Frankie Valli at 82
‘I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. I like to sing’
Frankie Valli expresses delight to discover that the Prime Minister chose one of his records for Desert
Island Discs. “That’s fantastic,” he laughs. “I’ve played the White House. Now I’ve got a fan in the House of Commons.”
The record Theresa May chose in her 2014 appearance was The Four Seasons’ Walk Like A Man, a hit in 1962, when May would have been six years old and Valli was the latest craze, an American pop sensation with a thick black quiff of hair and an outrageous falsetto.
“We just had a hit with Sherry and we wanted to establish a sound, so anybody who heard us immediately knew who it was,” recalls Valli, who is 82 and sporting a bristling coif of grey hair. “Walk Like A Man and Big Girls
Don’t Cry were a part of the same recording session, three number ones in a row.”
All the hits were written by the band’s keyboard player Bob Gaudio and producer Bob Crewe. “I related to
Walk Like A Man right off. It’s a very strong idea. What I got from it was a young boy growing up and going through changes, and he’s kind of being a cry baby and his dad straightens him out. Anything I struggled through, my dad would do that, say ‘come on, act like a man’.”
He adds: “It’s a song about taking on responsibility.”
Valli will be performing the song in Hyde Park on September 10, when he headlines the BBC Proms in the Park with the latest line up of The Four Seasons. “I’m still singing it, of course I am. You need to do that. Maybe I don’t sit around and sing those songs all day long when I’m at home but when you walk out on stage, and the audience is there, you better be thinking of who you are really singing for. That’s what keeps it fresh. It is the only way. Anybody who wants to sing for themselves should stay home and do it in the shower.”
The shower, it turns out, is actually one of Valli’s favourite places to perform. “To tell you the truth, I had a sound company come into my shower to take a sample of the echo and recreate it because I like it so much.”
He sings in the shower of his LA home every day when he is not on the road. “I go through scales, maybe some Sinatra, some standards for 35 or 40 minutes, sometimes an hour. I take very long showers. You have to sing every day, a little bit, to keep the voice in shape. It’s like lifting weights.”
Valli is a small man, 5ft 4in, slight of build, who exudes a physical nimbleness and energy that, like his still supple voice, belies his age. “You lose a note or two one way or another as you get older, but I don’t think it makes that big a difference – you can bring a song down half a tone, make adjustments. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs.” And that’s not all he doesn’t do. “I don’t play golf, I don’t play tennis, I don’t hike, I don’t ski. I like to sing. I’ve been doing it my whole life. What else am I going to do?”
He first came to the UK in 1963, when The Four Seasons were part of a package tour. “I brought back a record called Please Please Me and said ‘we should record this song, I think it’s a hit’,” he laughs. “I remember playing it to Bob Crewe. And he listened to it and he said ‘nah, we can write better songs than this’.” While The Beatles, who wrote and had a hit with the song, went on to rule the pop world, The Four Seasons notched up hit records for another two decades, with their repertoire expanding from doo-wop flavoured rock ’n’ roll to hits as diverse as soul ballad My Eyes Adored You, Seventies rock showstopper December
1963 (Oh What A Night) and disco classic Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.
“I always thought you had to be open to everything. I was a big Hank Williams country fan, a big gospel fan. I like all of it. I used to do impressions of other singers, so I had some idea of what you could do with a human voice, and I wasn’t afraid to try it.”
Valli is the only member of the original line-up still touring. “I don’t know anything else, I’ve been on the road so long.” Songwriter and producer Gaudio remains his musical partner but retired from live work at the end of the Sixties. Bassist Nick Massi quit in the mid-Sixties and died in 2000. Guitarist Tommy DeVito was expelled from the group in 1970 and is retired from the music business. “He didn’t leave a happy camper but we speak occasionally, we kind of made up.”
Theirs is a remarkable tale that has become known to new generations through the multi-award-winning musical Jersey Boys, which has enjoyed success around the world since 2005 and is still running on Broadway and the West End, and was made into a movie by Clint Eastwood in 2014. It is a tale that contrasts the fantasy of fame with the messy lives of a group raised in the mafia-infested streets of working-class New Jersey. “I was in a band with two guys who had done hard time [Massi and DeVito],” says Valli, who was born Francesco Castalluccio. “We were Italians, we came up in a very tough neighbourhood. There was an organised crime presence, there were illegal crap games. I had friends who were bookmakers and runners, people were in an out of jail. All the bars and nightclubs where we played were owned by organised crime. But when we started to get some success we never talked about it. We were afraid it would be exposed and it would be the end of our career.”
When it came to making a musical, he realised “we have to tell the truth – this is total exposure. But I thought, at this point in our lives, does it really matter?”
He recalls those early days as a struggle. “The environment I grew up in, there weren’t very many kids who went to high school and college. The opportunity wasn’t there. If you came from a poor background, it was up to you. It was tough getting through this.”
But he was determined to succeed. “I was a dreamer, and I don’t know if it was out of my cry for something more in life, but was always singing. No one starts out terrific. It’s like anything else, it takes a lot of practice and you have to be dedicated. I knew people who were going to music schools and art schools and dance schools, but I couldn’t afford to go to no school, so the possibilities were almost no possibilities at all. And that was my motivation. I had this theory in my head, well, who taught the first guy how to sing? Who taught the first artist how to paint, or the first builder how to build, or the first dancer how to dance? Where did it come from? And so I taught myself.
“But the most important, natural thing is something schools don’t teach, because nobody can teach you how to express yourself better than you. You’ve got to feel it. I read the lyrics, I think about it, and pay attention to what I’m singing until its really communicating. I want to get the most that I can out of a song. That’s what makes it matter.”
‘I take very long showers. You have to sing every day, a little bit, to keep the voice in shape’
Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons headline BBC Proms in the Park, at Hyde Park, on Sunday Sept 10