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tHE MUSIC WE LOVE, THE REASONS WE DO

Crimson and Clover – Tommy James & The Shondells

At first, Tommy James and “his” Shondells played straightforward rock and roll, but they soon became associated with the budding bubblegum music genre. James disputes this, saying that Super K Productions “bubblegum” producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz approached his record company (run by Morris Levy) looking for songwriting jobs. Levy spurned Kasenetz and Katz, so they went elsewhere and became successful with such bands as the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Bubblegum is generally traced to the success of the 1968 Fruitgum Company hit “Simon Says”. Tommy rejects the “bubblegum” label for his music.^[7] In early 1967 songwriter Ritchie Cordell gave them the No. 4 hit “I Think We’re Alone Now” and the No. 10 hit “Mirage“. In 1968, James had a No. 3 hit with “Mony Mony“. Co-written by James, Cordell, Cordell’s writing partner Bo Gentry, and Bobby Bloom, “Mony Mony” reached No. 3 in the US and was a British No. 1 in 1968. The title was inspired by a flashing sign for Mutual Of New York visible from James’s apartment balcony in New York. He followed it with “Do Something to Me“. However, James was labeled as a bubblegum pop artist, which he hated. Therefore, he changed his style to psychedelic rock.

“I remember playing this song over and over and over again as an eight year old, almost driving the whole family crazy. Today, at the age of sixty, the feeling’s exactly the same. Point is: there’s no such thing as being an “adult”, for the child within knows nothing about age. And the right music melts all those years like snowflakes.“

““Crimson and Clover” was recorded in late 1968 in about 5 hours and is one of the first songs recorded on 16-track. Tommy James played most of the instruments, while Mike Vale played bass and Peter Lucia, Jr. played drums. The song contains a tremolo effect on the guitar, set so that it vibrated in time with the song’s rhythm. Near the end of the recording, the band had an idea of utilizing the tremolo effect with vocals. To achieve this, the voice microphone was plugged into an Ampeg guitar amplifier with tremolo turned on, and the output from the amplifier was recorded while James sang “Crimson and clover, over and over”.“