LAS VEGAS (AFP) — Despite the many millions of records he has sold in his career and as famous as he was in his heyday, Frankie Valli says that he's finally feeling some real love and respect.
Only now, as the story of Valli and the Four Seasons has been immortalized in the Broadway hit "Jersey Boys" and is on its way to becoming a worldwide juggernaut, does the 74-year-old say he and his brethren are getting their due.
"For the amount of success we had in the record business, we were sort of like an undercurrent, an afterthought," said Valli, who sold more than 100 million records but remained in the shadow of the Beatles and the Beach Boys throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. "We were not embraced by the industry."
They are now.
"Jersey Boys", which follows the travails of Valli, singer-songwriter Bob Gaudio and the other two original Four Seasons from the rough streets of New Jersey to the heights of the pop music world, now has four companies beyond Broadway including a tour and versions in Chicago, London and Las Vegas.
A permanent production opens in Sydney in February and there's talk of additional companies for Canada, the Philippines and Germany among others.
More than 1.3 million people have seen the show on Broadway, where it has grossed more than 148 million dollars in ticket sales alone since opening in October 2005.
"It just gets more wonderful," Valli said. "Who would've thought it would get this big?"
Actually, Gaudio did. The 65-year-old songwriter responsible for such hits as "Sherry," "What A Night," and "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" was impressed the very first time he saw the previews near Los Angeles in 2004.
The audience response was enthusiastic even though the West Coast of the United States was "more of Beach Boys territory than ours."
Gaudio said the show works because of their decision to tell the whole mostly untold story, resulting in a show that details the quartet's in-fighting, their childhood indiscretions, their failed marriages and even the untimely death of Valli's daughter from a drug overdose.
"It did so well in La Jolla, it was frightening, the possibilities," Gaudio said. "We knew we had a fan base here that it could be explosive."
Now Valli is looking ahead to watching the show prosper overseas in a way that the Four Seasons themselves were unable to do because his three partners, particularly Tommy DeVito, were afraid of flying.
"Tommy came to Europe one time with us and never made the trip again," Valli said. "Certainly, we could have been bigger had we gone. I'm probably the only member of the Four Seasons who didn't mind getting on an airplane."
Valli, born Francis Stephen Castelluccio in the housing projects of Newark, New Jersey was recruited by DeVito into the group as a teen because of what would go on to be one of pop music's most famous falsettos.
He had little to do with the organized crime figures of his Italian neighborhood; the closest he came was his recurring role as a mobster on the HBO series "Sopranos."
Recently divorced from his third wife, Valli is something of a full-time ambassador for "Jersey Boys," living in Calabasas, California, but performing about 80 concert dates a year.
The advent of the show has mended some fences for Valli, too. In 2005, right after it opened, the performer unceremoniously walked out on a three-week contract at the Luxor Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas because he didn't like the show times and believed the resort wasn't promoting him properly.
He'd similarly abandoned a gig at the Flamingo Hotel-Casino a year earlier, leaving him something of a persona non grata on the Las Vegas Strip.
Yet in May when "Jersey Boys" premiered at the Palazzo, executives and performers from both of those resorts came to an opening that doubled as a 74th birthday party for Valli.
That reception, Valli and Gaudio said, is gratifying after all this time. Not even the induction of The Four Seasons into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 felt this good.
"It's been great for Frankie," Gaudio said. "He's gotten a tremendous amount of recognition, bordering on iconic and it's something he's always deserved. Now it's right, it's getting its proper place and it's thrilling."
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