In 1964, Tom Jones was just about broke, forcing his wife Linda to work at a factory, when he released a rock 'n' roll song called "Chills and Fever." The Rolling Stones-like single is full of bluesy guitar solos and snappy drum fills _ and it flopped. He was on the brink of depression when his manager, Gordon Mills, asked him to work up a song as a demo to guide a more established singer, Sandy Shaw: "It's Not Unusual."
Jones begged to record it, and Mills reluctantly agreed, with Shaw's permission, in early 1965. Jones' first single hit No. 1 in the U.K., and before long he was the Vegas showroom king surrounded by shrieking women and their projectile underpants. But what if "Chills and Fever" would have taken off? "It would have definitely given me a chance to record more of the same," says Jones, 76, by phone from Philadelphia. "I would have recorded more rock 'n' roll tunes, or more bluesy, rock-y gospel. ... As opposed to 'It's Not Unusual' being a pop song that took me into the pop world."
In the real world, "It's Not Unusual" is Jones' signature song, along with "Delilah" and "What's New Pussycat?" It's almost impossible to imagine him as a gritty rock 'n' roll singer, a la Mick Jagger or John Lennon, given his smooth voice and decades of super-tight trousers and low-neck '70s uniforms showing off a chest with the perfect glimpse of hair. His first American gig was at New York's Copacabana in 1968, and that led to gigs in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and, of course, Vegas, where he met Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley (who became an enthusiastic fan) and dominated showrooms for decades.
But his 2015 autobiography, "Over the Top and Back," doesn't start there. It starts in 1983, before an unmemorable gig in Framingham, Mass., after his recording career had dried up and he'd long since resigned himself to playing the hits repeatedly on stage. "I always had this thing in my mind that a song would come _ I didn't know where it was going to come from, or what it was going to be, but it was always at the back of mind," Jones says. "Sometimes you're doing so many shows you lose track of time _ I did, anyway _ and lose track of your identity. ... But thank God, it turned around again."
The turnaround song was a 1988 version of Prince's "Kiss," in collaboration with British synth-pop band Art of Noise. Jones, never a songwriter who could generate Bob Dylan-style excitement, was able to attract a younger audience and re-spark his recording career. "People were curious to find out what I would be doing with the Art of Noise," he says. "When they heard the record, everybody realized we didn't do it as a joke. Sometimes with a Prince song, he puts such a stamp on it with the arrangement, that you can't do much else with it. But thank God, with 'Kiss,' he kept it very sparse."
As the singer born Thomas John Woodward writes in his memoir, he grew up in a coal-mining family in Wales; his father worked in "deep, cramped tunnels where the mice would have your lunch away if you didn't keep it snapped tight in a tin." His parents sang in public _ Dad favored the classic Mexican bolero "Besame Mucho," while Mom preferred a flamboyant rendition of Eve Young's "Silver Dollar" _ and his sister and uncle had vocal talent as well. Jones spent his childhood entranced with "The Jolson Story" and listened to American blues songs via BBC radio through the early '50s.
He married his childhood sweetheart, Melinda Rose Woodard, when they were both 16. And while they remained together for 59 years, as London's Telegraph reported, Jones went through a lengthy "Lothario period" where he slept with 250 groupies a year, allowed himself to be photographed kissing other women and fathered a child out of wedlock. But the couple had apparently come to a point of peace and love, as he praises his wife throughout the book and mentions not a single word about his affairs. ("Which is weird, right?" complained a National Post reviewer. "That's kind of Tom Jones' thing.")
Earlier this year, while the singer was touring in Asia, Linda received a diagnosis of cancer and was told she'd have a week to live. "Just go forward," she reportedly told her husband. She died in April. Devastated, Jones thought he'd never sing again, especially "Tomorrow Night," a version of the late-'40s Lonnie Johnson hit she liked from 2015's bluesy "Long Lost Suitcase." "But I did," he says. "And it's given me pleasure. To be honest with you, singing is saving my life now. I thought my wife passing away would take that away from me. But actually, it's more meaningful. She's there when I'm singing 'Tomorrow Night' now. I'm thinking about her, as, when I recorded it, she was still alive. She was still there. So the song has taken on a new meaning to me. It's living."
