Me, the Mob, and the Music

by Tommy James

  Morris loved “Crystal Blue Persuasion.” He was crazy about it because it had a Latin feel. Morris, half Spanish, loved Latin music. Tito Puente, who I had become friendly with, also loved “Crystal Blue” and did it in his act. Roulette was always a big promoter of Latin jazz. I was riding high on pills and during this string of hits I went through one of my periodic rages over money. It was around this time that my contract was running out. It was common knowledge in the industry that Morris and I were going to have to renegotiate. I thought this might be a good time to pressure Morris. But Morris and I never discussed the issue man to man. It was always handled by my lawyer, Howard Beldock, and Morris’s lawyers. Other people had their eye on my contract. Clive Davis let it be known that he was interested in acquiring me for Columbia Records. Everybody was playing coy.

  My marriage at this time was showing signs of cracking. We weren’t having a terrible time, but I was taking pills every day and then drinking to come down off the pills. Ritchie Cordell and I were getting high a lot. We often went up to Bath, New Hampshire, with Ritchie and his wife because Ritchie liked to get away and shoot guns. He had a fascination with firearms and I caught the bug as well. I wound up buying a lot of guns. I bought a .22 pistol, a .25 automatic pistol, a Browning .22 magnum machine gun, a Marlin .22 with an octagon barrel, and a .32-caliber police pistol from 1902. It had a rubber handle and an eight-inch barrel. I brought all the guns home with me, which was a big risk because it was clearly against the law. I didn’t care about that. I stockpiled ammunition and occasionally I was shooting target practice off the deck of my terrace, trying to take out lightbulbs or hit the water tower across the street to make it leak. Ronnie was not very happy about that. My obsession reached a peak when I started carrying a pistol every time I went to the studio. I convinced myself that I might be in danger from every derelict walking home at 4:00 A.M. I was also worried I might be in trouble from my association with Morris and Roulette. People may have been looking at me as an “associate” of Morris, the way Morris was an “associate” of Vinnie the Chin. I was also seeing a psychiatrist.

  At that time, seeing a psychiatrist was kind of trendy, but I really needed one because I was becoming a lunatic and the guns were getting troubling. My shrink was Dr. Sumner Goldstein, and every Thursday I would visit his office in a beautiful brownstone. One afternoon at Dr. Goldstein’s office, as I was pulling a pack of cigarettes out of my briefcase, one of the pistols I always carried fell out on the floor. There is very little in the way of covering that kind of thing up. The doctor looked at me and said, “What the hell is that?” “Oh, that? That’s my gun.” I took the bullets out and showed him. He took it, hefted it, and gave it back. I reloaded it and put it back in my briefcase. He said, “You carry that thing around with you?” “Yeah, you never know.” One of our main topics of conversation was Morris’s refusal to pay me. He also knew how I felt working for the Genovese crime family and their cadre of killers and hoodlums. Dr. Goldstein put two and two together and came up with ten. He was convinced that I was going to shoot Morris.

  My doctor did not waste any time. He called Morris. One afternoon I came home from the studio, and sitting in my living room was Ronnie; my secretary, Joanne; Morris; Morris’s bodyguard; and Dr. Goldstein. I stood there, frozen. Morris said, “We’re going to take the guns up to my place.” I was having an intervention before there was a name for it. Morris said, “Follow me,” and we walked into the bedroom and out onto the back terrace. He suddenly grabbed me by the collar and lifted me off the ground so my feet were dangling. I was so high that I started laughing. “What the fuck you doing?” I could not stop giggling. I could hear the New York traffic below and the wind blowing in my face while Morris, with his hand on my throat, pushed me against the wall. “Do you know what I did to the bum who killed my brother?” Morris’s brother had been murdered at Birdland back in the late fifties. “I fucking took a knife and stuck it in his fucking stomach and twisted it”—he took his other hand and pushed it into my stomach—“I stuck it in his fucking stomach until his guts fell out.” When Morris put his hand in my stomach it tickled, and now I was really giggling. “Really?” I said. Morris let me down and then started laughing himself. “No, you ain’t going to hurt me, are you?” As we walked out of the bedroom he said, “Look, you come up to my place.” Morris had a farmhouse in Ghent, New York. “You can shoot anytime you want. You don’t want no guns in the city. It’s no fucking good.” Then he paused and said, “You scared walking home? I’ll send somebody.”

  The next thing I know they were packing my arsenal up—by now I had more than a dozen guns—into suitcases, garment bags, and any boxes I had around the apartment. “With all the crazy shit I did in my life,” Morris growled at me, “if I get pinched with this junk, you’re going to hear from me.” He and his driver, a young kid who was a black belt, took my weapons stash down the elevator and out to his car. I found out later that the kid was also Nate’s bodyguard, so he must have been quite a terror. And what did that say for Nate? You know you’ve reached a certain level of infamy when a bodyguard needs a bodyguard. From that point on, a Sicilian gentleman named Dom stopped by my apartment every Wednesday or Thursday, whenever I went to the studio. I remember he was a big Mets fan, he was good at beating people up, and he was an amateur photographer. It was fun making small talk with Dom. Once he asked me where I was from and I said, “Michigan.” He looked at me like he had never heard of the place. I said, “Michigan. You know, where they make all the cars. Like Studebakers. My uncle used to design Studebakers.” “No kidding,” said Dom. “My cousin Bobby used to steal ’em.” He always carried a gun and a 35-millimeter camera. He hung out with me at the studio and took a lot of pictures. They were so good, we used them on our second Greatest Hits album. It was predictable of Morris’s luck that he found a photographer he would not have to pay.

  “Sweet Cherry Wine” was a monster hit record. Later in the summer we released “Crystal Blue Persuasion” and that exploded. It was played immediately and everywhere, except Britain. Those two plus “Crimson and Clover” were thought of as a threesome because they came so fast after one another. That year, we became the first group to outsell the Beatles in single record sales.

  We went on to record what would become Cellophane Symphony at a new studio called Broadway Sound at Broadway and Fifty-fourth Street, above some street-level stores. It was beautiful and brand new. The men who owned the studio were there to meet me, and one of them was Whitey Ford from the New York Yankees. He was half owner of the place. When I checked out the control booth I saw this monstrosity, a contraption that looked like one of the old switchboards from the 1920s. I asked what it was and they told me it was a Moog synthesizer. I asked what it did, and they said, “Listen to this.” It mimicked every sound imaginable, woodwinds, brass, strings, and percussion. So we made an album around the synthesizer. We recorded blues, pop, jazz, and ran it through the “synth.” We were the first act to actually use one of these things that has now become standard in any recording studio.

  That day, I went out to lunch with Whitey Ford. There was nothing more ridiculous-sounding than me trying to talk baseball and Whitey trying to talk music. The conversation as I remember went something like this:

  WHITEY: No, actually that was the Boston Red Sox, not the Boston Celtics. They’re a basketball team.

  TOMMY: No, actually Buddy Holly’s group was the Crickets, not the Beatles. The Beatles are British.

  Cellophane was not as popular as Crimson because of its experimental nature, but it got us a lot of airplay on FM radio. The Shondells were selling albums to the hard-core hippies, which was hard to do. For some reason, in the late seventies the album inexplicably took off out of Cleveland and got a second life.

  In August we went to Hawaii to do a two-week combination gig and vacation. Everybody took their wives. “Crystal Blue” was number one, and we played in Hilo and Honolulu. We had a great reception but the big event was the volcan
o that was in the process of erupting. The place was overrun with volcanologists and geologists. We decided to take a look. We drove down at night, and there was a gate that was left open and a sign that read “Crater Rim Road.” We did not know that we were not supposed to be there. We found ourselves on the rim of the volcano and the entire road was carved out by lava flow. Our throats were burning from the sulfur. If we had stayed any longer, we would have died from asphyxiation.

  In between gigs, we stayed at a beautiful mansion at the foot of Diamond Head, on an old sugar plantation. The Rascals, who were on the gig with us, were staying down the street. The sea wall came right up to the back of the house. We had Polynesian servants waiting on us hand and foot. While I was relaxing with a mai tai on the veranda, I got a call from Roulette from my secretary, Joanne. Artie Kornfeld was the Cowsills’ producer, and a very successful one out of New York. Artie and I were friends and we even had the same attorney, Howard Beldock. Beldock called Joanne and said Artie would like to know if Tommy could play this gig he was helping to promote. I said, “Where is it?” She said, “It’s on a pig farm in upstate New York.” I said, “Are you nuts? You’re asking us to come back to New York, to leave paradise and fly halfway around the world to play a pig farm?” “Well, it looks like a pretty important gig, a lot of people are expected, and a lot of acts have already committed…” I said, “If we’re not there, tell them to start without us.” Just before the weekend the news about Woodstock was making all the TV news shows and we knew we might have made a mistake. There was nothing to do but go back to enjoying Hawaii, which I did. In fact, the next day I was floating in the sea just offshore when a huge tropical bee stung my water raft, almost drowning me. After the final gig we were taken back to the airport, and I boarded a plane with a bucket of fried chicken and a .22 automatic pistol that had eluded Morris’s search and I had hidden in the bucket of chicken. No one ever knew.

  The Atlanta Pop Festival was the next big rock concert and it was a very heady affair. Janis Joplin was there and we had a nice talk. She told me she loved me because I reminded her of Ricky Nelson, who was her favorite act. They brought us in by helicopter onto a makeshift helipad. It was at a racetrack and there was no way to drive in. It was the only time in my life I ever rode on a copter. I was pretty high and the only other thing I remember was that the act just before us was Sha Na Na. Everything was gargantuan. It was incredible to see 600,000 people. We got sloshed in the dressing room on Southern Comfort and Jack Daniel’s and the usual smorgasbord of pot and hash. From what I understand, it was better organized than Woodstock. All the bands liked it more and the crowd was better treated. It was another three-day festival. “Crimson and Clover” was such a great crowd pleaser but it was also incredible to be taken into the hearts of the other acts. “Crimson” was accepted by the fans who were focused on psychedelic and “heavy” music. They took it as part of our transformation from pop to more gritty rock, so we were able to play “Mony Mony” and “I Think We’re Alone Now” and also be accepted by the hard-core fans. Everybody just had fun. Our expectations about “Crimson” were spot on. We were so lucky to have that record at that time.

  The Atlanta show was actually part of a southern tour. A few days later, the mayor of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, gave us the key to the city. We were flying another propeller plane and the plane could not take off. The pilot had to recalibrate and try again. There was just too much weight. As soon as we made altitude, we flew smack into an electrical storm and got struck by lightning. I could see oil trickling down my window as we tried to navigate through the storm. The lightning actually does not hit the plane; it goes around it and creates a vacuum under the plane. It opens up the sky and the air underneath is split open. The bottom fell out of the sky and we dropped five thousand feet in a matter of seconds. I was sure we were going to crash. There were people screaming and crying but somehow we made it.

  Pete Lucia and I flew out separately during this tour and went from Memphis to Atlanta, on another propeller plane. It was us and about a hundred service guys. There was visceral hatred. A few whistles over our hair, but it wasn’t even good-natured anymore. We were all about the same age. The only reason I wasn’t one of them was that Morris Levy had pulled me out of the fire.

  We released three albums that year. Crimson, Cellophane, and Greatest Hits Volume II. Morris, who would never fly on an airplane, drove out to Las Vegas and invited all twenty-eight independent distributors along for a weekend of gambling and hedonism. These distributors were spread all over North America; distributors like Malverne, All State, Select-O-Hits, and Navarre. On Friday night they all had envelopes shoved under their hotel doors with a hundred-dollar chip in each and Morris’s blessing to have a good time. They would talk on Sunday morning. He took care of the rooms and all the other expenses. On Sunday, with each distributor hung over and probably a little chagrined, Morris announced his firm’s intentions. “The new Tommy James Greatest Hits is going to ship platinum.” He put his finger on each man’s chest and said, “You’re taking two hundred thousand copies, and you and you and you, a hundred thousand each, you understand me?” They understood. Each one left sweating blood but no one resisted. They wouldn’t have done this for anybody else in the industry.

  Once the distributors took all the albums that Morris shoved down their throats, Tommy James and the Shondells: Greatest Hits Volume II shipped platinum and jumped right on the charts. People in the industry, to this day, still refer to it as 42040, its order number instead of its title.

  The album took off like a rocket, so Morris brought on a new sales and marketing Guru named Ira Leslie. Ira’s uncle Jerry Winston owned Morris’s faithful New York/New Jersey distributor: Malverne Distribution. Because of Ira’s family connections, Morris knew he could trust him with, shall we say, more intricate matters, like paying off radio stations. Morris sent Ira all over the country on a special mission. Ira would fly into Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Houston and meet all the big powerhouse radio station reps at the gate with sealed envelopes bulging with cash. The reps would walk with him to his next flight, where Ira would say good luck and continue on. Sometimes he would fly to three or four cities in a single afternoon.

  I remember sitting in Morris’s office when Ira returned from one of his pay-for-play excursions. Morris barked, “Everything go okay?” Ira, who sounded almost as gruff as Morris, said, “No problems. By the way, you gave me too much money,” and he threw an envelope on Morris’s desk. “There’s a thousand dollars left over.” Morris looked at the envelope, thought for a second, and said, “You’re either the smartest or the dumbest fuckin’ promotion man I’ve ever had.”

  As it turned out, we ended up selling 12 million copies through the seventies. That was an awesome number. And a greatest hits album was effectively free, there were no recording costs. Morris never made that much money before.

  As a follow-up to “Crystal Blue Persuasion” I recorded “Ball of Fire,” which I wrote with a couple of guys from Alive And Kicking, a band I would produce a few years later. “Ball of Fire” was a very apocalyptic kind of song and it charted very well. Morris added it to the Greatest Hits album as a sales tactic. He would always put one new song on a Greatest Hits package so you would have to buy the album to get the single. The album was the greatest-selling record Roulette ever produced.

  My biggest heartache in the summer/fall of 1970 was that Red Schwartz and Morris got into their own fight over money. Red must have made Morris a millionaire fifty times over but he never made more than three hundred dollars per week. Red gave Morris an ultimatum, and Morris told him to go fuck himself. Red quit that afternoon and moved to California. It was like losing your right arm. I was miserable for weeks and kept that in my mind as my contract situation was finally reaching the boiling point. This was Morris’s way. Red, George Goldner—they were all used in one way or another. Morris’s original partner, Joel Kulsky, took Red’s place. And Joel Kulsky’s half-brother Phil K
arl took over publishing. It was hard to say what anybody really did. Somewhere along the way, Kulsky ran Diamond Records, but the interworkings of these relationships are so convoluted that probably the real stories are lost forever.

  Another thing that happened was that my old girlfriend from Niles named Ginger showed up in publishing one day after I got back from Hawaii. She angled a job from Phil Karl, and Ginger and I struck up the old friendship when Ronnie wasn’t around. I thought I was being cool, but it was just another dagger I was putting into myself and my marriage.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ball of Fire

  By the end of 1969, I hadn’t re-signed my contract because my lawyer, Howard Beldock, was trying to work out an arrangement to force Morris to make regular payments to me. Morris had suddenly taken a very fatherly concern over me. We seemed to be hanging out together more and more at the office, talking about business and life. It was at this time that he started inviting me up to his farm in Ghent, New York. Morris’s farm was his retreat and sabbatical. I think it represented a kind of healing grace for him or at least as close to grace as Morris Levy would ever get. It was for his family and friends. It was away from New York, Roulette, the hookers, and the Mulberry Street social club. The Roulette Regulars were conspicuous by their absence. By September I was going up to his farm nearly every weekend we weren’t playing out. Morris Gurlak would pick me up and we would drive up together. Other than Gurlak, I never saw any of the boys up at the farm. They came up occasionally for social functions, weddings, birthday parties, but that’s all. They would have been out of their element anyway. I can’t imagine them baling hay with Morris.