Eastwood’s adaptation of the popular stage show, a review of an old
group’s hits and story, hits home better than a thumbnail sketch of the idea
might have seemed
One of the
top-selling pop groups of the later twentieth century had career help from the
Mafia in starting out, but its sound remains
distinct and popular
Seventh in a series: The
Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture
of 2011–now
Subsections below:
A “turgid” brief
history shows how the group was mainly a singles band, with esthetics shaped by
“mono” sound
The group’s success
and distinction
The development of
rock music left the Four Seasons behind
The Mafia connection,
and the constellation of major players sets up the story
The players
The story, acting,
tone (a foretaste of Part 2)…
To come in Part 2 (rough sketch of subheads/themes): (1) The mob connection: a big deal? (I’m not out to “Sinatra” Frankie
Valli); (2) Story problems: in what order did certain things happen?; (3) The
bane of pop (a fun observation): stupidity in how certain listeners understand
(or not) lyrics
Groucho Marx once said, from what I read, that an audience
member about to see his and his brothers’ stage show asked him, “Will this show
be sad or high-kickin’?” Groucho said many years later than was one of the best
criteria to judge a show by.
When I heard in about early 2014 that late-life-productive
Clint Eastwood was directing a film
version of Jersey Boys, the Broadway presentation of the story of Frankie Valli
and the Four Seasons, I kind of thought a bit skeptically, “Hmm, let’s see how this ends up.” (An
earlier blog entry I did on the stage form of Jersey Boys is here.) It
turns out the film is more high-kicking than otherwise, but it does have some
problems.
(Interestingly, on the issue of whether pop music is
ephemeral, or do some examples of it last for many years, there is this: On the
morning of September 28, when I was in the midst—among other activities—of
working on this entry, including [while on my feet] planning what I hadn’t
already written for it, I heard the Four Seasons’ “Who Loves You” in a
supermarket. And I heard most of that song, including [muffled by ambient
noise] the instrumental break. It’s amazing it’s been almost exactly 40 years
since that song was a hit on AM radio. And I remember pretty clearly when it
was out [I was in eighth grade]. But when I heard it this day, I concluded why
the Four Seasons stopped releasing decided hits after 1976: the age for
doo-wop, which they are an example of—and they really were primarily a band of
voices, not of instrumental fanciness—was over by 1976. Their sound was more of
a “retro” one. And “Who Loves You” tried to update their harmonizing-vocals
sound for a new age, and didn’t really sound like their early hits.)
I had wanted to view the film’s DVD when it came out late
last year, and never got around to it. Lately, unable to borrow another DVD that
I preferred to look at (to serve a set of writing “irons on the fire” that I’m
more warmed up to), I suddenly picked up the Jersey Boys DVD, as a sort of time-passer.
The film winds you through a lot of preliminary story
before, about 35 minutes through, the Four Seasons’ singing sound starts to
gel, and the familiar hits start being marched out. After viewing the whole
film once, a song or two was enough in my head, with memories triggered of what
I knew of the group years ago, that I was apt to write a blog entry. We’ll see
if I do a rough job here; I intend to do a Part 2/follow-up.
A “turgid” brief
history shows how the group was mainly a singles band, with esthetics shaped by
“mono” sound
To understand the Four Seasons’ place in pop-music history,
it helps to understand how American popular music developed from the late 1950s
to the mid-1970s. This was arguably the period of richest ferment for this
music, as it was distributed by electronic means and tended to cater to young,
often teenage, audiences. Some book whose title I can’t recall sees the
greatest period of modern U.S.
pop to have been from about 1947 (?) to 1977. About in the middle of this
period was the “reign” of The Beatles, from 1962 to 1970.
By the mid-1950s, certainly by the late ’50s, the genre of
“rock ’n’ roll” had developed enough that it was a marketing tool (in days when
marketing wasn’t yet the “science” it is now) in terms of a music niche that
was starting to catch on fire with American youth, which radio stations and
record-manufacturing companies had to heed. Very briefly, rock music developed
as a hybrid of Black music—especially blues, gospel, and a general category you
could call “R & B” (rhythm and blues), which includes the (later) area of
“soul”—and the white genre of country music, which was a little more uniform in
style (though subcategories could include the likes of bluegrass), with its
recording epicenters in Nashville, Memphis, and elsewhere.
Earlier in the century (say, from about 1925 to about 1955),
popular music ranged from the more sophisticated, urban-oriented stuff of Cole
Porter to the more “jazz-singer” type material (aimed at white audiences) that
was popularized by Frank Sinatra, with Black music being an undercurrent
limited to mainly Black artists (blues and jazz musicians) and their audiences
and venues. (It is interesting to note that the Four Seasons’ “doo-wop” style
was associated in no small part with Black artists, and the group’s background
as individuals as well as for their own take on the music was urban—in their
case, the New Jersey variety; white country music had very little to do with
their style of vocals-centered music. But they still are usually slotted into
the rock ’n’ roll category more than anything else.)
By the early 1960s, rock ’n’ roll—whose first “mega-star”
was Elvis Presley, whose recording history started in a country-music
milieu—was a sort of fusion of Black and white “folk”-and-“underground” kinds
of music, with the genre becoming valued by young audiences as a way to express
their youthful jubilance, causes for concern (trying to gain love, expressing
sadness over loss of love, etc.), and (less directly) a sort of alienation from
larger technological culture (then defined by the white-collar world and the
military-industrial complex, let’s say). Rock music was a way of thumbing the
nose at “the Establishment” and yet providing a space for life-affirming common
ground—whites and Blacks could, in a sense, borrow from each other’s styles,
and to that extent assert a common thread in terms of what pop music should
proclaim. (The fact that there was something inherently political about
interest in rock music in the 1960s and ’70s is a theme I could say a lot on;
but suffice it to say here that David Chase, creator of the TV show The Sopranos, remarked, apropos of a
film he directed about the pop-music world a few years ago, about how
allegiance to certain rock groups in the 1960s was partly a matter of a sort of
[noisily callow] political allegiance, which I can pretty much vouch for based
on my own experience of this phenomenon from the later 1970s.)
The main form of media by which such pop music was transiently
broadcast was radio, and the main way it was sold—kids didn’t so much buy sheet
music for playing on the piano, as was more popular among older music fans—was
via recordings, usually on vinyl disks (i.e., records, including 45 r.p.m.
records for singles, and 33 1/3 r.p.m. “long-playing” [LP] records for
collections of songs called albums). Many of us age 65 and younger are probably
well familiarized with this.
From, let’s say, 1960 to about 1968 or ’69, as a matter of
what simply the technology was—what broadcasting companies were willing and
able to do, or which consumers owned what, etc.—AM radio was the main route for broadcasting, and singles
happened to be the favored way of buying music. These technical underpinnings
were in place in the 1950s, too, but the arguable high point of these means’
being exploited (with the best work promulgated) was in the early-to-mid 1960s.
(Records, of course, existed in other forms earlier, such as in 78 r.p.m. form
and [more-brittle] shellac disks, but I’m addressing the “world” in which post-1954 rock music flourished.)
As it happened, because of the dominance of AM radio for
much of the 1960s, monaural or “mono” sound was the predominant mode—as opposed
to stereo, where the sound is divided between two channels (left and right),
and hence you could have a richer presentation of sound, including “separation”
of instruments, voices, etc.
Sidebar: The way pop was piped to
you in the old days: If you weren’t alive and growing up in the early
1970s (or 1960s, for those older than I), you might not appreciate how AM radio
gave a certain stirring, yet presumed-clarion-call, semi-cheesy quality to pop
music (which people’s privatized ways of taking in music today, with the likes
of ear buds from an iPod, have eliminated): many hits of the time I first heard
on the radio on the school bus, via AM radio, which had its high-rotation way
of repeating the same songs through the day; and WABC, the big AM station of
the day in the New York metro area, added reverb to all the music it played, so
that it was later something of a shock to hear some long-memorized hits of the
1970s in their original form from a CD or such, without the reverb, and sounding much better for that.
As a measure of how the marketing changed so that stereo
started to predominate, The Beatles’ album The
Beatles (1968; a.k.a. “The White Album”) was the last of their albums mastered
in both mono and stereo versions, to suit the market; 1967-68 was about when
favorite groups’ records started being made more often with the design of sound
oriented to stereo rather than mono, and by the 1970s, basically no rock
artists released mono albums.
To sum, in the early 1960s, you had:
(1) AM radio as a dominant broadcasting force (and all the
stories of how record-producing companies might have manipulated [via “payola,”
which became a big scandal, or otherwise] how new releases got played to spur
audience interest, which is a story touched on very briefly in Jersey Boys, which I prefer not to delve
into here);
(2) mono sound as the way most rock fans got and enjoyed
their music, especially if they focused more on singles than on albums; and, as
another area I can’t delve into much here
(3) how the music-producing business was a sort of factory
opting, as many industries do, to shape product that was suited to the currently
hot market. This business was such as represented in the Brill
Building , the famous New York location (also depicted in Jersey Boys) that housed many
pop-music-producing luminaries and molded many recording stars. (Meanwhile,
some songwriters like Carole King and
producers like Don Kirshner, with whom
King worked, were located not in the Brill Building itself, but nearby in the
city, yet they still added something of the same concerted manufacturing ethos
to the overall type of industry that popular songwriting was then.)
In line with the factor of molding stars, producing concerns
that focused on a song’s sound weren’t just defined by something distinct and
appealing about singers’ voices, but by how the musical instruments were arrayed
on the recording, too. In this context, you had the ascendancy of the likes of
music producer Phil Spector, who shaped
many bands (not least, “girl groups”). You also had, working on the West Coast,
Brian Wilson, who was a sort of disciple
of Spector; Wilson worked with his own band (including two of his brothers) of
which he was a member, The Beach Boys. Wilson
was basically the producer of that band, especially in its later 1960s albums.
(Famously, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper
album was, to an extent, an attempt to equal the producing quality of Wilson ’s masterpiece, the
Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album.) The
resulting music could be dense, rich, and catchy, all tailored to meet our
tastes via monaural sound and AM radio’s rather simplifying way of presenting
music.
All this semi-academic heavy-breathing is by way of saying
how the Four Seasons fit into pop-music history: they brought a sort of doo-wop
vocal sound, which was associated mainly with Black singing in the late 1950s,
and which the band’s members had (as aspiring artists) honed in their lives “on
New Jersey streets”—and this was eventually combined with rich production
(recording of instruments in line with the parameters noted above). Their first
hit was “Sherry” (1962), before The Beatles’ first singles even landed in the
U.S., and the Four Seasons had, as the film presents it, three number 1 singles
in a row: these included, after “Sherry” as the first, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”
and “Walk Like a Man.”
The group’s success
and distinction
These songs—indeed, the group’s signature sound—are so
distinct and infectious that they give a good example of what is meant by
pop-music “hooks” being key to having hit singles: for instance, they linger
ringingly in your mind after you’ve heard them for the first time in a long
while. The song that seemed to haunt me the most after I first watched the film
was “Rag Doll” (1964), which has enough of a poignant theme lyrically and is
stately enough in its rich production that it almost sounds like something that
could have come off the Beach Boys’ later Pet
Sounds album. “Rag Doll” seems, actually, to have a sad (or half-sad) theme
buried inside a cheerful-ish sound, and this seems fitting, in that the Four
Seasons’ story, while accented by colorful incident and rather invigorating for
delivering a sort of rags-to-riches tale, also strikes me as having a sad
overlying tinge, which I’ll get back to.
(The crossbreeding of contrasting tones can be seen in
numerous ways in the Four Seasons’ music and the film’s [and stage show’s]
story. I will look in Part 2 at the sadness aspect of the story, which seems
not readily apparent when people take in the story of a successful band with
cheerful-vocal music. One aspect that stands out for me is that the song “December
1963 (Oh, What a Night)”—which both the film and commercials for the stage show
have trotted out as to suggest “Oh what a night you’ll have” of entertainment
fun—actually has a jaunty, deceptively light tone, but the story the semi-seamy
lyrics tell is of a 1976-germane sex story. I remember when I was 14 and
hearing this song—and of course, I was a callow, pre-puberty kid at the time—it
seemed surprisingly [or disconcertingly, to silly me] sex-oriented for a bouncy
hit you routinely heard on the school bus radio. Even the less pointedly risque
song “Who Loves You” has very streetwise lyrics of the time: “Who loves you,
pretty baby? / … Who’s gonna love you, momma?”—all very ’70s, no?)
The Four Seasons sold over 100 million records in its career,
according to The Rolling Stone
Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (hereafter, RSE), third edition (New
York : Rolling Stone Press, 2001), p. 346. This has to
be counted over the decades since the group’s first hits, because no one, not
even The Beatles, sold a total of 100 million records in the 1960s. (As one
measure, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper,
which was considered a monster hit of the time, sold only about—if I recall
what I read—two or three million copies in its first year or so of release.) (RSE adds that the Four Seasons’ record
of sales “mak[es] them the most long-lived and successful white doo-wop group”
[p. 346].)
The Four Seasons’ doo-wop sound could be called, in
retrospect, one that appealed to “teeny-boppers”—somewhat as did (without the
specific doo-wop quality) the early hits of The Beatles’ (and those of other
circa-1964 “British invasion” groups’). And you don’t have to have been a music
follower during the 1960s to know this sound. I was too young in the early ’60s
to be aware of the Four Seasons, but by 1975, when the group, unlikely in the
overall scheme of things, suddenly had two new hits—“Who Loves You” and
“December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)”—I knew these sounded different from the
early-’60s form of the group, which had been so recognizable by Frankie Valli’s
falsetto amid the harmonies. And I knew as
a mid-teen in late 1975 that the earlier Four Seasons sound was old-fashioned
by the “wised-up” mid-1970s.
One hint of the type of influence the Four Seasons had in
the early 1960s, which of course may be suggested by some observers with more
“creative retrospect” than actual reflection of the history (and which in The
Beatles’ case could have meant little in terms of what they went on to accomplish) is this: Ian MacDonald, in his Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records
and the Sixties (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), notes regarding
The Beatles’ song “From Me to You” a possible inspirational source for the
falsetto in the second phrase of each verse (“delivered by [John] Lennon with a
rasping upward slide into falsetto, harmoni[z]ed by his partner [Paul
McCartney] a pleading third below”): “The New York [sic] quartet The Four Seasons, then climbing the UK charts with
‘Big Girls Don’t Cry,’ employed similar falsetto and almost certainly
influenced The Beatles in this respect” (p. 59). He footnotes this remark with
“In October 1964, Vee Jay [the not-red-label record company that the Four
Seasons had signed to] wrung the last drops out of their licensed Beatles
material by combining them with a side of songs by The Four Seasons in a hybrid
album entitled The Beatles vs. The Four
Seasons.” If this sounds like an amazingly cheesy thing to have done with
both groups, it was, business-wise, a sign of those times. Actually, among my
books on The Beatles, I thought I recalled there was a picture of the cover of
this album, or a promotional item for it, but I couldn’t find it—but
MacDonald’s footnote about the album suffices here. (End note)
The development of
rock music left the Four Seasons behind
The old-fashioned quality of the Four Season’s sound brings
up another point. The group’s heyday was from 1962 to about 1968. This was also
the heyday of AM radio (though WABC was still a big deal well into the 1970s)
and of the single and mono sound as the main modes for recorded pop music. By
the very late 1960s, stereo, and the focus on albums as the way rock fans
preferred their music (though groups like the Beach Boys and The Beatles had
been moving albums [more or less valued
as such] since the early or mid ’60s), were starting to leave the Four Seasons
behind. The Beatles also exemplify the change in rock music’s “favored form” in
their career, which also explains why The Beatles have remained popular ever
since their breakup.
The Beatles grew during their career; and they showed—with Sgt. Pepper (1967), however mixed various
people’s views are today about it—that the album
can be the unit in which fans start to prefer their favorite group’s music. As
well, as they aged, The Beatles included more adult themes in their lyrics:
loneliness, workaday concerns, personal stirrings about religious (or
quasi-religious) issues (the Beach Boys touched a bit on this in Pet Sounds, too, and started to head
further into it with the aborted Smile
album, which didn’t get fully finished, and that by Brian Wilson, until decades
later). (I’m leaving out discussion of the influence of Bob Dylan, who remains,
for Baby Boomers, what seems a sort of patron saint of not just popular music
but the whole self-expressive ethos of their generation, but I didn’t count on
tracking his more refined kind of influence here. Anyway, The Beatles and the
Beach Boys, by virtue of their popularity, were more what defined popular music
in terms of the sensation of what was going on, not so much what the
intelligentsia valued in the 1960s.)
The Beatles’ growth as individual songwriters in their last
few studio albums, as well as the style of musical production’s foreshadowing
the typical music-producing styles of the 1970s, effectively made them a bridge
between the early ’60s and the 1970s in terms of the form pop music would take
as the music, its fans, and technology matured. They even were the first group
to show it could still have a strong, long-lasting fan base even after they
disbanded as a functioning group. This was arguably true for the Four Seasons,
too (though how they have been valued
has been different than the case for The Beatles).
Then, as the British group The Rolling Stones produced their
four best albums—from Beggars Banquet
(1968) to Exile on Main St. (1972),
and Led Zeppelin came along in late 1968 and early 1969, who built a career almost
entirely devoid of hit singles but who were still a monster success in the
1970s—and this just gives two of many measures of how rock music changed
post-1968—the days of any pop group that focused on catchy mono singles, mostly
about teeny-bopper-type love issues, and basically did no full album that is
noteworthy as such, had to be over. This was basically true for the Four
Seasons as a four-voice group by about 1968.
(Another measure of where the Four Seasons stood is that
their distributing record companies were never top-flight places—I mean,
Capitol served The Beatles in the U.S. , and Capitol also distributed
the likes of Sinatra. Vee Jay, an admittedly small-scale firm, distributed the
Four Seasons at first, to about the end of 1964; then from 1965 the group
recorded for Philips. They signed with Mowest, a subsidiary of Motown, in 1971,
when Valli and Bob Gaudi, on whom more below, were the only remaining members
of the original group. Today, the Rolling
Stone Album Guide, revised edition (Simon & Schuster, 2004) lists the
collected editions of the group’s work, some of which the guide rates quite
highly [p. 308], as distributed by Rhino, which is a sort of
oldies-distributor.)
But we also know that Frankie Valli, the lead singer of the
group—and a nice enough tenor voice when he doesn’t do the falsetto—had his own
hit records, including in 1967 and 1974-75, before the group—in a somewhat
different lineup—had the unlikely hits in 1975-76. Then, when U.S. pop music
was essentially defined by the alternatives of big-English-group rock (e.g.,
Led Zeppelin), disco, nascent punk music, and country rock (Lynyrd Skynyrd, the
Outlaws, the Marshall Tucker Band, and many others)—which all show the
fragmentation as well as sophistication-within-genres of the music—the Four
Seasons were done, at least as a group producing new material of any note.
(Today, some critics might say that the 1970s exemplified
the developed self-importance, and self-indulgence regarding some audience
segments, of rock and pop music, while the Four Seasons represented a more
innocent time, which may be a central factor of their appeal through today.)
Valli, as the film goes to pains to relate, was talented
enough that he had a solo career, which sometimes overlapped with the group’s
career when it was still a mutedly successful going concern—and when Valli used
his natural tenor voice, he sounded OK, when he dropped the falsetto voice that
(among harmonizing other voices) was a main hook of the Four Seasons’ sound in
the early 1960s and may be the single thing that seems most gimmicky about them
through today. Valli was the solo artist for such hits—many of which are very
recognizable, and help explain his group’s staying power—as “Can’t Take My Eyes
Off You” (1967), which has a classic, middle-of-the-road pop sound for 1967—and
the later songs “My Eyes Adored You” (a number 1 hit in 1975), which I very
much remember from when it was out (and never cared for a lot), and “Swearin’
to God” (number 6 in 1975), which I also remember. The Four Seasons had its two
anomalous 1970s hits in late 1975 and early 1976, as I mentioned above; in
these, Valli’s voice is recognizable (a tenor in “Who Loves You” and a bit
falsetto-y [“Oh, I had a funny feeling…”] in “December 1963”), but the true falsetto
quality is downplayed or eliminated in both. He also had a hit with the title
song “Grease” (1978) for the film (that song went to number 1, selling more
than seven million copies).
There’s no doubt Valli on his own had a successful career in
the 1970s, and he did it while stylistically occupying a sort of middle ground
between the “grungier” elements of rock music and the more square types of
“Latin [or Italian] singer” (like Sinatra, Dean Martin, or Tony Bennett), whose
stuff could be slotted into “cabaret” or inoffensive-pop genres. I would say I
was never a real fan, but the Four Seasons’ sound, and Valli’s hits of the ’70s,
stick in your mind (if you heard them on the radio when they were first
distributed) like the best (or most clinging/cloying ) of pop does. (Though “My
Eyes Adore You” turns me off the more I mull it over; it’s just not to my taste.)
The film’s story goes to a length to show how Valli aimed
toward being more of a hero to his band and, in particular, toward redeeming
the missteps of a fellow bandmate than any fans might have expected, when he
assumed the burden of repaying a big debt. What exactly this meant, in
real-business and moral terms, I will look at in Part 2.
##
This heralds the fact that, as we naïve consumers of pop
music at the time didn’t (and couldn’t) know, there was another reason (aside
from changing audience tastes) in about 1968 why the Four Seasons stopped
pursuing a creative career as a group, while Frankie Valli continued with a
solo career (while the group, with new members entering, did forge on through
the 1970s, but as a decidedly not-strongly-creative, not-edgy, maybe-oldies
act)—and the movie (as well as the stage show, I presume) tells us why, and
this adds some shadows to the group’s story.
This same factor is perhaps why the film project appealed to
Clint Eastwood, whose main late, directorial work seems to focus not just on
the strength and peculiar qualities of Americans but also on the presence of
guilt, pain, consciousness of coming death, and other such “religious” concerns
that Eastwood had previously to eschew when doing his spaghetti-western and
Dirty Harry work.
The Mafia connection,
and the constellation of major players sets up the story
The film presents the group’s story as a pungently “New
Jersey” one, and this aspect sort of knocks on an open door with me. But the
group had more of a mob association than I think any of its fans could know, yet
this had a peculiar effect on their career, unlike
with, say, Frank Sinatra, about whom a mob association was talked about with
some indignation by various onlookers for years (I deal with the Sinatra issue
in this earlier blog entry).
There is also, among rock stars, the more accidental
situations such as ex-Beatle John Lennon’s being required to record certain
songs for his Rock ’n’ Roll album
(1975) as a condition for settling a copyright infringement lawsuit (partly
indicated in Roy Carr and Tony Tyler, The
Beatles: An Illustrated Record [New York: Harmony Books, 1978], p. 114).
The suit was brought by Morris Levy, a copyright owner of old hits (including a
Chuck Berry song that Levy had alleged Lennon had plagiarized in his 1969 song
“Come Together”); Levy is noted as the “publisher” at the time for Berry’s
songs, with his plagiarism suit against Lennon discussed briefly, in Nicholas
Schaffner, The Beatles Forever
(Cameron House, 1977, p. 175). Levy, it would be noted years later, was also
linked to the mob (indicated in a story on a very separate matter in The Sunday Star-Ledger, September 23,
2012, Section One, pp. 1, 5). And in 1975 he seemed to take liberties with his
agreement with Lennon. After an initial out-of-court agreement in 1972 whereby
Lennon would record a couple Berry songs to settle Levy’s infringement suit,
with the songs slotted for Lennon’s anticipated Rock ’n’ Roll album, Levy tried, in early 1975, to address the
Lennon matter by releasing a differently constituted version of Lennon’s album,
differently titled, via Levy’s Adam VIII mail-order record label (Carr and
Tyler, p. 114; also Schaffner, p. 175). Then Lennon sued to block release of
this version, and prevailed in court (RSE,
p. 559). Presumably, royalties from Lennon’s album, related to the relevant
songs, were funneled to Levy to settle the complaint Levy originally made.
(The 2012 Ledger
article says that Roulette Records, not at issue in the Lennon case, was, as
quoted in the article, “a front for the Genovese crime family,” according to
singer Tommy James, whose work—such as the 1968 song “Mony Mony”—was released
on Roulette.)
This all makes us wonder just how much the Mafia was
infiltrated in the pop music business from the 1950s through the 1970s (at
least), and I’m sure this topic has been studied copiously by some number of
people.
Well, what do you know: a character in Jersey Boys named Gyp DeCarlo is a Mafia sort who helped the band
(more on him below), and he is apparently based in part on a real person who
was a member of the Genovese crime family.
This is part of the background for appreciating the more
anecdotal story of the Four Seasons; and as I recount all this, I take the film
on faith for what it says, at least much of it. The Broadway show had a book
written, by no less than Marshall Brickman,
who was also one of two screenwriters for the film (the other is Rick Elice).
But how much the stage and film stories deviated from real life is unclear—and
I will note a few qualms about minor details below, as just a start of
questioning; but for any formerly teeny-bopper-marketed group like the Four
Seasons to admit to the messy involvement it had with the mob in the 1960s
suggests—on the basis of the presumption of “wanting to come clean”—that
whatever deviations from reality are in the screenplay could well be minor, but
as we study the story against other sources, we may find we’re not so sure.
##
The players
The band formed in 1956 (according to RSE). In the following list of “major players,” we see some
historical discrepancies—the type of thing you would never see with, say, The
Beatles—that exemplify some of the problems (what is the true story here?) that
I will look at in Part 2, while I don’t want to discourage those interested
from getting enjoyment out of the film. The original band as hit-makers—shown
about in order they joined the band, per the film—consisted of the following
(and the birth dates show this wasn’t an average bank of 1960s vintage, who
were usually of about the Baby Boomer generation, born in 1940 or later; also, several
of the actors’ ages often aren’t of the callow twenties, which helps explain
the earthy edge to the performances in the film, which also helps the story):
* Tommy DeVito (born in 1936 according to RSE, but in 1928, according to Wikipedia
[a big discrepancy]), who was both a guitarist/singer for the band and its de
facto manager (he is played by Vincent Piazza, born in 1976). Tommy left
the band in 1970, according to RSE.
(Also, Tommy’s brother Nick DeVito, whose story-correlate briefly appears in
the film, and who played guitar, was with the band but left in 1960);
* Nick Massi (ne Nicholas Macioci) (1927-2000, according to
both RSE and Wikipedia), the band’s
electric-bassist and bass singer; he left the group in 1965, according to RSE (played by Michael Lomenda);
* Frankie Valli (ne Francis [per RSE] or Francesco [per Wikipedia] Casteluccio [RSE spelling; Wikipedia spells it Castelluccio]) (born in 1937 [RSE], or 1934 [Wikipedia], which latter
date would make him about 81 today), lead singer for the group, who also had a
solo career, and is the only Four Seasons member still active as a performer on
the road even this year; he is played by John Lloyd Young, born in 1975;
Young also performed the Valli role in the stage show, hence his well-etched
performance here;
* Bob Gaudio (born in 1942 [RSE and Wikipedia agree on this]), who joined the group in 1960; he
was songwriter (mainly of lyrics) and keyboard player as well as singer (played
by Erich Bergen, born in 1985; his being the youngest actor for the
original group brings a sort of callow quality to his character that seems
suited to him as the most “earnest-student” type within the group).
In its earlier days of association with a music producer in
New York City, the group performed backup for acts produced by Bob Crewe (on
whom more below), before the group started recording its own songs at the
urging of Valli.
Valli and Gaudio happened to form a business partnership
during their participation in the band that provided for their future ventures
outside it, which the film suggests didn’t appeal entirely to the understandably
role-conscious Tommy DeVito; and Valli and Gaudio men also, today, are
executive producers for the film. Indeed, their being owners of the group’s
material and name continued even when the group as performers had periods of
not existing, such as in the mid/later 1970s.
Also key to the group’s sound was Bob Crewe (1939-2014), a
record producer at New York ’s Brill Building Crewe
is listed in printed credits, wherever you see them, as a cowriter of some of
the group’s songs.
Per the film, rounding out the story’s main characters is a
sort of father figure to the boys, Gyp DeCarlo, whose name belonged, Wikipedia
says, to a real person, Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo (1902-73), a member of the Genovese crime family. From what I heard in a review
of the film last year, the Gyp character in the film is a fictionalized amalgam
of real-life mobsters the group was involved with. Gyp is played by Christopher Walken, and helps the group in some key
ways, especially when things come to a sort of dark climax, centered on Tommy
DeVito, about two-thirds through the film.
(I can picture, during the film’s production, director
Eastwood, his face as weathered as unpainted, 100-year-old barn wood,
approaching Walken, Eastwood speaking in his almost-preposterously sough-y
voice: “Now Chris, when you speak, don’t do that stroke-victim thing with the
unexpected long pauses—between words. Like the spirit is willing, but the
flesh—is weak. This guy is a can-do Jersey mobster. Keep the words flowing.” As
it happens, Walken does his pause-y thing a few times in the film, but not so
much that it sticks out.)
The story, acting,
tone (a foretaste of Part 2)…
Tommy DeVito, as portrayed here by Vincent Piazza—who, aside
from how we feel about the character, does the acting quite capably—depends a
lot on our willingness to have such a character routinely unfurl his mannerisms
in our lap. Some might not be ready to see a rather crass Italian delivery if
they might anticipatingly react as to say “Neanderthal!,” “peasant!” But Piazza’s
DeVito, piece by piece, comes across with all the Italian spark and rough
manners of a grubby lizard tail slapped down on our clean dinner plate.
To be continued.
##
End note. A general note on Ian MacDonald’s book: while
I have thumbed through it many times in the insouciantly hungry way of a
Beatles fan, using it to brace some of whatever I happened to be interested in
checking facts on, the book actually suffers in a way I am not alone in noting.
It is a trove of facts, opinions, claims, and so on, but it has various
inaccuracies, and some of its interpretations are peculiar, such as MacDonald’s
suggesting, simply because the Salvation Army property that Lennon took
inspiration from for the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” had allegedly served
girls, that the narrator of the song was female (p. 172), which is neither
necessary for understanding the song nor typical of how Lennon wrote. The book
is otherwise interesting for the musical sophistication MacDonald brings; when
he looks at things via musical-theory terms, he can be elucidating, such as
talking about how the time signature richly and repeatedly changes in the 1968
song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” (p. 255). But his dubious or seemingly
gratuitous interpretations—many of which you can pick out and “chuck aside”
like a pit from a piece of fruit—comprise a detracting feature of this book
that other critics have noted.
