A Word with Jay Siegel
Can you imagine? I was one of the lead singers in Neil Sedaka’s group and he sang background!” So exclaims the ever-youthful Jay Siegel, recalling his early days. “I went to Lincoln High school where the original Tokens group was formed with Neil Sedaka. He had this group called The Linc-Tones, named after Lincoln High School. One of the guys was leaving and he needed somebody to take his place.”
The pre-Jay Tokens had released “I Love My Baby” bundled with “While I Dream” on Melba Records that brought no sales. Next stop was Roulette Records, headed by the infamous mobster Morris Levy. By then, Neil had left the group to go solo and The Tokens were now Darrell and The Oxfords. “I was Darrell because the guy who wrote ‘Picture In My Wallet’ that thought that it was a great name since we were doing college dates. He said, ‘You’ll be Darrell, and I said, ‘OK.’”
“That’s why we never got paid: because we used to say, ‘OK.’” Well, that and the fact that Levy never paid any of his artists. For “Darrell” it was two singles at Roulette and then on to Warwick Records.
“[Fellow Token] Hank Medress knew these two kids from Lincoln High that had a band: Phil and Mitch Margo. We went over to their house and we started fooling around singing together, and ‘Tonight I Fell In Love’ was written in that house in maybe a half hour.”
“Hank was able to get three hundred dollars from this woman that he knew to make a demo at Allegro Studios of ‘Tonight I Fell In Love.’ She knew somebody that knew Morty Craft and he bought the record. They added three violins to our demo.”
“‘Tonight I Fell In Love’ was a #1 record in New York and the tristate area (Top 3 in Los Angeles and Chicago). I guess it sold about three-quarter of a million records, and we never got one penny. Morty Craft was one of the major crooks of the music business. There were a lot of them. They all went to the Morris Levy School of Not Paying.”
With a national hit on their resume, The Tokens were offered a contract by RCA Victor producers Hugo and Luigi. Craft’s response was - “and this is the God’s honest truth,” says Jay - “‘What could RCA do for you that I’ve haven’t done for you?’ And in unison we all said, ‘Pay us!’”
The Tokens, however, didn’t set the charts on fire for RCA, and after two failed singles their days there were numbered.
Early on, says Jay, “We used to do ‘Wimoweh’ at our live shows and the kids loved it.” “Wimoweh” was how The Weavers sang “mbube” - the Zulu word for “lion” from a 1939 recording of that title by Solomon Linda’s Original Evening Birds - on their 1952 hit.
“George Weiss wrote the lyrics to ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ and I re-wrote about eight bars of the melody,” says Jay. “The other three guys in the group were very leery of putting it out; they thought it was too strange. They wanted the flip side ‘Tina’ to be the A-side, which sounded more commercial. I thought [‘Lion’] had shot because it was so different.”
“This disc jockey Dick Smith at WORC in Worcester turned the record over, and played ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ and the phones lit up like crazy. Within the next three months it was #1 in 36 countries all over the world.”
Although subsequent RCA singles failed to equal “Lion,” The Tokens found a new niche in producing records. Hired by Capitol Records to come up with ten sides, they delivered nine that were “what we call ‘lead’ records, not gold,” says Jay. “You put them out and they sink right to the bottom.”
About their tenth record, the president of Capitol responded, “and these were his words, ‘it’s too trite.’ We brought it to a bunch of independent companies in New York and they all turned it down. Then one day we took it to Laurie Records. Doug Morris (currently the CEO and chairman of Sony Music) was the promotion guy there. He played the record and said, ‘Don’t let these kids out of the office that record’s a hit!’”
Indeed it was. “He’s So Fine” by The Chiffons was an across-the-charts #1 in the spring of 1963. “We were the first vocal group that produced a #1 record for another group,” notes Jay.”
They did the same for five more Chiffons hits as well as Hot 100 discs by Randy & The Rainbows, Andrea Carroll, The Four Pennies (AKA The Chiffons), The Happenings and - most famously - Tony Orlando and Dawn.
They even managed to rack up more hits under the Tokens name on their B.T. Puppy label. “B.T.” after the name of their production company Bright Tunes. And “Puppy?” “We had been on RCA Victor and we were a brand new, baby label so we put a puppy on the label instead of [RCA’s] Nipper the dog.”
After B.T. Puppy, The Tokens moved on to Warner Brothers and scored a 1967 Top 40 hit. “We loved ‘Portrait Of My Love’ by Steve Lawrence, and we said, ‘Let’s do it like a Tokens/Happenings kind of record.’”
Meanwhile they had also expanded into the much more lucrative field of advertising. “One year we had 30 ads on radio and television,” says Jay. “We were writing them, producing them and performing them. Some of the biggest ones that we had were ‘PanAm makes the going great,’ ‘a silly millimeter longer’ for Chesterfield cigarettes, and ‘fly Eastern - number one to the sun.’ We did a Clairol commercial and out of that came our record ‘She Lets Her Hair Down.’”
If that weren’t enough, “We were one of the first-call backup vocal groups,” says Jay. “That’s me singing with Keith on ’98.6,’ and we sang on Highway 61 Revisited, the Bob Dylan album.”
In 1973, The Tokens, minus Hank Medress who was now involved with production only, had a final Top 20 Cash Box hit as Cross Country with a CSN&Y-styled ballad of Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour.”
Despite all his success, what Jay is most proud of “has nothing to do with music. I just celebrated my 54th anniversary and to me that’s my greatest accomplishment: my family and my marriage.”
As for this year’s Malt Shop Memories Cruise, Jay promises a “great time. I’m going to sing all of our records in the same key, just the way they were recorded. People tell me that when they walk out of the show, they’re so happy. What a great job: making people happy! Could you have a better job than that?”
Ed Osborne © 2015