TOMMY JAMES AND THE SHONDELLS – "Mony Mony"

It may sound like Garage to you now , but the essence of this sound comes from the Kingsmen ( Louie, Louie ), and probably more in tune with the times and almost a direct rip-off of Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels ( ” Devil With A Blue Dress & Jenny Take A Ride”) who were kicking ass in The USA – mid sixties and are still around.

If the Shondells “for all the raw throats and volume… never sounds menacing” , Mitch was and this motor city muscle was also captured by the MC5.

I was at a company do last year and was astonished when this number came on. Little did I know about the rude, crude and hilarious counter melody that everbody chants out after Tommy offers the first line of the song. Do you all know what I’m talking about or is this just an Canadian thing ?

it’s been awhile but i think it’s ‘hey motherfucker! get laid! get fucked!’, i suspect very much this has to be discussed on that ilm thread about audience singalong addendums to songs.

I think that this track is way to early to even think of linking it to Garage. Frat yes. Heck, we haven’t touched punk yet and as far as I know garage is after punk in actual time.

Canadian version is ” Hey motherfucker , get drunk, get laid”…..but i am sure there are variaitons on the theme all leading to the same ineviatable situation.

Typically, having threated to clarify things Pete, you’ve confused them further (The Pretty Things were British, surely?) But yes, as I’ve always understood it, garage starts with the distorted r’n’b/r’n’r of The Kingsmen and The Sonics and mutates via time, British influence and drugs until you get The Seeds and the Chocolate Watchband – anything on Nuggets.

Somebody’s got to catch me up – when I hear “Garage” , I think Kurt Cobain or kids in Seattle thrashing away at some temporal angst.

Some of it’s just bad, amatuer r’n’r. I’ve got a daughter that thrashes to that effect – I should know – but she’s “emo”.

pretty things decidedly freakbeat, not garage

Remember that “garage” was not a perceived genre in the ’60s, which doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t one, but it does mean that no one was going “‘Wild Thing,’ oh yes, that’s garage rock,” and “‘With a Girl Like You,’ that’s not garage rock enough for me,” or anything. But I’d say of the bands that later got called garage rock, way way way more of ’em were trying to sound like the Yardbirds and the Stones than like “Louie Louie.” In fact, I’m not sure that anything other than “Wild Thing” was particularly trying to sound like “Louie Louie,” and I don’t think music would have been much different if none of those Pacific Northwest groups had existed – and as far as most of the country was concerned they didn’t; after “Louie Louie” none scored national hits until Paul Revere & the Raiders a few years afterwards. But that said, the Kingsmen, Sonics, and Wailers did represent something, a white rattle-clatter romp through r&b/early soul (some surf in there, too) that isn’t worrying about playing like pros or waiting for the Brit Invasion to come along and give ’em permission but is just ready to shove it in your ear. And I think Brian and Blount are basically on the money here, in that “Mony Mony” sounds more like the soul side than the psych-punk side of garage, Mitch Ryder being a touchstone and the Beatles doing their Isley imitation (more than the Isleys themselves) and the Young Rascals and the Music Explosion (“A Little Bit of Soul”) and the Human Beinz (“Nobody But Me”) and the Buckinghams (“Kind of a Drag”) and the Outsiders (“Time Won’t Let Me”).

The soul side and the psych punk side of “garage” could bleed into each other of course, and did in a lot of those songs (and if you flip over “A Little Bit of Soul” you actually get a much better garage rock song called “I See the Light” which starts off with Jerry Garcia-imitation guitar – which was not common yet – before slicing its way into basic pained girl-hate). Interesting thing about Tommy James is that as far as I know he basically aspired to be a music biz pro rather than a freak, so if he’s taking on psych punk at all (“Crimson and Clover”?) it’s at a music bizzer’s let’s-snap-our-fingers-and-get-hip-with-the-kids distance. His breakthrough single had been a low-rent cover of a Brill-building nonhit, and I’ll bet (though I don’t know this) he’d have been more comfortable with the Chip Taylors (guy who wrote “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning” and whose niece recently had a baby) and Neil Diamonds (“Cherry Cherry” being his garage rock classic) than with most of the garage brats. And Tom’s write about the complete lack of menace in his voice. And nonetheless his stuff does partake of that in-your-ear bash-it-out-and-trash-it subversiveness that takes you (in spirit if not in fact) out of the supposed straight-and-narrow (and therefore at age 14 I did find the song kind of scary), and then it can subvert in the other direction a couple of years later when Marsh-Bangs-Kaye et al. are inventing terms like “punk rock” and “garage rock” for this stuff and championing it as a trash-it-out party bash antidote to psychedelic freak counterculture respectability. And this is a bash that keeps on bashing: one of John Leland’s greatest moments was when he explained in his Spin column that he’d once told his mother that one thing he liked about music was noise, and then added that by “noise” he meant Tommy James, not the Stooges. And of course in its time “Mony Mony” was derided by hipsters as “bubblegum.”

(You underrate it, by the way; it’s at least an 8; and “Crimson and Clover” is a 9.)

You’ll note that never said that I liked “Mony, Mony”. And , as koganbot says I guess I was one of those hipsters that thought this was a bit bubblegum and also the lack of menace was more, to me, a lack of conviction compared say to Mitch Ryder.

Tommy’s preference for the bizz side of music/hit making goes along way to explain why the whole performance it too structured ( yell “yeah ” on the offbeat on bars 4 & 8 ! ) for my taste. It may be garage in it’s infancy but it’s certainly a 2 car garage , attached to nice semi.- ( detached ) in a better part of town.

That’s it for this song for me as it’s become a very annoying ear-worm.

“In fact, I’m not sure that anything other than “Wild Thing” was particularly trying to sound like “Louie Louie,” and I don’t think music would have been much different if none of those Pacific Northwest groups had existed”

Well, I’d agree that the Stones and Yardbirds were THE greatest garage rock influences, but any garage band with an organ didn’t pick it up from Blighty, they picked it up from The Kingsmen.

One undeniable 10 (if Popular was all Nuggets instead of Number Ones) is Teddy & His Patches’ Suzy Creamcheese, which kidnaps Louie Louie, throws it into a washing machine on spin cycle, then feeds it acid and covers it in stardust.

Tommy James’s posh garage theory – hmmm, this baffles us in Britain because we’d think any kids who had a garage to practise in were probably pre-tty middle class. Over here, musicians held their guitars high and played fast cos it kept them warm and took their minds off rumbling stomachs.

The Shondells’ Hanky Panky (a 9 in the US Popular parallel universe) is pure garage, menacing voice or no. Tommy was 15 or 16 when they recorded it. Beautiful amateurish stop/start noise with a very effective guitar break. Mony Mony is bubblegum soul, the band moved with the fashions just like everybody else, it’s only that the Shondells were more pop than rock. As for damning James a careerist – did he move into the biz after the group split? I don’t think he did.

Whereas U.S. garage rock as an echo of the Brit bands were kids from local scenes, these kind of halfway bohemias that would emerge in high schools or smaller cities.

Which doesn’t mean that some didn’t aspire to business respectability rather than counterculture respectability, or that biz people (some of whom no doubt aspired to being counterculture) couldn’t also produce the sound – the Monkees’ “Steppin’ Stone” being a prominent example.

Wichita at 21: surely you’re being slightly ironic when you say any kids with garages would have been considered middle class as a lot/most post war council estates and tower blocks had lock ups – obviously not for every house but for quite a few and these were especially in the case of non-tower block council estates built by the time we’re talking about.
And as for the “rumbling stomachs” – in postwar Britain did anyone except those from extremely dysfunctional families have empty stomachs because of poverty?
And in any case the groups drew their members from the aspirational upper working-classes/lower middle classes and not from the underclass – obvious in the fact that the majority were in education post-16.Surely the Beatles were a case in point – only Ringo was of the class where poverty may have been an issue – and I’m not sure if it ever actually was even for him.After all we’re talking about one of the wealthiest country’s at a time when the lower classes were as well off as they’d ever been before or since.

I can definitely hear echoes of ‘Twist and Shout’ in the call and response vocals and maybe bits of ‘Iko Iko’ in the rhythm. It’s the type of song they’d play when you were spinning around on the fairground waltzer.

I think Tom is correct with the 6/10 score here. A perfectly fine song to my ears.