If anyone ever tells you you don't have any balls, just brake down and cry and tell everyone your mom would never allow you to have any balls. She was afraid you would run out in front of traffic
'Ball Of Fire' Charted At 19 In 1969
Listening to: 'Ball Of Fire' from 'The Best Of Tommy James And Shondells' by 'Tommy James And The Shondells' on Media Center 9.0
Artist: TOMMY JAMES AND THE SHONDELLS
Tommy James & the Shondells -- the very mention of their name, even to someone
who doesn't really know their music, evokes images of dances and the kind of
fun that rock & roll represented before it redefined itself on more serious
terms. And between 1966 and 1969, the group enjoyed 14 Top 40 hits, most of
which remain among the most eminently listenable (if not always respected)
examples of pop/rock. The group was almost as much of a Top 40 radio
institution of the time as Creedence Clearwater Revival, but because they
weren't completely self-contained (they wrote some, but not all, or their own
hits) and were more rooted in pop/rock than basic rock & roll, it took decades
for writers and pop historians to look with favor on Tommy James & the
Shondells. Tommy James was born Thomas Jackson on April 20, 1947, in Dayton,
OH. He was introduced to music at age three, when he was given a ukulele by
his grandfather. He was an attractive child and was working as a model at age
four, which gave him something of a taste for performing. By age nine he'd
moved to the next step in music, taking up the guitar, and by 1958, when he
was 11, James began playing the electric guitar. In 1960, with his family now
living in Niles, MI, 13-year-old James and a group of four friends from junior
high school -- Larry Coverdale on guitar, Larry Wright on bass, Craig
Villeneuve on piano, and Jim Payne on drums -- got together to play dances and
parties. This was the original lineup of the Shondells, and they became good
enough to earn decent money locally, and even got noticed by an outfit called
Northway Sound Records, who recorded the quintet in a Tommy James original
entitled "Judy" in 1962. That single didn't make much noise beyond their
immediate locale, but in late 1963, the group came to the notice of a local
disc jockey starting up a new label called Snap Records. They cut four sides,
two of which were issued and ...