Jersey Boys: here and there and everywhere
I saw a production of “Jersey Boys” recently in southern Maine at the Ogunquit Playhouse. It’s still going on, but apparently it’s sold out or almost sold out for the rest of the run—and no wonder, because watching it is a whole lot of fun for us codgers who were young in the 60s. In case you don’t know anything about the musical, it’s one of those sure-fire hits that traces the rise and fall and rise of a well-known rock group, in this case the Four Seasons.
I recall the Four Seasons and Frankie Valli, he of the extraordinary falsetto. But before I attended the show I couldn’t have told you, off the top of my head, the names of their hits. I knew that there were many, and I knew that I probably was familiar with an awful lot of them, but I couldn’t have conjured any of them up.
I didn’t read the program before the show, because I wanted to be surprised. But as they say, the hits kept coming. And coming and coming. And I knew all but one. Not just “knew” in some vague sense, but in the very specific sense of knowing all the words and all the intonations and rhythms of the originals.
From the evidence of the sing-along propensities of all the greyhairs surrounding me, so did just about everyone in the audience, too. The entertainers and the audience all seemed to be having a fabulous time, and so did I. If it wasn’t exactly being young again, it was something almost like it.
The actor who played Frankie Valli sounded extraordinarily like him, although this being 2018 the sound was ramped up past the point I would desire (and with more choreography and movement; the actual Four Seasons were usually more static when they performed). And of course, when I got home I went straight to YouTube, where I found this little sampler medley by the originals, the one-and-onlys. The guy at the keyboard, Bob Gaudio, wrote almost all their music:
The musical “Jersey Boys” was on Broadway from 2005 to 2017; that’s quite a run. Then it opened off-Broadway. But in the meantime it also went all over the world, including to places you wouldn’t necessarily imagine.
Here’s what seems to be the cast of the Japanese version. They have a little problem with some of the phonemes that don’t ordinarily occur in their language, but they still do a bang-up job:
Here’s a short clip of the production I saw, which sounded even better in person. It’s playing till October 28, but as I said, tickets are scarce:
This one’s about five years old. It’s about the search and audition process to find Frankie Vallis all over the world:
The cast performed a few songs at a Christmas party in NYC I attended a number of years ago. They were, as expected, fantastic.
I probably saw it in 2017 on Broadway. I wasn’t interested in seeing it, but on a trip back to New York to visit my sister I got two tickets because she wanted to. I put it off for years because I didn’t like the format of taking the hit songs of a group and wrapping a musical around it.
But, I enjoyed it. Part of it was nostalgia for my youth, a time which to most oldsters seems much better than the time now and part was that it is an interesting story. So interesting that after seeing it I read a little more about them to see how much of the show was true. I still don’t like that type of format, but it was a great show.
We saw the musical at the University of Iowa. Great fun. Btw we take earplugs to almost all music performances. We are of the “if it’s too loud, you are too old” crowd. We are seeing Richard Shindell soon and thankfully no plugs will be necessary.
Nice to hear you liked it! My kid does stagework for the Playhouse — I’ll pass your comments along.
Steeleye Span covered Rag Doll, which was unexpected. The lyrics actually almost could be to a song from two centuries ago, couldn’t they?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNiGVcz_4EU
To me it is the memories that the music brings up, of youth, college and graduate school. Of being young and studying so hard. Of girls, falling in love and getting married to the same girl I am still married to. But there was also a lot of good music in the explosive beginning of rock and roll 1956 to 1962. Two all time favorites: The Everly Brothers and The Doo Wop Era. There are many groups doing Doo Wop concerts, including many of Frankie Valli’s hits. Even Paul Anka is still out there. Wonderful to have come of age in those years. Thanks for the review of The Jersey Boys!
Steeleye Span did a very good cover of Rag Doll.
Dee Dee Sharp did a cover of I Will Follow Him, which is, in my opinion, better than Peggy March’s original version.
A cover version which I heard on a car radio while traveling through Mexico back in the day: Enrique Guzmán sings Yo te seguiré/I Will Follow Him. Enrique Guzmán has spent a lifetime covering US rock hits.
Though the Beatles bracket my teenage years, I listen more these days to Doo-Wop than I do to the Beatles. A further irony is that in the years before the Beatles, I listened much more to folk than I did to pop/rock. That is, I have listened more to Doo-Wop as an old fogy than I did as a kid.
It’s funny how quickly things changed in the 60s. The Four Seasons were a little before my time, completely out of style by the time I was listening to AM radio, and whereas in the late 70s there was some revival interest in Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and maybe the Shangri-Las, Frankie Valli just sounded too hardcore swish homosexual for anyone to want to cover those songs or put those records on.
Some black singers sang in falsetto without sounding campy and campy and gay, including Curtis Mayfield, Al Green and Marvin Gaye at times, and Mick Jagger sang “Emotional Rescue” in this manner on a lark, but it wasn’t the same thing.
“But there was also a lot of good music in the explosive beginning of rock and roll 1956 to 1962. ”
I played for years in a band that performed that era of music. We really went 1950-1969, doing earlier R&B as well as some British Invasion and Beach Boys but the heart of it was that American Graffiti era. We did quite a bit of doo-wop with 4 and 5 part harmonies, including a few of the more obscure ones though of course our bread and butter was the big hits.
“Some black singers sang in falsetto without sounding campy and gay, including Curtis Mayfield, Al Green and Marvin Gaye”
Jackie Wilson. He had a voice of phenomenal range and power, and definitely not gay. Though I never thought of Frankie Valli as sounding gay.
The Jersey Boys videos take me back to my younger days too. Just for fun, here is the French version of “Oh, What a Night”– “Ces Soirées là.” (The French are still a bit chauvinistic about their language, it seems).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M15dWvXyd_0&ab_channel=travie2face
Just for fun, here is the French version of “Oh, What a Night”– “Ces Soirées là.” (The French are still a bit chauvinistic about their language, it seems).
While we in the US assume that the pop music direction always goes in the direction of US to France, there are exceptions. In 1959, The Browns had a hit: Three Bells, which recounts the life of one Jimmy Brown through birth, marriage, and death. The song had a revival from The Sopranos TV show.
It turns out this was a French song translated into English. Not surprisingly, the definitive version of Les Trois Cloches comes from Edith Piaf. It appears that she first recorded it in 1946.
Here is a more recent version. Les trois cloches Les Compagnons du Jourdain et Madrijazz-gospel Arrangement Jean-Luc Dutoit. The most interesting part begins at about 4:00.
I saw the movie version and loved it. I was born in ’73 but even I was familiar with all the songs. Not one I had never heard.
Frankie Valli never sounded the least bit gay to me. A falsetto is a falsetto; I always saw it as a device to sound different, but not to sound gay. He nailed the falsetto.
The movie was very good too, and oh, the music … I always liked all the songs individually but wow, when they’re presented as a group in a movie with a story tying them together, they became transcendent for me at least.
I never fully appreciated how well put together and “fully-formed” these songs are, and the overall quality of the songwriting by Bob Gaudio.
Jeff Brokaw:
That’s it. I grew up with those songs and probably never even realized they all were from the Four Seasons. I never put the whole picture together. They were just fun songs, with a good beat, nice harmony—that sort of thing. And it happened over so many years. With the Beatles it all was compressed into just a few years, and they always had such a strong identity and such a huge following that they were impossible to ignore. The Four Seasons seemed like they were just background noise, but what background noise it was! I didn’t appreciate them at the time. But when you see the show and “the hits just keep coming,” it’s amazing what their entire oeuvre was—really, some of the best and most fun songs of the era.
“The Four Seasons seemed like they were just background noise”
They were really quite popular. Their early hits “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like a Man” not only hit #1 on the Billboard charts but each stayed there for many weeks. I remember their hit “Dawn” from the spring of 1964 as being one of the few songs that broke through the torrent of Beatlemania. They kept having hits through the ’60s but I don’t think their peak period was any longer than the Beatles’.
They didn’t exactly fit neatly into any genre. They were a more vocally-oriented group at a time when guitar groups led by the Beach Boys and Beatles were coming to the fore. They may have started to seem anachronistic in the late ’60s when rock moved in the direction of psychedelic music and progressive rock. But now much of that late ’60s music seems dated while the Four Seasons have survived quite well.
Years ago, I went to a show called, “Forever Plaid” which was a cute show that featured 50s music. That was a stage show but there is a a movie, I understand. I’ve not seen it but, for us oldsters, the stage show was fun.
Thanks, Assistant Village Idiot and Gringo, for the info about the Steeleye Span version of Rag Doll. Mr Whatsit is a major Steeleye Span fan but had never h,eard of this one. Just now we played it on YouTube and loved it — in fact, Mr W says he likes their version better than the original. I wouldn’t go that far (not being quite as fond of the Steeleye Span sound as he is) but I certainly thought it was great. Maddy Prior – what a voice.
Are you sure Valli was doing falsetto? Some guys, with training, can get up there without the glottal manipulation.
I recall not liking very much of the music of that era, except for some of the folk stuff. Particularly didn’t like Four Seasons.
Twenty years ago, returning from a fraternity reunion of classes 63-69, I hit an oldies station. The memories were fantastic. Four Seasons, “We Got to Get out Of This Place” “Paint it Black”.
Still didn’t like the stuff, but if you were lonely, the Lettermen would sit you right down.
Richard Aubrey:
Absolutely falsetto. His natural chest voice is baritone, by the way.
Here’s something about his falsetto as well as falsetto in general. And here’s how to train that falsetto.
I recall some guys in our OCS class putting together a small chorus. One guy said to the dude elected to direct it, “I can get up there and it’s not falsetto.” Seemed to be important. So I guess it was a countertenor.
Their lead piece was a mix of “Don’t let the sun catch you crying” and “It’s not fair, it’s not fair at all”. Not the thing for an Infantry party with women.
I wondered if I made it up or heard it someplace. How many of those women looked up at the guys they were dancing with and saw skulls?
“Particularly didn’t like Four Seasons.”
I wasn’t crazy about their vocal sound – Valli’s falsetto seemed kind of screechy to me – but I liked a lot of their songs. Some of my favorites were “Dawn”, “Big Man in Town” and “Let’s Hang On”. People naturally focus on the performers but songwriting is really the key to pop music.
FOAF. Absolutely right on song writing. Somebody said that music contains three elements. Logic, metaphor, and smell. The first two are in the lyrics and “smell” is the melody and instrumentation. Smell is supposedly the most evocative of senses, and the musical version can be effective or not. Just for grins, pick a common song–Danny Boy, ex–and listen to various renditions on youtube. Words are the same–straight exposition and metaphor the same–and the melody is the same, but the differing voices/instrumentation are different and make a different impact.