Mony Mony: Unraveling the mystery of the song’s infamous, crowd-sung lyric
Recently Nissan launched an ad promoting the sale of their Sentra model which featured the longtime party anthem “Mony Mony,” as its centerpiece. The ad is upbeat and catchy, which does a terrible disservice to those of us that will be paying for a wedding in the next decade or two. If in fact the song finds new life and DJ’s feel compelled to play the song (and its accompanying mystery, crowd-sung lyric) at gatherings nationwide, we as the parents paying for the celebration are doomed to an awkward few moments as grandma hears things she shouldn’t.
The commercial also made me wonder: what mad genius came up with the words that seem to fit so seamlessly into the song and are now considered a perfectly normal third stanza?
Tommy James & the Shondells originally recorded the song “Mony Mony” in 1968 after landing on the song’s title in a way that was anything but rock ‘n roll. From Tommy James:
So we knew what kind of a word we had, it’s just that everything we came up with sounded so bad. So Ritchie Cordell, my songwriting partner and I, are up in my apartment up at 888 Eighth Avenue in New York. And finally we get disgusted, we throw our guitars down, we go out on the terrace, we light up a cigarette, and we look up into the sky. And the first thing our eyes fall on…
