Tommy James – “Three Times In Love”

TOP 40 DEBUT: February 23, 1980

PEAK POSITION: #19 (March 29, 1980)

The Eighties might’ve been the peak era for that eternal showbiz tradition: The Aging Artist Comeback. Between 1980 and 1989, both the Godfather and the Queen of Soul returned to the Top 5 after decade-long lapses; so did one Righteous Brother, the better half of Ike & Tina Turner, and a fair amount of Beach Boys. Sixties nostalgia came roaring back into vogue, not coincidentally around the same time Baby Boomers started running all the networks, studios, and radio stations. (And greenlighting projects like The Big Chill and The Wonder Years.) By the next decade, MTV and Top 40 would begin erecting age barriers, refusing admittance to anyone who wasn’t “Unplugged” or standing next to Rob Thomas. But the ‘80s, perhaps more than any other period in pop music history, respected its elders. For many half-forgotten rockers angling to get back on the charts, it was an amazing time to be alive.

Tommy James was only 32 years old when the decade began, arguably too young to already be “washed up” and playing the nostalgia circuit. But he’d also been absent from the Top 40 for more than eight years, and in the days before oldies radio took off, that was enough to make the ex-Shondell an official relic. James spent the better part of those years actively fighting his own obsolescence: touring constantly, recording new music, and aggressively promoting those recent releases on stage. Nothing went any higher than #67.

Finally, in early 1979, James got serious. He assembled his band, sequestered them inside his house, and declared they wouldn’t leave without producing a hit. Within three weeks, the former teen star had a finished demo of “Three Times In Love.” By March of the following year, James would be back inside the Top 20—and atop the Adult Contemporary chart—with one of the first big “comeback singles” of the new decade. In the short term, “Three Times In Love” achieved its goal: It gave James his hit. But this slice of soft-rock cheese would eventually turn into a cautionary tale for fellow aging artists, a warning against selling your soul for the sake of one ruthlessly bland pop trifle.

Born Thomas Jackson in Dayton, Ohio, Tommy James first took up guitar at age nine and had his first band, Tom and the Tornadoes, by age twelve. The Tornadoes eventually became the Shondells, and in late ’63, they cut four tracks for a new label, Snap Records. One of them was an infectious ditty entitled “Hanky Panky.” That song, recorded when James was just sixteen years old, would become his first #1 hit, but he’d turn nineteen before “Hanky Panky” actually topped the charts, three years later, in the summer of ’66.

The story behind “Hanky Panky” is, frankly, amazing: James had recorded the tune—originally written by Jeff Barry and Elle Greenwich—from memory, after hearing it performed by a rival band. Snap only had the funds for a regional release, so “Hanky Panky” never made it beyond the perimeter of Niles, Michigan. After the single’s non-success, the original Shondells broke up; James eventually wound up working at a record store. And then, in 1966, a Pittsburgh promoter bought a copy in a used-record bin and began playing the song at local dances, where it garnered a huge reaction. Customers started hunting for the non-existent single. Bootleggers began producing copies. Nearly 80,000 illegal pressings were sold in the Pittsburgh area before James—and a reconfigured Shondells—signed a new contract with Roulette Records to distribute the original 1963 version nationally.

Following the fluke success of “Hanky Panky,” James and his band would score thirteen more Top 40 singles between ‘66 and ’69, which puts them in the same league as the Beatles, the Stones, and Creedence. Unfortunately, their association with “teen pop,” coupled with the stigma of outside writing credits on their early hits, meant the Shondells never received the same level of critical respect as all those other outfits. And yet, their best work still holds up to this day, sounding as infectious, invigorating, and (surprisingly) subversive as anything released by their more acclaimed peers. Fogerty sang about the bayou, Lennon & McCartney sang about hallucinogenic drugs (and also English gardens), but Tommy James? He just sang about sex. Lots and lots of sex.

The Shondells’ next big hit, the #4 “I Think We’re Alone Now” (a 9), opened with the infamous line children behave, before muddying the details enough to be about anything from censor-friendly hand-holding to horny teenagers fornicating. (Hint: It’s probably the latter.) The #3 “Mony Mony” (a 10) read as either a metaphor for bumping uglies, or a vivid retelling of an especially pleasant pony ride. (This one was obvious even before audiences began adding their own, additional R-rated lyrics.) Even “Hanky Panky” (an 8), which ostensibly referred to a dance of the same name, now comes off as possibly the worst-disguised double entendre in Billboard #1 history. And again, the Shondells’ sexually-charged teen anthems were all over Top 40 at a time when the Stones couldn’t sing “Let’s Spend The Night Together” on national television. In his own, quietly smutty way, James was a revolutionary.

And then he found God—and also psychedelic rock. James’ shift from bubblegum pop towards weirder, self-written material didn’t coincide perfectly with his conversion to Christianity—“Mony Mony,” for one, arrives a few months after the fact—but both events, taken in tandem, completely changed the entire fabric of the Shondells’ sound. Naturally, you would assume their music suffered as a result. You would assume wrong.

“Crimson And Clover,” which ascended to #1 in February 1969, is arguably the best record James ever made (and a 10), an otherworldly ballad that pulls the rare feat of sounding both intensely holy and incredibly druggy. (In a free-ranging 2009 interview with Songfacts, Tommy admitted to using narcotics long after his conversion, which certainly helped.) In quick succession, the Shondells followed that up with “Sweet Cherry Wine” (#7, a 5), the Breaking Bad favorite “Crystal Blue Persuasion” (#2, a 9), and a preemptive greatest hits album. The only thing that could slow their momentum was, apparently, a drug overdose. Following a March 1970 concert in Birmingham, Alabama, James collapsed after coming off stage, where he was initially pronounced dead. His months-long recovery effectively ended the band.

After quitting drugs for good, James launched his new solo career by fully embracing his Christian faith, a move that resulted in an absolutely insane album cover and yet another classic single: “Draggin’ The Line” (a 9), a woozy shuffle as ridiculously catchy—and heavily psychedelic—as any of the Shondells’ late-period recordings. “Draggin’ The Line” was a legitimate smash, peaking at #4 in August ’71, but James couldn’t find a way to follow it up. The boogaloo gospel of “I’m Coming Home” (a 6) squeaked into the Top 40 at #40; “Nothing To Hide” did a tiny bit worse, stopping at #41. James spent the rest of the decade jumping between labels and releasing singles that, invariably, landed in the bottom half of the Hot 100. By the time he came up with “Three Times In Love,” he didn’t even have a record deal.

“I swear it was like a straight shot, it was like a bullet.” That’s how James described writing his last Top 20 single to Goldmine in 1980: “Ronnie Serota and I sat down and the first song we wrote was ‘Three Times In Love’… It couldn’t have happened any faster.” Serota was the guitarist in James’ touring band; his work on the Three Times In Love album turned out to be his first—and last—professional credit. Most of the other musicians involved were journeymen as well, with similar empty resumes. Unsurprisingly, their nondescript forces combined to produce a thoroughly generic, utterly faceless hit single.

“Three Times In Love” is competent, garden-variety soft-rock, devoid of personality and absent any trace of the ramshackle energy characterizing the Shondells’ epic run of hits. (Or James’ own trio of early-Seventies solo records, for that matter.) It’s a tune cobbled together from secondhand parts: an intro lifted from “Afternoon Delight,” a chorus nicked from the Eagles. The only memorable hook comes on that harmony-drenched refrain—which makes sense, since the melody is basically “Already Gone” after ingesting a handful of Valiums. I find the entire thing baffling, and also a little sad. How on Earth did James go from cranking out near-perfect pop songs to aping Ambrosia in less than a decade?

“Three Times In Love” came at the tail end of a weird run of singles obsessed with that magic number: “Three Times A Lady,” “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad,” even Foghat’s “Third Time Lucky” from earlier in the year. Maybe there was something in the water between ’78 and ’79; maybe the old “third time’s a charm” adage had an end-of-the-decade resurgence. For whatever reason, James treats that hoary expression as sacred text, starting with a chorus that makes no actual sense: “Everybody’s three times in love/ Two times ain’t enough.” Really, Tommy? Does that apply to everyone? Should married childhood sweethearts just divorce now to get to that requisite third relationship? And is there any hope for those of us on our fourth, or fifth—or fifteenth—time around?

Naturally, James didn’t stop there, choosing instead to expand the whole “three” motif, in crushingly literal fashion, across the entire song. Each individual verse details one of a trio of previous affairs—starting, for some unfortunate reason, with a teenage deflowering. So yes, James chose to open his comeback single with this especially icky line: “She was all of a lady/ You were all of sixteen.” In fairness, “I Think We’re Alone Now” covered similar terrain, but at least that song was performed by an actual teenager. “Three Times In Love” gets no such pass. There are certainly ways for a 32-year-old man to describe his first sexual encounter without making the entire audience deeply uncomfortable; “You were king of the mountain/ She was your queen” ain’t one of them.

Look, I get that “Three Times In Love” doesn’t aim for anything more than pure nostalgia: a gentle reminiscence of past loves, a simple tale presented in a suitably sun-drenched, hazy afterglow. Certainly, that approach connected with Millennium Records, who signed James to a one-album deal on the basis of his original demo. And it apparently worked for an aging demographic of listeners in 1980, many of whom had grown up on the Shondells and probably enjoyed hearing James’ voice in this new, mellow context.

And yet, so many things in this soft-focus narrative set my teeth on edge. “Three Times In Love” isn't just derivative and dull; it's also lazy. For a supposedly autobiographical song, there’s not a hint of personal detail: just cliché (“Lovers get older/ Summer goes away”) stacked upon cliché (“You’re older and wiser/ And you’re covering a lot of ground”). Even worse, the whole thing culminates in one howler of a callback: “She is all of your ladies/ You are every man.” That’s a lyric awful enough to make you imagine James wrote it solely as an inside joke, a way to admit that “Three Times In Love” doesn’t deliver any actual emotion—or anything resembling genuine human experience. Instead, this is placeholder music, a generic song about a generic Everyman enjoying generic romance at three separate (but equally generic) moments in his generic life.

“Three Times In Love” didn’t turn out to be a true comeback for James as much as a brief, weird chart anomaly. Millennium only promoted one other single from the album: “You’re So Easy To Love,” which peaked at #101. Within a year, James was label-less once more. He wouldn’t release another album until 1990, right around the time Rhino Records began reissuing the Shondells’ back catalog on compact disc. Multiple Tommy James compilations would appear over the next three decades, some featuring up to thirty songs to make space for B-sides and solo tracks like “Draggin’ The Line.” Despite its Top 20 status, “Three Times In Love” didn’t show up once. (Well, not until this 48-track collection from 2008.)

James’ real career revival wouldn’t arrive until later in the decade, thanks to some auspicious timing—plus some other artists. In 1982, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts became the first act to reach the Top 10 with a cover of one of his songs; five years later, two different singers would hit #1 in successive weeks with competing Shondells remakes. Two decades after his prime, Tommy James was suddenly hot again. And with one crazy bit of chart serendipity, a new generation reconfirmed the ageless pop smarts of those early singles, long after his final—and most dismissible—hit had slipped completely out of the public consciousness.

GRADE: 3/10

BONUS BITS: Hoffmann & Hoffmann were a German singing duo consisting of brothers Michael and Günter; unless you’re a big fan of the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest, you’ve probably never heard of them. But they’re getting a mention on this site for one reason: In 1980, they released an album entitled In Deiner Straße, which contains the only official remake of “Three Times In Love.” Fun fact: “So Liebst Nur Du” actually translates to “So Only You Love,” because H&H hired someone to rewrite the words. So yes, even a Schlager duo from Germany heard those original lyrics and took a hard pass.