The DVD also has its moments: a '63 performance from The Steve Allen Show done in front of a studio orchestra where we get to hear Frankie blow the lyrics to "Big Girls Don't Cry;" a '64 medley of five then-current hits capped by a finger-snappin' rendition of Frank Loesser's "Brotherhood of Man" (well, I suppose we couldn't ignore the On Stage material altogether); a Valli solo performance from The Bitter End, showing our man crooning "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" to an audience of adoring young Hollywood extras and a performance from a 1968 Kraft Music Hall of "Saturday's Father," which combines on-stage performance with hokey filmed footage of a divorced dad taking his little girl out for the weekend.
That last provides a telling clue as to why the Seasons' late sixties attempts at keeping up with the Beatles were doomed to fail with the teen pop audience. If Imitation Life Gazette was the band's attempt at producing their own Sgt. Pepper, than "Father" was that album's answer to "She's Leaving Home." But where "Home" struck the sixties zeitgeist by focusing on a young girl running off because her parents don't understand her, "Father" asks us to empathize with the parent. In terms of pop hit-making, Frankie and the boys had stepped firmly on the wrong side of the generation gap.
The final tracks on the set's DVD are three promo films produced in the seventies to sell the band's disco hits: fairly uninteresting visually, though the outfits are all amusingly awful. (Funny how the suit-&-tie look of the early performances holds up so much better than the leisure suits worn in their L.A. Coliseum gig.) In later years, Valli was no longer as capable of reaching the falsetto heights that he once could climb, but he still remained an ace pop crooner. A hit like "December 1963" may've hinged on its boomer audience's nostalgic impulses, but it still remained rooted in some damn fine singin' – not to mention, that irreducible Jersey Beat.
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