Wayne Cresser's blog

Me, The Mob, and the Music
One Helluva of a Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick
225 pp, Scribner

Tommy James', Me, the Mob and the Music isn’t quite a tell-all, which may come as a relief to afficianados of 60's pop/rock. Despite the title, don’t expect any sketches of the inner-workings of the Genovese crime family or lurid details about what James may have witnessed or overheard—it’s mostly an occasionally troubling story about Tommy the barely post-pubescent babe in the woods’ dealings with the so-called Godfather of the music business, that Bully of Broadway (or thereabouts) Morris “Moish” Levy.

For almost a decade James was a veritable hit-making machine for Levy’s Roulette Records, really the only winner in the Roulette stable. As the tape unwinds though, James emerges as the hardest working serf on Levy’s manor, locked in a bizarre mentor/tormentor relationship with Moish that drives him to heavy drinking, pill-popping, a penchant for guns and therapy.

I don’t care that the album Yardbirds fans have come to know as Roger the Engineer didn’t include “Happening Ten Years Time Ago,” or the B side, “Psycho Daisies” on it originally.  I don’t care either that Epic called it Over Under Sideways Down in the U.S. when it was called The Yardbirds in England. It’s the Jeff Beck Yardbirds album, because whatever style is happening, going down, transpiring and/or taking place, Beck is nearly without exception at his all-time experimental best in a group format on this record.

There I said it, hedgingly. You can come after me if you like. I’ll make you tea and scones. Beck had set a tone, more accurately a fuzz tone on the psychedelic/blues single “Shapes of Things” earlier in 1966. And that's a mystery too: why was the Yardbirds’ biggest stateside hit left off?  “Shapes” came out in the winter of 1966, Roger in the summer. Go figure. But nothing about the Yardbirds’ legitimate recorded output and its subsequent marketing makes a whole lot of sense. No, not a whole lotta sense.

See, I’m not going to argue with Tom Henderson, Frank Portman’s rock savvy teenage protagonist in the wonderful King Dork when he says, “Now Led Zeppelin is all right (good  drums and guitar anyway, though that lead singer should have been silenced or muzzled or something—frankly, I prefer it in Yardbird form to be honest).” Me too. And I’m inclined to think of the Marquee and Giorgio Gomelsky’s Crawdaddy club as cauldrons of cool. From 1964-1966, the Yardbirds held forth famously at both.

Boom Boom Boomtown!

For boys of a certain age, certain time, adventure role models were characters more of this world than others. Taking your cues from Classics Illustrated, Wonder-Books, American Heritage histories and Marvel Comics, you might want to be a cowboy, a sea captain, an aviator (or the riskier version of that, a fighter pilot), a sports hero or some outsized superhero. Boys more darkly inclined might want to be gunslingers, pirates, Baron Von Richthofen, Bizzaro or a New York Yankee. All these characters were romanticized, and all, upon closer inspection, would reveal flaws, kinks in their makeup and the kinds of shortcomings that would shatter the idealized version. If you wanted to feel the air to go out of the balloon, all you had to do was put down the juvenile literature and read some eyewitness history, biography or open your own eyes to see Yaz sneaking a cigarette in the Boston Red Sox dugout.

In adolescence you’d discover that the American frontier attracted a lot of sociopaths, Ty Cobb was a racist and illegal gambling was part of most games, war was an ugly and unnecessary thing and in fantasy land, the price of being a superhero was a life of secrets and isolation. I think I’m pretty safe in saying, one could still go out to sea, but in hindsight it seems like a very lonely thing to do. There was, however, a type of hero celeb who seemed insulated from scandal, muck and mire, at least as far as my experience was concerned, and that was the local kids show host, the affable guy with the gimmick and the cartoons.

Here’s how my mind works sometimes. Like a relay race. Alex Chilton dies and the synapses start yapping and snapping and something like this comes out. I had read and heard in different places, Paul Westerberg’s tribute in the online New York Times, a conversation I had with someone who knew him, that in the years after he moved from Memphis to New Orleans, Chilton was washing dishes for a living or as Westerberg mentioned, living in a tent in Tennessee. Whether these things were about choice or necessity, I don’t know. On the face of it, they are not activities one associates with legendary rock status, or lifestyle choices popular musicians normally make. But I don’t claim to have known Alex Chilton through anything but his music, and although his talent for melody seemed to flow without effort, there was nothing easy about the way Chilton treated it, as has been previously noted by Robert Hull on this site.

So what do I know? Washing dishes and living in a tent might have fulfilled some promise he made to himself. He would try to live like an ascetic. He would try the mendicant path. Maybe anything worth saying isn’t supposed to come easy.

But the synapses start yapping and snapping and the baton gets passed. I think, hey, what about That 70’s Show? Didn’t he make a pile from “In the Street?” Didn’t that show give the world Mila Kunis from Kiev? Didn’t Chilton agree to a Box Tops tour not so long ago? Hey, didn’t Big Star make their first studio record since 1973 in 2005 and weren’t they scheduled to play at South by Southwest when Chilton passed away. Wasn’t the world becoming A.C.’s oyster again?

One thing that never gets old in pop music is funny, mainly because there’s so little of it, Ween, Tenacious D, and Flight of the Conchords notwithstanding. Of course the comedy doesn’t work if you don’t have appealing hooks or great chops. When the latter includes pumping rhythms, popping syncopation, voices that can step out or blend, and enough smarts to put it all in a blender and still be identifiable as you and only you___ or them, as was the case of the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet (NRBQ), then you deserve the (nearly) forty year run you had.

Keyboardist Terry Adams’ loony hats and karate chops to the clavinet, the nightly draws from the Magic Box, exploding Cabbage Patch Dolls, otherworldly appearances by faux manager/wrestling goon Captain Lou Albano, all the while playing an everything-but-the- kitchen-sink brand of post-modern American music comprise some of the goo that made NRBQ stick so hard.

At the end of my brief stint as a college radio DJ, I nicked two records from the vaults. I’m not proud of that, but I’m happy that I have them, both imports from Britain with the shiny, laminated covers and track lists different from their American counterparts, if indeed they had American counterparts. I’ve outgrown Music in a Doll’s House by Family, but I still dig the eponymously named The Move. I already had their second record, Shazam and loved it, but the first one, with “(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree,” “Fire Brigade” and “Night of Fear” was all mod pop at its cheeky best.

Music in the movies got more interesting when I was a approaching my teens. Of course I didn’t realize that until I saw Jeff Beck smash his guitar to bits in Blow-Up, which I wouldn’t have seen at all but Mrs. Silverman wanted her son Robert and me out of her house. So Mr. Silverman, the projectionist, brought us to work with him and sat us down in the darkened movie house where we watched in amazement a double feature of Blow-Up and Tom Jones. I have never been the same.

The music thing became what I liked most about seeing movies as a snotty adolescent. Blow-Up, was quickly followed by Simon and Garfunkel’s more rock than folk sounds in The Graduate, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s electric jugband music meets Tin Pan Alley in You’re A Big Boy Now, the diverse banquet of Easy Rider, Apple band Badfinger in The Magic Christian, and before my passion for rock documentaries took over completely, the ultimate expression of movie music as soundtrack for my teenage ennui, the nine Cat Stevens songs that permanently lift Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude into greatness.Why these songs have only been released together on vinyl and why that didn’t happen until 2007 are riddles buried under impenetrable layers of showbiz archaeology. Actually, there could be a very simple explanation; I just don’t have a clue.