Word: valli
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...Valli, though, had been singing that way, professionally, for about a decade, and the group had been together nearly that long, without getting very far. The "sound" needed songs to encase it, bring out the power and drama behind its freakishness. In the early '60s-before the blooming of the singer-songwriter, before performers were routinely called artists, before the unit of music was an album-groups relied on songwriters and producers to give them hit singles. The Drifters had Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller producing their hits, and a gang of young pros in the Brill Building (Goffin...
...tradition, an octave or so below Frankie's. Usually the other guys didn't have much 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...
...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...
...Maurice Williams "Stay." A boy invites a girl to "come, come, come out tonight ... to my Twist party," The percussion was the soon-to-be-familiar Seasons combination of hand-claps and marching feet that lent a 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...
...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...