to see how the voting was going. I wanted to see which act had taken our place when Frank McGee’s voice broke into the commentary and said, “Hold it, hold, it… there’s apparently been a shooting at Kennedy headquarters.” I was horrified and too tired and strung out from a weekend of rock and roll and pills to feel anything but despair. I stayed up with Ronnie, transfixed by the television and what proved to be a deathwatch. In my delirium, it felt like I had been through two assassinations in twenty-four hours, not to mention that Martin Luther King had been gunned down a month before. I think it was Gore Vidal who was asked a little later on what hero Americans could turn to and he said, “None, this country shoots all its heroes.”

  The whole country was up for two days and eventually Robert Kennedy died. That ended the sixties for me. The magic and the good feelings shriveled up and died with Bobby. I went into a depression because I felt so close to the events and the man. I am sure it was partly fueled by pills and booze, which I did nonstop for weeks after the killing. It was a terrible loss of belief in everything.

  Then two things happened that pulled me out of my funk. “Mony Mony” just exploded in Britain. It was the biggest record they had ever had in the sixties as far as singles sales. It had been number one for weeks, so the BBC called Roulette to ask if we would do a tour of Britain culminating with a nationwide appearance on their Bandstand-type show called Top of the Pops. We agreed. It would get us out of the country, into a new world of adulation and success. Why not? They started a nationwide publicity blitz anticipating our arrival.

  But then we got another call right after we agreed to the tour. It was from Hubert Humphrey’s office. Humphrey’s assistant, Ursula Culver, asked if we would appear with the vice president on his campaign trail. We would start traveling with him after the nomination. I felt it was our duty to do whatever we could to keep Nixon out of the White House. We were honored. It was the first time a rock act had hooked up with a presidential campaign in any real way. I tried to explain this to the BBC. They would have none of it. They banned our records. They were very upset and didn’t play any of our records for almost five years. I hated to lose Britain, but tough.

  We were supposed to meet Humphrey in Wheeling, West Virginia, after the convention. Ritchie Cordell, Mike Vale, and I were up at my place in New York writing and high on pills. We had the convention on. Suddenly all of Chicago exploded. Kids were getting their heads beaten in. The cops were mounting an armed attack. It went on for hours. Mike and I said, “What have we got ourselves into? Is every rally going to be like this?” It seemed the whole country was exploding. Humphrey was nominated the following night at about 2:00 A.M. It was an understatement to say his campaign got off to a bad start.

  We met him the following Wednesday. We flew down on a prop plane on which the wings were above the cabin and you could see gasoline running down the windows. We landed and then were driven in golf carts to another hanger at the airport where Humphrey was going to speak. We went inside and they had a makeshift stage set up with American flags all over the place. We changed and went up on stage and were introduced without any sound check. The Secret Service were everywhere and they were on high alert. We played about five songs. They put folding chairs up on the stage, and we sat by Mrs. Humphrey in our stage clothes while a contingent of local politicians made speeches. One guy actually called the vice president “Herbert” Humphrey. Flashbulbs were exploding, and Humphrey came up to great applause and made an impassioned speech. TV cameras caught the event and the campaign was off and running.

  We transferred to another puddle jumper, a Convair, for the next campaign stop. On the plane, Humphrey finally came back to meet us. “Well, Tommy James, how are you?” I got up and hit my head on the overhead bin. “OOO, are you okay, young man?” He spoke in that high-pitched chant he always had. “Thanks for joining the campaign.” We went on to two more campaign stops, in North Carolina and Georgia.

  Mr. Humphrey wanted us anytime we could make it. They gave us our own Learjet from Butler Aviation out of LaGuardia Airport. Our itinerary was taken care of. And so we joined the campaign. We must have done more than fifty big rallies in all. In the meantime, we were performing our own dates, but we and the campaign coordinated everything.

  We played at Binghamton, New York, at a coliseum. There were flyers and posters up all over town: “Appearing One Night Only: Tommy James and the Shondells,” and then underneath, in small letters, “Also appearing Vice President Hubert Humphrey.” We got top billing. Humphrey would walk out on stage after our set and say, “Look at these crowds, Mr. Nixon,” and, of course, they credited us for the crowds. Our rallies had metamorphosed from airport hanger to coliseums of 20,000 to 30,000 people.

  There were many other celebrities that appeared as well, but we were the only ones who appeared all the time. In Yonkers, we played a rally and had to pick up Shelley Winters at her Upper East Side brownstone. We took a couple of limos. She climbed in, and after she said hello, she hit the bar and downed a quick pint of scotch. Of course, we were all high on pills. Alan King, the comedian, was master of ceremonies and met the limo. Shelley got out with her glass of booze and we all went to the stage. We played our abbreviated set first and then took our place on the dais with Mrs. Humphrey on one side and Alan King on the other. Alan was thrilled and was without his trademark air of disgust that got him so many laughs. “This is going to be great,” he said. Finally, Shelley Winters took the podium and almost fell over. She was slurring her words. “I’m an actress and I can say any damn thing I want, and I say Hubert Humphrey is going to be the next president of the United States.” At least she got his name right. Alan King turned to me and said, “Every time this fucking broad shows up, we lose ten thousand votes.” What Alan did not know was that the stage was miked to pick up the applause when the politicians spoke. His critique of Shelley Winters went out through the sound system and the whole auditorium heard him and started to roar. He just put his hand to his forehead and sank into the chair.

  Once during the campaign Humphrey called me up and asked if I would come over to his suite. I was with Pete Lucia and the two of us went up to see the vice president. His doctor was there and a bunch of party officials, and Humphrey was holding court in a corner of the room. We were taken over to the couch where he was expounding on something. After he finished, he floored me by asking if I would consider heading a president’s council on youth affairs. It would be a kind of subcabinet position because he wanted to stay in touch with y
oung people. I said something stupid like, “Mr. Vice President, the youth of this country are definitely having affairs, and I’m just the guy to look into it.” If you hang around politicians enough you start talking like them. We laughed and then I said I’d be honored. Then he asked us for our opinion on something he and his advisers had been working on. He then proceeded to tell us his plan for ending the Vietnam War. “We want to have a national referendum as soon as I get in office. We want to end this thing. It’ll do two things: it’ll show the world what democracy really is and also save about thirty thousand kids.” I couldn’t believe we were hearing that, because the news media was just chomping at the bit to hear something like that, but he refused to espouse it publicly because it would have been a slap in the face of Johnson, and Humphrey felt Johnson was responsible for his being the nominee in the first place. Johnson, by the way, had yet to endorse him. We knew we were hearing history but we were sworn to secrecy.

  We often went up to his suite to talk about the issues of the day, his latest speech, and how the day’s rally had gone. Some nights were more animated than others. It was almost like after a gig with everybody sitting around, winding down. One night he said, “I’m exhausted and I’ve got to stay up and write this darn speech.” And I said, “You know when I have to stay up I sometimes take these stay-awake pills.” And I took out a vial of black beauties and gave him one. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I did that, but that shows you the times. The next night he said, “Geez, those things are powerful, I was up the whole night.” “Well, if you need any more,” I said, “just let me know.” He never asked for them again. His doctor must have given him the heads-up.

  We were there the night of the election at the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis. I can’t begin to tell you how electric that scene was. It was so exciting because of how much was riding on this election, the assassinations months before, the convention, the war—we felt like we were at the center of things. And we were. The hotel was filled with celebrities like Gene Barry, Lee Majors. All the TV networks were there. We were actually on all three at once and we played a couple of sets waiting for the results to come in. Nixon had begun months before with an outrageous lead in the polls, somewhere around 30 percent. By election night, the candidates were neck and neck. Humphrey credited us with the bump in the polls, and though I don’t think we played that crucial a part, we were tickled with the compliment.

  The whole night was a party. Mike, Pete, Joanne, and I went up to Humphrey’s suite and Lee Majors came over. He was drunk as a skunk, tried to hit on Joanne, and wound up spilling his drink down her blouse. I said, “That’s it,” and pushed him away. He said, “Fuck you,” and pushed me back, and we had to be separated. I almost got into a fistfight with the Six Million Dollar Man on the night of the presidential election. By the end of the night, I was just as bad as or worse than Lee Majors and there was still no winner announced.

  Suddenly the buzz at election headquarters was that the voting machines in Chicago had broken down. Nobody knew what was going on in Cook County. Later that morning, a flood of votes went Nixon’s way and he was projected the winner. Everyone knew what had happened. It was Mayor Daley’s revenge on the Democrats for his national humiliation at the convention.

  What a letdown. It really looked for a while like Humphrey was going to win. The next morning can only be described as a national hangover. We had breakfast with Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey, and everyone wanted a recount because we were all convinced the election was stolen. He refused. “Mr. Nixon is our president now.” Then he paused a moment and said, “This guy has a terrible habit of getting himself in trouble. You have to watch him. He didn’t get the name Tricky Dick for nothing. He’s going to need all the help we can give him, because he’ll find some way to screw it up.”

  It was just one of many disappointments in 1968. The success of “Mony” was offset by the BBC ban. We all had so much hope for and faith in Robert Kennedy, and then he was shot. Then Hubert Humphrey was really trying to change things, and he was beaten in one of the shadiest election coups ever. To go through everything and to end up with Nixon, after all that. No Camelot II, no Humphrey, more and more Vietnam with no end in sight.

  Before the 1968 election, there was very little left-right, conservative-liberal dichotomy. That election, that year, was when we lost our unity and became a red and blue country. Divided we fall. There was a real sense of trauma at the end of that election and Humphrey was correct. We did lose thousands more kids.

  Humphrey and I stayed friends. In 1975, I did a concert for UNESCO. We did a show at an arena in Landover, Maryland, and I was presented with a plaque from the State Department. Hubert Humphrey gave me the award. We stayed in touch up until the day he died.

  When you’re out on a campaign it is very much like being on tour. There is a lot of downtime. As we traveled on our Learjet we had a lot of opportunity to check out the competition. What we discovered amazed us. Everybody was buying albums. It was like going from reading poetry to reading novels. Eight-track tapes came out on the market with accompanying boom boxes to play them on. Before that point, you could hear an entire album only on your stereo at home. Albums didn’t travel well. You never heard an album outside of your own rig. Now they were portable. Pete Lucia had an eight track and he would bring the latest albums out and we listened to them religiously: the hot new bands were Led Zeppelin; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Joe Cocker; Neil Young. All album acts.

  When we left for the fall campaign, it was a singles market and we were part of it. When we got back, it was an album market. All of our friends had fallen by the wayside. It wasn’t the Rascals or the Association anymore. It was King Crimson, Led Zeppelin: the album acts. We knew that if we wanted to survive in this business, we would have to become an album act. We could not stay pop any longer. That’s when we began the Crimson and Clover album.

  We went into the studio toward the end of the campaign and produced the “Crimson and Clover” single. I am convinced that that single allowed us to make the transition to the next level of our career. No other project before or since would have allowed that to happen. The single was finished in December, having taken us about five hours. I don’t think we ever moved so fast in the studio. I played most of the instruments, Mike played bass, and Pete played drums. It was gearing up to be the most important release for us, because in order for it to be successful it would have to be the major turning point for Tommy James and the Shondells. Roulette put its entire promotional and sales apparatus in high gear. That night, I finished “Crimson” and made a rough mix, right off the board. We were going to come back in a week to mix in a lot of ambient sound, a lot of echo. We wanted it to be a more profound statement than was on the mix.

  But I was so excited I stopped by Morris’s office. “Is that the next single?” Morris listened and gave me his blessing. He thought the record was going to be a monster. For days after I played him the record he kept calling me up at my apartment. “This is a fucking number one record.” He also told me, “I’m very proud of what you did with Humphrey. You know he was a liberal before it was fashionable to be a liberal.” Morris never talked to me like that. I did not know he knew words that big. He wanted to know everything we did on the campaign. “How the fuck did you pull this off?” I had impressed Morris Levy. At the office the next day, I ran into Nate McCalla, and he was just as giddy. “We’re all proud of what you’re doing. Keep up the good work.” Morris and Roulette had been following our Humphrey tour with pride. I found out that Morris had told everyone he knew, including Tommy Ryan and the boys. Considering the fact that we destroyed sales in Britain, which meant a pinch in Morris’s pocketbook, he should have been furious, but he wasn’t. Morris never said anything about the lost revenue. He treated me like I had graduated from Harvard.

  That weekend, the Shondells and I played a date in Chicago and we were met at the airport by a limousine. As we were driving to our hotel, I stopped by WLS on the
off chance that program director John Rook was there. I wanted to get some reaction to “Crimson” from a radio station that had always been so good to us. John was in that afternoon and invited me to sit with him. He made a big deal out of me being there. I did an interview and talked about the new single. I should not have done it, but I played him the rough mix when we were off the air. He flipped over the record. “Let me get Larry Lujack in here. We just hired him.” Lujack would go on to be one of WLS’s top DJs. Rook played Lujack the rough mix and without my knowledge or approval pushed a record button on the tape recorder and made himself a copy. Lujack loved it. They handed me back the tape and we parted with promises to call each other next week. By the time I had gotten into the limo, the radio was tuned to WLS and Larry Lujak was announcing in his best DJ voice: “World exclusive… Tommy James and the Shondells… brand new single… ‘Crimson and Clover.’” He was playing the rough mix on the radio as a world exclusive. I knew I was never going to hear the end of this from Jim Stagg. I was warned on “Mony” not to give WLS an exclusive.

  Monday morning, when I stopped by at Roulette, a five-foot funeral wreath was sitting outside Red Schwartz’s office with a banner that read: “Condolences on the death of Tommy James and the Shondells at WCLF Radio.” It was from Jim Stagg at the rival station. Morris came right out and said, “What the fuck?” I told them both what had happened. Red called Rook and told him about the wreath. Jim Stagg wouldn’t take Red’s call. Rook said, “Fuck Jim Stagg, I’ll play it every twenty minutes.” And then he added in radio lingo, “He’ll have to go on the record.” And that is what he did. This was still the rough mix. I never got a chance to remix the record.