by Tommy James
Clive Davis was making overtures about buying out my contract but Morris wouldn’t budge. I found this out through the grapevine. The funny part was that it really never dawned on me how much I was being screwed by Morris. I had never had the money in front of me, so I never missed it in the way that I would have if, say, I had a million dollars and then next year lost a million dollars. I was making good money on the road so I always had enough to get by. Morris was so consummate in his thievery that I could never really see what was never in front of me.
The band and I spent a lot of time listening to the competition. Pete Lucia was predictably up on all the newest acts or recently released albums. The band and I had a ball listening to King Crimson, Neil Young, and Crazy Horse. It took me years to realize that In the Court of the Crimson King didn’t come with marijuana seeds enclosed in the cover. That was our favorite rolling album, and Pete was a rolling master. Bruce Staple from Allegro competed for best dovetail joint roller with Pete. We all evolved around the same time—that is to say, our hair got longer and we got high more. I don’t know if that is devolving or evolving, but we thought it was the best way to keep up with the technology, which was also evolving. Pete always managed to score the best hash, orange hash, hash laced with something or other. Bruce was sweet on Jamaican weed. For me, pot that was so good made me paranoid. I didn’t like getting out of control. Being out of control scared me to death. That’s why I did booze and uppers, because when you did them, even though you were out of control, you didn’t think you were. I never did acid. I didn’t like space drugs. I wanted something that would put you someplace.
It was a quiet time for Roulette as far as I was concerned. All Morris’s partners were happy. I saw a lot of Vinnie the Chin and Tommy Ryan. The Greatest Hits album sold extraordinarily well through the Christmas season of 1969. For the first time, I allowed myself ever so slightly to relax and enjoy my success, and part of that was going up to Morris’s farm.
We would leave on Friday and come back Sunday or Monday morning. It was great on Friday night. Morris’s nonmusical friends would stop by, like Dr. Joyce Brothers and her husband. I was always amazed at the people he knew. Every once in a while something would come up that would keep him away from the farm, like attending the wedding of Bob Hope’s daughter, but it would have to be something very important. The whole neighborhood was being overrun with Morris’s friends like Nate, Tommy Mottola, and Vinnie the Chin’s brother Father Louis Gigante. Morris had all his friends buy farms. It was about four hours from New York, between the Catskills and the Berkshires. Another thing that amazed me was that Morris’s property was a working dairy farm. The house was about a hundred years old with a man-made lake bordering it on the east. There were rolling hills and huge dairy barns and a colossal blue silo with a silver top and white lettering that read “Adam Levy and Father” instead of “Morris Levy and Son.” There were milking barns, and he must have had a hundred cows. Morris actually made thousands of dollars a year on milk. This was free money because the cows came with the place. He hired an independent firm to run that part of the farm. He had it down to a science. They would all be milked at this huge milk factory. They had milk machines, stalls, there was processing done on the premises, and then it was sold to the local milk company. There was a crew of people who fed the cows and mucked out the stalls. Later he expanded the farm to stables for breeding racehorses. It was eleven hundred acres. There was an entourage of locals that visited him. He was constantly buying land that touched his, constantly expanding his estate. He also had an arsenal of hunting rifles, pistols, and shotguns, and walls of ammunition. The two of us would spend hours target shooting whenever I visited.
The house was gorgeous, with a real New England feel to it, hardwood floors, and a little breezeway in the back where Morris would chop wood for the fireplace. He had a live-in elderly couple that ran the place. She would cook in a big, expansive kitchen that always smelled like just-baked bread. There was a big parlor that Morris had turned into a game room with billiard tables and chessboards, and every room seemed to have a television. The living room had two couches and the fireplace was always roaring. It was a masterpiece. The veranda went all the way around the house. Big hallways, with about five or six bedrooms. Nome, Morris’s wife, would come up Saturday morning.
Friday night, Morris and I would get loaded. Watching the fire, with our feet up, we often talked business, but I often tried to get into Morris’s soul. “Let me just ask you a question. Nobody can size a deal up like you. You’re like a computer on a spaceship. You can do anything. Why do you hang with these Mob guys?” He would laugh and say, “These are my friends, these are the guys I grew up with. It’s what I am.” That was about as honest an answer as I got out of him. Morris was in some ways a very noble character and in other ways he was a scumbag. He was a thief, and possibly a killer, and he was proud of it. But when the “noble” people in this business needed a favor, when they needed something sordid to be done, and did not want to get their hands dirty, they called Morris. Morris would love to go pitch hay, he loved manual labor, and he loved his sons and nieces and nephews. But if you crossed him, he would see you dead. He was more fun to be with than anybody. He was not lazy and he had a great sense of what was right and not right. He called it like he saw it. Who was going to tell him otherwise? The police? The government? He saw the world as a crime family, the government being the biggest thief of all. The police were corrupt. Politicians were liars and crooks. And most of the time he was right. He lived by his own morality, if you could call it that. Morris never brought up my contract during this time. He would never lower himself. He would agonize and bully my lawyer, but he never said a word to me. We were on a different level of communication.
One of the things Morris was always concerned about was me taking pills. Since we were baring our souls up at the farm, he would come back at me and say, “What do you have to take that shit for? You got more fucking talent in your little finger than the rest of these guys got in their whole bodies. You don’t need that shit. If I thought that shit would do any good, I’d give all my fucking writers pills.” He brought this up fairly often and I never had a good answer. I used pills more than I liked them. I used them to stay up at night because I had to get things done. I’d use them to go on stage because I’d always had a nagging dose of stage fright ever since I was a kid. Once I was onstage performing, I was fine, but that second just before you’re introduced, waiting in the wings, can be terrifying. I’d use pills to write because they gave me a zany feeling that I felt I could channel into something creative. I used them to find a magic topic to write about, but I usually would then forget about it by the next day. I lost a lot of songs that way, forgetting what I had written. I never confessed this to Morris. You never wanted to expose any weakness you might have in front of Morris because he would use it against you if he needed to.
But as long as I was having hits, I knew I could always count on Morris for anything (except getting paid). As long as I was important to Morris, I always had the feeling he would be there for me. Once during one of our southern tours, a group of hillbilly promoters refused to pay us. They just said, “We all lost money ourselves, son. You don’t expect us to take all the pain, do you now?” I called Morris, and he asked me if I wanted Nate to go down and talk to them. I thought about it and could not do it. Nate would have killed them with his bare hands and then enjoyed a cigarette afterward as if he’d just had sex. I told Morris no and he said, “It’s your call.” Another time we were playing New Jersey and the promoter again refused to pay us. When I went into his office, he had a gun on the desk. He said, “One of our guys just got out of prison and he needs money. You got a problem with that?” I asked to use the phone and called my agent. I said, “Could you tell Morris we have a problem in Red Bank.” My agent kept hissing at me through the phone, “Get the hell out of there.” But I was too high to care. “Just tell Morris I need him to call me.” When I hung up, the pr
omoter said, “Is that Morris Levy you’re talking about?” I said, “Yeah.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills and counted out my fee. “No hard feelings,” he said.
I went up to Ghent dozens of times, until Morris finally had his real estate agent, Serge Bervy, find me a place in Rensselaer County, which was one county over from Ghent, in Stephentown, New York, about twenty-six miles from Albany and eleven miles south of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The driveway was two miles long up on top of Round Mountain. I had water rights for 31,000 acres. There were 375 acres that the immediate house and land were on and another 1,000 acres that was up on the mountain. I owned 13,000 acres in all, and it was magnificent. It was built by one of the Rockefeller sisters and her husband and never finished. Production stopped because the marriage ended. It was a big two-level house made of rosewood. After I sold it, years later, it was turned into a ski resort. We had a caretaker who looked after things because I could come up only on weekends. Morris negotiated the deal for me. Morris even covered the down payment. Of course he paid for it with my money, but it’s the thought that counts. There was a mortgage that I covered. It was the biggest house I would ever live in. I started to bring my friends up for the weekend, and kept the house until 1974. The Shondells and I used to practice there. We came up on weekends and stopped at the little general store at the foot of the mountain. We would buy the place out of food, booze, and ammunition and we would just hang until Monday or Tuesday of the next week. We would drive up in the winter to purposely get snowed in.
Morris took me to a Mets game during the World Series. He got us all great tickets behind home plate. Morris wanted to pick us up in a limo, but Pete Lucia loved taking the subway. Morris was friends with Lionel Hampton, who was a great Mets fan, and the two of them went to every home game. Morris was in such a good mood. He even invited Bo and Ritchie and they both came. Morris and Lionel sat right behind them. We saw all the incredible catches by Tommy Agee.
By the end of the year, Morris finally agreed to a deal with Howard Beldock and I re-signed with Roulette. It was a ten-year contract and Morris would pay a certain amount every week against the royalty number and agreed to give me statements quarterly. This went on for a little less than a year until, one day, he simply abandoned the agreement. “Fuck you,” he said, “what are you going to do about it?” And it was back to business as usual. I should have known better, and I did know better, but by this time leaving Roulette would have been like turning myself into an orphan. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it and I wanted to believe that things between Morris and me had changed.
We released “She” that year, another hit for us. Jimmy Wisner in the interim had been gobbled up by Clive Davis and became head of A&R at Columbia, and he produced people like Robert Goulet, Barbra Streisand, and Tony Bennett, but he still found time to work with me and did an incredible arrangement on “She” that included horns, strings, and a choir. It sold a lot. It wasn’t as big as the last two singles but it netted us another gold record.
We started work on a brand-new concept album called Travelin’. It was intended to be the grittiest album we’d ever done. We wanted it not to sound like a studio album and we succeeded. It was hard guitars and drums. It was our first since Cellophane. Once you start down the road to concept albums, you have to keep going and keep putting yourself in different situations. This album was expensive to make right down to the cover, an original painting by Ron Lesser, who was Norman Rockwell’s protégé. The painting was the band in a stagecoach with me driving the team and Morris Levy as a bandit racing after us.
Travelin’ went right out on the charts in the spring of 1970. We rehearsed a new thematic show to go with the album, our first album-tour package. Our concerts had always involved playing the hit singles we had done or were currently promoting. We never did a Crimson and Clover album tour per se. Travelin’ was a performance breakthrough. We costumed ourselves like on the album and combined the new set with the old hits, but it was a very different experience. Meanwhile, I was reaching the breaking point. I was accepting too many dates and popping too many pills in order to have the energy to fulfill them. One night in Birmingham, Alabama, as soon as I got off stage, I fainted. I was weak and dehydrated, and I overheard the backstage doctor say, “He looks dead.” The newspapers picked that up, and when I went up to Roulette the following Monday, everybody was actually shocked that I was still alive, although Ronnie and Morris knew I was okay because I had talked to them that night.
I needed some time off. My doctor told me I had to take a rest. We had been on this hell of a ride continuously since 1966, and my voice was being destroyed from overwork and dissipation. I weighed 140 pounds; I was weak. If I wasn’t in the studio I was writing. If I wasn’t writing, I was performing. I had to step off the merry-go-round. Up in my agent’s office, the band and I decided to take some time off. The guys wanted to take a different direction and started an act called Hog Heaven with a southern rock, contemporary Christian feel to it. They got Morris to sign them and they did an album. They had a chart single called “If It Feels Good Do It.” No one intended it to be forever, but while the Shondells were working on Hog Heaven, I got the bug to go into the studio again.
My new agent, Mark Allen, was convinced that I was a great producer and thought I should loan myself out to other record companies. I started by producing Alive and Kicking. I had brought my old friend Bob King up in 1969. Bob and I used to play together back in South Bend and we became writing partners. He wrote most of the Travelin’ album with me. Our writing tended to be more down to earth. We wrote a song called “Tighter, Tighter” up at my farm but never did anything with it. Finally, by 1970, King and I went into the studio to cut a track with Jimmy Wisner, but I didn’t like the way I sounded. That’s when the idea came up to give the song to Alive and Kicking.
I rewrote it as a duet because the band had boy-girl leads with lots of great harmonies. We laid their vocals over my track and they sounded great. We put on their guitar and organ player and it rocked. Bob and I were very proud of it. I took it up to Morris, who flipped. Alive and Kicking was the only act of any consequence he signed while I was at Roulette. This was my first production outside of the Shondells, and it was a big feather in my cap. Morris even induced Red Schwartz to come back and work the single. “Tighter, Tighter” became a Top 10 record. Mark Allen suggested I produce other acts, and he gave me a band he was representing called Exile, who did another song by me and Bob King called “Church Street Soul Revival.” Mark put me in touch with Clive Davis, who was head of A&R at Columbia, and that’s where we recorded it. Clive loved it, and asked me to come on as a full-time producer at Columbia. Morris said nothing but I knew he was watching me out of the corner of his eye.
I became an in-house producer at Columbia and produced quite a few acts like Patti Austin, but there were always problems with Columbia about releasing records. They had things like release schedules and things that I never had to deal with at Roulette because there was just Morris. When I first came to New York and went to Columbia to get a deal for “Hanky Panky,” I had to meet with the vice president of Special Products and Creative Affairs, which was all very impressive. At Roulette, that job was handled by some guy named Murray and his title was “Hey you, c’mere.” A perfect example was the work I did with Exile.
The record we made was test-marketed in Louisville, Kentucky, and it went to number one, which to me meant it would go to number one every other place. Columbia had issues. They thought it might interfere with another act they were promoting, I can’t recall who, and so they buried the record. They never released it beyond Louisville and I never got a good reason, to this day, why they shelved the project. They had something else to release and releasing two records at once was too complicated for them. No one knows or at least no one told me. I thought, On Roulette this would be a number one record. It killed me.
Mark Allen also had a deal at Paramount, which had
just opened up in the Gulf and Western building at Columbus Circle. Billy Meshel was a very respected publisher in the business and he had come on board. Don Berkheimer, who had been with RCA, also came on board. Jeff Barry was hired as an A&R man. They had just signed Melanie, who had had big hits with Buddah, and there was a great production team. Paramount had lots of capital and gave us an entire floor. Everyone was happy. I produced a couple of acts and wanted to bring some new people in. But Paramount was having big trouble with the West Coast office, which was jealous of the East Coast and did everything they could to sabotage us. The corporate world was driving me crazy. As much as I hated not being paid, Morris was a man who got the job done.
In 1970, I was cutting back on the uppers and feeling healthier than I had in a long time, but right in the middle of this Ronnie and I split up. I was just too nutty. Too many other women, too many pills, too much insanity. It was my fault. I wasn’t paying any attention to her. The life of a rock and roller, on a good day, can be near madness. And I was exacerbating things. She was a good person. And I was a flaming asshole. Since I’d stopped touring I had even less time to spend at home. The divorce was hard and grueling. It was not so much that it was contentious, but as in my first divorce, there was again the sense that, in the midst of all this wonderful success, I was a failure. I was a failure at the one part of my life I should have concentrated on most. Dr. Goldstein, my shrink, had put me on quaaludes, a new wonder drug on the market at the time. I was taking too many of them, the 714 variety, which were as big as horse pills. In fact, I was taking quaaludes and Valium as well as uppers—not a good recipe for a successful marriage. It was a horrible time. I switched lawyers again, as if that would change anything. The divorce came through without complications. I actually had my parents move from South Bend and got them an apartment next door to me. As much as I kept pushing Ronnie away from me by my insane behavior, I also knew that I was no good by myself.