Hey, this is Paul Martin. And Ray the Roadie. For the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast.

So how you doing, Paul? I'm doing good, Ray. How about yourself? I'm doing peachy. Just had a great, long Labor Day weekend.

It's a good time. Can I call you peachy? You can. Okay, peachy.

That would be peachy. So what you been up to? You know, just hanging out and cooking on the grill and kind of enjoying life. That's all.

There you go. That's what it's all about, man. That's right.

So what do we got coming up this week? We have this week, we have the one, the only Crying Shames, legendary, the legendary Crying Shames. We have Tom Doody and JC Hook, who we spoke with. We went out to one of their shows and saw them and they did a great job, but we got a chance to talk to them before the show, backstage.

Yes, we did. And that was a great time. It was really nice seeing them, guys.

Glad to see them still out there and singing it up, entertaining the fans. Yeah, they had quite a crowd, too. A big crowd.

I was surprised. That was really a big crowd. It was there in Hillside and they had quite a crowd and they hadn't played, they said, in several years.

So it's their first gig back. They're doing a couple of more around the Chicago area, Arlington Heights and in Beverly at the Beverly Arts Center and a couple of other places. But you might want to go out and check them out.

Most definitely. They'll be around for a little while and, you know, Tom was out in California, so it's probably a bit more difficult for them to get together. Yes, it is.

Yes, it is. Let's get to the show right now. And see what they have to say.

Let's go. Hey, this is Paul Martin. And Ray the Roadie.

For the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast. Today we're bringing you Tom Doody, the Toad from Crying Shames. And J.C. Hook is with us, too.

How you guys doing? We're doing great. How about you? Very well. Still above ground.

Good. There you go. Yep.

Yeah, we're counting that, too. Better be seen than viewed. You got that right.

You got that right. So what's going on with you guys? Are you playing a lot now? Well, we're starting to, and we're still playing. Jimmy has been able to be contacted by a few people that wanted us to play some of the summer jobs.

We haven't done these in years. We've been basically doing just the Cornerstones of Rock, you know, two or three times a year. But a lot of people have requested that we play, and this is the fruition of it.

This is the first job we've played as a band. How about you? Well, it was when I had a couple of strokes, we stopped, and now it's been two or three years. Two or three years.

Yeah. So this is the first one. You got a number of shows lined up right now? Yeah.

Yeah, we do. Four more. Until the end of October, and then Tom and I are going to do another Cornerstone show.

Yeah, in November. So, yeah, we've got one in Winfield. Winfield? Yeah.

We've got one in Arlington Heights, and one in the Beverly Arts Center. Oh, the Beverly Arts Center. It's a nice place.

It is a nice place. Beverly's a nice area. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. It's loud in here. We apologize.

That's okay. It's part of the thing of being backstage. It is.

Yeah. Well, you know, rock and roll. Rock and roll.

When we get here and the board blows up. Yeah, that's right. So what do you guys want to know? Well, tell us a little bit about how you guys started.

I know you started out as the Travelers, and things changed a little bit. Yeah, we started out as the Travelers in 1960, the end of 64, beginning of 65. I was at a junior college with Jerry Stone, and we were sitting up in the lounge, and he said, you know, I'm going to put my band back together.

I knew he was in a group called Travelers, and he hadn't played in about a year and a half, and he said, I'm looking for a lead singer. Do you know anybody that can sing? And I said, yeah, Jerry, I can sing. I hadn't sung since the choir in a Catholic grade school.

Oh, okay. Okay. And I was, you know, that was like when I was 12 years old.

I was 19. I had no musical training whatsoever. None.

Zero. I didn't know how many notes were in a scale. I knew nothing.

Absolutely zero. But I did know five Beatles songs. So I went to a rehearsal that they had, and I sang those songs, and they said, you know, this is great.

Come back next week. I didn't know what that meant, but it meant I was in the band. Right.

And I went back the next week, and the bass player, John Manzer, said in the middle of the rehearsal, he said, you know what? With his voice, we aren't going to go anywhere. So he picked up his stuff and left. So here I was in a new band with no bass player.

Dave Purple, who went to school with Jerry and I, knew about what we were doing. He was in a lounge with us the next day, and he said, hey, I can play bass. Now, we knew Dave was a musician.

He was a great keyboard player. I mean, really great keyboard player. And we said, okay, come on.

So he borrowed his brother's bass and came to the rehearsal, and we did five Beatles songs again, and he nailed them, just killed them. What we didn't know is that Dave had never played a bass before, ever. He just laid out on a piece of paper what the notes would be.

He learned these Beatles songs by rote. He happened to be one of the most fabulous bass players in the world. I mean, he was just a great bass player.

But he knew nothing. So there was a guy who knew nothing about music. There was a guy who knew nothing about bass.

So it started with a pack of lies. And we had a keyboard player who was pretty good. That was Nancy Morgan's brother, Dave Morgan.

He was 16, was a keyboard player. He and his whole family moved out to California, so he wasn't with us anymore. But his sister Nancy, who I dated in high school, she married John Ritter.

And Dave was with the Stone Painting Band. And he is now with Three Dog Nights. Oh, really? Yeah, wow.

We're doing a thing. We're louder than you are. All right, that's fine.

So anyway, that was the beginning. And we were playing quite a bit because they were very talented musicians. And we were able to sing, which other people weren't.

And we did Beatles songs and Bird songs. And we used to play in places that would hold 400 or 500 people. And they usually had 1,200 to 1,500 in them.

I mean, it was just packed wall-to-wall. Now, some places, if you pass out, you don't hit the floor today. So we leave.

Our manager, Fred Bolander, was from Hinsdale. And he said, you know what? He said, it's really good. You could use something for a stage show.

I know a guy. Who do you know? He said, I know a guy who looks like John Lennon. Great.

He said, he doesn't have a left hand. I said, well, that sounds interesting. And he said, but he'll put a hook on and play tambourine.

We said, oh, that's right up our alley. So he had Jim come to one of our jobs. And it was a sold-out thing.

And Jim was dancing on the edge of the stage. And all of the girls were just looking at him. So we knew we had something.

Either we had included the band. I don't know where I lost it. And he came to like four or five more jobs.

And it was great, because we weren't paying him. So it was perfect. And then with all the girls hanging around, we said, all right.

You can be in the band. And truthfully, that's how it happened. And I didn't even lie about knowing anything.

And he didn't. No, he still doesn't. I still don't.

All right. And then he was in the band. And I think we were together maybe six or seven months.

And we played for DexCard. It was a disc jockey. Sure.

And he loved us. He said, I'm doing another one of these things tomorrow. You know, they used to have sock hops.

And they'd spin the records. And we'd play a set. And then they'd spin the record.

And he said, I'm doing another one tomorrow in Libertyville. I want you guys to play that. I said, great.

So we went up there. And we did a really great show. And Dex, after the show, said, OK, this is Bob Monaco.

And we said, oh, the guy that was taking tickets? He said, yeah. He said, Bob is a promo man with MGM Records. And he said, he's got a partner that owns a record company.

They would like to sign you guys. Seriously. And we said, well, shit.

I don't know. You know, we've got some real valuable stuff. So we met Jim Golden.

And he was older than Bob. I think Jim Golden was 31 years old. Bob was about 22, 25.

17, 18, 19, you know. And then they said, well, we want to go record you guys. I said, OK.

We went into a studio. And we recorded If I Needed Someone. It was a John Lennon tune.

It was a George Harrison. And we recorded it because it was part of our live set. And we just killed it.

We just absolutely killed that song. So we went in there and recorded it. It sounded great.

And they were getting ready to release it. And we got a note from George Harrison's management saying, that song can't be released in the United States. So, you know, here we are.

We're ready to release this song. And we thought it was going to be a hit. And we couldn't do it.

So we were down. And Jim Golden said, you know what? We're not going to wait for this for long. So tomorrow, get ready to go do another song.

What? So we did, we had a record by The Searchers called Sugar and Spice. Right. And, you know, it had been a minor hit a few years ago.

And I remember watching a group perform it. And all the kids got on the dance floor with us. But, well, that's pretty good.

So we learned the song that night. And I did not like the melody to it. I hated it, to be fair.

It sounded like a dirge. So what I did is I changed the melody around. I used some harmony parts and the melody.

And if you listen to their Sugar and Spice and our Sugar and Spice, I mean, you go, this is the same record. Right. Well, you guys are known for your vocal harmonies.

Yeah, right, right. And your melodic tone or whatever. And your sound, you sound like the birds and the beetles.

So we had a 12-string guitar. We put that in. Birds.

We had a Rickenbacker 12. And we recorded it the next day at Sound Studios in Chicago. Sugar and Spice and all things nice.

Kisses sweeter than wine. Sugar and Spice and all things nice. You know that little girl is mine.

Stares at my baby on the street. People passing by just look at my baby. But my baby looks so sweet.

You know she's Sugar and Spice. We laid down the instrumental on one track that took probably 25 minutes to do. They had a microphone in the middle of the studio, one mic, and we all stood around it and sang.

And we could hear it in our earphones. We kind of balanced ourselves the way we wanted it to be. And the engineer said, yeah, that's good.

He said, let's make a take on this. So on another track we did it. Right away we did another one.

So we had three tracks, one track of instruments, two tracks of vocals. And it took us maybe 45 minutes to do that, another 20 minutes to do a B-side, which was Ben Franklin's Almanac, which we had written a few hours before. And we said, oh, this sounds really good.

And they were making acetates, which are basically the discs that they use to print the vinyl off of. It's a real hot copy, beautiful copy. And Bob Monaco, our manager, said, well, I've got to go take this upstairs.

WLS was upstairs. We're packing up Lower Wacker. This was at Wacker in Michigan.

And we were packing up Lower Wacker, and we were getting out. I remember getting up onto Michigan Avenue. And we turned on WLS because we knew Dex was on.

And all of a sudden he comes on and he said, and this is a group that I've discovered. This is the first time you're going to hear from them, and it's not the last. He said, here's their new hit single.

We had just recorded this. In 50,000 watts, blasting Sugar and Spice, as we're going down Michigan Avenue. I mean, 20 minutes after we recorded it, I mean, we almost crashed the damn car.

Tell me about the importance of WLS and WCFL at the time. It's hard for people to realize it now. The heroes and the stars in the music world back then were the radio stations and particularly the disc jockeys.

I mean, they were movie stars in the business. They were the biggest. And we had Dex Card, one of the most famous disc jockeys in the area, get behind our record.

Within an hour and a half, that song had played five times on WLS. Wow. We went to a hangout of ours in LaGrange called Top's Big Boy.

And we got out of our car and ran up there. And all of our friends were hanging out there. And we said, we just recorded a record.

And another kid came in from out of his car. He said, they recorded a record. It's on now.

Top's just cleared out. Everybody turned on the radios on their car. And Sugar and Spice and everybody was dancing to that.

So that was great. That was cool. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what happened.

And then you released the album, right? Sugar and Spice. Sugar and Spice was released by Columbia because we had a big hit with Sugar and Spice. Yeah.

Is that Ronnie Rice? It is. No, it's not. You brute.

Anyway, we had a hit record with that. And Columbia wanted an album out. So what we did is we just did our live show on the album.

We would go out. Well, I can tell you exactly where we were. We were in Green Bay, Wisconsin, playing that night.

Got done at 10.30, packed up, and came home. And we were home about 4.30 or 5. At 7 the next morning, we started recording. Back in the studio.

We started recording. Wow. We got done recording half a day then, and we had to go up to Hayward, Wisconsin.

We went up there. I mean, you don't want two hours of sleep, but even if you're 19 and stuff. Oh, yeah.

And we drove all the way back, and we did the remainder of that. A total of 17 hours in the studio, we recorded the rest of Sugar and Spice. So 17 hours, and that was it.

And it was, thank God, it was stuff that we had done live. One of the songs that we didn't put on the album was a copy of You're Gonna Lose That Girl. And our manager, Bob, said, Look, do me a favor.

I want this for my daughter. And we said, Yeah, right. He said, Just, you know, do it live, and we'll just, I'll keep the tape.

So what we did is, we had the instruments set up. There were mics on the instruments, and that one mic stand standing in the middle of the studio, and we just counted off and did it like that. And it's on one of the compilation things.

Sounds pretty darn good. Right. Yeah.

So, I mean, that was amazing. Sugar and Spice went off like a rocket ship. We had, I think it made like top 40 in the nation, but they couldn't print enough copies to keep up with the demand.

Wow, that's great. That's why we signed with Columbia. They couldn't.

And it was Jim Golden's record store. He couldn't print up enough copies. They said if they would have, it would have been a top five or top ten song, but it was still very recognized.

Right, and it still did quite well for you. Yeah, oh, it did real well, yeah. And then the next year, right, probably six or seven, you did A Scratch in the Sky, which was much more original stuff.

It was all original. When Sugar and Spice was out, our first big job was with the Byrds at McCormick Place. We're just doing the line check right now for the other stuff.

And we played with them. They were heroes of ours, so we were just in awe. And I can remember us playing.

We killed it, and they played, and of course they killed it. And before we played with them, they were very standoffish. Afterwards, they were very open and welcoming.

As a matter of fact, Jim McGuinn, or Roger McGuinn, Jim McGuinn, he came up to Fares, and I was right there, and he said, now one thing you guys do really, really well, he says, you are great singers. You guys can sing like nobody's business. But he said, you will do absolutely nothing in this business unless you write your own songs.

We said, oh, okay, well, we'll write our own songs. Good advice. Yeah, and that basically came to fruition in our second album, Scratchin' the Sky.

It was done by Jim Fares, he wrote, and Lenny wrote about 99% of it. And we rehearsed like crazy for that thing. I mean, just constantly rehearsing.

It had more of a California sound to it. Well, yeah, Jim at that time was really into the Beach Boys. I was still into the Beatles and the Byrds, but he was into the Beach Boys.

And not just the Beach Boys, but if you listen to the way the chords progress on that, they're very unusual. It's not a normal 1-4-5 or a 1-5-6-4, it's just very unusual. And also he wanted to fill in spaces with either vocal harmonies or guitar parts or piano parts or whatever.

So it was more of a wall of sound kind of thing. But we were determined as we did it that we wanted to be able to reproduce everything we did in the studio live. So everything that was on that record, somebody had to go play it.

Did you get some bagpipes in there? Yeah, Fares played those. He wanted to do the whole thing, but he couldn't, so he just stuck the chanter in his mouth and played it that way. And then 68 came out with Synthesis.

Yeah, another album that I loved. I thought we did the best singing we've ever done on any of the albums with that one. We added Dave Carter, and we had Al Dawson, two other really fine singers.

So we had a lineup of really good singers. Jim Fares steps out at that point. Yeah, Fares stepped out.

He wanted to produce records. He was kind of bored playing. He didn't really want to be on stage.

He wanted to create and do all of that stuff, kind of more like Brian Wilson, basically. I mean, that was his hero, and that's kind of the way he went. Really, really, really fortunate that we had him in the group.

I really mean it. Just an incredibly talented guy to be around. Learned a lot about music from him, and I will forever be grateful.

I thought someone had said that he did come out and done some shows with you. He did, he did, yeah. A few years ago? Yeah, James did.

He has a different vision for what the song should be. He wants to do versions of the song. In other words, when you go up and play the song, nobody knows what you're doing.

Right, I see. And we wanted it to be the songs that people come out to see. And there was a friction there, so we just... Right.

I'm not saying that we were right, or he was right, or we were wrong, or he was wrong. It was just the way that we felt. We're still good friends.

I noticed on Synthesis, too, seemed to be more like a psychedelic type of rock. Yeah, it was more psychedelic. The thing is that we had started out as basically the English Invasion type of sound.

That's what we sounded like. We sounded like the birds. And that's really where our sweet spot was.

Music was changing dramatically. Sure was. Dramatically at that time.

We tried to keep up, but the problem is when you do something that you truly are good at, you go into that lane, and you're just there, and you see everything through the lens of that particular lane. Music had taken a different direction than what we did. In hindsight, I wish we were able to do it, but I still didn't know anything about music, so I didn't know which way to go.

Fares was a big director in which way we wanted to go. Lenny and Isaac were both very, very fine songwriters, but they didn't have that vision that Fares did about this is the road we're going to take, we're going to do it, period. It was a lot of things scattered, and it's nothing against them.

It was probably on me more than anything. I sang a certain way, and that certain way really didn't lend itself to the way music was going. Right.

Were you under a lot of pressure from Columbia in order to write? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tons. Tons and tons. Yeah, I imagine it was.

But you know what? That's part of it. You were under pressure either you don't have a record, you don't have a contract, you're working like hell for nothing. That's a lot of pressure.

And if you do, especially then, you didn't make any money on the records. Right. They used it all, basically they just took all the money.

But you look back at it, they spent a lot of money on people to make them into something. So it was kind of a corrupt way of doing it. They stole from Peter to pay Paul.

Right. But you know, that's just the way it was. And yeah, I mean, we came up in that era and it is what we signed into and that was fine.

We were lucky enough to have some effect on the music industry at that time. Well, I think you've had a wonderful effect on the music industry. Oh, thank you.

And we're looking forward to sticking around and hearing some music today. Yeah. And hearing some of the shows.

Well, hopefully we remember some of it. Did you do mainly your touring around the United States? Did you ever go international? No, never international. And mainly our touring was in the Midwest, South and East.

Okay. You know, back then, when we were reaching our stride, there were about 186 or 187 million people in the country. There are now 330-something million.

And the West Coast... They all have guns. Yeah, they all have guns. Yeah, which is why the Japanese didn't invade us.

Did you guys know that? They said they had no plans of ever invading America because there was a gun behind every blade of grass. So... The biggest army in the world, right? Yeah. So, you know, except for L.A., there really was nothing on the West Coast.

Right. You know, all of the population was, you know, Mississippi, East. And we played, I mean, name a town, name a school.

We were there. And how long did this last? How long did it last? Well, we went from 65 through, I think, the end of 1969. And people said, Why did you break up? Well, we were a 60s group, and it was going to the 70s.

And then you got back together when? 1982 was the first time. Okay. We rehearsed just down the street from here.

Jimmy lived in Hillside a couple of blocks from here. And it was all the original guys except for the drummer. The drummer had real serious health issues, couldn't with his back and stuff.

So we used another guy who had played with us also, Ron Kaplan. And we played Jane Byrne's Chicago Fest, and it was really good. Had a zillion people there, and it was fun.

It was fun. Now, wasn't there an Ide's Shames reunion? Yep, Ide's Shames Union. When I left music for about 2 or 3 years, I lived up in Minnesota.

It was a better world for it. And it was a better world for it. Thanks a lot.

That's our lead guitar player, and I put up with that. Yeah, I lived up in Minnesota. I got a call from a guy who was one of our road men, Dave Remedy is his name.

And he said, you know, the Ives of March had broken up, and there's a couple of guys that still want to play. Would you like to join them? You know, so I came back down. We did that.

Larry Mills was out there, the tall guy I was talking to. Right, I talked to Larry. Larry Mills was there, Chuck Somar was in it, John Pavlet, a great guitar player, was part of that group.

And Don Melton, who was a keyboard player, was part of it as well. And we did that for 2 to 3 years. It never really went anywhere.

We were playing pop music in the era of disco. Right, right. So, behind the curve again.

Yeah, I talked to Larry. I did some recording with Larry. Yeah, okay.

Over the years. It was kind of a good group. The singing was insane.

Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Well, we appreciate you spending some time with us today.

You bet. We got tons of time. We all got time.

We got tons of time and a bad knee. But we can find you at a website. Yeah, you can't really find us.

You can find me at Tom Doody. If you want to email me, it's Thomas Doody at MSN.com. I mean, no thing. On Facebook.

Yeah, you know where I'm at. Sure, okay. So, yeah.

I rarely get on social. I'm on anti-social media. And he always has been.

And I'm really not pushing it. I mean, I got a thousand friend requests that I have done. You've never passed one up.

What? A friend request. I know. I've got like 3,000 or 3,500, something like that.

I just recently found that on the interweb, there's other things than porn. I just found that. I did not know that.

Tom said, hey, why don't you get on the, you know, social media. I go, hey. So I really don't do it, but I do have a page.

Do you? Yeah. Yeah, it's a porn page. Yeah.

Me and Stormy Daniels. But it's a page. Me and Stormy Daniels.

That's it. All right, you guys. Thank you.

Wow, Ray, they had some great stories, didn't they? Yeah, they sure did. Boy, they got quite a history. Yes, they do.

Yes, they do. The fact that they were listening to their song on the radio within a half an hour after they recorded it is just amazing to me. That's got to be something.

I mean, I couldn't imagine. I couldn't imagine suddenly hearing yourself on the radio right after you got it done. It's almost like that movie with the Wonders, that thing you do.

Oh, yeah. Right. You know, they did the same thing there.

They recorded something and they were all over the radio. That's really neat. Well, that's how the music business was back then, you know.

And you had a disc jockey in your pocket, and that was a cool thing to have. Yeah, radio was very important. I mean, that's pretty much your only outlet without people actually buying your albums and stuff.

I mean, nowadays you can get music everywhere. Yeah, you can. And it's not like it used to be, certainly, is it? No, it's not.

No, it's not. But that was a great time. Tom was a great, great guy.

Glad that he took the time out to talk to us, him and JC. Really appreciate that. Well, thanks for listening once again, folks.

Be sure to check us out on the Road to Rock radio every Monday night at 6 p.m. And the Illinois Rock and Roll History Museum. And Route 66. And Route 66.

The Illinois Rock and Roll Museum. Right. Got it.

All right. We'll see you guys next week. Okay.

Take care. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.