THE STORY OF A SONG: Tommy James & the Shondells - Mony Mony (1968)

Just like an expert mechanic can build—and rebuild—cars, Tommy James understood what was going on under the hood of a hit ’60s pop song. In 1964, he emerged from his native Michigan with a cover of “Hanky Panky” that would become a radio hit in Pittsburgh one year later and make him a national star.

In 1967, he had another hit with “I Think We’re Alone Now”—a song written by Ritchie Cordell that was so catchy it worked forwards and backwards (the song “Mirage” was a happy accident, the result of “I Think We’re Alone Now” being fed into a tape machine the wrong way and played backwards to create a new chord progression, that Cordell matched with new lyrics).

In the case of “Mony Mony”, James collaborated with a group that included Cordell, Bo Gentry and Bobby Bloom (“Montego Bay”) to produce a radio­friendly groove that James just knew would be a hit—if he could only come up with the right name for it.

“I had the track done before I had a title”, he told Hitch magazine in 1995. “I wanted something catchy like ‘Sloopy’ or ‘Bony Maroney’, but everything sounded so stupid. So Ritchie Cordell and I were writing it in New York City, and we were about to throw in the towel when I went out onto the terrace, looked up and saw the Mutual of New York build­ing (which has its initials illuminated in red at its top). I said, ‘That’s gotta be it! Ritchie, come here, you’ve gotta see this!’.... I’ve always thought that if I had looked the other way, it might have been called ‘Hotel Taft.’”