Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick
When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.
Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.
Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.
James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.
Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.
[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]
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