Me, the Mob, and the Music

by Tommy James

  Even so, by 1961 the Tornadoes were playing almost every weekend at a variety of sock hops, school dances, and the like. We were also developing a small but loyal following that seemed to show up everywhere we played. We had business cards made up: “THE TORNADOES… Dance Band For All Occasions!” And the phone kept ringing. We played weddings, parties, clubs, any gig we could find.

  One day after school, I stopped at the Spin-It record shop in Niles, where I was a steady customer, to ask if we could put our business cards under the glass counter where other area bands advertised. The shop was owned by a very hip middle-aged woman named Edith Frucci, who everyone affectionately called Dickie. Dickie’s store on Main Street was the center of the musical action in town. I also knew that she liked me and was always asking me how the band was doing. But that afternoon I walked right into the middle of an argument between Dickie and one of her clerks, who had apparently come late for work. I do not know who said what to whom but the clerk grabbed his coat and walked out the door.

  The next thing I knew, Dickie walked over to me and half-jokingly said, “So, do you want a job?” Without hesitating I replied, “Yes, ma’am.” And she said, “You got it.” Working for Dickie at the record shop would prove to be the gateway to my career.

  The job entailed a little bit of everything. I sold records and schmoozed with the customers, which was very cool. I also had to mop the floors, dust the shelves, and wash the windows, which was very uncool. I tried to time the grunge work when I figured none of my friends might stop by. Dickie always got a kick out of watching me squirm whenever I had a mop in my hand and a good-looking girl would walk in, or worse, a member of another band.

  I worked after school all week and all day Saturday. But the best thing was I got to run the band out of the record shop. This was incredibly helpful. It gave the Tornadoes a lot of new contacts we would not have had otherwise. For me it was like going to Rock and Roll College. I got to know the record business from the retail side. I read all the trade papers and learned who the major players were in the record industry—the distributors, publishers, label executives, and even some of the promotion men. As a favor to Dickie, many of the other merchants in town let us put up posters in their shop windows announcing our upcoming dates. All this helped the Tornadoes compete with other area bands. And there were plenty of them.

  There was a group called the Princeton Five that was terribly popular in the South Bend area. Their names might conjure up images of collegiate crooners, like the Brothers Four, but these guys were rockers. They were our nemesis. There was a group called the Playmates from La Port and the Tempests from Elkhart, and still another band from Mishawaka called the Spinners. There was even another Niles band, called the Corvettes. These were only the most popular, but this was our competition and we were the new kids on the block.

  Another frustrating aspect of being in a struggling young band was the constant personnel changes. In early 1962, Mike Booth, the guy who got me into all this, got a job working weekends and had to quit. We were lucky to find a good replacement, Nelson Shepard, who had a wealth of experience playing with other bands. He had a dazzling set of red-sparkle Rogers drums and a 1960 Bonneville convertible that could blow anything off the road. Did I mention owning a car was important? We now had three of them. Plus Nelson’s mother, Annette, took over our management. Mrs. Shepard was good with details, enjoyed being involved with the band, and was home all day to handle any calls.

  In early 1962, Dickie’s son Norm was going to nearby Hillsdale College and got us a gig playing a real Animal House frat party. It was a Friday night, two hundred bucks, and all the beer we could drink. Nobody knew I was only fourteen years old. Between the second and third set, somebody challenged me to chug-a-lug a pitcher of beer. I had never had a beer before, except the occasional sip from a relative’s glass at family gatherings. I took the challenge and drank the pitcher in thirty seconds. Ten minutes later I felt like I was on another planet. The only problem was that I loved it.

  The next set was incredible. My stage fright was gone. My voice sounded like thunder through the PA system and every lick on the guitar sounded brilliant, to me at least. When we played “What’d I Say” I felt like I had total command of the room. When I did the call-and-response part of the song:

  “Hey-ay-ay!”……… . “Hey-ay-ay!”

  “Oh-Oh!”……… . “Oh-Oh!”

  The place went nuts. I felt invincible. I had found my magic elixir: Budweiser.

  After the party, Coverdale was so drunk he could not drive. And since all the other guys had brought their own cars that night and I was traveling with Larry, I had to drive his rusted-out ’53 Chevy all the way back to Niles. The scary part was that I had never really driven a car before, let alone navigated one down a major highway in the middle of the night, and I was nearly as high as Larry. Somehow we made it home.

  In the spring of 1962, while I was working at the Spin-It, I got into a conversation with Bud Ruiter, one of Dickie’s distributors. Bud worked for Singer One Stop Distribution out of Chicago. The one-stops were the capillaries of the record business and tended to be very street level in their business dealings. Bud sold records from every label to the little mom-and-pop stores on his route between Chicago and Hastings, Michigan, right out of the back of his van. As we talked, I eventually got around to the Tornadoes and told him about my band. “Well, you know,” he said, “we have a recording studio over in Hastings and if we hear something good we own a little label called Northway Sound that we can release it on. I stick them in the van and put them in all my stores, on spec, of course.” He handed me some samples of a country act he’d recently recorded. I did not care too much for his group but I was sure intrigued at the idea of making records.

  “Would you be interested in recording my band?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Pick a Saturday and come over. You guys can lay some stuff down on tape and we’ll see how it goes.”

  A couple of weeks later, we made the journey over to Hastings. As it turned out, Bud had his own mom-and-pop record shop with a recording studio in the back room. It was a nifty place with a control booth and a sound room with some decent microphones. Of course, it was mono recording all the way, but we were thrilled. We set up our instruments, Bud miked them and did a level check, and we played and sang at the same time. There was no separate tracking of the instruments and vocals.

  We recorded two songs: “Judy,” which was a song I wrote about the girl I was in love with at the time, and “Long Ponytail” by the Fireballs. Coverdale and I liked the Fireballs and played a lot of their tunes. We did about six takes of each song and picked the ones we liked best. We had never heard ourselves before and were pretty amazed and pleased at the way we sounded. Like wide-eyed puppies looking for a pat on the head, we asked Bud what he thought and he encouraged us by saying, “Hey, it’s as good as any of the other shit out there today.”

  After the recording session, Bud suggested that since I was the lead singer, I incorporate my name into the band. It was something that had never come up before and I felt awkward about it, but Bud wanted it that way and no one in the band seemed to have a problem with it. So the record label read: Judy/Long Ponytail by Tom and the Tornadoes.

  A few weeks later, the first hundred pressings came into the Spin-It. The labels were aqua blue with black lettering and the jacket was plain white, but to me, it was as beautiful as anything that was on Capitol or RCA. For a while I simply held on to the vinyl, bending and smelling it, feeling the seams and grooves. It had an official Northway Sound order number on it. It had all the information about the publishers and, in parentheses, under “Judy” was my name (Tom Jackson). I was actually holding a record that you could play on a record player, written and performed by me.

  We put it on the in-store turntable right away and people bought it. Dickie pushed it like it was the hottest record in the country. By the end of the day, we were nearly sold out. Bud, as he agreed, put th
em on consignment in all the record shops he visited. We had played in some of the towns on Bud’s route, which helped sales. Bud eventually pressed about three thousand copies and they did pretty well. Adopting a pattern that would often repeat itself throughout my career, we did not make much money on the deal, but we sold a lot of records.

  One of the regulars that came into the Spin-It was a fellow named Frank Fabiano. Frank’s dad ran the local jukebox and pinball machine concessions and Frank Jr. worked for his father. Frank Sr. was allegedly an old cohort of Al Capone who, according to rumor, set Fabiano up in business. Their operation was in Buchanan, about five miles outside Niles in a big Victorian mansion on a hill that looked like the set from Psycho. Frank Jr. also managed the Corvettes, the other rock and roll band from Niles.

  Frank was always hinting that he wanted to manage the Tornadoes. He always teased me that the Corvettes played better gigs than we did because he was their manager. We already had Annette Shepard as our manager and I had always kept Fabiano at arm’s length, even though his remarks about our gigs were true. But now we had this record out and I was going to need Frank’s help getting it on his jukeboxes, so I did not see the harm in making him something… say, an agent. He controlled nearly all the jukebox action within a fifty-mile radius of Niles. Now that we were “his” act, he put our record on all his jukeboxes.

  Having our record on the jukeboxes was great for business and great for our ego. We even had professionally printed “title strips” with TOM AND THE TORNADOES in bright, bold letters next to the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons. And Frank did bring in some choice gigs, even if they were only Corvette rejects.

  We rode “Judy” and “Long Ponytail” for as long as we could. But we had no concrete plans to make any more records. It was fun. It was a kick. But what was the point? We knew we could not break out of our little Midwest cocoon without some kind of national exposure. Why kid ourselves? We were just another local band.

  In 1963, in addition to playing with the Tornadoes, I was also a fairly normal sophomore in high school looking forward, like every kid my age, to my sixteenth birthday and getting my driver’s license. I was more or less going steady with a cute, petite girl named Diane who I’d met through a friend who was dating Diane’s sister. I am not sure if this was a sign of the times, but she reminded me of Annette Funicello, with that short black hair and an irresistible encouraging smile that made everything seem sweet. She was everything a kid my age was looking for: tight wool sweaters, short skirts, and perfume. She was also six months older than I was, which meant she had a driver’s license of her own, so she became part girlfriend and part chauffeur. Getting my own license became more than a rite of passage. I wanted to take her home at the end of the night, not have her drop me off.

  In early February, I asked my folks if I could have a car since they would have to sign for it. My mother stunned me by announcing, “Your father and I have no problem with you getting a car, but we do have a problem with beer on your breath when you come home from these dances you play at. It’s got to stop!” Wow, I was busted. I had no idea she knew. I sheepishly said okay and I really gave it my best… for a while.

  My promise worked and on April 29, 1963, Dad came home with “my” car. It was a slightly rusted ’57 Dodge with about 90,000 miles on it, but to me it was a Rolls-Royce. It was a big, black-and-white four-door with a gold strip down the side. It had rocket fins, whitewalls, push-button drive, and it was all mine. When you are sixteen years old, having your own car is a life-changing event. You go from teenage geek to jet-setter overnight. I drove to school every day, to the record shop after school, and to gigs on the weekends. And whenever I wasn’t doing that, my friends and I were making what was called the “cruising loop” from Thomas’s restaurant on US 31, back to Niles, and down Main Street to Front Street and back.

  When Diane was not around, I would secretly hang out with a girl named Ginger. Even though she was a year younger than me, she was very voluptuous and tall with auburn hair. I did not feel right about what I was doing but that did not stop me. I never meant to hurt anyone. It was just a part of being young, of being thoughtless.

  That summer was the greatest. For the band and me it was the best summer yet. We played all the resort beaches up and down Lake Michigan: Silver Beach, Waco Beach, Tower Hill, and a great little combination dancehall and boathouse called Ronnie’s Pavilion on Clear Lake, just outside Buchanan. It seemed like every week we had a great gig somewhere on the water.

  Motown and surf music were hot that year and we did them to death. We also played “Quarter to Three” by Gary (U.S.) Bonds, “Wah Watusi” by the Orlons, practically everything by the Beach Boys, “Do You Love Me” by the Contours, instrumentals like “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris, “Pipeline” by the Chantays, and “Easier Said Than Done” by the Essex, but by far the most requested song that summer was “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, a song in which no matter how closely you listen to it, the lyrics are still unintelligible. Years later I found out even the Kingsmen did not know what the hell they were singing.

  We made good money that summer. We got new outfits, powder blue dinner jackets and sharkskin suits, and new equipment. Larry Coverdale and I bought Fender guitars. I got a Jazzmaster and Larry got a Jaguar. We also bought matching piggyback amps. Larry Wright got a new Ampeg bass amp. We bought an Electro-Voice PA system with Musicaster speakers and four 664 mikes that looked like a row of chrome-plated pistols.

  We had huge crowds all summer long. On a Friday night at Ronnie’s Pavilion, we’d start at eight, and by midnight we usually had more than a thousand kids on a dance floor built to hold only a few hundred. Sometimes it got so packed the local fire marshals would come in and shut us down before the night was through. But that’s the way it was all summer: frantic and high-voltage. In many ways, the summer of ’63 was the last great summer in America. Never again would we be quite so optimistic or unapologetically carefree.

  Before we knew it, summer was over and I had to start my junior year in high school. By this time Diane and I had become “pearled.” I am not sure whether this tradition was confined to the Midwest, but it was beyond “pinning” a girl. You actually had to go to a jewelry store, buy a pearl pin, and give it to your sweetheart. It was about as serious as you could get in high school. It was beyond going steady. It was like being engaged to be engaged. To me the most exciting thing in the world was cheap perfume and angora sweaters. I was smitten, no doubt about it.

  One day in late September, when I went to work at the Spin-It, I noticed a cardboard cutout, about eighteen inches high, on the top of the counter. The cutout had a picture of the back of four very hairy heads. It was from Capitol Records, and a caption in small print said, “The Beatles Are Coming.” I remember thinking how bizarre this looked. I asked Dickie about it and she said, “One of the one-stop guys brought it in. Some new group, I guess.”

  I did not think much about it until a few weeks passed and that cutout was replaced by another with a picture of the same four heads, slightly turned, almost in profile so you could see ears and sideburns. The print was slightly larger and bolder but the message was the same: “The Beatles Are Coming.” Kids came into the shop and started asking questions. Who were these guys? What did it all mean? We were apparently being teased. But since it was Capitol Records, I knew it must be important and that it must be going on all over the country, not just at the Spin-It. But it was still a big mystery.

  * * *

  On Friday, November 22, I stayed home from school in the morning with a “sore throat.” Actually, it was a bit of a hangover from drinking beer the night before. By noon, I was feeling okay and decided to go to afternoon classes. I remember parking my car and walking into school during lunch break, a little before twelve. Just a normal day. I went to my locker, got my books, and walked to the cafeteria, where a friend of mine, Joe Pieta, came up to me and said, “Did you hear about Kennedy?” I said, “What do you mean?” “Kennedy’s been
shot.”

  The bell rang and I went to my next class, which was study hall. In class, nothing seemed out of the ordinary at first until my teacher, Mr. Kelly, called me over to his desk and asked me to run to the principal’s office and find out how the president was doing. It usually felt great walking the halls while everyone else was in class, but this time I felt a sense of dread. When I got to the office, I saw a group of teachers and office staff huddled around a small portable radio on the receptionist’s desk. And that is when I heard it. “It’s official. President Kennedy is dead.”

  “My God,” I thought. “How could this happen? Who could have done such a thing?” I was only sixteen and had never really experienced profound loss or grief. Like everybody old enough to remember, that moment was branded on my brain forever. It was a long walk back to study hall. I did not know how else to tell Mr. Kelly except to say, “He’s dead.” He looked at me with a sort of wild stare and said, “So help me, Jackson, if you’re joking…” “No,” I said. “It’s the truth.” Suddenly the loudspeaker came on. It was the assistant principal. “As some of you may already know, the president was shot today. And he is dead.” A collective sigh swept over the classroom. “Classes will be suspended the rest of the day and all students may leave now.” I remember just the faint shuffling of feet as everyone left the room. I do not think a word was spoken. I looked back at Mr. Kelly. He was at his desk, slumped over with his hand on his forehead. He was shaking.

  There is no need to rehash the whole macabre melodrama that transpired over the next few days. We have all seen those images a thousand times. For me, the murder of John Kennedy has remained a deep scar and a dividing line between two worlds. Twenty-seven years later, in 1990, I would spot my teacher, Mr. John Kelly, on CNN after he had become assistant secretary of state under George Bush, and our highest-ranking diplomat in the Middle East. I had my manager make contact with his office in Washington. Although we could not meet, he told my manager that he indeed remembered me from Niles High School and that horrible day in 1963.