Me, the Mob, and the Music

by Tommy James

  The only thing that made December tolerable was the Beatles. The day their first single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” was released, the heads on the cutout poster had finally turned all the way around. It was the same photo that was on the dust jacket of their new record. It was probably the best prerelease promotional campaign for a new group I have ever seen.

  By January, the Beatles were everywhere. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was number one. Several of their old singles, which had previously bombed on other labels, were now being feverishly rereleased as new recordings and were all jumping into the Top 10. Records like “She Loves You/I’ll Get You” on Swan and “Please Please Me/From Me to You” on Vee-Jay. Big Top records even rereleased Del Shannon’s version of “From Me to You,” which he had originally released in 1963. At one point, the Beatles actually had the top five records on the Billboard charts. Nothing like it ever happened before or since.

  Coverdale and I put the Beatles under a microscope right away. In one month, we went from thinking their music was juvenile and silly to thinking they were geniuses, especially Larry, who was partial to two-part harmony groups like the Everly Brothers. He went nuts for John’s and Paul’s vocals. When we first started learning their songs, we were amazed at the intricacy of their chord structure and the sophistication of what, on the surface, appeared to be ditty-bop melodies. They had some magic that wore down all resistance. We learned every Beatles song that was available. We devoted an entire set to nothing but Beatles songs. We even wore Beatles wigs. As soon as the wigs went on, the girls went from dancing and chewing gum to gawking and screaming.

  The Beatles opened up a floodgate and the British Invasion was on. The Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Animals, the Zombies, the Kinks… on and on and on. And these were all big groups on big labels. We loved the new sound. It was very different from the three-chord rockers we had been playing up to that point. It was like the Russians putting up Sputnik. Up until the Beatles, we thought Americans were the masters of rock and roll.

  The night the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan for the first time, the whole country was watching. It was the most hyped event in the history of television. I was at a friend’s house that night and watched the show with him and his family. As they showed the individual members of the group and flashed their names and ages on the screen, under John Lennon’s name ran the disclaimer “Sorry girls, he’s married.” My friend’s dad turned to the rest of us and bellowed, “I wonder which one of those queers he’s married to.” That was when “the sixties” began.

  This change in music was also reflected in the Tornadoes. We were so transfixed by all the new groups from Britain and so preoccupied with imitating the British rockers, that we weren’t paying attention to what was going on in our own backyard.

  That spring a mysterious box of records came into the Spin-It with about twenty-five copies of a song called “California Sun” by a group I had never heard of, the Rivieras. Stranger still, it was on the Riviera label, which in all likelihood meant it was a local band pressing its own records. I put it on the turntable. It sounded like a second-rate impersonation of the Princeton Five’s version of “California Sun,” which they had been playing for years and was practically their theme song. My antennae went up. I asked Dickie where these records had come from, and she told me a guy named Dobslaw dropped them off. “Bob Dobslaw? The manager of the Playmates?” She handed me a glossy eight-by-ten. I could not believe it. The Rivieras were really the Playmates, our old sparring partners from La Porte, Indiana. How did they do it? I grudgingly accepted the fact that another local band had had the savvy to put out a record. But I figured, what the hell difference does it make? Without national promotion or a miracle, they could not do any better than we did with “Judy” and “Long Ponytail.” That all changed that Friday night when I turned on my car radio to WLS, the biggest station in the Midwest, and almost drove off the road. It was Art Roberts, WLS’s top DJ, announcing as only he could, “The new smmmmmmash hit by the Rivieras… Cal-La-Forn-Ya-Suuuuuun!”

  I honestly did not know whether to cry or put my fist through the windshield. God, was I jealous. This could not be happening. We knew these guys. They were local schlocks, just like us. What was going on here? I had always felt that their manager, Bob Dobslaw, was a bone fide nerd who could not find his backside with both hands, but he quickly went up a few notches in my estimation. I was in a state of shock. Over the next few weeks, I helplessly watched as the record climbed relentlessly up the charts. Top 30! No, No. Top 20! Stop, Stop! Top 10! Oh my God. And not just on WLS… the whole damn country.

  Dickie seemed to know what I was going through. She took me aside one day and we had a real heart-to-heart talk. She said, “You know, in a way, these guys have done you a big favor.” “What do you mean?” “Well, if they can do it, so can you.” And she was right. The Rivieras proved that with a good record and a decent distributor, even a local band could make it. That made everything a lot better but not much.

  That summer, a DJ named Jack Douglas came into the Spin-It. His real name was Jack Deafenbaugh and he was the morning man at WNIL, the local radio station in Niles. He was friends with Dickie and came in regularly to buy records. We had never really talked before but on this day he specifically came to speak to me.

  “Hi, I’m Jack Douglas,” he said. “Do you still have your band?”

  “We sure do,” I said.

  “You know I played your last record on my show and we got a great response to it. I know it sounds like a crackpot idea, but for a long time now I’ve wanted to start my own label. Would you guys be interested in recording something?”

  “Hell yes,” I said.

  “We can record right here in Niles at the radio station. And there’s a great little pressing plant in Mishawaka…”

  It was exciting listening to him. He was serious and he had a plan. He figured he could get his regional radio friends to play anything we released as long as it was commercial and well recorded. “Who knows,” he said. “With enough local airplay maybe we can break out of Chicago. At least we’ll have a shot.” All I kept thinking about was the Rivieras. I asked him what the name of his label was and he said, “Snap Records.” And I said, “Let’s do it.”

  As usual, many things were happening to me all at once. Mike Finch left the group to join the navy and Nelson Shepard got married and also had to quit. I kept losing guys to the realities of life. Mike and his sax were replaced by an excellent keyboard player named Craig Villeneuve and Jim Payne became our new drummer.

  With the new record deal and the new band members, we thought it was time for a name change as well. We had been toying with a name that I had made up the previous year in study hall: the Shondells. We all liked the way it sounded and the way it looked when you wrote it out. And besides, back then anything with “ells” on the end of it was a potential musical brand name. The following week, when we walked into the WNIL studio for our first recording session on Snap Records, we were officially the Shondells.

  We were all pleasantly surprised at how plush and modern the studio was. It was a big step up from Bud Ruiter’s back room. The whole complex had thick carpeting, but we were even more amazed at all the equipment in the control booth. There were racks and racks of every electronic recording toy available at the time. Just beyond the control booth were several soundproof rooms of all different sizes where commercials were recorded and interviews taped. Douglas took us into the biggest one, which was about the size of a small bedroom, and told us to set up our equipment. He got down on his hands and knees and miked every instrument and put sound baffles between the drums and each amplifier. Jack was a good engineer. He gave us each a set of headphones with adjustable volume controls that we could plug into any of the jacks that lined the wall. God, we felt unbelievably cool. We looked at one another as if to say, “This is it!” Then came the catch.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Jack noncha
lantly. “I know you guys want to do rock and roll, but I’d like the first single to be a little song I wrote. After that, you can do anything you want.”

  THUD. SILENCE. FEAR. RIGOR MORTIS.

  Douglas sat down at Craig Villaneuve’s electric Wurlitzer piano and proceeded to play the most godawful, inane, ridiculous, silliest piece of crap we had ever heard. It was called “Pretty Little Red Bird” and it sounded just like the title. We looked at one another in stunned silence. I cleared my throat and lied for all of us. “Ah… it’s got possibilities.”

  When the realization hit us that our first release on Snap Records was going to be Mother Goose instead of rock and roll the whole mood of the session changed. But what could we do? We had heard about corruption in the recording business and of people selling their souls for the chance to make records. It was now our turn. We had to record “Pretty Little Red Bird.”

  We put a half-assed arrangement together and Douglas released it as our first record on Snap. The B side was a tune I had written called “Wishing Well.” We spent the next six weeks praying that the record would die quickly with as little airplay as possible. We got our wish.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hanky Panky

  Now that summer was over and “Pretty Little Red Bird” had sunk mercifully into oblivion, I got news that hit me like a fist in the face. My girlfriend, Diane, was pregnant. Toward the end of summer 1964, Diane had been away with her parents for about three weeks somewhere in the South. We had a very emotional goodbye, and as soon as she got back she came to my house. She had never come to my house without calling before, and I was flabbergasted. When she told me that she thought she was pregnant, I was in shock. It was truly the last thing I expected. We went to a doctor and had her tested and there was no mistake. At age seventeen, I was going to be a father. It was that simple and, like it or not, things were going to change. We were both starting our senior year. We had been dating for nearly two years and we were serious about each other. We loved each other as much as two kids can, but kids is what we were and scared to death is how we felt. In the Midwest of 1964, abortion was so clandestine and unthinkable that we didn’t even consider it. We were going to get married. For better or worse, I was a carouser, but when I got the news from Diane, it was like a cold shower. I tried to concentrate on school and on band business. Even though it was never a very serious romance, I stopped seeing Ginger and tried to twist myself into what I imagined was a responsible husband and father. The baby was not due until the following April, so we had a few months to prepare. Telling our parents was agonizing. We decided we would do it separately.

  Telling my parents was a nightmare, but though they were upset and disappointed they also became very supportive. Whatever they could do to help, they would do it. I could count on them. Diane had a tougher time of it with her folks. They were so upset that Diane felt she didn’t have any other choice but to move out. She had to stay with friends for a few weeks until I was able to work out an arrangement with Larry Coverdale and his wife. I rented a bedroom from them and Diane stayed there until we were married. We still had school to think of, but now instead of looking forward to final exams, we were trying to finalize our wedding plans. Every day I would go to school, then go to the record shop, get something to eat, and then drop by Larry’s and sit with Diane as late as I could until I had to go back to my house to study. It was the kind of life you simply lived without thinking about it too much and then afterward, you wonder how the hell you did it. When I could get away for a while and be by myself, I did.

  On Sunday afternoons, when I was not playing with the Shondells, I used to sneak into a local nightclub called Shula’s and drink beer. After Diane’s heart-stopping news, Sundays could not come fast enough. The band and I had done gigs at Shula’s and the bartenders all thought I was old enough to drink. There was always a rock band on Sundays and it was usually somebody I knew. This particular September afternoon, the Spinners were playing. They were friends and I had not seen them in a while and I wanted to check them out.

  One of the songs they played during their first set got an amazing reaction from the crowd. It was called “Hanky Panky.” I had never heard it before. In between sets, the drummer, Hank Randolph, came over to my table and I asked him what the story was with that song. Was it something he wrote with his brother Chuck, who was the lead guitarist? “No, we heard another band do it a few weeks ago and the crowd went nuts, so we decided to do it.” They could not find a copy of the record so they were really playing whatever bits and pieces they could remember.

  During the next set, over the PA system, I could hear people requesting this song over and over. The requests were coming mainly from the girls, which was always a good sign. The Spinners played “Hanky Panky” twice more that afternoon and each time the reaction was the same. The crowd went wild. Everybody hit the dance floor and sang along. I remember thinking what an unusual response this was from a normally low-key, Sunday-afternoon crowd. It was more like the reaction you would expect from a good party crowd on a Saturday night.

  When I left Shula’s later that afternoon, all I could think about was getting into Jack Douglas’s studio and recording that song. After the Rivieras’ rip-off of “California Sun” from the Princeton Five, I knew we didn’t have much time and I was not going to take any chances. “Hanky Panky” was going to belong to the Shondells. As soon as I got home, I called Coverdale and Douglas and told them I had our next single.

  The next day, at the Spin-It, I asked our resident musicologist, “Dr. John,” who was my fellow clerk and had been with Dickie for years, if he had ever heard of a song called “Hanky Panky.” “No, who’s it by?” “I have no idea.” The doctor got out his huge, thirty-pound retailers’ guide, which listed virtually every record ever made, and looked it up. It turned out to be the flip side of a record called “That Boy John” by the Raindrops on Jubilee Records. We found out it had been released the previous fall but was almost immediately pulled off the market after the Kennedy assassination because the John in the title was JFK. (I found out later that the Raindrops were really the great Brill Building songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.) In essence, it was the B side of a record nobody ever heard. Well, almost nobody. The Spinners had sure heard of it and so had the group who did it originally. I really felt we had to move fast.

  At the rehearsal the following night, we set out to learn “Hanky Panky,” except that we were as much in the dark as the Spinners as to what the words really were. All I could remember was: “My baby does the Hanky Panky.” We were actually doing an imitation of the Spinners’ imitation, and who knew how far the chain stretched? Since we needed more lyrics than that, Coverdale and I made up some disposable mumblings that passed for a second verse.

  I saw her walkin’ on down the line,

  You know I saw her for the very first time…

  We played it at our next couple of gigs and got the same reaction the Spinners got. Everybody loved that song. We knew we had a hold of something big. We got more requests for “Hanky Panky” than any song we had ever done, and we knew it was probably the first time any of these kids were hearing it. When we finally made it into the studio in late October, we had a tremendous sense of confidence and inevitability. We felt the song was already a hit. All we had to do was get it down on tape and the rest would take care of itself.

  The session went off without a hitch. Between rewrites and the live gigs, we had made the song our own. Douglas’s production was pretty clean and straightforward, with just a touch of tape reverb for echo. We did three takes and picked the second one for the A side. For the B side, we threw together an instrumental called “Thunderbolt.” We listened to “Hanky Panky” over and over, and the more we heard it, the better it sounded. Douglas loved it too. “This really sounds like a smash,” he said. We had finally made a record that we were proud to call our own.

  Douglas made several thousand pressings, and when the first batch arrived a coup
le of weeks later at the Spin-It, it was a big event. Dickie pulled out all the stops and had posters and bumper stickers made up. Douglas saw to it that all the music stores in the surrounding towns had plenty of copies. He also got all his DJ buddies to give us lots of airplay. We would sit in our cars at night and scan the radio dial in hopes that some distant station would play the record, and every now and then, we actually heard it. What a great feeling it was to hear “Hanky Panky” on the way to a gig, or to and from school, or to have my friends tell me that they heard the record on such and such a station.

  By Christmas, we were out of records and had to press more. It was a hit and everybody knew it. Wherever the record played, it sold. And it was Top 10 on every radio station that played it. In the Niles—South Bend area, we were number one. In most of the nearby towns, we were outselling the major artists.

  Because of the local success of “Hanky Panky,” we started promoting our own gigs. We went to various halls like the National Guard Armory, the Elks Club, and the American Legion Hall, and sold the managers on the idea of splitting the concessions and the take at the door. We had enough of a following by then to guarantee a good-sized crowd and everybody made money. By early 1965, we had a smartly functioning little machine going. I worked out a deal with the kids in my high school art department to make posters for our upcoming dances. We hired off-duty cops as bouncers and to work security. Several of the local papers did feature articles on us and helped promote our dates.