by Tommy James
I tried for about three weeks, but I couldn’t read, and the only book I brought with me was my Bible. All your muscles are contracting when you’ve been on Valium. You look at something and the writing flies off the pages and escapes before you can comprehend. When my eyes refocused I said, “Lord, I’m going to open a page of the Bible and I want you to guide my hand. Please stop me where you want me to read.” I opened to Psalm 32, a conversation between David and God.
Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding.
I could not believe it, but it just seemed like God talking to me. Really talking to me. I showed it to my roommate, who was younger than I was. He read the passage and tears came to his eyes too.
I will guide thee with mine eye.
It was God talking to me and giving me this great chance to be a new man, a new husband and father, even a new musician.
Thou art my hiding place; Thou shalt preserve me from trouble; Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.
I got out of the Ford Center right around the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, on November 22, 1986. We stayed with friends in Palm Springs, and I relished the freedom and sheer pleasure of it all. It was brand new to me. I was brand new to me. We leased a place from Barry Manilow. Lynda and I stayed there for several months and adapted pretty well to the California lifestyle. It was also great to be near the Ford Center, just in case. We picked fruit for our breakfast from trees in our backyard and sat in the spa all afternoon. I was being reeducated about life, a life I had missed, a life that wasn’t locked away in a studio, or dressing room, or a cramped office at Roulette. But the best part was finally being able to practice what I had for so long preached but could never really fathom. I was finally living like a Christian, or at least the best Christian I could be, rather than all the double-talk, the double-mindedness that had so absorbed me and kept me so fundamentally, essentially unhappy.
Howie Silverman and David Fishoff came out to see me and asked if they could manage me. I said yes. David at that time was managing the entire front line of the New York football Giants, who were headed to the Super Bowl that year. He invited me to go. Howie Silverman is still my agent. This was also part of growing up and living without booze and pills. People were no longer expendable and replaceable. They were people.
I went back home to New Jersey. It was weird getting used to my house again. I got a call from Pete Lucia, my old drummer from the Shondells, who had just gotten a job in the A&R department at Capitol Records in L.A. He asked me if I would consider producing some groups for Capitol. I said yes. My whole life right then was just saying yes. We were going to get together when I came out to the Super Bowl. Lynda and I went into the city that week and met with Phil Simms, McConkey, Bavaro, and all the rest of the team at the Hard Rock Café. There was a big press party, and I sat at the head table and was elected as the sort of unofficial mascot for the team. That night, January 6, I got a call from Pete’s sister that Pete had just died. He had a heart murmur for years that we all knew about and it finally took its toll. One month before his fortieth birthday he was playing golf and had just finished the front nine. He went into the clubhouse and collapsed. He was dead before he hit the ground. The medic tried for over an hour but he was gone. I called all the Shondells and we got together for the first time since our unintended breakup, and went to Pete’s funeral in New Jersey. I called Morris, and he was very saddened by Pete’s death. I think he must have felt that was the beginning of the end of so many things. He told me that if Pete’s family needed anything, to let him know. Anything at all. And I believe he meant it deeply.
I finally returned to the road. It was a great concert year and I was able to take more dates than I ever did before. At the Betty Ford Center they all told me to take it easy in the beginning, take it slow; be careful and start out with small venues until you get your nerves back. I had confessed, at the center, to always having stage fright and needing to get half-lit before I went on. Howie booked my first date back at Madison Square Garden. So much for small venues. I got on stage and my legs were shaking. The first song we did was “Draggin’ the Line” and I forgot the words, but after three songs into the set I was having a ball. I wasn’t acting anymore. I realized that for years I had been scripting and choreographing every move I ever made: at this point… smile; at this point… take small bow. I was like a programmed robot. But at that Garden show I was completely spontaneous. If I felt like screaming, I screamed. If I felt like kicking my leg, I did. And the audience could sense it. They were giving back to me in a way I hadn’t felt since those early days playing the surf clubs up and down Lake Michigan when I was a kid with the Tornadoes. I was really free and I regained an incredible sense of “now.” If I did something, the reaction was now. I was in the groove. I couldn’t wait to do the next show. But more profoundly, I knew that if I stayed sober and kept to my program; if I did good work or at least the best work I could do; the Lord would move heaven and earth to bless me.
Morris was set for trial in 1987. It took his lawyers months to read the roomful of transcriptions the FBI had amassed. Morris was involved in more scams than anyone ever realized or could document. But the cutout business was his Stradivarius and he played it like a virtuoso.
Morris had a record company called Promo Records that he had owned with Tommy Eboli, and through that label, Morris effectively invented the cutout business. He created companies like Adam VIII or partnered with companies like K-tel to push through television promotions whatever albums he had overstocked. Usually he would put compilation albums together filled with songs to which he owned the publishing rights. But more insidiously, he concocted an even better scam.
Morris knew that if you created a second label as an adjunct to your main label and pressed records that never sold, you could write off your expenses to the IRS. Morris had dozens of labels under the Roulette umbrella. Some were legitimate labels that usually defined a specific genre, like rock, doo-wop, jazz, folk, comedy, Latin, or the latest flavor of the month. But some, like the Tiger Lily label, were nothing more than tax scams. Morris used Tiger Lily like a garage sale. He took random recordings that had been accumulating in his vaults and pressed them up under the Tiger Lily label and then warehoused them. They were never actually sent out to retailers. If they were sent out, it was only in tiny shipments meant to give the impression of vast distribution. Some of the material was by legitimate artists but most of the albums pressed were from kids who had sent crudely made tapes of their songs to Roulette on the million-to-one shot of hitting the big time. Very rarely was there a recognizable name on the cover. Everything had plausible deniability and there were one or two legitimate sales receipts to shut up nosy investigators asking questions. Most of the obscure bands on Tiger Lily had no idea an album of their material was even made. Morris would press up a few hundred copies of each album, claim he’d actually pressed up 25,000 or more, and then claim the loss. Other record companies followed Morris’s lead. Most of the records were held in secret warehouses for a couple of years and then dumped or slowly fed to backwater retailers who handled that kind of thing. By the time Morris owned his record store chain, Strawberries, he was making money on the venture three ways. But it also became his downfall.
Music Corporation of America was an entertainment giant out of Chicago that ran nightclubs, record labels, and artists, and managed entertainers as big as Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and Ronald Reagan. MCA always played both ends against the middle. Their Mob ties went back to the Al Capone days. They tried to cover themselves politically by being the largest contributor to the Reagan Presidential Library, to the tune of half a million dollars. In 1984, MCA wanted to sell about five million cutouts for a little over a million dollars. A retailer out of Pennsylvania named John LaMonte was designated to accept shipment, which proved to be a convoy of about sixty eighteen-wheelers. There were some first-class albums involved in the deal, by artists like Elton John, the Who,
and other top acts. Everyone involved in the intermediate transactions were mobsters or wannabes. The FBI got involved because they were investigating MCA, mostly for tax evasion. The transaction was handled by Morris Levy and his associate Sonny Vastola. Morris saw a way to make a quick killing, and before the shipment arrived at LaMonte’s warehouse, the boys had skimmed the shipment of all the most salable records. When LaMonte took possession and checked the inventory, he realized he was being cheated and refused to pay the bill. That is when things fell apart.
Because LaMonte had a conviction for counterfeiting (record albums, of course), the FBI became interested when his name came up in connection with MCA. They broke into the Roulette offices in the middle of the night and placed microphones and video cameras in Morris’s inner sanctum. They watched and listened. For over a year, Morris and Sonny tried everything they could to get LaMonte to pay but he would not budge. They brought in Mob negotiators to try to mediate the problem. They threatened to take over LaMonte’s business. Sonny and some of his associates personally went to Pennsylvania to persuade LaMonte, but they could do nothing except put him in the hospital for six weeks while doctors reconstructed his face with wire. After that, LaMonte agreed to wear another kind of wire, and the feds eventually had a case against Morris for racketeering and extortion.
I, on the other hand, was doing pretty well. I was touring and spending winters in Palm Springs. Sometime in the summer of 1987, Billy Idol put out a cover of “Mony Mony” and Tiffany did her version of “I Think We’re Alone Now.” Neither knew the other was doing a Tommy James song. On a flight out to a date, Lynda put a copy of Billboard in front of me. Both artists were reviewed the same week and both were going up the charts like they were holding hands. By October, both records went number one. The first time cover versions of an artist’s hits had gone back-to-back number one. We were getting a lot of covers of our songs by then and a lot of movies were using our songs as part of their soundtracks. In a real howler, ICM was putting a movie deal together about Jerry Lee Lewis called Great Balls of Fire starring Dennis Quaid, and they offered me the role of Jimmy Swaggart. I wisely and respectfully declined. It is always the thought that counts.
I went to the Super Bowl at the Rose Bowl and the Giants won. I went back to the Betty Ford Center and talked to some of the new patients. Red was out in California by now selling cars, and whenever I was in L.A. I would call him and we would meet for dinner. I was with Red when we got the word that Morris had been convicted. Joel Diamond, a friend of mine and a music publisher, told us over lunch. No one expected this. It seemed inconceivable that Morris could get caught at anything. He was given a ten-year sentence, which we knew he would beat on appeal. He had to beat it. He was Morris. The feeling was, put him up before a firing squad, but in an orange jumpsuit? Never.
As soon as the conviction went through, Morris began selling off his holdings. He sold everything except the farm in Ghent. He sold Roulette to Rhino Records, which was then distributed by EMI. Big Seven Publishing was sold to Windswept Pacific, which was owned by Chuck Kaye and a Japanese company called JVC. Strawberries was bought by a company owned by Jose Menendez. When Menendez and his wife were murdered, the FBI came to Morris. “What the fuck am I going to kill the guy for, you assholes? He just wrote me a check for forty-seven million dollars.” As it turned out, the Menendez children actually killed their parents. The point was that suddenly all of my music was out on CD. For the first time in my career I was getting paid royalties, and the checks were mind-boggling, in some cases six and even seven figures per year. My music was being represented intelligently and fairly all over the world. Our concert price went up and I was even getting foreign residuals, not to mention radio airplay. Britain started playing my records again. Life was good.
I knew about Morris in late 1989, that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and that it wasn’t good. I knew that he had lost his appeal but that the sentence had been commuted because he was so sick, but even then, I could not bring myself to believe that Morris was going to die. He tried to emigrate to Australia, for some reason, and wanted to take all his friends with him, but the Australian government had done its homework and denied him entry. The end was coming. All his old cronies—those who were still alive, anyway—ex-employees like Karin, his ex-wives, children, nieces and nephews, old Roulette artists all made the pilgrimage to the farm to say their goodbyes. According to Karin, Little Richard called every day trying to get Morris to pray with him. Morris weakly, politely, declined. He lay in bed mostly and smoked pot to ease the pain of the cancer. He seemed happy and resigned.
I don’t know why I didn’t call. I thought, “I don’t have to believe this if I don’t want to.” I should have gone up to see him. I should have canceled this damned concert. How many times had I said that in my life to my wives, my son, and now to Morris?
The interviewer looked at me. “Mr. James, I’ve run out of cassettes.” I looked at him for a second as if he were crazy. “How long have I been talking?” “A while,” he said. “Everybody’s gone.” He was right. The band, my wife, Carol, Ron had all gone back to the hotel. Finally, the DJ packed up his tape recorder and left too. The last thing he said to me was “I’m sorry… about Morris.”
I put on my jacket, grabbed my guitar, and walked down the long corridor to the stage door. I opened it up and went outside and there was the limo. The air was cool and the sky was bright with stars. The rear door of the limo was already open and I got inside. As I shut the door, I turned to my left and I swear I could almost see Morris sitting there taking a puff from his Pall Mall, blowing out the smoke, and the starlight from the window coming through the smoke. “Still on that ride, huh? You’re doing good, kid.” I said, “I knew they’d never get you,” and he just laughed as we took off together into the night.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the following men and women for their help and remembrances: Paul Colby, Carmine De Noia, Karin Grasso, Eddie Gray, Lynda James, Normand Kurtz, Ira Leslie, Zak Levy, Herbie Rosen, Ronnie Rosman, Red Schwartz, Mike Vale, and Jimmy Wisner. Special thanks to Tommy’s personal manager, Carol Ross Durborow, without whom this book would never have happened. Special thanks to Ed Osborne for his editorial work and Mark Singer for his archival research. A very special thanks to our agents, Bob Levine and Kim Schefler, for their hard work and faith in this project and to everyone at Scribner and Simon & Schuster, especially Brian Belfiglio, Aisha Cloud, vice president and editor in chief Nan Graham, senior editor extraordinaire Brant Rumble, and the tireless Anna deVries.
Tommy’s dad and mom, Joe and Belle Jackson, on their honeymoon, 1937.
Tommy “Jackson” with his first guitar, 1957.
Fourteen-year-old Tommy with his first rock band, the Tornadoes. Left to right: Mike Finch (sax), Nelson Shepard (drums), TJ, Larry Wright (bass), Larry Coverdale (guitar), 1962.
Tommy in the Spin-It record shop, Niles, Michigan. Left to right: resident musicologist “Dr. John,” store clerks Bobbie Mansfield and TJ with shop owner Edith “Dickie” Frucci, 1963.
The original Shondells: The group that recorded “Hanky Panky” on Snap Records. Left to right: Larry Wright (bass), Craig Villeneuve (piano), TJ, Jim Payne (drums), Larry Coverdale (guitar), 1964.
Tommy’s first wife, Diane, and son, Brian, 1967.
Tommy and the Shondells being awarded their first gold record for “Hanky Panky” by Roulette Records president Morris Levy. Left to right: Ron Rosman, George Magura, TJ, Vinnie Pietropali, Mike Vale, Joe Kessler, Morris Levy, 1966.
Tommy signs an exclusive management agreement with Leonard Stogel and Associates in Morris Levy’s office with Lenny and Morris looking on, 1966.
Writer-producer Ritchie Cordell and Tommy heading for the studio, 1967.