‘I hope you’re ready, kid, because you’re about to go on one hell of a ride,” Morris Levy, the boss of Roulette Records, told Tommy James as the teenager signed a contract with the label. It was 1966 and James, 19, a small-town boy with the fastest-selling hit single in Pittsburgh’s history, had arrived in Manhattan the previous morning to find every label wanted to sign him. The next day, all offers were retracted – except Roulette’s. Levy – a notorious gangster whose label had prospered in the early 50s with Frankie Lymon and Count Basie – was referred to without irony as the Godfather and, when he put the word out that James was his, no record executive dared to cross him.
Thus James, now 73, stepped on to what he calls “a ride”. With his backing band, the Shondells, he scored 23 US chart singles, plus nine gold or platinum albums – selling 100m records – including much-covered pop classics such as I Think We’re Alone Now and Crimson and Clover. For these, he received a pittance.
“Somewhere in the ballpark of $30m to $40m in royalties,” says James from his New Jersey home when asked to put a figure on the fortune that never reached him. “It was always a challenge to get money from Morris Levy and Roulette – one thing you don’t want to challenge mob guys on is money. Morris wasn’t a ‘made man’ – he was Jewish – but he was a mob associate and a very heavy guy. You shook his hand and it was like grabbing hold of a catcher’s mitt. He talked like diss” – James imitates a raspy mobster voice. “We learned early on that it was highly unlikely we were going to get what we were due, so we just got on with making music.” He pauses. “They say crime doesn’t pay and it’s true – the criminals who ran Roulette never paid me!”
James’s Roulette catalogue is being reissued on a six-CD box set this month, which should direct belated attention to a remarkable body of work. Beginning with garage rock in 1966 then spanning pop, R&B, psychedelia and hard rock before finishing in country in 1973, he has never been given the retrospective treatment before. Greatest hits compilations reduce him to a handful of very catchy tunes, while heritage magazines such as Mojo and Uncut eulogise his contemporaries yet ignore James.
This is partly due to Mony, Mony – a UK No 1 in 1968 – which ensured James was incorrectly labelled here as “bubblegum” and a one-hit wonder. In the US, Roulette’s reputation ensured the media kept a safe distance. All of this has distracted from how fabulous James’s best music is: his run of innovative hit singles and albums places him close behind the Beach Boys and the Beatles for 60s pop joy and unbridled creativity. But if Roulette’s unruly ethos ensured James never received his critical dues, this, as with the missing royalties, does not appear to upset him. “Without Morris, there’s no Tommy James,” he says matter-of-factly.
Moishe “Morris” Levy was one of the fabled “record men” who set up independent labels in the US after the second world war to work in genres the majors ignored, such as jazz and R&B. Some, like the founders of Blue Note, Atlantic, Chess, Motown and Sun Records, were honourable aficionados who performed a remarkable service. Others were hustlers, looking to exploit often semi-literate artists.
And then there was Morris. From a hardscrabble Harlem upbringing, he came to own Birdland, Manhattan’s foremost jazz club, managed Alan Freed, the DJ who coined the term “rock’n’roll”, and took over several record labels and music publishers. How Levy became so powerful has never been disclosed, but what is clear is his connection to the Genovese crime syndicate. Thomas Eboli, the head of the “family”, was Levy’s business partner, while Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, another cohort, was the model for Tony Soprano in The Sopranos (in that series, Levy was portrayed as Hesh Rabkin, a ruthless Jewish record label executive).
By the mid-60s, Roulette had not had a major hit for several years. When James appeared with Hanky Panky, a single he recorded in 1964 for a tiny Michigan label, Levy sensed salvation. Hanky Panky had sold well around Michigan, but achieved nothing more until, in 1966, a Pittsburgh promoter found a copy and got a strong enough response from dancers to bootleg it; he sold 80,000 copies in 10 days. James, a teenage father who was providing for his family by singing R&B and Beatles covers in bars across the Midwest, did not know about his hit until the promoter tracked him down. Taken to Manhattan, James signed away his life.
Rereleased on Roulette, Hanky Panky topped the US charts and James’s promoter-manager asked Levy for royalties. He was slammed against the wall and told that, if he set foot in Roulette’s offices again, he would be killed. He fled back to Pittsburgh, leaving a naive youth up against a mobster. Yet James now considers himself lucky to have been signed to Roulette.
“If I’d been on a big, corporate label, they might well have treated me as a one-hit wonder,” he says. “With Roulette, Tommy James and the Shondells were their biggest act, so we got all the attention and Morris gave me the keys to the candy store: unlimited studio time and the opportunity to learn my craft and put a production crew together. I learned not just how to use the studio, but how to be in control of your own destiny.”
Not that the ride was ever easy: Levy had the band churning out singles and albums (20 singles and eight LPs in five years), as well as touring constantly. Levy’s inimical behaviour led to James’s band members and songwriting partners quitting, but the singer soldiered on, delivering hit after hit. “Getting paid was like taking a bone from a doberman,” says James of the occasions when he had to demand that Levy write a cheque to cover the band’s wages and touring expenses, noting that he himself lived comfortably from concert fees and commercial tie-ins. The relationship between artist and label boss developed into one James describes “as that of father and son. Admittedly, an abusive father – one who beats his kid then sends him to college.”
James’s hits were distinguished by their huge hooks, great sense of yearning (sexual and spiritual) and genre-crossing sound – I Think We’re Alone Now is perfect power pop, Mony, Mony storming, blue-eyed soul. In 1969, he hit his peak, artistically and commercially, with the psychedelic opus Crimson and Clover. It topped the US chart and sold 5m copies, while the album of the same name won him a rock audience. From the same album, his next hit, the sublime Crystal Blue Persuasion, would become a Latin soul favourite, a staple on reggae soundsystems and employed effectively on Breaking Bad to soundtrack a montage of Walter White’s blue crystal meth production.
Considering how the album sounds as if it was created “under the influence”, I guessed James was singing about hallucinations. “Nooooooo,” he replies. “It’s about becoming a Christian – completely the opposite! But I love how Breaking Bad used Crystal Blue Persuasion and, hey, you take it where you can get it.”
Forced to move to Nashville in 1971 after war broke out between the “families” – many of Levy’s associates met violent deaths and he feared his golden goose might be targeted – James was traumatised and aware he would never be paid what Levy owed him. The ride was over. He began the difficult process of extricating himself from Roulette.
Levy would later fund Sugar Hill Records, the pioneering rap label that never paid artist such as Grandmaster Flash what they were due; James, after a period in the wilderness, found his songs being sung by younger artists. History was made when Tiffany, who reached US No 1 in 1987 with I Think We’re Alone Now (written by Ritchie Cordell and a US Top 5 hit for James in 1967), was replaced at the top by Billy Idol’s cover of Mony, Mony. Artists as varied as REM, Joan Jett, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, the Cramps, Culture Club, Cher, Tom Jones, Weezer, the Heptones and Joe Bataan have all sung James’s tunes.
After he was indicted for racketeering, Levy sold Roulette in 1986; James subsequently received his first ever royalty cheques, from the label’s new owner, EMI. Levy died of cancer in 1990, so escaped a 10-year prison sentence – and paying James what he owed. Nonetheless, James got poetic justice with his bestselling autobiography Me, the Mob and the Music. Barbara De Fina, the film producer behind Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and many other movies, is overseeing the film adaptation.
James continues to play across the US, but has never performed in Europe. If his Roulette box set attracts enough attention, he says, he might just cross the pond after the pandemic. “I’d love to,” says James, a man who is evidently happy with his lot. “I’m blessed, mobsters and all.”
The Celebration: The Complete Roulette Recordings 1966-1973 is released on 29 January on Cherry Red Records
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