Tommy James and the Hanky Panky

I remember being a young boy at summer camp in 1966 when the Tommy James and the Shondells’ song, My Baby Does the Hanky Panky, was a huge hit. I owned a little black AM transistor radio that I carried around with me most of the day, listening to a local top 40 station that seemed to play the song at least once an hour, along with other pop hits of the day like Little Red Riding Hood and Sweet Pea. Being just nine years old at the time, I thought the phrase “hanky panky” referred to a dance – you know, sort of like the hokey pokey. I was so naïve!

I do recall, however, just how much I liked the song – its overall twangy-ness, the steady, rocking rhythm of the instruments, the slightly out-of-tune background vocals, the crappy guitar solo – it was all good! I just never gave any real thought to the underlying meaning of the words, that’s all. Still, it was a pretty good tune.

Several years later, when I was in the sixth grade, some friends of mine and I formed a band to perform at a school talent show, and we chose to play another Tommy James’ hit, Crimson and Clover – yet another song the meaning of which completely eluded my still young and naïve brain! How good we all must have looked wearing our bellbottom pants, polyester shirts and matching neck scarves. Sort of a Greg Brady thing, I guess.

The coolest thing about doing the song, Crimson and Clover, was that in order to get the warbly effect for the vocal at the end of the song, we had to borrow from a friend a guitar amplifier that had a tremolo unit built in. (Actually, it was a small, internal fan placed in front of the speaker.) By attaching a microphone to the amp, we were able to copy perfectly the sound on the record: Crim-im-im-im-son-on-on-and-clo-oh-oh-oh-ver-er-er-er… O-oh-oh-oh-ver-er-an-and-o-oh-oh-oh-ver-er-er-er! The only difference was that our singer sang the song an octave higher than Tommy James! Sort of a Peter Brady thing – but hey, we were just 12 years old…