Tommy James has not led a boring life. The pride of Niles, Michigan and his band the Shondells saw their first single, 1964’s impossibly innocent ode to sex “Hanky Panky,” become a modest Midwestern hit before fading out, leading to the dissolution of the band. And that would have been the end of it had the song not reached the ears of a Pittsburgh DJ, whose ceaseless promotion broke it nationwide and took it to the top of the pop charts, leading a shocked and (by then band-less) James to hire a group of nobodies he ran across playing a club in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
That’s hardly a unique story, but James’ unfortunate connections with the Mob during his dealings with Roulette Records and its president Morris Levi—the real life inspiration for Herman “Hesh” Rabkin of Sopranos fame—and participation in Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign tour as “Youth Affairs Commission” director are. Oh, and then there was the night in 1970 a doped-up James walked off stage in Birmingham, Alabama and promptly dropped dead (he was ultimately resuscitated). As for Hubert Humphrey, he was so grateful to James he wrote the liner notes for the band’s 1968 album Crimson & Clover. In the notes he misspells “rallies” as “rallys.” No wonder the guy lost.
James rejected the bubblegum music label, and he was right to do so. Unlike virtually every bubblegum musician out there, James wrote or co-wrote most of the Shondells’ hits, and his band actually played on their records. And the band’s music wasn’t targeted exclusively toward the pre-teen set. Even “Hanky Panky” and “I Think We’re Alone Now”—both of which I couldn’t get enough of as a pre-teen—appealed to both kids and their parents, as did most of the songs on the hit-filled 2002 Rhino Records compilation The Essentials: Tommy James & the Shondells. “Hanky Panky” and the band’s other songs may have earned the Shondells zero cred amongst the Summer of Love’s drop-outs, freaks and hairies, but America’s much larger short-haired demographic loved them. Squares Tommy James & the Shondells may have been, but America was still one square nation, LSD, sexual revolution, and anti-Vietnam war protest marches notwithstanding.
James had a genius for writing catchy melodies and coupling them with universal sentiments, and the public responded—the Shondells scored two number one and twelve top forty hits, five which cracked the Top Ten. And as I noted above James wrote most of the band’s hits, although “Hanky Panky”—a sterilized garage rocker with a sanitized message (they could hardly sing “My baby loves to fuck” now could they?) wasn’t one of them. “Say I Am (What I Am)” is yet another scrubbed-behind-the-ears garage rocker that has both get up and go and a stone simple melody line with echoes of the primal “Louie Louie.”
“I Think We’re Alone Now,” which can plausibly be called a bubblegum song thanks to its opening lines, “Children behave/That’s what they say when we’re together/And watch how you play/They don’t understand,” is a lush but rockin’ precursor to the Raspberries that was later covered by Lene Lovich. Its melody is every bit as infectious as the staccato opening guitar riff, the heartbeat mimicry of the drumming, and the simple organ riff. “Mirage” isn’t as instantly addictive as “I Think We’re Alone Now,” but it boasts both soaring harmonies and far-out organ, as does the handclap-heavy “Gettin’ Together” with its great “Daytime, night time, your time, my time” lyric and Beach Boy vocal harmonies.
“Mony Mony” is as close as Tommy James & The Shondells got to gritty garage rock. It has a big bottom, and at one point the normally restrained James actually screams he’s so excited. Sure it’s a straight-up rip of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ “Devil with a Blue Dress On,” but who’s keeping track except the copyright lawyers, and so far as I know they never said a peep. Maybe James’ mob connections led them to keep their mouths shut.
The tepidly psychedelic “Crimson & Clover” (which topped the pop charts in February 1968) is so fucking cool Joan Jett saw fit to cover it, and no wonder; James’ quavering vocals, that tremolo on the guitar, and the great backing vocals lend the song a one-in-a million feel, and the song’s sudden accelerations and power chords give it real mule kick. And don’t even get me started on the tremolo vocal effects towards the end, which blew me away as a kid. “Sweet Cherry Wine” opens with a ringing bell and organ before a simple jangly guitar comes in, then James commences to thank the Lord for giving us the grape. After that a horn section bursts into the studio and gets busy. Tommy doesn’t sound a bit soused, but boy is he earnest.
James says he took the title of the immortal “Crystal Blue Persuasion” (another example of psychedelic lite) from the Book of Revelations while his manager says he took it from elsewhere in the Good Book, but biblical scholarship aside it’s a more restrained companion piece to the far funnier Fifth Dimension medley “Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.” It’s more timeless too, because it’s devoid of the latter song’s dated hippie dippy connotations, even if they both mention crystals. This made the song more palatable to your mom and her bridge.club, who were terrified of unwashed long-hairs even before Charles Manson came along and gave hippies some really bad publicity.
“Ball of Fire” hardly lives up to its incendiary title, but it’s a strong song nonetheless, with that repetition of “Keeps on watching/Over you and I/Way up high” bringing to mind the “Way down below the ocean/Where I wanna be, she may be” of Donovan’s “Atlantis.” “She” is probably the weakest cut on the compilation; it’s every bit as annoyingly romantic as its title would make you think, and its lack of thrills is the reason it’s failed to weasel its way into humankind’s collective unconscious the way, say, “Hanky Panky” has.
1970’s “Draggin’ the Line” was recorded by James following the break-up of the Shondells and hence probably shouldn’t be on the comp, but I’m not complaining. He recorded it after finding Jesus, a fact he made no attempt to keep secret—he entitled his 1971 sophomore LP Christian of the World. But Christian or not there are those who think the slow neo-psychedelic shuffle’s real subject is James’ abuse of cocaine, a habit he could hardly have acquired from the Son of God. That is unless Jesus wears a coke spoon around his neck instead of a crucifix. And who could blame Him? It takes a whole lot of medicine to forget being nailed to a cross.
Tommy James may have risen from the dead, hung out with Hubert Humphrey, and crossed paths with organized crime, but none stopped him from writing some of the best and most accessible pop songs of his era. He may have been no radical—he was the director of a presidential campaign youth affairs commission, not the head of the Weather Underground—but his baby sure knew how to do the hanky panky. Which dead, alive, or being dangled by the ankles over the railing of a forty-fourth floor hotel balcony by a guy named Joey Fatso makes him one lucky guy.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
