The Four Seasons C/D?

any greatest hits/anthology should have most of the best stuff.

my personal favorites are:

Rag Doll
Big Man in Town
Let's Hang On!
Working My Way Back to You
Beggin'
C'mon Marianne

and Frankie Valli:

Can't Take My Eyes off of You
The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore

And btw. that Vivaldi work is too :-)

"Opus 17 (Don't You Worry 'Bout Me)"

if i'm not mistaken, you could get damn good money for those albums today.

I think it's great but I've got weird taste. Four Seasons = CLASSIC. "Silver Star" brilliant but "The Night" could well be my favourite single of all time.

Genuine Imitation Life Gazette is a work of genius but has to be heard in tandem with Sinatra's Watertown - Gaudio and Crewe wrote and produced both, and there are both musical and lyrical overlaps between the two albums.

(looooong piece on the latter coming up soonish as part of my 1974 blog thing)

i remember those strange "four seasons vs. the beatles" albums my parents had.
They actually owned some of those? I remember still seeing those in record stores in the seventies, if that is possible, but noone I know ever bought them. No doubt, your parents bought them in the early sixties.

Did the Four Seasons ever have an awkward folk/hippie phase a la Dion? Probably not; Mojo would've been all over that if they had.

songs are effin' great,
if you don't mind snotty snark
mixed with white guy soul

the cover art
OFF THE HOOK AND BATSHIT WEIRD
thesis material

(one of the weirdest songs I have _ever_ heard)

Their version of the title track (Genuine Imitation Life) is easily the best of the 3 I've heard.

He *does* too! How else to describe the vocals on "Idaho"!

Say what you will about F. Valli and his falsetto, the way he delivers the line "And don't you forget that I'm feeling it too" is the mark of a great singer.

I was watching the Season 4 Sopranos episode that ends with "Dawn" last week, and wondering if the Four Seasons had a box set. Then I opened the mail from Rhino, and there it was. Growing up, I hated "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "Sherry," but so much of their music is just gorgeous. The box set reaches up to the "Grease" theme, which I've always loved. Didn't even know this was the same band to do "Oh What a Night."

http://www.rhino.com/rzine/pressrelease.lasso?PRID=483

December 1963?

I wish I could get my hands on Valli's album for Motown - the single, "The Night," is a northern soul CLASSIC with a fucking wicked bass line

"Beggin'" has recently been remixed (the "Pilooski Remix" whomsoever that may be) which may yet give them their second UK number one in an "Are You Ready For Love"/"Thunder In My Heart" sense.

Cool.

Valli, of course, also acted in fifth (?) season of "The Sopranos."

I like the Timebox cover of "Beggin'"

Ah yes, Patto before they were Patto - magic.

When Ollie was still playing vibes.

"The Night" is on that box set, too.

December 1963?

Yep.

"The Night" is on that box set, too.

yeah but the rest of the album could be in that vein!!

... unfortunately the rest of the album isn't that good, there is a sort of "Genuine Imitation Life" mini-epic ballad on it which is good however

"Who Loves You" is from that period, eh? I think that's a great song...possibly better than the "December 1963" one.

and 'grease'..."We take the pressure and we throw away/conventionality belongs to yesterday"

somehow for me fvalli delivering that line bests that whole movie in its entirety.

Idaho!

The piano in "American and Crucifixion and Resurrection" sounds like the soundtrack to a "hippee freakout" in a bad movie from 1971 ala "Charly" that doesn't exist but that I very much want to see.

Wow, The Motown Years compilation is awfully good! I think it would surprise a lot of people who dismiss the band in this thread.

yeah all that Motown Valli/Seasons stuff got reissued and it's pretty amazing. I got 4 FV solo albums on the hard drive and they're full of gems. "Frankie Valli Is the Word" especially noteworthy for Bros Gibb enthusiasts - "Save Me, Save Me" classic Grease-era Bee Gees semi-disco with Valli at the helm (sounding less confident/fine-tuned than on Grease tho); the horn breakdown with the hand claps is just wonderful, and there are several of those Bee Gees chord changes that made me nauseous when I was a kid but now scratch all the right itches. For me though the most interesting thing about some Valli solo stuff is how there's this disconnect between the repertoire & the artist - it's like, consummate performer sometimes, singer in possession of a unique gift, but sometimes - even sometimes at his best - he doesn't sound particularly invested in the material. like he's punching the clock, not in a "not working hard enough way," but in a "just here to do my job" way. which is kind of rad. you don't hear much auteur/big-vision coming out of the singer - but at the same time, he's nearer the center than artists about whom you might cite that as a flaw.

my fascination with this dude is entering its 30th year I think, never mind me I'm just ramblin

Played the Four Seasons, Soft Cell, and Pulp versions of "The Night" last night. Superb song, as mentioned upthread.

Hey guys, I just got "Genuine Imitation Life Gazette" in a Brighton scrimyard for £3

I have played track one so far, it's "Smile" beach boys but not that far off "666" Aphrodite's Child.

(This makes up for back in 1978 or thereabouts, Woolworths had a sell-off of stuff hanging around their warehouse in Reading, they had about 50 copies, fairly sure it was the newspaper edition as you couldn't tell that easily who the album was by, for 30p each or thereabouts. Didn't get one, thought if it was that cheap it must be terrible)

I took my mom to see Jersey Boys last week and I've been exploring the Four Seasons' catalog since then. Just listened to "Genuine Imitation Life Gazette" for the first time last night. It wasn't as weird as I thought it would be, but I liked it more than I expected to.

I saw Jersey Boys today --- it was impressive how much of the catalog they fit into the show, felt like they were launching into a song every 5 minutes, which was pretty great

Not to be nitpicky but I was secretly a little disappointed with the Frankie Valli guy. He was good as an imitation for people who maybe haven't heard the Four Seasons in a long time and just want a nostalgia trip, but he really only nailed the style in the falsetto. He didn't have the low tone much at all, and at times was so nasal he sounded more like Spongebob. It didn't ruin the show or anything but I kept thinking that I coudn't wait to listen to the real stuff when I got home.

My Mum was a huge Four Seasons fan when I was growing up....being slammed by that huge wave of songs today was such a crazy time machine, I felt like a little kid again.

my parents just watched the movie and it was kind of a bummer watching the dude who plays frankie. guy can hit the notes but consistently screws up the phrasing, and his voice is so much less expressive

This is way too much for my tastes (one good CD compilation is enough for me), but for diehards, this will likely be impossible to top:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOEIQo9QwI

Good lord. Who the hell is gonna buy that? Ten guys on the Hoffman forum?

Libraries, friends and family? 2,500 doesn't seem like a huge press run for worldwide distribution.

You forgot the #onethread when you mentioned libraries

they should have called it Four Seasons - Total Soundscaping or Four Seasons - Total Bandscaping or something tho

I clicked on the video all like "c'mon guys there's a 10CD Manfred Mann box, why would you think a big Four Seasons box is off limits"...and then I saw the actual specifications.

Holy shit lol.

I mean, their key demographic isn't getting any younger, and the number of people who became serious hard-core Fourheads from seeing Jersey Boys couldn't be more than 100-150. Figure 25-30% of the audience for the show bought the Broadway cast recording, maybe 20% of that number bought a Four Seasons CD compilation, 10% of that number bought The Kaleidoscope Good-Time Machine Post-Dispatch or whatever the fuck that's called, and maybe 5% of that number knows someone who might be interested in this box.

I'm interested in it... I'm not going to buy it though.

I am the target market for this, hard to overstate just how much the music here means to me, but if I spend five hundred dollars on a box set I don't think I can even say "my wife would be mad at me," I would be mad at me if I dropped 500 bones on this.

J Edgar, if you really, REALLY are that tempted, I would suggest buying two - one to keep and one to sell after the market price goes through the roof when it inevitably goes out of print. This happened with Bob Dylan's Cutting Edge super deluxe set, which was 18 CD's and retailed for $700. Seemed ridiculously expensive at the time, but in the six years it's been out-of-print, near mint copies regularly fetch at least $1400. I just downloaded a copy, but I certainly covet the real thing. In retrospect, I would have bought two copies had I known I could sell one to cover the cost of both. (It took a while for the set to sell out - IIRC they still had a lot for sale after they began shipping, so I didn't think it would become that valuable.)

I only spent $500 on a boxed set twice ever in my life (a few years ago, when my savings were triple what they are now, lolz). one of them was the Judas Priest box, the high sticker price wasn't really due to the amount of music as much as the extras, like autographed photos of Rob Halford (not robo-signed, the real deal). the other was an Anthrax box which netted me a gold record with my name on it so now I can lie and tell people I played on Among the Living.

I fucking love The Four Seasons, literally everything about their music brings me joy, idk if I could EVER listen to this much of them though, unless the price tag came with Frankie showing up at my house and singing five songs.

honestly though if there were thirteen cds of them rehearsing the songs I would listen to the shit out of that. hearing vocal groups rehearse is sometimes more fun than hearing the finished product

Would it be "cheating" to skip straight to Genuine Imitation Life Gazette when I've only familiar with (and not especially fond of) a handful of their hits?

The group themselves probably thought of those early LPs as filler/something to get through while the singles were the real thing, I can't see any level of reverence for the group that would make someone insist you listen to them first.

OK, but would I be losing a lot of context without listening to a greatest hits first?

Hmmm, I think if you've heard a handful and didn't like them I dunno if there's anything on a greatest hits that would give you anything more, though I may be forgetting something. Can always go back to it after you've exhausted the Genuine Imitation album anyway.