Music Review: Workin’ Our Way Back Through The Four Seasons Catalog - Part One

Depending on when you grew up with 'em, they were either the Four Seasons or Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons. The first was a group that made its name on a string of falsetto-driven 60's rhythm-'n'-pop gems; the second rebuilt its sagging career on disco and the imitation nostalgia of Grease-Is-the-Word. Though early inductees into the Rock Hall of Fame, for the longest time the only collections of the Seasons Sound available on compact disc was anthologies, but now the pop obsessives at Collector's Choice Music – with a commendable eye toward cashing in on the Broadway success of Jersey Boys – have dug more deeply into the catalog with the simultaneous release of eleven of the JBoys' original albums.

Ten of these records are packaged two to a jewel case, with the eleventh, the 1980 reunion disc Reunited Live, the only single-disc selection. Six of the releases capture the group from the sixties; five are from its seventies and eighties incarnations. Though, in sum, this is only about a third of the guys' considerable discography. It still represents a goodly chunk of pop music, particularly for listeners only familiar with the oldies station standbys. So let's take the easy route and examine these babies by separate eras, okay?

The first long-player to be reissued comes from when the boys were switching labels from Vee-Jay (where they had their first trio of Number Ones – "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," and "Walk Like A Man") to Philips Records: 1964's Folk-Nanny and Born to Wander. The first is a Vee-Jay release compiled of tracks that the company still had shelved in the library. Though this collection of left-behinds contained a modest hit (the boys' remake of Maurice Williams' "Stay"), the album it appears in remains a fairly crass attempt at capitalizing on the then-booming Hootenanny craze. Only thing folkie about Folk-Nanny is a cover pic of our boys holding acoustic guitars in front of what looks to be a spinning wheel. Nanny's opener, "Connie-O," was even the flip to "Big Girls Don't Cry," though doubtless some Vee-Jay exec thought the addition of that big "O" [supply your own joke] at the end made the song look folkish.

Fraud or not, the record contains some prime singin' in the Seasons' patented Jersey r-&-p style. Two choice doo-wop ballads ("Goodnight My Love," "Teardrops") are nicely covered. Plus we get a chirpy beach music cover of the theme song from the Leslie Caron movie, Lili, and a relentlessly upbeat pop song by the group's primary composing team, producer Bob Crewe & keyboardist Bob Gaudio, entitled "Melancholy," which includes a dippy chorus ("Gosh oh golly, I'm melancholy") that only lead singer Valli could've pulled off. Not an indispensable Seasons disc, but a consistently entertaining one.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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