Oh what a life: Frankie Valli reflects on ‘Jersey Boys’

Oh what a life: Frankie Valli reflects on ‘Jersey Boys’

 That’s what Frankie Valli found himself considering the first time he watched a run-through of “Jersey Boys,” the mega-hit Broadway musical that depicts Valli’s rise to fame in the 1960s with the band that would become famous as the Four Seasons.
“How would the word ‘strange’ sound to you?” Valli said the other day. “It’s like a reflection of yourself. You look in the mirror and all of a sudden the reflection you see in the mirror is doing you. And you’re just standing there watching.”
To call Valli an iconic figure in pop music might be an understatement. He and the Four Seasons scored 40 Top 40 hits, including eight singles that went to No. 1. Most of the songs were written by the group’s co-founder Bob Gaudio. Today many of them - “Walk Like a Man,” “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” - remain instantly recognizable. What makes them so, aside from Gaudio’s expert craftsmanship, are Valli’s utterly unique falsetto vocals.
But Valli said he didn’t realize he was doing anything special.
“The magic that may seem to be there was something that was normal and natural,” he said from a tour stop in Denver. “I never studied singing with anybody. And I never thought that what I was doing was so incredibly unique. I thought anybody singing could do it. It took me awhile to understand that. I had this wonderful gift, and I loved using it.
“I learned to sing by doing impressions, singing songs that I liked that the radio was playing. You liked the song and you wanted to sound like the person doing it. . If you could imitate four or five people, if you really worked on it you could probably do 15 or 20. But as I said, I never gave it a second thought. I thought all singers could do that.”
“Jersey Boys,” with which Valli and Gaudio were directly involved, is an international hit, and Valli said there are plans to adapt it as a film, which could begin shooting as early as January. In terms of the story, which depicts the group’s early struggles, the conflicts among bandmates, brushes with organized crime and eventual success as recording artists, Valli said the show is “95 percent accurate.”
For this concert tour, Valli is bringing a band that includes two guitars, a bass, drums, keyboards, a sax player, four singers and a small horn section. The audience, he said, will hear plenty of hits.