The Koachmen played a circuit of clubs in the Midwest through the summer and fall of 1965, but returned to Niles in February 1966, after the gigs dried up, to plot their next move.

James first learned of all this activity in April 1966 after getting a telephone call from Pittsburgh disc jockey "Mad Mike" Metro(vich) asking him to come and perform the song.

James attempted to contact other members of the Shondells, but they had all moved away, joined the service or gotten married and left the music business altogether.

In his book, Me, The Mob and the Music, James credits Pittsburgh dance promoter Bob Mack and never mentions Metrovich.

Bob Mack made his dance club bands available to James for promotional appearances, but nothing seemed to fit until a guitarist from one of the bands took James to the Thunderbird Lounge in Greensburg, where he recruited a quintet that was playing there called the Raconteurs – Joe Kessler (guitar), Ron Rosman (keyboards), George Magura (saxophone and piano), Mike Vale (bass) and Vincent Pietropaoli (drums) – as the new Shondells.

"I was in a Greensburg, PA club one night, and I walked up to a group that was playing that I thought was pretty good and asked them if they wanted to be the Shondells.

In 1967 Kessler and Pietropaoli were forced to leave after a dispute when planned monies were not remitted to them by Roulette, a label closely associated with organized crime, and whose head, Morris Levy, was the inspiration for the Herman "Hesh" Rabkin character on The Sopranos.

[7] At first, Tommy James and "his" Shondells played straightforward rock and roll, but they soon became associated with the budding bubblegum music genre.

James disputes this, saying that Super K Productions "bubblegum" producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz approached his record company (run by Morris Levy) looking for songwriting jobs.

[11] From late 1968, the group began writing their own songs, with James and Lucia penning the psychedelic-tinged classic "Crimson and Clover", which was recorded and mixed by Bruce Staple, with James tackling vocal duties and playing many of the instruments himself, and featured the creative use of studio effects such as delay and tremolo.

[13] At a concert in Birmingham, Alabama, in March 1970, an exhausted James collapsed after coming off stage from a reaction to drugs and was pronounced dead.

[15] James launched a solo career in 1970 that yielded two notable hits over a 10-year span, "Draggin' the Line" (1971) and "Three Times in Love" (1980).

During the 1980s, the group's songbook produced major hits for three other artists: Joan Jett & The Blackhearts' version of "Crimson and Clover" (No.

[16] Other Shondells covers have been performed by acts as disparate as psychobilly ravers the Cramps, new wave singer Lene Lovich, country music veteran Dolly Parton, and the Boston Pops orchestra.

In March 2011 the Tommy James song "I'm Alive" (co-written with Peter Lucia) became a top 20 hit in the Netherlands for UK singer Don Fardon after his version had been used in a Vodafone commercial.