The rock star who became the Vice President’s drug dealer: “Out on the campaign trail”
It’s 1963, you’re a conservative, and the world seems to be going to shit. The president’s head has recently been blown off. You’re actually more nonplussed about that than most, considering he was a little too lefty for your tastes. The far graver issue is that a great swathe of unwashed kids no longer seem to be saying ‘sir’ in your once esteemed presence.
You’re J Edgar Hoover. You’re the head of the FBI. And you have a headache on your hands. The crux of your conservatism, as is always the case, can be surmised as thus: why would you want things to change, even for the better, when the current inequity suits you? So far, that has gone largely unchallenged. And then The Beatles happened.
In a matter of months, four working class young lads from Liverpool have risen to a rarified position whereby they are commanding an audience hitherto unknown in human history. That’s scary. They are talking about peace, love, and staying in bed. You think they should be talking about the need to crush communism in the East and encouraging the return of side partings.
But they’re not, and their message is massively popular. In fact, mathematically speaking, they were roughly 14x more popular than Taylor Swift is presently. That gives them, and the musical peers that are gathering around them, a huge ideological sway over the youth of the day. But you remember you are J Edgar Hoover, and you can do something amazing.
As the head of the FBI, you have more well-manicured arseholes at your disposal than every one of Hugh Hefner’s pool parties combined. You will use these besuited pawns to infiltrate and crush the left. You announce in classified memos that Martin Luther King Jr is “the most dangerous n—- in America.”
You enact the COINTELPRO directive. You’re aim is internally expressed as thus: “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavour is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralise the activities of black-nationalist, hate-type organisations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters.”
Your activities will later be deemed “serious abuses of constitutional rights” and “in many cases [violations of] the law”, but that’s a problem for the 1970s when the Church Committee comes to a head. For now, your aim is to disrupt the uprising of peace and love in all of its forms. But how on earth do you stop a problem like people liking the music of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and other unwashed hippies with pipedreams aplenty?
Well, your nemesis has a different idea. He is Hubert Humphrey, and in 1965, he will become Vice President. His views are liberal. He supports the Civil Rights movement. He advocates for social reforms. And he opposes FBI surveillance… Oh, and he gets out of his gourd with a rock ‘n’ roll band.
Tommy James and the Shondells are capturing the times with hits like ‘Crimson and Clover’ and ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’. Humphrey likes them. Thus, he is part of the unfathomable problem you are trying to solve. He doesn’t see it as a problem. He thinks the government should be aligning with this new youthful engagement in politics rather than going to war with it.
This was something Tommy James had been thinking about for a while. He knew about the interplay between art and power. After all, he was signed to Roulette Records, a label run by the notorious mobster Morris Levy. Levy used culture to endow his operation with a sense of legitimacy. James wondered whether he could do the inverse of RFK.
“We had performed in Manhattan’s Union Square at a Bobby Kennedy rally, early in his presidential bid,” James explained to Goldmine. “I believed in RFK with all my heart. That was back in a time when we all thought a politician could really change things. As a result, we were put on a list of groups available for other rallies. Our demographics were good. They liked us.”
This was the opposite of what you, as Hoover, wanted. The strong arm of power should’ve been infiltrating culture – not the other way around. “We were then asked to perform in Los Angeles with RFK on the night he was killed,” James adds. “We had to turn it down because we were booked at The World Teen Fair in, of all places, Dallas, Texas.”
James was devastated to learn of RFK’s assassination that night in a Dallas hotel room, just hours after visiting the spot where his brother was slain. On a personal level, Levy hardly paid his acts but, on the other hand, he did give unlimited creative license, and James figured he and the Shondells were leveraging this for positive change. That capacity to lend his underpaid art to something meaningful felt stripped away. But he wasn’t dismayed by this for long.
“Then we get a call from Hubert Humphrey asking us to go out on the campaign trail, and we immediately said yes,” James recalls. “We met him the next week, and he couldn’t have been nicer. We ended up doing the whole campaign and becoming great friends. He asked me to become presidential adviser on youth affairs if he won.”
You are reeling. James and Humphrey are not. “It was the first time that a rock act and a major politician hooked up,” the singer recalls. You pray for the worst. The potential calamity of this soon privately comes to the fore. James was no stranger to drugs, you see, once proving too stoned to meet with Frank Sinatra and forced to stand him up. You’ve never thought that sort of figure should be colluding with Vice Presidents, to such an extent that you’ve been colluding with such figures to ensure that any interactions that they do have are disruptive and disastrous.
As it happens, a far more maligned misdemeanour ended up unfurling in the curious, cosy case of Humphrey and James. “I even slipped him a Black Beauty,” the ‘Crimson and Clover’ singer comically recalls. “Oh man, you do not want to know Hubert Humphrey on speed! I could’ve been arrested.” But you weren’t on hand to do so.
While the Turtles might have been so stoned in the White House that they kept falling off the stage, and Grace Slick famously tried to slip LSD into the President’s tea, the first documented willing drug deal between a number one hit rock band and a senior politician unspooled very convivially as thus: “One night he was complaining of being so tired. ‘I’m downright drowsy,’ he complained to me when we were alone, ‘and I have to stay up late writing.’”
James continued, “I told him I had what I called some ‘stay-awake’ pills in my pocket. ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘do you think a thing like that would work?’ I said, ‘I think it would, Mr Vice President. I take it when I have to stay up late composing.’ Red lights should have gone off all over the place, but he took it from me and he told me a couple of days later, ‘That darn thing kept me up all night.’”
James, a mob-funded chart topper, had just given the potential leader of the free world some budget amphetamines. This is exactly the type of manic thing you’ve always wanted to brandish against the Democrats and the filthy pill-pushing singers they were mingling with. But you were too busy trying to manufacture your own manic, distorted extremes of this scenario that the rather charming non-scandal passed you by.
You have ran files on John Lennon, John Denver, The Monkees, Jimi Hendrix, and more. But you’ve missed this sordid Shondell link, despite knowing their label boss was a known mobster. You are J Edgar Hoover. And you are a right daft cunt.
