“They made a tape of the record - pops and all.

“There was one copy of the record,” James said. The kids in Pittsburgh were crazy about it. 1,” he said.Ī local disk jockey found a copy of Hanky Panky in a used record rack and started playing it at dances. But that’s how the good Lord works: Because if that club hadn’t gone belly up, we wouldn’t be talking today.” When James returned to Niles, he got a call from Pittsburgh that the given-up-for-dead Hanky Panky had been bootlegged and 80,000 copies had been sold in 10 days. “We slumped back to Niles feeling very defeated and depressed. Right in the middle of my two weeks, the guy goes belly up. “We were playing a little club in Janesville, Wis., in March of ’66. In 1965, they hit the road, playing up through Chicago and the Midwest. The Shondells went their separate ways and James put together another group. The record came out and died shortly thereafter.” We were right in the middle between Chicago and Detroit and sort of too far from either. “But we really couldn’t break out of Michigan. It was a local hit and it made the Shondells “big fish in a little pond,” James said. Hanky Panky was recorded at a Niles radio station in early 1964 and released locally on a little label called Snap Records. Nobody really knew all the lyrics, so the singers just kind of filled in the gaps.

The song was a favorite of the kids in the Niles area and it always had a great response when the bands played it at dances. While in high school, he and his band, the Shondells, recorded a song they had learned from a rival band called Hanky Panky, which was obscure song written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. He played in his first band when he was 12. James, who was born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio, grew up in small town of Niles, Mich., near the Indiana state line. Page originally published on 21 January 2013 latest edit: 5 July 2022Įxcerpts from the article “ For Tommy James, the Past is the Future” by Rick Campbell, published at (Houston Chronicle blog) on 5 July 2010:

Tommy James and the Shondells: Hanky Panky, 1964, and selections from 1967 to 1969

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