[Edits 1/18/14.]
The remarks here on Jersey
Boys were originally attached to another entry, but I thought I would toss them
out here, because of their potential contribution to serious debates of moment.
(Joking? A bit. But how about this: a line from a TV commercial for the Jersey Boys show talks about how, obviously
in a place like Jersey, to get out of the neighborhood, you either went into
the Army, “mobbed up” [snort], or “became a star”—said with slight
NYC-urban-area accent. Some people outside New Jersey, who are taking in the
George Washington Bridge scandal, might wonder what else some locals might
aspire to do….)
The TV commercials for the staged Jersey Boys—about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—reminds
me of something whenever I see it. Now, today, people who were “aware in an
adult enough way” during the 1970s may vary in their memory of manners and little
cultural artifacts from those times. And today’s young people (born after 1980
or so) might not care about these.
But in the developing youth culture of that time—and the air
of debauchery, rudeness, “earthly delights,” and so on that characterized much
of ’70s pop culture (at least some of
its premises)—certain manners were current some
years, and not others; changes even
in slang terms could change so readily year by year. And popular music “of the
moment” had a certain flavor, varying with year, decade, etc.
It was such a time of “hewing to the current concrete” that
if, today, you really want to depict the ’70s, you have to be careful you’re
not anachronistic…but of course, various mountings and production of popular
art have been erring on what happened what decade, and what year, anyway. And
for many audience members, this might not matter.
One can get kind of fanatical with these quibbles. For
instance, and I don’t think this is too crazy, whenever I see Apocalypse Now, a film I like quite a
bit, I take note of how some of the slang that Clean (played by Laurence
Fishburne) and others use was current in 1976, but not in 1970, which is about
when the movie is set (references to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the reference
to the Manson Family murders of 1969 all help root this timing).
For instance, someone (Chef) says to Clean, “Get down,
bubba!”—but “get down” was very much a disco-era phrase, starting around 1976,
and not used in 1970. In one of the scenes added to the 2001 edition of the
film, there is a scene (when the PBR crew is leaving the USO-stage location)
where Clean is telling a long anecdote (and maybe Fishburne was allowed by
director Francis Ford Coppola to improvise here a bit), and Clean says, in a rather
extraneous phrase, “Don’t do it like that!” This was also a mid-’70s phrase,
not seen during the height of the Vietnam War (say, around 1970).
To the point at hand:
The Four Seasons songs “Who Loves You” (1975) and “December
1963 (Oh, What a Night)” (1976) were very much ’70s songs, with a sort of
vaguely disco-oriented flavor to the former (with its bass and
drumming styles) and a certain obvious risque element in the lyrics of the latter (along with some disco touches, such as wah-wah guitar in an instrumental transition [did a correction; got the songs mixed up]).
And strangely, the lineup of the Four Seasons for these songs was not that of
the 1960s, with Frankie Valli’s falsetto voice front and center. In fact, I
remember when the songs were out, I was surprised to hear they were from that
group, because they did not have the typical, 1960s Four Seasons sound (which
sounded distinctly old-fashioned by 1976).
In fact, on “Oh, What a Night,” Valli’s voice comes in only
on the middle eight (or whatever transitional section that is) in a somewhat
deepened version of his voice. The bulk of the song is sung by someone else,
who sounds atypical of the band in its 1960s heyday.
But to judge from the TV commercial, the Broadway version of
Jersey Boys has the 1960s-like
lineup—looking like identically dressed dweebs, dancing in sync (and rather
like robots), and with Valli’s falsetto crowning the sound—doing those two
1970s songs as if they were hits in about 1963. Not so.
Maybe you don’t care.
