CHAPTER 17
The Rock Star and the Godfather
Tommy James and Morris Levy
Isn’t it terrible when the only pictures you can find of the executives at your record company are their mug shots?
—Tommy James
The first time I saw Tommy James perform live, in June 1976, it was a revelation. Five years after his last Top 40 hit—“Draggin’ the Line”—he and his five-piece band delivered a tremendous set of hits performed with verve and faithfulness. Tommy’s voice was strong and his band’s four-part harmonies were superb. The set was remarkable for another reason: there were only thirty people in the audience at West Hollywood’s Troubadour nightclub. It made no difference to Tommy, as he delivered the kind of performance one would have expected had there been thousands of fans cheering him on. Towards the end of the set, while the band was vamping during “Mony Mony,” he leaped off the stage and jogged around the club, shaking the hand of everyone in attendance. The way he expressed his appreciation made a big impression on me.
When Tommy James and the Shondells were getting airplay with their hits in the 1960s, I liked enough of them to buy their best of album when it was released. While their previous albums had worthwhile tracks, they were typical of the time, composed of mostly filler material. In my freshman year at UCLA, I carpooled with a couple of high school friends to a campus parking lot. One had bought an eight-track tape of Tommy’s Crimson and Clover album, which was a marvel. The long version of the title track—the single of which hit number one—was one of the better psychedelic records of the time. Atypically for a band known for Top 40 hits, most of the songs on the album were good and were recorded with uncommon clarity and dynamics. I bought the album and the group’s follow up, Cellophane Symphony, which included some perfectly acceptable arrangements featuring electronic instrumentation by way of a Moog synthesizer. The album was recorded at Broadway Sound, a studio co-owned by recently retired Yankees pitching great Whitey Ford, who had purchased the Moog from the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz.
In October 1964 the Shondells, Tommy Jackson’s band (he was known by his real surname at the time), recorded a song that Tommy had heard a rival band perform, titled “Hanky Panky.” The term isn’t used much these days, but was a playful expression for improper sexual behavior. Nobody knew much about the song, including the full set of lyrics. The song originated as a B-side to the Raindrops’ “That Boy John,” released in late 1963. The Raindrops were actually Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, who were beginning to distinguish themselves as hit songwriters with “Be My Baby,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Leader of the Pack,” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” among their credits. Barry called “Hanky Panky” “a terrible song.” The idea was to have an inferior B-side so a DJ wouldn’t be tempted to play the wrong song—the one not being promoted—on the radio.
A local DJ at WNIL recorded the Shondells in the radio station studio and released a single on the Snap Records label. It received some impressive airplay in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, but by the time Tommy graduated from high school in June 1965, the record was no longer being played. Nearly a year later, a Pittsburgh dance promoter popularized the record in his area, resulting in tens of thousands of bootleg 45s being sold. Tommy needed a deal, and fast, to counter the bootlegged sales. His promoter/manager had him sign with Roulette Records. Because the original master tape couldn’t be located, Roulette made a tape from one of the bootlegged records. It climbed to number one in July, almost two years after it was recorded. It’s probably the only big hit to have been taken directly off of another record.
With the original Shondells dispersed, Tommy hired a Pittsburgh club band and the ensemble was now billed as Tommy James and the Shondells. The Beatles inspired the new era of rock ’n’ roll, but not everybody who joined a band felt comfortable with the cultural path the Beatles blazed. Tommy and his bandmates were initially slow to embrace the changes, as their first tour program indicates: “They all have fairly short hair … not crew cut but short, and they are very definitely against the scruffy look as exemplified by some of the British acts.”
A remarkable run of hits followed. From the time Roulette released “Hanky Panky” in June 1966 through the end of the 1960s, the group had more top ten hits than any other American rock group. The appeal of the original records was reconfirmed in the 1980s when three covers hit the top ten: Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” and Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony” were back to back number ones in November 1987, while Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ “Crimson & Clover” made it to number seven in 1982.
I saw Tommy play next in August 1988 when he shared a bill with the Rascals at the Universal Amphitheatre. Backstage after the show, I introduced myself and had a brief exchange with him. I told him that we were negotiating to buy the Roulette catalogue. He confirmed for me Roulette’s reputation for not paying royalties. I told him that if we made the purchase, he would get royalties from us. He was cordial, but I don’t think he gave it much consideration.
The owner of Roulette Records, Morris (Moishe) Levy, was a Damon Runyon character: tall, stocky, and gruff, with a manner acquired on the streets. He had a tough childhood, with his father and an older brother dying when he was very young. He learned the value of music publishing when he was in his twenties as the co-owner of the Birdland jazz club in Manhattan. He cobbled together a catalogue of masters from labels he was a partner in, invariably buying out his associates when they needed funds to cover gambling debts. Levy had a reputation among executives in the business that his word was his bond, while at the same time having the notoriety among his recording artists and songwriters of failing to account properly for royalty payments. When Levy’s artists asked for their money, he would often reply with, “Royalty? You want royalty, go to England!” That he was physically intimidating and linked to the Genovese crime family meant that there were few who challenged him. A joke circulated for many years that scientists were looking for the quietest place on earth in which to conduct experiments and they had finally found it: Roulette’s royalty accounting department.
He was aggressive in his business dealings. He managed DJ Alan Freed and attempted to trademark the term “rock and roll.” On songs he published, he sometimes added his name as a songwriter, even though he had nothing to do with the creation. Morris came up with a smart way to distribute payola. He paid DJs for introducing acts at record hops and live dates. He understood the value of charity and raised millions of dollars for the T. J. Martel Foundation and United Jewish Appeal, of which he was that organization’s Man of the Year in 1973.
Morris always denied that he was in business with the mob, claiming that these were old friends from early in his life. He would point to a framed photo of himself and Cardinal Spellman hanging on the wall in his office. His standard line was, “That don’t make me Catholic.” His activities caught up with him, and a Federal jury convicted him of extortion in 1988. Federal authorities described him as “the Godfather of the American music business.” Although he had sold his publishing business, there were few companies interested in his masters because executives feared a rash of lawsuits would face the new owner from emboldened artists who no longer had to deal with Morris for the royalties they were owed.
He wanted $5 million for the rights to his masters, but there were no takers. Richard quarterbacked the evaluation process, making a chart on notebook paper: A&R provided him with a list of titles that we could release, and sales and marketing gave him an estimate of the sales we could expect. He had a separate category of titles we didn’t think we could sell enough copies of to justify releasing ourselves, those we could license to another company. My main contribution to the process was surveying a number of music supervisors and film and TV licensing people who reported difficulties in dealing with Roulette since they frequently failed to returned calls. So, I knew there would be a big upside in media licensing. Because the purchase price was so hefty, beyond what Rhino could afford, we approached our distributor, Capitol, who contacted their international company, EMI Music, about partnering with us on the deal.
After Bob Emmer joined the company in October 1987 and got up to speed, he proved to be a big asset. In addition to anchoring our new business affairs department—and relieving me of drafting and reviewing most of the contracts—he was also adept in making deals. He wasn’t so good at administration and at times lapsed into “speaking jazz,” as Richard referred to Bob’s concocted excuses when he failed to accomplish a task or forgot a previous discussion, because he improvised, like a jazz musician. Bob was sociable in a way Richard and I weren’t, so in May 1989 we sent him to New York to meet with the EMI team and see Morris.
The negotiations did not go smoothly. Morris wandered around his apartment with his bathrobe hanging open, revealing his underwear. He had a problem with his sciatic nerve, and he had to lie on his back to relieve the pain. The first meeting did not go well, and he dismissed Bob and the EMI team. Walking through Central Park afterwards, Bob felt bad, called Morris, and persuaded him to meet the following day, which he would agree to only if Bob did all the talking among the buyers. This arrangement in place, anytime anybody from the EMI team had a question, they had to ask Bob to ask Morris, even though he was sitting mere feet away on his sofa.
Morris agreed to proceed, but gave the team 72 hours to go through the 101-page agreement. They met in a law office day and night, as it was the weekend. The office wasn’t air-conditioned, so after the paralegals left, the team stripped down to their underwear to withstand the heat. Morris was surprised at the scene when he delivered a Sunday night dinner of Chinese take-out. He admonished them because he knew that the offices of the law firm two floors up were air-conditioned on the weekend. The deal was agreed to, subject to Morris meeting Richard.
Richard flew in and he and Bob drove to Ghent to visit Morris at his farm. Bob noticed that the framed family photos on the wall had heads cut out in the pictures. He asked Morris about them, and Morris responded, “I love my children; I hate my fuckin’ ex-wives.” Richard was struck by how frail Morris seemed, especially after dinner, when the fatigued Morris continued discussing the contract in his bedroom: Morris in bed, Bob and Richard sitting on it.
The purchase price was a bit under $5 million. Rhino put up a little more than half for the North American rights (excluding the jazz titles). EMI got the rights for the rest of the world (including the jazz). To guard against claims of unpaid royalties, Morris agreed to a “basket” of $350,000 for a period of a year. This meant that we could withhold that sum of money from the purchase price, subject to any claims. The only one we received was from New Orleans funk band the Meters, and that was worked out for a relatively small amount. Mitch Ryder, along with his group the Detroit Wheels, had hits with “Devil with a Blue Dress On” and “Sock It to Me, Baby!” The group had recorded on the DynaVoice label that Morris had acquired, but there didn’t appear to be a contract anybody could locate. Ryder’s lawyer, Neville Johnson, contacted us. Even though he was a friend of mine, I thought he was being overly aggressive in squeezing us for a higher royalty than his client would otherwise have received. After we came to an agreement, I couldn’t fault Neville, and didn’t let it impair our relationship.
Morris died of liver cancer in May 1990, without having served his time in jail. Morris was right when he told us that we would do well. Owing primarily to the robust sales of Tommy James and the Shondells (three titles sold well over 100,000) and KC and the Sunshine Band (whose best of sold over 500,000), we made back our money in less than three years.
Permit me to digress. Despite Rhino’s reputation, KC—real name Harry Wayne Casey—didn’t trust us enough to even let us borrow his master tapes, which were better than what we had received from Roulette. The band’s records were well-produced, and Bill Inglot wanted to use KC’s tapes to get the best sound for our reissues. KC put him off for months. Finally, Brian Schuman sent freelancer Bob Fisher to Miami. He spent hours outside of KC’s house—actually his mother’s house, as KC had run into problems with the IRS. He knocked on the door all day, but KC didn’t answer because he was asleep until 6 p.m. KC whined about how Henry Stone (owner of KC’s original label, TK Records) and Morris Levy had ripped him off. Somehow Bob was able to finesse borrowing the tapes to do the work at nearby Criteria Studios. Bob reported back that KC’s tapes were stored under his bed, in clothes closets, and in nooks and crannies throughout the house. He had no gold records on the wall. The only signs of success were photos of him with celebrities like Bob Hope and Dinah Shore.
The visibility of our KC and the Sunshine Band releases helped to revive interest in him. Early in our relationship, he was always calling us to accelerate his royalty payments. It seemed like he always needed money. In a few years, renewed interest in him had grown to where he was considering which offer to accept to play on New Year’s Eve for a fee of $1 million dollars. He no longer called our royalty department.
When I heard about HBO scheduling a new series about the Mafia in January 1999, my thought was, hasn’t this been done to death? In addition, the novelty of a crime boss like Tony Soprano seeing a psychiatrist (Dr. Melfi) paralleled the roles of Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal in the movie Analyze This, which was released in the middle of The Sopranos first season. Analyze This was a hit movie, grossing over $100 million, so how many people would care about The Sopranos? When the show’s viewership doubled in its second season, I thought it would be opportune to pitch a movie based on the relationship between Tommy and Morris. My working title was “The Rock Star and the Godfather.” There was even a character in The Sopranos based on Morris. Hesh Rabkin was Jewish, tall, and physically imposing, had made his fortune in the record business in the fifties and sixties, and owned a horse farm in upstate New York.
In the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog, a scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river on his back. The frog is reluctant, because he says the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion counters that he wouldn’t do that, because then they would both drown. The frog agrees. Half way through the water, much to the frog’s surprise, the scorpion stings him. As they are both sinking, the frog asks the scorpion why. His reply is “It’s my nature.” Despite a person’s intentions, sometimes they’re unable to go against their basic nature, even if it negatively affects their life. From hearing Tommy tell his story, there was real affection between the two, a genuine father and son relationship, but Morris still couldn’t help himself from ripping Tommy off. It was his nature.
The success of The Sopranos showed that people weren’t tired of Mafia-themed dramas, and I was interested in fleshing out this relationship. Tommy’s story presented a unique twist—one that was true—with great music for the soundtrack. I ran the idea by Ron McGee, who wrote the script for Daydream Believers, the Monkees movie. He was interested, and so was Tommy. What follows are excerpts from two lengthy phone conversations the three of us had in 2000—one in September and one in November—to determine the elements of the story. Where clarification is needed, my additions are in italics.
HAROLD: In the early days, did you get a sense that Morris had mob ties?
TOMMY: It was in May 1966, at the signing of my record deal. Morris’ goons came in and one of them said, “Morris, we’ve got to talk to you right away.” Morris went from being this charming guy to a serious one. I overheard them telling Morris that they just beat some guy to death in New Jersey.
HAROLD: Were there other things you saw that were mob-like?
TOMMY: There were meetings in Morris office with these guys every few weeks. I knew these were serious people because Morris introduced them to me as “Mr.…” These were scary people; they all looked the same and talked the same. Vincent “the Chin” Gigante [who became head of the Genovese family in 1981] was a regular. Morris seemed to be in charge of the meetings.
HAROLD: What was Morris’ reason for not paying you your royalties?
TOMMY: His position was that I was always in the red because my studio bills were so high. [Laughs] The occasional statements I received always showed that I owed him money. Here we were selling millions of records, and I never seemed to recoup my recording expenses. The money I earned as a songwriter was also put towards recouping those costs, so it made no sense. After the three-year deal I signed was up, we probably sold 30 million records, and he’s saying we haven’t sold enough to recover our recording costs.
[Tommy’s figure was indeed his estimate, as he never received a full account of what he had sold. In the 1960s an artist’s collected sales were calculated in this way: one record sold for every single, and five records sold for every album, as a single consisted of two songs and an album usually had between ten and twelve. In Tommy’s example, his 30 million in sales might have been from four million albums and ten million singles. This method was abandoned in the 1970s when albums were acknowledged for regularly selling in large amounts.]
TOMMY: Morris would ride that pony as long as he could. Other times he told me he couldn’t pay me because he wasn’t paid on time from his independent distributors. By 1968 I realized this was really a scam.
Morris got me out of the draft. It was in late 1968 or early 1969 when I was called to the draft board. Previously I had a deferment because I was married, but they needed more soldiers to report to Vietnam, so they changed my status from 3A to 1A. I thought the change might have been initiated by the Nixon administration because I had backed Hubert Humphrey and played at a number of rallies to support him in his campaign for president in 1968. Humphrey was paranoid around young people because they had given him a hard time over the protest against the Vietnam War. We were the first group of longhaired freaks who were friendly. Back at the hotel room, after the rallies, he wanted to know our opinions on things, of what the young people wanted. If he won the election, he promised me a position heading a national youth commission. I had him write the liner notes to our Crimson and Clover album. We remained friends until his death.
I don’t know how this would play to the Vietnam veterans, if we put this in the movie. I freaked out. I hired psychiatrists and other doctors to write me letters. It just so happened that Morris was on the board of directors of Chemical Bank. One of his best friends, who was also on this board, happened to be the head of the Selective Service in New York. As fate would have it, this guy put in the fix. I took my physical at the draft board on Whitehall Street. At the end of the day, they said I had night color blindness, and I was given a 4F. And I know it was because of what Morris did.
HAROLD: How did Morris intimidate you?
TOMMY: You’ve got to understand that Morris intimidated people. He looked like Al Capone, or a character right out of a movie. He talked with a gruff Bronx accent. But he never threatened me. One time he came up to my apartment. My wife, my secretary, Morris, and I were all talking. He said, “Come here, kid,” and he took me out on my terrace. He grabs a hold of the front of my shirt, and he says, “I’m gonna tell you something.” He goes into a tirade about how there was a dispute at Birdland, the jazz club he owned, and a mob guy killed his brother instead of him. He gets more agitated when he tells me that he killed the guy who killed his brother. Then he gets very physical: “I took out a knife and I stuck it like this!” With his finger he jabs me in the stomach! “And I stuck it like this, and his intestines were hanging out.” He said he was going to throw him off a building—like this one—but didn’t. While he’s telling me this, I’m freaking out. I’m wondering, why is he telling me this? This was Morris’ way of letting me know that behind everything we’re talking about, he can be a threat. This was his way of letting me know he was nobody to be messed with.
HAROLD: During this period, was there anybody you could go to?
TOMMY: I felt very alone, and ill-equipped to take him on. I once sent a couple of lawyers up to see him, and they ended up in business with him. I didn’t feel there was anybody I could even go to for advice. I didn’t want to do anything that would destroy my career. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of records. I wasn’t sure what to do.
HAROLD: So, if you sued him and he put an injunction on you, or suspended your contract, or a similar action, it would stop the momentum you had.
TOMMY: Exactly. And it probably would have. A few years later, that’s what I had to do to get out of my Roulette contract, and that’s the effect it had. The bad feelings had been building. It came to a head in 1969 when my contract was up, and I was going to leave. That year was huge for me because we became an album act. We weren’t being paid. It wasn’t like I wasn’t getting any money at all—just not close to what Morris owed me. When I told him I needed money, when he felt like it, he would give me a check here or there for $10,000 or $25,000. I was put into the position of having to beg for my money. I was frustrated and humiliated in having to do it, to beg like a bum, rather than being paid properly as a normal person.
HAROLD: But you re-signed.
TOMMY: Suddenly, Morris was my best buddy. We went to the World Series together [the New York Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles in five games in 1969]. [Jazz musician] Lionel Hampton went with us. I spent weekends at his farm. Sometimes I took my wife. Morris and I hung out together. We’d drink all weekend and have fun. Celebrities and other interesting people came up. One of the first times I visited, he had Dr. Joyce Brothers and her husband. He didn’t hang out with wise guys, except, like on Tuesdays. He had the most amazing gun collection I’ve ever seen in my life, rows of high-powered rifles and Remingtons. I saw a happy family man. His farm was his oasis in the desert; he wasn’t like he was in New York.
Morris had an amazing operation, a multimillion dollar dairy farm. Everything the guy touched seemed to turn to gold. He said to me, “Why don’t you get a place close by. Let me look into it.” He bought me an 1100-acre farm in upstate New York. He made the initial payment—and took it out of my royalties—and I made the mortgage payments.
Morris liked to get out and work. He put on overalls and shoveled manure and baled hay, like one of the farm hands. He loved it. He loved being with his son Adam. The three of us went target shooting, or hung out with the cows. The evening ritual would be a huge dinner around a gigantic table. Afterwards, we sat in front of the fire in the large fireplace, drank brandy from snifters, and talked until three in the morning. Once we talked about sci-fi movies from the fifties. I probably knew him as well as anybody. He would tell me how old he felt. He told me his life story, how to get back at a teacher who humiliated him in class; he lifted her wig and poured ink on her head. He was expelled from that. He kept bringing it up, saying, “If my teacher could see me today.”
I got buzzed enough one night and asked him why he got involved with gangsters. I told him, “You’ve got a mind like a computer. You could have been one of the biggest businessmen around.” He blew my comment off. The only thing he would say was, “I am what I am.”
Morris talked me into staying by offering me a real big payout: a large advance, with guaranteed regular payments every year over and above any royalties that were due, a tailor made agreement with additional perks, including me becoming Roulette’s in-house A&R man. At that time I was producing myself. He said, “Why don’t you produce other acts for Roulette? You can help me run the label.” It was Morris’s way of showing that he respected my talent. He was impressed that I was writing and producing my own records.
After the first year, he stopped making payments. I sent my accountant over to talk to him, and he came back shaking. When I confronted Morris, his attitude was, “What are you going to do about it?” Morris never threatened me outright. He had no problem threatening the accounting people I sent up there to get my money.
HAROLD: What impresses me is that, not only were you successful as an artist, but also when you started to produce. [Tommy cowrote and coproduced “Tighter and Tighter” by Alive N Kicking, which became a top ten hit for Roulette in July 1970. In the previous summer, a Texas group called the Clique had a hit with “Sugar On Sunday,” a song Tommy wrote for the Crimson & Clover album but didn’t release as a single.] How could Morris have killed the bird that laid the golden eggs? How could he have not taken care of you?
TOMMY: He was the most penny-wise, pound-foolish person I ever knew. He could be sitting there with $75 million, and he would still cut your heart out for $5,000. He owned an unbelievable catalogue of songs and the masters to go with them. He could have made a deal with a major label distributor from which he would have made even more money. But then he wouldn’t have been able to screw somebody out of 20 percent. It was interesting how emotionally disturbed the guy was. He was paranoid. He would not let anybody else run his publishing company. He liked playing the role of the gangster, but because of that, people wouldn’t have anything to do with him. If he played it straight, he could have been even more successful. In one respect, he was one of the most reckless people I’ve ever met, and at the same time, one of the most anal. I was angry because I knew I was getting ripped off. At the same time, I knew that the money I was making—from touring, from radio play, and from commercials—was because Morris was spending money promoting my records. If it wasn’t for Morris Levy, there wouldn’t be a Tommy James.
One consequence of Morris’s nonpayment of royalties was that Tommy lost the crack songwriting/production team of Bo Gentry and Ritchie Cordell, who provided the string of hits following “Hanky Panky,” which included “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Mirage,” and fostered Tommy’s first credit as a hit songwriter with “Mony Mony”—inspired by the flashing neon sign on the building of the Mutual of New York insurance company. Despite their success, and the profits it brought to Roulette, Morris couldn’t help stiffing them either, and they departed. They continued to have hits, most notably with “Indian Giver” by the 1910 Fruit Gum Company, which climbed to number five in the spring of 1969. By necessity, Tommy rose to the occasion as both a songwriter and producer, and commenced his most fruitful period.
HAROLD: One thing we need to go into here is your consumption of drugs. In your book you refer to it as a way you dealt with stage fright. [Tommy forwarded us a few early chapters of the book he was to publish in 2010 as Me the Mob and the Music.] Was your frustration with Morris also a factor?
TOMMY: Popping pills was a way to stay up for twenty hours straight when I was working on an album. Beginning in 1967, everybody I worked with in the studio—musicians, producer, engineer—seemed to be popping pills. Someone gave me a Dexedrine, and I kept taking them. We had the studio booked every Tuesday and Wednesday. After a Saturday night gig, I would pop pills to stay up to write songs for the following week’s session. I was writing with a sense of desperation because we needed songs to record the following week.
Although I became a born-again Christian in 1967, I was still popping pills, so I was not walking the walk for a long time. But it had a profound effect on my music. A number of the songs I wrote were religiously oriented, like “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” which came right out of the Book of Revelation in the Bible. “Sweet Cherry Wine” is about my conversion experience. “Ball of Fire” was also taken from the Bible. I find it interesting how the good Lord would choose to bless me through a guy like Morris Levy.
Morris had been on me to stop taking the pills for a long time. He was very upset with the death of Frankie Lymon. He came to see me at the studio that night [February 28, 1968] to tell me that Frankie had died. He said, “Frankie was a kid who had it all, and fucked it up, and that’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t stop this shit.”
I took pills for such a long duration that it finally caught up with me in 1970, at a gig in Birmingham, Alabama. I fainted on stage and had to be taken to the hospital. I had lost weight. I had been up for a couple of days. Some reporters got the story wrong and said that I had died. When I called the Roulette office the next day, they were surprised because they had heard I had died. The doctor told me that I had to stop taking pills, and that I had to take six months off. I never stuck a needle in my arm or took acid. I was scared of that stuff. You can kill yourself just as well with booze and pills. During this period I got a divorce from my second wife. During my recovery, I would go up to the office once a week. Morris always wanted to know how I was. He would tell me to stay out of the studio, to do what the doctor told me.
A consequence was that I lost my band. I didn’t intend to break them up, but that’s what happened because they weren’t working. [The Shondells were an important component of Tommy’s success. Bassist Mike Vale cowrote a handful of their hits; drummer Pete Lucia cowrote “Crimson & Clover.” With some personnel changes—Shondells’ guitarist Ed Gray and keyboardist Ron Rosman left—the group became Hog Heaven and recorded an album for Roulette, but it didn’t sell.]
HAROLD: Rock stars are usually depicted as being cool, but you’re more like a rock ’n’ roll Woody Allen.
TOMMY: That’s right. Every time we tried to be cool, something would happen. I’ve got my act on stage down pretty good, but inside, I’m anal-retentive. I’m a perfectionist, and it kills me when I can’t be perfect, which is all the time. So I live my life in this terror, especially when I’m on stage. I’m shy, by nature, so I picked the wrong business to be shy in. Doing TV shows has always scared the piss out of me.
RON: When did it fall apart between you and Morris?
TOMMY: It came to a head in about 1972. In 1971 the Gambinos were taking over New York, and people were getting killed. Morris was aligned with the Genovese family. He and Nate McCalla left the country for a year. They went to Spain. Two of his partners were killed: Tommy Eboli—who also went by the name Tommy Ryan—and Morris Gurlak.
[Eboli was murdered on the night of July 16, 1972, blocks away from where Tommy was performing at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn. Nate McCalla, at over six feet tall and 250 pounds, was a physically imposing black man from Harlem who, according to Tommy, had been a highly decorated paratrooper in the Korean War. He was Morris’ enforcer and bodyguard, and accompanied Tommy at Morris’ request. Morris loved him and gave him his own label, Calla Records, on which J. J. Jackson had a hit with “But It’s Alright.” McCalla was found murdered, shot in the back of his head, in Ft. Lauderdale in 1980. Neither crime was solved.]
TOMMY: I was left holding the bag at Roulette. I was still trying to make music amidst all this craziness. At some point I was summoned to my attorney’s office. He reasoned that if people were looking for Morris and he wasn’t around, they might come after me, as I was the only thing that was making money for Morris. He said that I should make myself scarce, too. The first thing I did was to go up to my farm and stay there. Then my lawyer put together an album for me to record in Nashville, with [musicians] Pete Drake, and D. J. Fontana and Scotty Moore, who had recorded with Elvis. I spent four months in Nashville making a country-influenced album. I handed it to Joel Kolsky, a New York street guy who was one of Roulette’s radio promotion guys, and was now running the label with his brother. He looked at me like I was from Neptune: “What is it, you’re wearing cowboy boots now?” Roulette was no longer a friendly place. I finally made up my mind that I was through with Roulette.
When Morris came back in 1972, we had a real blowout. I had reached a point where I didn’t care: put me in cement boots if you like, but let me out of here! I went up to the office and said to Morris that it was over. It became a real screaming match. I had never heard Morris yell so loud at me. He said, “You ain’t fuckin’ going nowhere.” He was not going to give in, so I had to sabotage my career. I played crazy. I was sick all the time. I couldn’t go into the studio. I could never quite get anything done. Morris was still releasing records he had in the vault. All charted, but none were big hits. When he ran out of masters in 1974 he finally let me go, but I had to leave my publishing with him, for any songs I had written, or would write through 1979.
RON: After the blow out, did you still see Morris?
TOMMY: No matter how much we yelled and screamed at each other, two days later we were friends again. I went up to the office three years later, and he offered me a deal for my own label.
Tommy was, and would be, great to work with. When we finished our second phone meeting he said, “I want you to know that I’m very honored that you would think my touchy story would be interesting enough to make into a movie.” I thought we had something. Even though the Monkees and Meatloaf movies (both of which Ron wrote) had been among VH1’s highest rated, Mike Larkin, the executive in charge of that division, wasn’t interested. We submitted the proposal to Showtime because I had heard that Jerry Offsay, the president of programming, liked rock ’n’ roll. He had green lit the Jimi Hendrix movie that Showtime ran in 2000. Ron and I pitched it to one or two more producers, but no one was interested.
In October 2001, as I was about to leave the label, Tommy called me to express his appreciation: “You’re one of the hippest people in the music business. You’ve led the way with reissues. You’re a stand-up guy.” A little over two years later, I received a call from him. He was concerned because his royalty payments from Rhino had dropped precipitously. I think he was fearful of his experience with Roulette being repeated. Although I could only presume, I assured him that Rhino was probably paying him properly. There were different people at the head of the company now. His music was no longer a priority.