‘I was going to cut hair if music hadn’t worked out’
As he plays his last ever concerts in Britain, Jersey Boy Frankie Valli looks back on an astonishing 65-year career with James Hall
Frankie Valli was holidaying in Rome in June 1965 when he heard that The Beatles were in town. His band, The Four Seasons, were chart rivals with the Fab Four, having been kept off the number one slot twice in America the previous year by the Liverpudlians.
“I found out where they were, went into their hotel and asked to be connected with John Lennon,” the 84-year-old recalls. “I went up to their suite and we just hung out. It was a lot of fun. They were all there.”
What did they get up to? “We talked about music… And I found out that John Lennon was a major Frankie Valli fan.”
Valli has many such stories, which he delivers in the matter-of-fact manner of a man who, you suspect, has seen it all. Over his 65-year career, New Jersey-born Valli has had a ringside seat on the history of rock ’n’ roll. He released his first single in 1953, the year before Elvis’s debut, and went on to have a string of number ones with The Four Seasons, including Walk Like a Man and Big Girls Don’t Cry. He presaged disco with December 1963 (Oh What a Night), had solo success with Can’t Take My Eyes off You and became a Northern Soul favourite. All this was before he sung the theme tune for Grease, played mobster Rusty Millio in The Sopranos and, in 2005, had a Broadway musical written about his band. The Jersey Boys became a Tony-winning, international smash.
But Valli is about to pack up his ringside seat. Last week he embarked on a farewell tour of the UK, which ends in Manchester on Thursday. While the decision to stop touring is understandable for a man in his ninth decade, it was tough to take. “I don’t know how I’ll feel. I know it’s going to be hard,” he says.
Born Francesco Castelluccio in Newark in 1934, Valli wanted to sing from the age of seven, having been “mesmerised” seeing Frank Sinatra in Manhattan’s Paramount Theatre. He changed his name to the snappier Valli and joined a series of groups as a teen, honing his distinctive falsetto.
It was only when friend and aspiring actor Joe Pesci (yes, that one) introduced him and bandmate Tommy Devito to a talented songwriter called Bob Gaudio that The Four Seasons was formed. In 1962, the band had a number one hit with their first single Sherry. Chart dominance followed.
Pesci, of course, went on to star in Goodfellas. The link is apt. Living in New Jersey’s Italian-american community, Valli had links to the Mob. Gyp Decarlo, a high-ranking member of New York’s Genovese crime family, was “like an uncle”. “You could say [he was] the Godfather. He was very well respected in the neighbourhood,” says Valli. Decarlo shielded Valli from trouble and made problems go away.
Valli even played two shows for Decarlo at his Atlanta prison when he was jailed. The singer also knew John Gotti, the notorious head of the Gambino family.
“If I was working somewhere [Gotti] would come in and we’d talk. It wasn’t anything except ‘How are you? How you doing? Do you need anything?’ Those kind of things.” By harnessing his unique voice, getting married and having a family, Valli avoided getting sucked into the mafia milieu. Many contemporaries weren’t so lucky. “A lot of people I grew up with and went to school with were found in trunks of cars. They really got in serious trouble.” His Sopranos role, it seems, was the embodiment of art imitating life (although his character got whacked in the front of a car, not the back).
There’s a life lesson right there: sing and get a missus or risk swimming with the fishes. And Valli has made the most of every moment. He hung out backstage with Elvis at the Las Vegas Hilton (“before he got heavy”). “Elvis was an incredible host. Gracious and warm… I think Nancy Sinatra was there,” he recalls. He also got to know her father, his childhood hero.
After Valli had surgery to remove a polyp from his vocal chord, Ol’ Blue Eyes called him to his Vegas suite and gave him a vocal lesson with long-time pianist Bill Miller. Sinatra and Miller even jotted their vocal exercises on a piece of paper that Valli has sadly lost.
I ask him which of all the musicians he has met has been the biggest a-------. He laughs. “There have been quite a few”, but he refuses to name names. In his experience, the bigger the star, the less objectionable they are. Mid-ranking stars are the worst because they’re “angry that they didn’t get as far as they wanted”.
Valli says the trick to weathering changing musical tastes – and he’s ridden out everything from psychedelia to prog to punk – is to ignore fads altogether. “We just stayed at a level, doing what we did.”
Having lived through 14 US presidents, Valli’s take on the incumbent creaks with experience and pragmatism. While Valli “removed himself ” from both political parties around a decade ago, he says “a lot of things” that President Trump has done are good. “I don’t agree with the way he speaks sometimes but he is who he is. The bottom line is: you get the job done. You hear a lot of things about Bill Clinton, [but] he did a great job as president. You can’t deny that. I’m looking at the economy and I personally don’t think it’s an accident [that it’s doing well],” he says.
“The way I look at it is this: whoever is president, give them an opportunity to do what they do. And when it’s over, if you don’t like it you vote for someone else… I’m sure that you guys have the same kind of problems in the UK.”
The singer, who has been married three times, also praises the Metoo movement, condemning anyone who takes advantage of women. “I’m happy to see that somebody is doing something about it,” he says. Valli dismisses as “nonsense” claims made in 2014 by former lover April Kirkwood that he was controlling. “None of it is accurate,” he says.
Alongside his successful career, Valli has had more than his fair share of tragedy. In 1980 his daughter Francine died of a drug overdose just months after his stepdaughter Celia died falling off a fire escape. I ask him how he got through it. He pauses, his voice cracking. “To be very honest with you, sometimes I don’t know. It was a very tough period for me. You would think that as time went by it would get easier. But it doesn’t. You should never lose a child,” he says.
There is a wealth of accumulated wisdom crammed into Valli’s 5ft 4in frame. You don’t have a career as long as rock ’n’ roll itself without knowing a thing or two. I ask him which, if any, contemporary acts he admires. He praises Bruno Mars’s “exceptional talent” but says the industry is “really tough” for singers starting out today.
There are very few record labels left and too many venues have closed, he says. “The little places that I played do not exist any more. So where do you show your wares?”
What advice would he give aspiring musicians? His answer is simple: have a backup career. He trained as a hairdresser. It’s decidedly un-rock ’n’ roll advice from music’s elder statesman. But you’d ignore Valli at your peril.
‘A lot of people I grew up with and went to school with were found in trunks of cars’