Screw "Star Wars," real right-thinking people know what 5/4 Day REALLY means . . .

[Gefn]

5/4 is my birthday.  I had to recharge my phone twice because of all the clever people calling and texting me.  This thread is hysterical.  I sent some of these to my son and was rewarded with a phone call from him in which he was laughing too hard to talk.  I love it when he laughs like that!

Happy Birthday @ConstitutionRose
 

[andy58-in-nh]

@r9etb
 

Some backstories of songs are that way. Consider this, too:

In early 1964, Bob Gaudio---the keyboardsman for the 4 Seasons, and author or co-author of most of their songs---
was driving home from a Manhattan recording session when he stopped at a red light before turning to enter the
Lincoln Tunnel for his New Jersey home. At that intersection, one of New York's legendary squeegee kids came up
and washed his windshield. Gaudio fumbled his wallet out and found he had nothing smaller than a $5 bill. He
gave the kid---a girl---the $5 anyway. As he turned on the green light, he caught a look at her in his rearview
mirror and it haunted him how soiled she looked despite being somewhat pretty.

"She looked like a rag doll," Gaudio thought to himself.

He got home and wrote a song about her the same night, standing the story line of the Seasons' then-current
hit "Dawn (Go Away)" right on its head: now, he wrote in terms of well-off boy/girl from the wrong side of the
tracks:


The 4 Seasons, "Rag Doll"

And, while he was at it, Gaudio and Seasons producer Bob Crewe stood Phil Spector on his head, proving
you could get a "Wall of Sound"-like sound using nothing more than drums (Buddy Saltzman, the Seasons's
usual go-to drummer in the studio), bass (the Seasons' Nick Massi, who also wrote most of their vocal
arrangements), one guitar (the Seasons' Tommy DeVito), the Seasons' voices, and a glockenspiel.

A decade later, when the 4 Seasons dipped into the disco waters a bit, out popped "December 1963 (Oh What
a Night)"---written about the night that year during which Gaudio, the youngest member of the group, lost
his virginity!

The sources of Bob Gaudio's musical inspiration are explored in Jersey Boys, which although somewhat inconsistent as a film (in my opinion) contains some genuinely entertaining moments. One of them is the last one you mentioned, in which Tommy DeVito throws a Christmas party complete with booze and beautiful call girls, one of whom he provides to the young Bob Gaudio as a present.  The next morning, there's a crowd gathered at Bob's hotel room door, and they all cheer when it opens up and he's standing there in his bathrobe. "You were right", he says. "It is more fun with another person."       

[Wingnut]

And of course this gem from 1978:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oicjDieAyJs

The amazing thing about that is
1.  Some TV exec thought that the Concept of a SW Xmas was a good Idea.
2.  They actually convinced Lucas and the cast it was a good idea to whore out your soul for lots of money.
3.  GM was so lame in 78 that they sponsored it.

[r9etb]

The amazing thing about that is
1.  Some TV exec thought that the Concept of a SW Xmas was a good Idea.
2.  They actually convinced Lucas and the cast it was a good idea to whore out your soul for lots of money.
3.  GM was so lame in 78 that they sponsored it.

It turns out that the word "craptastic" is in the Oxford English Dictionary. 
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/craptastic

Including a well-enunciated sound recording of the word, in veddy proper English.

Its etymology dates from the 1990s, but surely its origins were deeply rooted in .... whatever the heck that was.

[EasyAce]

The sources of Bob Gaudio's musical inspiration are explored in Jersey Boys, which although somewhat inconsistent as a film (in my opinion) contains some genuinely entertaining moments. One of them is the last one you mentioned, in which Tommy DeVito throws a Christmas party complete with booze and beautiful call girls, one of whom he provides to the young Bob Gaudio as a present.  The next morning, there's a crowd gathered at Bob's hotel room door, and they all cheer when it opens up and he's standing there in his bathrobe. "You were right", he says. "It is more fun with another person."     

Jersey Boys as a film was a complete bowdlerised piece of crapola. Here's a review I published elsewhere after I saw
the film:

Well, the drive-in experience was classic; I hadn't been to a drive-in in years and it seemed only appropriate that Jersey
Boys---the Clint Eastwood film derived from the stage hit about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons---should play at one.
Unfortunately, the film is anything but the classic the drive-in was. In a word, Jersey Boys the film is a crime.

If there was a continuity department overseeing the film, they must have been a) on strike, or b) sleeping on the job. This film
screws up the timelines involved in the Four Seasons' story so badly that by the time the film finishes with their Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame induction in 1990 you feel sorry even for the sleaziest Season of them all, guitarist/singer Tommy DeVito, who both
founded and damn near destroyed the group in one lifetime.

It only begins with someone who knows the band's history knowing damn well that Frankie Valli couldn't possibly have been
singing "My Eyes Adored You" as a lullaby to his little daughter, Francine, in the mid-1960s . . . because the song wouldn't
even be written until 1974, and Valli wasn't usually the one who provided the germs (or the lyrics) for their songs, anyway.

Valli had begun making solo records on the side around 1965. (One of the best of those, "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine," bombed---
but a year later, the Walker Brothers took a note-for-note copy of it to the top ten.) He finally hit solo paydirt in 1967 with "Can't
Take My Eyes Off You." Shame the filmmakers didn't remember---they depict the song as being Valli's great comeback record
in the 1970s---that Valli's first solo hit happened even as the Four Seasons were still together as a hitmaking proposition and
were still putting up hits in 1967 and 1968, even if Joe Long replaced original bassist/bass voice Nick Massi in 1966, after
their Working My Way Back to You album had been released.

Specifically, the film says "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" was co-composer Bob Gaudio's bid to shake Valli out of his depression
following the death of daughter Francine in a drug-related accident. Good call, guys. Francine was killed in 1980, six months
after Valli's stepdaughter Celia was killed in an automobile accident, by which time Valli's second run as a solo hitmaker---
which began with the aforesaid "My Eyes Adored You" in 1974---was just about finished.

And it was "My Eyes Adored You," not "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," over which Valli and Gaudio (keyboards/vocals/chief co-
songwriter) had to fence to get it released at all. The third-generation Four Seasons (Gaudio had retired from touring and
begun concentrating strictly on writing and producing---as he still does; Massi's replacement Long had left the group; and,
DeVito was long enough gone, too, about which more anon) recorded it while they were under contract to the Motown
subsidiary MoWest but MoWest refused to release it. Valli and Gaudio finally convinced Private Stock Records to take a
chance on the song, and it went to number one, launching a terrific comeback for Valli.

What the film got right: Tommy DeVito was a sleazebucket, practically from the word "go." He may have been the
Season most likely to become a made wiseguy if music hadn't come into his life. And he was squeezed out of the Four
Seasons over his financial irresponsibility---he was supposed to be handling the band's finances, but he ran up such a
deep bill with loan sharks and the IRS over his gambling habit that the group forced a showdown that ended with Valli
and Gaudio agreeing to pay off the debt in return for DeVito leaving the group and surrendering his share in their
formal business partnership.

The problem was that that showdown happened in 1971---not in 1966. The film portrays the showdown concurrently as
being the final straw that pushed Massi out of the group. Massi and DeVito did have personality conflicts on the
road, but Massi had also tired of touring and wanted just to go home. (The film depicts Massi as having been a Season-
to-be from pretty much the early 1950s outset, but he didn't actually join the group until 1961, the year before they
started racking up the hits. He left the road but he continued working as the Four Seasons' vocal arranger until the
band's contract with Philips Records expired.)

Massi (who also surrendered his partnership in the Four Seasons' song publishing, prompting a name change of their
publishing company from Gavadima to Seasons Four) may also have been put off by a deal between Valli and Gaudio:
planning to push Valli as a parallel solo performer by 1965, possibly as a hedge against the Seasons' infighting destroying
any career momentum, Gaudio and Valli made a handshake agreement to split the proceeds from that plan 50/50---an
agreement to which the two men have lived up to this day, strictly on a handshake.

The Seasons were due to undertake a British tour in 1971; when DeVito was forced out of the group, they put it out that he'd
left because of hearing problems. The Seasons weren't inclined to wash their dirty laundry in public; their story may have been
as tortuous as the Beach Boys' story, but the Seasons themselves preferred to keep their problems out of the public eye.

The film gives almost little sense of where the Seasons came from in actuality. DeVito and Valli did come up on the rougher
Jersey streets, but except for a couple of scenes depicting Valli at home with his parents you get no sense of their backgrounds.
Valli seems to have had a somewhat normal childhood, albeit one of some struggle (his father designed displays for Lionel
Trains; his mother worked for a beer brewer). DeVito grew up with an abusive father, which surely pushed him to the street life
and the petty crime in which he indulged pretty much until the Seasons' career (initially as the Four Lovers) began showing
signs of paying off, but it isn't even hinted, never mind mentioned in the film.

Massi is shown as almost a woodenhead; he, too, is given no background shrift. Gaudio---the Season who wasn't Jersey born
or (mostly) bred (he was a Bronx boy)---was probably the only member of the group who didn't grow up with any kind of family
turmoil, much the way George Harrison was the only Beatle who grew up without family trouble, but the film offers nothing of
that background. (The comparison is apt in more than one way: like Harrison in the Beatles, Gaudio was the youngest Season;
he was barely out of his teens when he uncorked "Sherry" in 1962, after producer Bob Crewe suggested he write a song playing
to Valli's vocal strength, especially his shattering falsetto.)

Generally, Gaudio is portrayed as a musical genius who could barely see what else was in front of him until he found out
the hard way, which wasn't necessarily true. No mention is made of his actually having been a child prodigy whose parents
encouraged his musical passions and who gave a Carnegie Hall piano recital at age seven, before his parents moved the
family out of the Bronx into Jersey. The fact that Gaudio was a teenage hitmaker (he co-wrote "Short Shorts," a big 1958
hit for the Royal Teens of whom he was a member at fifteen) before being brought into what became the Four Seasons (by
way of an acquaintance with future actor Joe Pesci, a lifelong friend of DeVito's, who pumped Gaudio to the group as a
songwriting whip) is mentioned barely in passing.

His finest hour of instant inspiration doesn't even rate a mention in passing. You can't make any production about the Four
Seasons without "Rag Doll," of course, but the song's sweet backstory doesn't even rate a passing hint. In early 1964, Gaudio
was stopped at a Manhattan traffic light after leaving a recording session. One of the New York squeegee kids came over and
cleaned his windshield for him. He fumbled in his pocket for something to give her but had nothing smaller than a five dollar
bill. He gave the girl the bill, anyway. As he began to pull away to turn toward the Lincoln Tunnel back to New Jersey, Gaudio
saw her in his rear view mirror---standing in the middle of the street, holding the bill in her hand, gaping at him. And he
noticed how she looked in her soiled dress and gaping face: "She looked," he thought to himself, "like a rag doll."

When he got home, he wrote a song about her, standing the Seasons' previous hit "Dawn (Go Away)" on its head and forging
a story about a well-off guy's parents pressuring him to dump the girl from the wrong side of town. With an arrangement that
stood Phil Spector's Wall of Sound squarely on its head---Gaudio and Crewe achieved a wall of sound with nothing but DeVito's
guitar, Massi's bass, Buddy Saltzman's thundercrack drumming (as session drummers not affiliated with the Funk Brothers
went, Saltzman was easily Hal Blaine's equal and probably could have held his own in bands like the Rascals or Mitch Ryder
and the Detroit Wheels), and an unknown studio musician playing a glockenspiel, behind the Seasons' well-honed voices---
"Rag Doll" was a smash. And the last Four Seasons record by the original quartet to hit number one.

The musical performances in the film should outrage anyone who was a serious fan of the Four Seasons in their hitmaking
heyday. The Seasons' 1960s records featured the punchy soul-style drumming of Saltzman, but the way the music is played
in the film it would put to sleep the grannies in Branson Missouri. (All four actors playing the original Seasons could sing---
they'd been in various stage productions of Jersey Boys---and the actors playing Gaudio, DeVito, and Massi could play
their instruments.) It's lifeless, limpen, and punchless.

John Lloyd Young, who played Frankie Valli on Broadway and won a Tony Award for his effort, couldn't possibly have won it
for his singing---he cuts the teeth out of Valli's normal tenor and building-shattering falsetto here, and there are moments
where he can barely hit the notes. The chunky guitar and earthy bass of DeVito and Massi are flatted into ghastly stiffness
by their screen counterparts. The stand-ins for Saltzman (there are several shown in assorted recording studio scenes) play
as though the very idea of hitting the drums at all scares them sh@tless.

If Eastwood was that tentative and that uninformed about the Seasons' music, why didn't he just dub the Season's original
recordings into those scenes? Some of the group's biggest hits don't even show up except in out-of-time, out-of-continuity
snippets if at all. Don't expect to hear anything like "Save It For Me," "Big Man in Town," "Let's Hang On," or "Beggin',"
among others.

And while we're on that subject, don't even think about expecting to see anything involving the Four Seasons' most ambitious
project of all, the criminally underrated 1969 concept album The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette.

Bidding to shed their hip-to-be-square image, Bob Gaudio took a crack at writing a story album in which both the vocal perfor-
mances and the subject matter of the Seasons would expand, collaborating with folk songwriter Jake Holmes to deliver the songs.
The only song on the album sounding anything close to a classic Four Seasons record was "Idaho," a flop single, as was the
album's pilot fish, "Saturday's Father" (a haunting song about a divorced father allowed to see his children only one weekend
day a month), but The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette became an anomaly in the Seasons' catalog: the public wouldn't
go for it, but the critics slowly but surely came to love and appreciate it. (It also featured the first album cover based on a front-
page-newspaper design, four years before Jethro Tull got the same idea for Thick as a Brick.)


The 4 Seasons, "Saturday's Father"

That album might have escaped the band's fan base but it had one fan of note---Frank Sinatra. Ol' Blue Eyes was so impressed
with the ambitious work from his fellow Jersey boys that he hired Gaudio and Holmes to write him a concept album, the likewise
criminally underappreciated Watertown. (About a man's life following the crackup of his marriage---a subject with which
Gaudio was acquainted initimately enough, considering the turmoil involving the Seasons' marriages---the project was originally
aimed at being a television special, but the television idea fell away quickly enough.) But the only mention of Frank Sinatra in
Jersey Boys is some small, decadent hotel party to which he invites the Seasons without once showing his own mug.

Eastwood couldn't even get one small but critical detail about the group right: They were never billed as Frankie Valli & the Four
Seasons prior to 1969, when the billing first appeared on their single "Patch of Blue." The standard billing for the group on their
records, first at Vee-Jay and later at Philips, had been "The 4 Seasons Featuring the 'sound' of Frankie Valli."

Dramatic license is all well and good, but history also has its claims. Granted that it wasn't easy to mulct the Four Seasons' story
for even the original stage hit, and from everything I've read about the surviving original Seasons' cooperation in the stage and
film versions of Jersey Boys (Massi died in 2000), it wouldn't have raised any objections (other than perhaps Valli being discomfited
over any depiction that two of his children got dead in 1980, when showing just the one was painful enough for him) to have told
things the way they really were and in the real order in which they happened.

Eastwood and the writers are so inept at understanding real nuances in musical figures that they never once address a critical
facet to the Four Seasons' approach: They were somewhat older, with a different kind of working class sensibility, than the rock
generation into which they flew forth, and they weren't exactly rebels with or without a cause if you didn't count the street and
Mob surroundings in which three of them grew up. The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette might have satirised American
life and culture but it did so from the point of view of thirtysomething men (one of whom, DeVito, was only two years from
fortysomethinghood) who'd kicked themselves the hard way into the upper class, not from that of dreamy hippies, college
students (none of the original Seasons got much past high school, assuming they went even that far; even Gaudio, the
straightest member of the group, quit high school when the Royal Teens were compelled to tour on "Short Shorts"), or
bohemians. It should have been a natural for Eastwood considering his sensibilities outside film, but he doesn't even seem
to have been aware that the album existed, considering he's barely aware that the Seasons had more hits than "Sherry,"
"Big Girls Don't Cry," "Walk Like a Man," or "Dawn (Go Away)."

The likely (if inadvertent) seed might have been a Working My Way Back to You track, "Beggar's Parade," in which Gaudio
and Crewe questioned the sincerity and credibility of the street protesters beginning to make a larger presence in 1966.
(This was the last album on which Nick Massi was a full-time participant.) A beautiful song otherwise, "Beggar's Parade"
might well have had a legitimate argument, but in 1966 it only reinforced the Four Seasons as hitmaking, singles-oriented
squares. Eastwood's supposed to be this oddly insightful director who's supposed to have had something to say in his
equally shortfallen biopic of jazz legend Charlie Parker (Bird), but failing to hone in on the sensibilities behind the Seasons'
music---even (especially?) through such a jarring album cut as "Beggar's Parade"---exposes him as a musical and cultural
halfwit.


The 4 Seasons, "Beggar's Parade"

For those who care about such things, Frankie Valli continues performing and recording to this day. (He made a pleasant but
overlooked album of 1960s covers---covers of songs he'd never recorded before in his life---a few years ago.) Bob Gaudio
has long since relocated to Nashville and has continued a respected career as a writer and producer since backing away little
by little from the Four Seasons in the late 1970s. (Among his projects: Neil Diamond's album hit I'm Glad You're With Me
Tonight, the blockbuster Diamond/Barbra Streisand duet "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," and Eric Carmen's first---and
best---solo album, including the two hit singles it yielded, "All By Myself" and "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again," plus future
work by Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson.)

Tommy DeVito relocated to Las Vegas (some of his siblings already lived there) after his forceout from the Four Seasons with
$100,000 in the bank. He ran through it in a year, then took up housecleaning as a profession, marrying a Vegas showgirl who'd
quit when her show went topless. He got back onto his feet slowly, raising a family and eventually becoming a recording studio
operator and producer, not to mention getting some low-keyed film work thanks to his old friend Joe Pesci. He swears to this day
he left the Four Seasons of his own volition, tired of touring, and insists Nick Massi left the group because he wanted to be more
of a frontman, though neither is borne out by the actual facts. As for Massi, when his work as the Seasons' vocal arranger ended,
he lingered in the music business awhile but ended up fighting a battle with the bottle for years while sometimes painting portraits
of peoples' pets for a living.

You'll have to surf the Internet to learn those things, because you won't learn them---as, alas, many other things---from Jersey
Boys. The Four Seasons made some of the 1960s' most memorable music, even if it's been short shrifted a) by critics who dismiss
them (unfairly and inaccurately) as just a doo-wop group who got lucky with a bunch of hit singles; and, b) by the Seasons
themselves, accidentally. They took control of all their masters each time a label deal ended, leaving the labels with nothing to
keep in print, meaning no Four Seasons album---granted most of their '60s albums involved hit singles and filler for the most
part, other than the brilliant Rag Doll, Working My Way Back to You, and The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette---remained
in print very long, leaving them relegated to assorted anthologies for years.

It's a shame that both the music and the story behind it got so badly bowdlerised by a filmmaker who had little enough regard
for the music itself and even less regard for telling the story, warts and all, right. Since Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio served as
executive producers for both the stage hit and the film, you can't help wondering at which point they threw up their hands and
said, more or less, "OK, we can live with this, long as we get paid . . . "

One thing the film does allow a hint about turns out to have been true, by the way: the Four Seasons' 1970s hit "December
1963 (Oh, What a Night)," in which they tried revolving lead vocals for the first time on a Four Seasons record, really did
reference the night Bob Gaudio finally lost his virginity---at 21, and with a little help from his friends. Except that the film
won't let you hear Valli straining to contain a smirking giggle while singing his parts, since he was the only Season left while
making that record to know its backstory.

[Doug Loss]

To be honest, when I see "5/4" this is what I immediately think of:

[INVAR]

And of course this gem from 1978:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oicjDieAyJs

That was totally uncalled for.  How dare you inflict pain upon the members of this board by posting what the UN Civil Rights division has declared to be torture! 

Every Star Wars fan in the entire universe, universally loathes and cringes at the mere mention of 'The Holiday Special'.  The only thing salvageable from that bleeding hemorrhoid of a travesty is the animated sequence that introduced Boba Fett.

That entire fiasco was Lucas' brainchild, and given where he ended up in terms of story telling (Indy 4 anyone?) you can see clearly what mind it came out of.  The TV execs simply commandeered the other acts to fill voids in the painful-to-watch storyline.   It aired once, and never seen again.

I remember my brother and I back then, looking at one another and exclaiming out loud: "What the crap is that?  How stupid!".  Once Carrie Fisher began singing we both turned the set off and dry heaved.  Of course Harvey Corman in drag was unsettling because we both agreed he was no Bugs Bunny.  We were convinced he inspired John Wayne Gacy.

Thankfully we got Battlestar Galactica the following year to wash the foul taste out of our mouth from the experience.

[LateForLunch]

 Once Carrie Fisher began singing we both turned the set off and dry heaved.

Sorry to tell you, but you missed out. She started that song fully clothed but did it as a striptease. Patience is a virtue, son.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

This is pretty funny:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oscbps596J4