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| They are both Tommy Tutone. |
The Hit
“I saw her about five years ago and asked her if she wanted anybody to know who she was and she said no.”
First, yes, there was a real Jenny. Also, Tommy Heath (wait for it) told classicbands.com that 867-5309 was her parents phone number, which makes you worry a little. I remember hearing rumors about what happens when you dial 867-5309 (also, is it stuck in your head yet?) back in early ‘80s suburban Ohio – some trafficking in the ridiculous shit pre-teen boys make up when they try to sound worldly before they’ve seen much of it – but calling a random number from a song also sounded like something people would do (and then we got the internet and now we get that shit on loop.)
The rumors were true: people really did call the phone number Tommy Tutone made famous – and in nearly every area code, apparently – and at least one person who interviewed him repaid the favor:
“It caused a lot of trouble, which I learned about because people who were mad at me put my phone number in their article about me. I had to change it. I’m sorry folks, we were just messing around.”
Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny/867-5309” has a wide enough grip on a certain period of pop culture that if you fed 100 random strangers the number “867,” I’m guessing most could come back with “5309” - though some might refuse to along because you just got the damn song stuck in their head.
50% song, 50% punchline. I remember mocking Heath’s vocals at the time – sounded like he gargles milk before picking up the mic (says the long-time Elvis Costello fan) – but it’s not a terrible song. I comes from a fairly specific, short-lived sub-genre of 80s rock – post-dad-rock (e.g., Foreigner), but with new-wave tones/production on the guitar and about one-third to one-half the tempo of punk – and I don’t hate that sound...maybe it’s the way the hook takes over until it’s all you hear that makes it what Heath acknowledges it to be:
“I don't know about people who never heard of me. Maybe people that didn't take it too seriously. It's a novelty song basically.”
The Rest of the Story
Tommy Tutone was and wasn’t Tommy Heath’s stage name. Heath did carry around “Tommy Tutone” as a nickname for a while, but the name officially belonged to the band. Even that comes with an oblique punchline: the two main members of Tommy Tutone were Heath (rhythm guitar/lead vocals) and a guy named Jim Keller (lead guitar). The band started with former Steve Jones/Ozzy Osbourne bassist Terry Nails...and some random drummer. A guy named Jonathan Lyons Terlep, aka, Jon Lyons replaced Nails by the time “Jenny” came out, and it kept going from there. From Wikipedia:
“However, Lyons was soon replaced by Greg Sutton, later Pete Costello, and more recently Jimmy James. Mona Gnader, the bassist in Sammy Hagar's Waborita band, played with the band as well. Original drummer Kenny Johnson of Chris Isaak's band was replaced by Mickey Shine (Clover and drummer on the first Elvis Costello album) was replaced by Victor Carberry for the band's second album. Carberry was in turn replaced with Jerry Angel. John Cowsill of The Cowsills played percussion (and sang) on “867-5309/Jenny.”
And there’s the Elvis Costello connection. Fun fact, Keller wrote “Jenny” with Alex Call, who also played in Clover.
Nothing in the source material tells me Keller and Heath were bosom friends or anything, but they still gave it a go once they met and worked together well enough. Part of that showed in the songwriting – a critic once credited them with “a rare talent for writing catchy hooks and memorable melodies” – but Keller had something Heath did not: the ability to schmooze and talk them up. Heath had played in bands since his college days – and across a fair range of genres – but he kind of toiled in the shadows, sort of blending into each band he joined, at least until Keller came along. His very real shyness comes up in nearly every source...but a front-man lurked in Heath’s body (beware the pop-ups on that link):
“Eventually, when I got in college in the 1970s, I didn’t really like any of the music out there. So I started playing music in self-defense with my friends. I, the shyest person in the room, stepped on the stage and took over and became this really obnoxious, almost Jerry Lee Lewis kind of kind of guy, and became the leader, much to everyone’s surprise.”
Tommy Tutone started in the Mendocino, CA area, playing bars, venues, and so on, before they moved up to San Francisco. They didn’t quite fit into that scene – e.g., what Heath calls “real punk” was taking off - but it put them in front of enough people to help them find a place where they did. From Classicbands:
“We were a very quirky band. We didn't really rock. We just sounded different. Somebody asked us to do a showcase for this other band that everybody thought was real cool in San Francisco, and the people from L.A. came out and said forget those, we want that opening act. So, that's how we got signed.”
They impressed enough people that they backed into a bidding war – a contest ultimately won by Warner Brothers New York, and the same lady who had the taste, but not the commercial savvy, to sign Big Star. Keller and Heath had played together long enough by that time that they had two albums’ worth of songs when they went into the studio. Some of it came from the Keller/Heath team, but they had some things in the back pocket too:
“And we had a couple of ghost writers helping us out. He had a friend who was a doctor who'd send us ten songs that he would stay up all night typing. We'd just sit down and run through all of them and if two or three of 'em made us laugh, we'd just keep 'em. People would call us up and say ‘I'm trying to forget that damn song.’ I guess that's what our calling card was.”
The rumors were true: people really did call the phone number Tommy Tutone made famous – and in nearly every area code, apparently – and at least one person who interviewed him repaid the favor:
“It caused a lot of trouble, which I learned about because people who were mad at me put my phone number in their article about me. I had to change it. I’m sorry folks, we were just messing around.”
Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny/867-5309” has a wide enough grip on a certain period of pop culture that if you fed 100 random strangers the number “867,” I’m guessing most could come back with “5309” - though some might refuse to along because you just got the damn song stuck in their head.
50% song, 50% punchline. I remember mocking Heath’s vocals at the time – sounded like he gargles milk before picking up the mic (says the long-time Elvis Costello fan) – but it’s not a terrible song. I comes from a fairly specific, short-lived sub-genre of 80s rock – post-dad-rock (e.g., Foreigner), but with new-wave tones/production on the guitar and about one-third to one-half the tempo of punk – and I don’t hate that sound...maybe it’s the way the hook takes over until it’s all you hear that makes it what Heath acknowledges it to be:
“I don't know about people who never heard of me. Maybe people that didn't take it too seriously. It's a novelty song basically.”
The Rest of the Story
Tommy Tutone was and wasn’t Tommy Heath’s stage name. Heath did carry around “Tommy Tutone” as a nickname for a while, but the name officially belonged to the band. Even that comes with an oblique punchline: the two main members of Tommy Tutone were Heath (rhythm guitar/lead vocals) and a guy named Jim Keller (lead guitar). The band started with former Steve Jones/Ozzy Osbourne bassist Terry Nails...and some random drummer. A guy named Jonathan Lyons Terlep, aka, Jon Lyons replaced Nails by the time “Jenny” came out, and it kept going from there. From Wikipedia:
“However, Lyons was soon replaced by Greg Sutton, later Pete Costello, and more recently Jimmy James. Mona Gnader, the bassist in Sammy Hagar's Waborita band, played with the band as well. Original drummer Kenny Johnson of Chris Isaak's band was replaced by Mickey Shine (Clover and drummer on the first Elvis Costello album) was replaced by Victor Carberry for the band's second album. Carberry was in turn replaced with Jerry Angel. John Cowsill of The Cowsills played percussion (and sang) on “867-5309/Jenny.”
And there’s the Elvis Costello connection. Fun fact, Keller wrote “Jenny” with Alex Call, who also played in Clover.
Nothing in the source material tells me Keller and Heath were bosom friends or anything, but they still gave it a go once they met and worked together well enough. Part of that showed in the songwriting – a critic once credited them with “a rare talent for writing catchy hooks and memorable melodies” – but Keller had something Heath did not: the ability to schmooze and talk them up. Heath had played in bands since his college days – and across a fair range of genres – but he kind of toiled in the shadows, sort of blending into each band he joined, at least until Keller came along. His very real shyness comes up in nearly every source...but a front-man lurked in Heath’s body (beware the pop-ups on that link):
“Eventually, when I got in college in the 1970s, I didn’t really like any of the music out there. So I started playing music in self-defense with my friends. I, the shyest person in the room, stepped on the stage and took over and became this really obnoxious, almost Jerry Lee Lewis kind of kind of guy, and became the leader, much to everyone’s surprise.”
Tommy Tutone started in the Mendocino, CA area, playing bars, venues, and so on, before they moved up to San Francisco. They didn’t quite fit into that scene – e.g., what Heath calls “real punk” was taking off - but it put them in front of enough people to help them find a place where they did. From Classicbands:
“We were a very quirky band. We didn't really rock. We just sounded different. Somebody asked us to do a showcase for this other band that everybody thought was real cool in San Francisco, and the people from L.A. came out and said forget those, we want that opening act. So, that's how we got signed.”
They impressed enough people that they backed into a bidding war – a contest ultimately won by Warner Brothers New York, and the same lady who had the taste, but not the commercial savvy, to sign Big Star. Keller and Heath had played together long enough by that time that they had two albums’ worth of songs when they went into the studio. Some of it came from the Keller/Heath team, but they had some things in the back pocket too:
“And we had a couple of ghost writers helping us out. He had a friend who was a doctor who'd send us ten songs that he would stay up all night typing. We'd just sit down and run through all of them and if two or three of 'em made us laugh, we'd just keep 'em. People would call us up and say ‘I'm trying to forget that damn song.’ I guess that's what our calling card was.”
Their eponymous debut album came out in 1980 and included the minor, yet still Top 40 (No. 38) hit, “Angel Say No,” plus what Heath dubbed a “minor FM hit” with the reggae-tinged “Cheap Date” (i.e., it’s reggae in the same vein as Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives”). That gave them a little momentum, but not enough to really break through. Columbia, not knowing what to do with Tommy Tutone, left them alone (“We had such a different, quirky sound, that they were afraid to mess with us, so they let us follow our own trail”) as they pulled their follow up album...Tommy Tutone 2 (really?) to release in 1981. “Jenny” came off that album and, as anyone old enough to remember knows, the entire goddamn planet, plus MTV, put that song into crazy-heavy rotation. Speaking from memory, MTV also pushed a second single, “Which Man Are You,” only that one never charted.
After all that, Tommy Tutone ended with a whimper. They released a third album - 1983’s National Emotion, which included another minor hit, “Get Around Girl” – and played shows “here and there,” but the traction was gone. Heath and Keller parted ways after five years. Heath, still too shy to push his music, but also nowhere near as prolific as Keller (“I was writing a decent song. He was writing ten songs a day, fifteen good ones a year”), kept the band going, but only at half steam.
Oddly, Keller crashed harder than Heath. As he put it (and very eloquently): “After the band crashed and burned, I had a period of unsightly lifestyle.” Over time, he straightened out, landed a straight job, got married, had kids, the whole nine normal yards and, in 2005, he returned to songwriting and performing under his own name. After trying some years of trying to write songs for the Nashville machine (unsuccessfully; though he did become a fan of and friends with The Smithereens), Heath relocated to Portland, Oregon, and worked as a computer analyst/software engineer. He never advertised his past, but people here and there inevitably found out and that was that. A fun sidebar: the members of Tommy Tutone operated more as coworkers than friends, or even comrades; they only got to know one another during the 1990s, when they all had (mostly) checked out of the music business (Tommy Tutone released two albums in the 1990s – Nervous Love and Tutone.rtf – so, the whole “checking out” thing doesn’t tally). Like Keller, Heath jumped back into music and, by the mid-2000s, he'd quit his day-job to take another go at the music business. Tommy Tutone is still a going concern, or close to one, with the release of Beautiful Ending in 2019.
About the Sampler
I linked to about 2/5th of the tiny sampler above. Spotify has only the two albums, which (thankfully?) limited the sampler’s size. It all sounds like Tommy Tutone, which as noted above, doesn’t sound like anything else but a small handful of bands that played around the same time. Wikipedia dubbed it “power pop,” but even that runs against Heath’s note that “we really didn’t rock.” Judge for yourself, based on the following selection. By album:
Tommy Tutone: “Girl in the Back Seat,” “Rachel” (Rick Springfield-esque, this one) and “Am I Supposed to Lie.”
Tommy Tutone 2: “Not Say Goodbye,” “Bernadiah” (a slow jam) and “Shadow on the Road Ahead.”
And I feel the same way about all those as I do about “Jenny” only without the earworm curse.
After all that, Tommy Tutone ended with a whimper. They released a third album - 1983’s National Emotion, which included another minor hit, “Get Around Girl” – and played shows “here and there,” but the traction was gone. Heath and Keller parted ways after five years. Heath, still too shy to push his music, but also nowhere near as prolific as Keller (“I was writing a decent song. He was writing ten songs a day, fifteen good ones a year”), kept the band going, but only at half steam.
Oddly, Keller crashed harder than Heath. As he put it (and very eloquently): “After the band crashed and burned, I had a period of unsightly lifestyle.” Over time, he straightened out, landed a straight job, got married, had kids, the whole nine normal yards and, in 2005, he returned to songwriting and performing under his own name. After trying some years of trying to write songs for the Nashville machine (unsuccessfully; though he did become a fan of and friends with The Smithereens), Heath relocated to Portland, Oregon, and worked as a computer analyst/software engineer. He never advertised his past, but people here and there inevitably found out and that was that. A fun sidebar: the members of Tommy Tutone operated more as coworkers than friends, or even comrades; they only got to know one another during the 1990s, when they all had (mostly) checked out of the music business (Tommy Tutone released two albums in the 1990s – Nervous Love and Tutone.rtf – so, the whole “checking out” thing doesn’t tally). Like Keller, Heath jumped back into music and, by the mid-2000s, he'd quit his day-job to take another go at the music business. Tommy Tutone is still a going concern, or close to one, with the release of Beautiful Ending in 2019.
About the Sampler
I linked to about 2/5th of the tiny sampler above. Spotify has only the two albums, which (thankfully?) limited the sampler’s size. It all sounds like Tommy Tutone, which as noted above, doesn’t sound like anything else but a small handful of bands that played around the same time. Wikipedia dubbed it “power pop,” but even that runs against Heath’s note that “we really didn’t rock.” Judge for yourself, based on the following selection. By album:
Tommy Tutone: “Girl in the Back Seat,” “Rachel” (Rick Springfield-esque, this one) and “Am I Supposed to Lie.”
Tommy Tutone 2: “Not Say Goodbye,” “Bernadiah” (a slow jam) and “Shadow on the Road Ahead.”
And I feel the same way about all those as I do about “Jenny” only without the earworm curse.
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