Word: gaudio
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...Stoller producing their hits, and a gang of young pros in the Brill Building (Goffin and King, Pomus and Shuman) writing them. The Seasons were lucky to align with producer Bob Crewe, who had written such hits as "Silhouettes" and "Tallahassee Lassie." They were even more fortunate that Bob Gaudio joined the Seasons in the late '50s-not as another voice, but as the group's brain and heart (Valli's being its soul...
...Gaudio was the Seasons' Brian Wilson: a writer-performer who defined the group's tight-harmony sound but soon tired of the road and stayed home to become a full-time pop composer. The moment in Jersey Boys where the Gaudio character hears Valli and says, "I gotta write for that voice," rings true. Valli, fronting the group's tight, muscular harmony, inspired Gaudio, often in collaboration with Crewe, to create two-minute operas that did a lot within the restrictive pop format...
...songwriters had been there before. Gaudio was writing blame songs long before he hooked up with the Seasons. "I cried for you, now cry for me ... You made a fool of me, so now I'm leavin' you." And Crewe's "Silhouettes," written with Frank Slay, Jr., is an early rock-'n-roll story song, in which the singer pines that he's seen his girl kiss another guy behind her drawn windowshade. His furious knocks on the building's door are answered by a stranger, who "said to my shock / 'You're on the wrong block.'" Finally he rushes...
...Some of the best Seasons songs have the emotional sourness (Gaudio) set in a mini-play structure (Crewe). Stuff happens in these songs. Lives change with a hard word or an unspoken one. Wisdom arrives like a chill. And the wisdom is: not all endings are happy. You can't always get what you want, or what you need, either. Love is something you fall out of, like a plane without a parachute. So many of these songs are about an affair that has to end, because one of the players is tired of it or because society conspires against...
...Walk Like a Man. The bongo riffs that began "Sherry" and "Big Girls Don't Cry" 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...