Word: falsetto
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...Valli wasn't just kidding with his falsetto. It was not pure, not angelic, like the sweet-child voices of Brian and Carl Wilson on such Beach Boys tracks as "In My Room" and "God Only Knows." Valli's had a raspiness that gave his romantic pleas gravel, gravity, balls. This was no castrato, but a grown, yearning heterosexual male whose impossibly high voice set him apart, in tone and content, from the baritone norm, and made him perfect for all the outsider characters he would articulate in the Seasons' hits...
...more to do than intone a few vowel sounds or (on "Stay") pow sounds-the oohs and ahhs of 50s doo-wop. But there was a solidity to the Seasons' backing vocals. With Valli doing all the filigree work, the other three were the long, smooth, sturdy road his falsetto danced on. Listen, for example, to "Rag Doll" (one of 51 selections on the very rich Seasons Anthology CD from Rhino Records). It begins with four bars of oohs, setting an eerie, pretty mood that won't quite reveal itself, then explodes into four bars of AHHHHHS...
...military air to the enterprise. The unique element, of course, was Valli's voice, stretching two words into ten aching, urgent syllables ("Sheh-eh-eh-eh-eh-er-ry bay-yay-bee") over half of the four-line chorus. / Sheh-eh-ry, can you come out tonight?" The falsetto is used to establish the singer as the proper young gent ("You better ask your mama. / Tell her everything is all right"). Then the tenor shout in the bridge reveals him as the panting teen wolf ("With your red dress on, / Mmm, you look so fine. / Move it nice and easy...
...give way to a fusillade of snare-drum aggression: a declaration of the war between the sexes. On his third try, Gaudio found a narrative use for the tramp-tramp-tramp beat of the first two songs: I'm gonna march right out of your heart. Valli's falsetto croons a pretty, otherworldly air while the other Seasons bark out, "Walk! Walk! Walk! Walk!" In three series of this long march (played at the beginning, middle and end, and expending more than half of the 2 minute, 15 second song), the Seasons announce themselves as the vanishing lovelorn, the French...
...McAnuff, went for Plan C. They had two ideas for freshening the material. One was to emphasize the Seasons' Italo-American roots, especially the connection to the New Jersey mob of founder Nick DeVito; this turns the show from a simple exercise in Frankie Valli nostalgia into "The Falsetto and the Sopranos." The other was to give each member of the group weight by letting him tell part of the story. Tommy says, "You ask four guys, you get four different versions." That's Jersey Boys: a Rahway Rashomon...