My friend Ken Shane is a writer for Popdose and interviewed the Four Seasons songwriter Bob Gaudio. Gaudio is one of the all time greats, his hits include “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,’ “Rag Doll,” “Big Man in Town,” “Bye Bye Baby” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” so, yeah, we pop guys are very very impressed, right?
Shane is pretty much the pop connoisseur of the moment so the interview is a great read from beginning to end and you can read it here, but here are some highlights.
“I was a frustrated drummer so drum stuff kind of fell in my lap, or I fell in the drummer’s lap (laughs). A lot of that stuff was dictated on sessions. The drum fills, the openings, the closings. They were to me as much a part of our records as the songs were, as Frankie was. That’s a slight exaggeration, but you get the point.”
“Early on, and I don’t remember what year, we were touring the U.K., and the Beatles had a record out called “Please Please Me.” They were not here (in the U.S.) yet. I brought that record back to the States, and I brought it to Vee Jay Records because I thought it was something that we might like to cover.”
“(The Jersey Boys Soundtrack) was an interesting process in the sense that I didn’t feel comfortable with the ingredients that I got from the film. That’s not necessarily unusual because films are cut up and songs aren’t completed in many cases. So unless you plan it out to have a soundtrack you don’t have a whole lot of information to come up with a 50 minute CD.”
The latter quote, which I’d guess Gaudio didn’t mean as such, is something of an accurate description of Eastwood’s “Jersey Boys” main problem: it doesn’t give the songs the time they needed to catch fire.
