And it was actually bigger in England than it was here. Tommy clears this up: "What happened was 'Mony Mony' became the biggest-selling single in Britain up to that point. There's a story floating around that The Beatles wrote a song for Tommy James & the Shondells, and they turned it down. And so it was me and Daffy Duck for a long time. So when they shipped it back to the United States it was in black and white. In between double features, they played 'Mony Mony.' And the reason you see it in black-and-white is because it was shown on the Beat Club in England, and it was a film of a film. So the only place we could get our video played was over in Europe in the movie theatres. TV would not play video made by musicians, they just wouldn't do it. And we couldn't get it played anywhere in the United States. So 'Mony' was one of the first videos made. But we couldn't get them played anywhere. And so we hired a film company, went in and did a video of 'Mony.' We actually did a video of 'Ball of Fire,' and we did a video of 'She' as well. You'd find things would run sometimes on television, there'd be like a movie with a song in it, and they'd take the film clip and run it. And I couldn't figure out why nobody was doing it. And to me it seemed very sensible to make a film of your hit record. And 'Mony' was the very first video we had ever done. There weren't a lot of places to show music videos in 1968, but James thought it was important to have one. All the writers and publishers were there, so we invited them all downstairs, and it was really a party that got captured on tape."Ĭheck out the video for this song. This was in the 1650 Broadway Building, the basement of 1650 was a big music industry building. When we made the record, we had our usual studio band, but we also dragged in people off the street, we had secretaries come downstairs. And so we must have laughed for about ten minutes, and that became the title of the song. We said, 'That's perfect! What could be more perfect than that?' Mony, M-O-N-Y, Mutual of New York. We saw this at the same time, and we both just started laughing. I had looked at this thing for years, and it was sitting there looking me right in the face. With a dollar sign in the middle of the O, and it gave you the time and the temperature. And the first thing our eyes fall on is the Mutual of New York Insurance Company. And finally we get disgusted, we throw our guitars down, we go out on the terrace, we light up a cigarette, and we look up into the sky. So Ritchie Cordell, my songwriting partner and I, are up in my apartment up at 888 Eighth Avenue in New York. So we knew what kind of a word we had, it's just that everything we came up with sounded so bad. And it's just driving us nuts, because we're looking for like a 'Sloopy' or some crazy name – it had to be a two-syllable girl's name that was memorable and silly and kind of stupid sounding. We had most of the words to the song, but we still had no title. It was called sound surgery, and we finally put it together in probably a month. And so I wanted to do a party rock record.Īnd we went in the studio, and we pasted this thing together out of drums here, and a guitar riff here. Nobody was making party rock records really in 1968, those big-drum-California-sun-what-I-sing-money-type songs. And the idea was to create a party rock record in 1968 that was pretty much of a throwback to the early '60s. In our interview with Tommy James, he explained: "Originally, we did the track without a song.
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