867-5309 / Jenny

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a real jukebox ghost, brothers and sisters. Right now the turntable is spinning "867-5309 / Jenny" by Tommy Tutone, pulled off the album Tommy Tutone 2, and the Zoo Freaks on the other end of the wire already know every digit by heart. That seven-number chorus is one of those riffs that sticks to the wall of a bar the same way the song claims a girl's name did. Over at THE ZOO we like a record that still starts arguments forty-odd years after it climbed the charts, and this one has never stopped arguing with itself.

The man who actually wrote the thing, Alex Call, sat down with Songfacts back in 2004 and blew a hole in every bathroom-wall legend. He said he came up with Jenny, the telephone number, and the music while he was sitting in his backyard under a plum tree. There was no Jenny. He did not know where the number came from. He was just trying to write a four-chord rock song and it came out. He had a little squirrel-powered four-track set up in an industrial yard in California, and he went up there and made a tape. He had the guitar lick, the name, and the number, but he did not know what the song was about. His buddy Jim Keller, lead guitar player in Tommy Tutone and the co-writer, stopped by and said it was a girl's number on a bathroom wall. They had a good laugh. Call told him that was exactly right. The verses got written in fifteen or twenty minutes because once you saw the picture, the lines were obvious. Call has said for years that the band's story about a real Jenny who ran a recording studio makes a better tale, but it is not true. It sounds a lot better than saying he made it up under a plum tree.

Keller told a different story when People magazine caught him in 1982, while the single was still hot. He said Jenny was a regular girl, not a hooker, and that friends of his wrote her name and number on a men's room wall at a bar. He called her on a dare, they dated for a while, and he had not talked with her since the song became a hit, but he heard she thought he was a real jerk for writing it. Years later he walked that back. In a Guitar Player interview he set the record straight and said there was never a real Jenny, and none of them saw that number anywhere. The label thought they should make up a good story about it, so they went with it, and it took on a life of its own. He also said the song is impossible to mess up, like Louie Louie, and that there is never a bad version of it. It always has that charm, and it is always fun.

Tommy Heath, the singer, has never quite let the real-girl version go. He has told interviewers there is an actual Jenny, that the number belonged to her parents, and that they changed it. He has said he saw her years later and asked if she wanted anybody to know who she was, and she said no. In a 2020 sit-down with Forbes he laughed at the split inside the camp. He said they tell him he has a tenuous hold on reality, but Jenny and he think she is real, and Jim and Alex say she is not. That is all he can say. He claims she gave him the number and he wrote it on a bathroom wall instead of handing it to Keller, and that the other two claim that never happened. Heath also owns the weird heart of the lyric. He calls the guy in the song a stalker, and says that somehow, being such a character, he is able to convince you the guy has a heart of gold, so everybody likes him. On why the record stuck, he figures it is numerology or something, a magic combination, kind of a nursery rhyme, with a little soul injected into it.

The session itself was a bar-band job, which is how Keller likes to describe what you hear. Call had sketched an opening arpeggio on acoustic. Keller took it, dumbed it down on an electric, and made it more rock and roll. He tried some off-color storylines that did not fit, so he and Heath spent several days pruning the song and softening the tone until it would sit on the radio. The cut landed on Tommy Tutone 2, issued by Columbia in the fall of 1981, with Heath on vocals and rhythm guitar, Keller on lead, Jon Lyons on bass, and Victor Carberry on drums. John Cowsill of the Cowsills sat in on percussion and sang on the track. The single went out in November of 1981, caught fire on the West Coast, and by April of 1982 had parked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the rock tracks chart. It went gold. The album itself climbed into the top twenty. VH1 later parked the song at number thirty-six on its list of the greatest songs of the 1980s.

Then the phone company got involved, whether it wanted to or not. Kids all over the country dialed 867-5309 and asked for Jenny. Folks unlucky enough to hold that number started getting calls in the middle of the night. One woman told reporters that when the phone rang her husband would answer, and he could not hear too well, so when they asked for Jenny he would say Jimmy did not live there anymore. She said she would like to get hold of Tommy Tutone's neck and choke him. People changed their numbers. The gag did not die with the decade. When Brown University added an 867 exchange years later, the two students who drew 867-5309 were still getting hang-ups and messages from strangers who half expected Jenny to pick up. A guy who plugged in that number in another town reported about thirty calls a day, from bar drunks, body shops, cheerleaders on the ride home, and collection agencies that were never going to get paid. The song had asked Jenny not to change her number. A whole lot of real people had no choice.

The band that carried the record into the world started as a San Francisco bar outfit in 1978. Tommy Heath had grown up in Philadelphia, Texas, and Montana, soaked up soul, surf, and even a little banjo-folkie country, then headed for San Francisco during the Summer of Love to be a hippie. The name came off his boyhood nickname and a college band he once had called Tommy and the Two-Tones. Columbia liked the handle and shortened it. Keller's own road in was pure rock and roll itinerant. He got kicked out of high school, moved to Vermont in 1972, worked as a carpenter, and played. In 1974 he drove across the country with a table saw and a guitar in the back of a pickup and landed in San Francisco. In 1977 he was sitting in with friends at a club on Upper Market Street, singing some of his own tunes, when a guy came up afterward and introduced himself. That was Tommy Heath. Heath liked the songs and asked Keller to join the band. Keller thought he came on a little strong, but he agreed to play a gig. Heath could hear what the songs were worth next to his voice, and Tommy Tutone was born. They started out billed as Tutone-Keller until the label talked them into the shorter name. Bassist Terry Nails rounded out the first lineup. They rehearsed constantly in a space in Marin owned by Marty Balin, a joint they called The Church, and they worked the same circuit that brushed up against Clover, the band that had held Huey Lewis and, as it happened, Alex Call.

The first album, cut with Nails and drummer Mickey Shine, dropped in 1980 and gave them a top-forty foot in the door with "Angel Say No," which peaked at number thirty-eight. They opened for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on the Damn the Torpedoes run, going from little rooms to stages like Red Rocks. Neither Heath nor Keller expected the bathroom-wall number to be the one that broke them. Keller brought Call's tape into rehearsal, the rhythm section locked onto it, and suddenly the joke had to be taken seriously. After Tommy Tutone 2, a third album called National Emotion failed to produce another hit, and the original partnership drifted. Keller eventually stopped performing in the mid-nineties and went on to run Philip Glass's publishing company, Dunvagen. Heath became a computer analyst and software engineer and settled in Portland. The name never quite went away. Heath has kept a version of the band on the road for years, cutting fresh singles and even a later pass at Jenny, and the old number still gets requested wherever a bar band knows three chords and a telephone.

If you want the camp straight from the source, the working home base is Tommy Tutone, where the 2024 pass at 8675309/Jenny sits right next to the tour notes. The official Instagram, under the handle that bills itself as the only Tommy Tutone, lives at therealtommytutone and leads with the same seven digits. The verified Facebook page is Tommy Tutone, and the fans keep a public room going at the Tommy Tutone group, where the Jenny number still gets passed around like a secret handshake. Spin it again, Zoo Freaks. Some records you dial. This one dials you back.