Post by valerie davenport on Sept 23, 2007 8:20:07 GMT -5
Frankie Valli Is Back in Season
By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
Published: September 23, 2007
FRANKIE VALLI sat amid the bustling lunch crowd at Patsy’s, the Midtown Italian restaurant he has patronized for more than 40 years, with the air of a man who knows that he is going to get exactly what he wants. He had performed the night before, but, wearing a white jacket over a dark shirt, he seemed refreshed, relaxed. Mr. Valli dined at Patsy’s with his friend and idol Frank Sinatra back in the ’60s. Much has changed since then, but this restaurant, like Hemingway’s clean, well-lighted place, has remained a bastion, in Mr. Valli’s view, of lasting values in a modern world that often seems rickety.
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Enlarge This Image
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Frankie Valli at his home in California. Forty-five years after his first hit record his star is rising again.
Multimedia
Song Excerpts Let it Be Me Spanish Harlem Take Good Care of My Baby:
Enlarge This Image
Bobby Bank/WireImage
Frankie Valli with the latest edition of the Four Seasons in concert this summer. The group performs about 70 shows a year.
A specially prepared bowl of minestrone was set before him by the chef. Mr. Valli let it cool for a moment, then tasted it. “Now this,” he said quietly, “is a great example of tender loving care.”
“This is a family operation,” he continued, “which means everybody from out front to the kitchen. These are all family recipes. This restaurant has been here forever.”
And so, it sometimes seems, has Mr. Valli. He first became a star in 1962, when his group, the Four Seasons, soared to No. 1 on the strength of a perfect pop song called “Sherry” and the wings of Mr. Valli’s stratospheric falsetto. And now, 45 years later, his star is rising again.
“Jersey Boys,” the Broadway musical based on the Four Seasons’ rise and fall, is a major success. Bruce Springsteen, the quintessential Jersey Boy, went to see it last month, and a photograph of him backstage with the cast ran in Rolling Stone. In England, where “Jersey Boys” will open next year, a blistering remix of the Four Seasons’ 1967 single “Beggin’ ” became a Top 40 hit. A career-spanning boxed set, “Jersey Beat: The Music of Frankie Valli & the 4 Seasons,” came out this year. Beginning in 2004 Mr. Valli had a recurring role as the stone-faced mob captain Rusty Millio in “The Sopranos.” And in a recent issue of Blender, Mr. Valli was described as “owning the 2000s.”
So however rickety the modern world may seem, it has somehow caught up with Mr. Valli. Against all conceivable odds this 73-year-old singer is now something he has never been before: hip.
To capitalize on Mr. Valli’s current stature, on Oct. 2 Universal Motown is releasing “Romancing the ’60s,” on which he sings love songs from the period when he attained his first great prominence. While the 13 songs Mr. Valli chose to interpret, from Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” to Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem,” span the entire decade, the album is really a tribute to the smartly produced, soulful pop that defined the ’60s before psychedelia, blues-rock and protest music began to dominate. The album’s models are recent collections by the likes of Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart, which recast songs familiar to older listeners and were rewarded with healthy sales. That it is Mr. Valli’s first album of new material in 15 years lends it a sense of occasion.
Mr. Valli is “a guy who can walk through walls now,” said Doug Morris, the chairman and chief executive of the Universal Music Group. “My dream is that this creates a franchise, where every year we put out another album of Frankie Valli’s interpretations of classic songs.”
THE desire to create a franchise with a singer who is already well into his 70s perhaps says as much about the precarious state of the music industry as it does about Mr. Valli’s commercial prospects. But older fans remain one of the few demographic groups buying CDs, rather than downloading music from the Internet. And no one who attends one of the riotously received performances of “Jersey Boys” — or one of the 70 or so shows that Mr. Valli still performs each year with a newly constituted Four Seasons — can deny that there is an audience for his music. (He is set to play four nights in November at the Frederick P. Rose Hall of Jazz at Lincoln Center.)
Mr. Valli is the latest in a series of grandfatherly figures to undergo revivals; his predecessors include the likes of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Hugh Hefner. And a certain irony imbues the reverential cult status now accorded the Four Seasons album “The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette,” an unlikely psychedelic experiment from 1967. In a YouTube culture measured in nanoseconds, audiences seem curiously fascinated by anyone who has lasted, particularly those who have done so on their own terms, as Mr. Valli has.
Still, without question, “Jersey Boys” is driving the renewed interest in Mr. Valli. The show, which is more of a no-holds-barred band biography than a jukebox musical, won four Tony Awards, including best musical, and it has grossed more than $100 million since it opened less than two years ago. Performances in other cities have generated an additional $50 million.
“I’m elated,” Mr. Valli said. “It’s over the top for me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m dreaming. It really has been wonderful.”
Dressed in black pants and a round-collared gray shirt, Mr. Valli sat on a couch in his suite at the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, a few hours before closing a three-night stand there. He’s short — his size is a running joke in “Jersey Boys” — but his presence, thoughtful and intense, makes him seem larger. Workout clothes were drying on a handrail that ran inside the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, and the phones in his room rang constantly. Mr. Valli lives near Los Angeles, so performing in his home state means that family members, friends and admirers all want tickets and a chance to visit. Even Scott Weiland, the bad-boy lead singer of the hard-rock band Velvet Revolver, which was also playing at the Borgata, stopped backstage to pay his respects.
Born Francis Castelluccio in 1934 and raised in Newark, Mr. Valli comes from a working-class background. As “Jersey Boys” depicts, organized crime figures were ever present in the neighborhoods, bars and clubs where he and the rest of the classic lineup of the Four Seasons — Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi — performed.
Skip to next paragraph
Courtesy of the Four Seasons
Frankie Valli, second from left, with the genuine article in the early ’60s.
Multimedia
Song Excerpts Let it Be Me Spanish Harlem Take Good Care of My Baby:
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
The Four Seasons as recreated in the Tony-winning musical “Jersey Boys.”
“We worked in every saloon in New Jersey, and in most cases the guys who owned those places were mobbed up,” Mr. Valli said. “We were used to it. We got to know everybody, and they liked us. I was never owned by the mob, or part of the mob. If I didn’t have any success, and I wanted to go that route, I certainly could have.
“But success, what was it? A kid comes out of high school. Nobody’s sending me to college. Whatever I wanted to do, I had to take care of it on my own. Who knows what would have happened?”
What did happen was that “Sherry” launched a daunting string of hits — “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Dawn,” “Rag Doll” and dozens of others — that made the Four Seasons one of the biggest groups of the ’60s. Their impeccable harmonies derived from the doo-wop era, but Mr. Valli’s falsetto was a force of nature that defied genre and gave the foursome an immediately identifiable sound.
In his room at the Borgata, Mr. Valli characteristically played down his singing. “I never gave it a lot of thought,” he said. “People would say, ‘He’s got a three- or four-octave range,’ and I had no idea what that even meant. Somebody would say, ‘Hit this note,’ and I’d just do it.”
But there is something far greater than technical ability in Mr. Valli’s extraordinary voice. “To sing that high and that strong is pretty much unique,” explained Steven Van Zandt, a fellow New Jerseyan who plays guitar with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and starred as Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano’s consigliere, in “The Sopranos.” “But his regular voice is so amazing. I’d love it when he’d break out of the falsetto, like at the end of the chorus in ‘Walk Like a Man.’ When he’d hit” — he sang — “ ‘and walk like a man, my son.’ Whoa! Goose bumps. A fantastic, otherworldly voice.”
Speaking of his own ambitions as a signer, Mr. Valli said: “It’s very important to be believable. Nobody can teach you the soulful parts, the heartful parts, of what singing is about. It’s like putting your signature on the song. I’ve always tried to do that.”
BOB GAUDIO, one of the founding members of the Four Seasons and co-writer of nearly all the group’s hits, sat sipping a glass of wine and eating a vegetable panini in a hotel lounge after a recent performance of “Jersey Boys” in New York.
Mr. Gaudio, who produced “Romancing the ’60s,” and Mr. Valli have been musical collaborators and business partners for well over four decades on the strength of a handshake — a “Jersey contract,” as the musical puts it. They own the masters of all the Four Seasons’ music, as well as Mr. Valli’s solo material, and they have retained their publishing rights, rarities for musicians of their era. They split everything 50-50.
At the performance of “Jersey Boys” and afterward, Mr. Gaudio went completely unrecognized, which is fine with him. Never comfortable in the spotlight, he quit performing in the early ’70s to concentrate on songwriting and production.
“Frankie has been put in an icon status by this show, and that’s a just reward for him,” Mr. Gaudio said. “Two, three, four hits — yeah, whatever. But after 20, 30, 40, you’ve got to say hey, wait a minute. How many people have accomplished what he’s accomplished as a vocalist?”
The Four Seasons are among the few American groups to survive the British Invasion in the 1960s, and Mr. Valli has hit the charts at least once in every decade since then. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. But once musical tastes changed after the Beatles, the Four Seasons never again seemed significant.
Part of the reason for that is cultural. For example, as the spectacular use of Mr. Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” in the barroom scene of the Michael Cimino film “The Deer Hunter” makes clear, fans of the Four Seasons were far more likely to fight in the Vietnam War than to protest it. For a long time anyone hoping to seem cool could scarcely do worse that proclaim devotion to the Four Seasons.
None of which fazes Mr. Valli at all. Even in the leanest times there was always as much work available for him as a live performer as he cared to do. Anyway, he was “never one of those guys who wanted to work 300 nights a year.” As for whether or not “Romancing the ’60s” becomes a hit, Mr. Valli shrugs in that offhand Italian way that expresses supreme indifference. “You go in and do the best you can,” he said. “How many hits do you need?”
Mr. Valli refused dessert at Patsy’s, but a plate of sweets was brought out for him anyway. He picked up a small cookie, dipped it beneath the foam of his decaf cappuccino and took a bite. His face softened with pleasure.
“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said. “With all the ups and downs, all the disappointments, all the accolades that come with success, I wouldn’t change it for anything. To get out onstage and watch people get happy and appreciate what you’re doing? That’s like being touched by God to do something very special. It’s really nice.”
By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
Published: September 23, 2007
FRANKIE VALLI sat amid the bustling lunch crowd at Patsy’s, the Midtown Italian restaurant he has patronized for more than 40 years, with the air of a man who knows that he is going to get exactly what he wants. He had performed the night before, but, wearing a white jacket over a dark shirt, he seemed refreshed, relaxed. Mr. Valli dined at Patsy’s with his friend and idol Frank Sinatra back in the ’60s. Much has changed since then, but this restaurant, like Hemingway’s clean, well-lighted place, has remained a bastion, in Mr. Valli’s view, of lasting values in a modern world that often seems rickety.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Frankie Valli at his home in California. Forty-five years after his first hit record his star is rising again.
Multimedia
Song Excerpts Let it Be Me Spanish Harlem Take Good Care of My Baby:
Enlarge This Image
Bobby Bank/WireImage
Frankie Valli with the latest edition of the Four Seasons in concert this summer. The group performs about 70 shows a year.
A specially prepared bowl of minestrone was set before him by the chef. Mr. Valli let it cool for a moment, then tasted it. “Now this,” he said quietly, “is a great example of tender loving care.”
“This is a family operation,” he continued, “which means everybody from out front to the kitchen. These are all family recipes. This restaurant has been here forever.”
And so, it sometimes seems, has Mr. Valli. He first became a star in 1962, when his group, the Four Seasons, soared to No. 1 on the strength of a perfect pop song called “Sherry” and the wings of Mr. Valli’s stratospheric falsetto. And now, 45 years later, his star is rising again.
“Jersey Boys,” the Broadway musical based on the Four Seasons’ rise and fall, is a major success. Bruce Springsteen, the quintessential Jersey Boy, went to see it last month, and a photograph of him backstage with the cast ran in Rolling Stone. In England, where “Jersey Boys” will open next year, a blistering remix of the Four Seasons’ 1967 single “Beggin’ ” became a Top 40 hit. A career-spanning boxed set, “Jersey Beat: The Music of Frankie Valli & the 4 Seasons,” came out this year. Beginning in 2004 Mr. Valli had a recurring role as the stone-faced mob captain Rusty Millio in “The Sopranos.” And in a recent issue of Blender, Mr. Valli was described as “owning the 2000s.”
So however rickety the modern world may seem, it has somehow caught up with Mr. Valli. Against all conceivable odds this 73-year-old singer is now something he has never been before: hip.
To capitalize on Mr. Valli’s current stature, on Oct. 2 Universal Motown is releasing “Romancing the ’60s,” on which he sings love songs from the period when he attained his first great prominence. While the 13 songs Mr. Valli chose to interpret, from Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” to Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem,” span the entire decade, the album is really a tribute to the smartly produced, soulful pop that defined the ’60s before psychedelia, blues-rock and protest music began to dominate. The album’s models are recent collections by the likes of Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart, which recast songs familiar to older listeners and were rewarded with healthy sales. That it is Mr. Valli’s first album of new material in 15 years lends it a sense of occasion.
Mr. Valli is “a guy who can walk through walls now,” said Doug Morris, the chairman and chief executive of the Universal Music Group. “My dream is that this creates a franchise, where every year we put out another album of Frankie Valli’s interpretations of classic songs.”
THE desire to create a franchise with a singer who is already well into his 70s perhaps says as much about the precarious state of the music industry as it does about Mr. Valli’s commercial prospects. But older fans remain one of the few demographic groups buying CDs, rather than downloading music from the Internet. And no one who attends one of the riotously received performances of “Jersey Boys” — or one of the 70 or so shows that Mr. Valli still performs each year with a newly constituted Four Seasons — can deny that there is an audience for his music. (He is set to play four nights in November at the Frederick P. Rose Hall of Jazz at Lincoln Center.)
Mr. Valli is the latest in a series of grandfatherly figures to undergo revivals; his predecessors include the likes of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Hugh Hefner. And a certain irony imbues the reverential cult status now accorded the Four Seasons album “The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette,” an unlikely psychedelic experiment from 1967. In a YouTube culture measured in nanoseconds, audiences seem curiously fascinated by anyone who has lasted, particularly those who have done so on their own terms, as Mr. Valli has.
Still, without question, “Jersey Boys” is driving the renewed interest in Mr. Valli. The show, which is more of a no-holds-barred band biography than a jukebox musical, won four Tony Awards, including best musical, and it has grossed more than $100 million since it opened less than two years ago. Performances in other cities have generated an additional $50 million.
“I’m elated,” Mr. Valli said. “It’s over the top for me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m dreaming. It really has been wonderful.”
Dressed in black pants and a round-collared gray shirt, Mr. Valli sat on a couch in his suite at the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, a few hours before closing a three-night stand there. He’s short — his size is a running joke in “Jersey Boys” — but his presence, thoughtful and intense, makes him seem larger. Workout clothes were drying on a handrail that ran inside the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, and the phones in his room rang constantly. Mr. Valli lives near Los Angeles, so performing in his home state means that family members, friends and admirers all want tickets and a chance to visit. Even Scott Weiland, the bad-boy lead singer of the hard-rock band Velvet Revolver, which was also playing at the Borgata, stopped backstage to pay his respects.
Born Francis Castelluccio in 1934 and raised in Newark, Mr. Valli comes from a working-class background. As “Jersey Boys” depicts, organized crime figures were ever present in the neighborhoods, bars and clubs where he and the rest of the classic lineup of the Four Seasons — Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi — performed.
Skip to next paragraph
Courtesy of the Four Seasons
Frankie Valli, second from left, with the genuine article in the early ’60s.
Multimedia
Song Excerpts Let it Be Me Spanish Harlem Take Good Care of My Baby:
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
The Four Seasons as recreated in the Tony-winning musical “Jersey Boys.”
“We worked in every saloon in New Jersey, and in most cases the guys who owned those places were mobbed up,” Mr. Valli said. “We were used to it. We got to know everybody, and they liked us. I was never owned by the mob, or part of the mob. If I didn’t have any success, and I wanted to go that route, I certainly could have.
“But success, what was it? A kid comes out of high school. Nobody’s sending me to college. Whatever I wanted to do, I had to take care of it on my own. Who knows what would have happened?”
What did happen was that “Sherry” launched a daunting string of hits — “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Dawn,” “Rag Doll” and dozens of others — that made the Four Seasons one of the biggest groups of the ’60s. Their impeccable harmonies derived from the doo-wop era, but Mr. Valli’s falsetto was a force of nature that defied genre and gave the foursome an immediately identifiable sound.
In his room at the Borgata, Mr. Valli characteristically played down his singing. “I never gave it a lot of thought,” he said. “People would say, ‘He’s got a three- or four-octave range,’ and I had no idea what that even meant. Somebody would say, ‘Hit this note,’ and I’d just do it.”
But there is something far greater than technical ability in Mr. Valli’s extraordinary voice. “To sing that high and that strong is pretty much unique,” explained Steven Van Zandt, a fellow New Jerseyan who plays guitar with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and starred as Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano’s consigliere, in “The Sopranos.” “But his regular voice is so amazing. I’d love it when he’d break out of the falsetto, like at the end of the chorus in ‘Walk Like a Man.’ When he’d hit” — he sang — “ ‘and walk like a man, my son.’ Whoa! Goose bumps. A fantastic, otherworldly voice.”
Speaking of his own ambitions as a signer, Mr. Valli said: “It’s very important to be believable. Nobody can teach you the soulful parts, the heartful parts, of what singing is about. It’s like putting your signature on the song. I’ve always tried to do that.”
BOB GAUDIO, one of the founding members of the Four Seasons and co-writer of nearly all the group’s hits, sat sipping a glass of wine and eating a vegetable panini in a hotel lounge after a recent performance of “Jersey Boys” in New York.
Mr. Gaudio, who produced “Romancing the ’60s,” and Mr. Valli have been musical collaborators and business partners for well over four decades on the strength of a handshake — a “Jersey contract,” as the musical puts it. They own the masters of all the Four Seasons’ music, as well as Mr. Valli’s solo material, and they have retained their publishing rights, rarities for musicians of their era. They split everything 50-50.
At the performance of “Jersey Boys” and afterward, Mr. Gaudio went completely unrecognized, which is fine with him. Never comfortable in the spotlight, he quit performing in the early ’70s to concentrate on songwriting and production.
“Frankie has been put in an icon status by this show, and that’s a just reward for him,” Mr. Gaudio said. “Two, three, four hits — yeah, whatever. But after 20, 30, 40, you’ve got to say hey, wait a minute. How many people have accomplished what he’s accomplished as a vocalist?”
The Four Seasons are among the few American groups to survive the British Invasion in the 1960s, and Mr. Valli has hit the charts at least once in every decade since then. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. But once musical tastes changed after the Beatles, the Four Seasons never again seemed significant.
Part of the reason for that is cultural. For example, as the spectacular use of Mr. Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” in the barroom scene of the Michael Cimino film “The Deer Hunter” makes clear, fans of the Four Seasons were far more likely to fight in the Vietnam War than to protest it. For a long time anyone hoping to seem cool could scarcely do worse that proclaim devotion to the Four Seasons.
None of which fazes Mr. Valli at all. Even in the leanest times there was always as much work available for him as a live performer as he cared to do. Anyway, he was “never one of those guys who wanted to work 300 nights a year.” As for whether or not “Romancing the ’60s” becomes a hit, Mr. Valli shrugs in that offhand Italian way that expresses supreme indifference. “You go in and do the best you can,” he said. “How many hits do you need?”
Mr. Valli refused dessert at Patsy’s, but a plate of sweets was brought out for him anyway. He picked up a small cookie, dipped it beneath the foam of his decaf cappuccino and took a bite. His face softened with pleasure.
“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said. “With all the ups and downs, all the disappointments, all the accolades that come with success, I wouldn’t change it for anything. To get out onstage and watch people get happy and appreciate what you’re doing? That’s like being touched by God to do something very special. It’s really nice.”
