Mony Mony

In our interview with Tommy James, he explained: "Originally, we did the track without a song. And the idea was to create a party rock record; in 1968 that was pretty much of a throwback to the early '60s. Nobody was making party rock records really in 1968, those big-drum-California-sun-what-I-sing-money-type songs. And so I wanted to do a party rock record. And we went in the studio, and we pasted this thing together out of drums here, and a guitar riff here. It was called sound surgery, and we finally put it together in probably a month. We had most of the words to the song, but we still had no title. 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. So we knew what kind of a word we had, it's just that everything we came up with sounded so bad. So Ritchie Cordell, my songwriting partner and I, are up in my apartment up at 888 Eighth Avenue in New York. 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. And the first thing our eyes fall on is the Mutual of New York Insurance Company. M-O-N-Y. True story. With a dollar sign in the middle of the O, and it gave you the time and the temperature. I had looked at this thing for years, and it was sitting there looking me right in the face. We saw this at the same time, and we both just started laughing. We said, 'That's perfect! What could be more perfect than that?' Mony, M-O-N-Y, Mutual of New York. And so we must have laughed for about ten minutes, and that became the title of the song. 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. This was in the 1650 Broadway Building, the basement of 1650 was a big music industry building. All the writers and publishers were there, so we invited them all downstairs, and it was really a party that got captured on tape."

Amphetamines and the Mafia played a surprising role in this Bubblegum classic. Roulette Records was run by The Mob, as James explained in his Songfacts interview. As for the drugs, Kenny Laguna, a producer who played keyboards and sang with The Shondells, told us: "We used to do a lot of amphetamines. They were very popular with people trying to succeed, so we'd spend all day and night 'up' making records, and not worrying about getting paid. It was perfect for the record companies, who would supply us with amphetamines." James added: "The record company didn't have anything to do with that. That was probably us. That was our decision, that wasn't their decision."

Two versions were put together to form the song. The part that goes, 'I love you Mony, Mo Mo Mony...' was Bobby Bloom, who was also working for Roulette Records (Bloom sang "Montego Bay," which was a hit in 1970). The rest of it was written by James with producers Bo Gentry and Ritchie Cordell.