Why is Valli on stage, charging as much as some $300 a ticket, for a reverse form of karaoke? Photo / Raul Romo, The Washington Post
He’s become the subject of viral memes and jokes about lip-syncing. But the 90-year-old pop legend defends his live performances and his love of being on stage.
A Frankie Valli concert these days starts with a film. It’s short, but it spans some 60 years of his singing career: Big Girls Don’t Cry, Working My Way Back to You, the Broadway jukebox hit Jersey Boys. A drum thumps, the band kicks in, and the man himself, 90 years old, emerges slowly from the wings of Boston’s Wang Theatre and launches into the 1978 song that was his seventh and (presumably) last No 1 hit, the theme from Grease.
“I saw my problems, and I’ll see the light. We got a lovin’ thing, we gotta feed it right … ”
One thing’s clear almost immediately: Valli may be performing, but he’s not singing - at least not on the mic. The voice carrying through the Wang is a ringer for the Vallie of yore, and those sitting in the nice seats or watching close-up videos later can see that his lips are barely moving.
So why is he on stage, charging as much as some $300 a ticket, for a reverse form of karaoke?
This tour, tagged Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons: The Last Encores, has gone viral for all the wrong reasons, with memes noting the frail nature of the star and his reliance on recorded vocals. Comments range from outraged (“Whoever keeps sending Frankie Valli out on stage at this point is committing elder abuse”) to nastily comic (“It’s rare to see someone sing at their own funeral”) to supportive (“Ageists need to just SHUT UP!”).
At Valli’s 90-minute performance in Boston, those in the crowd didn’t seem to care whether he was singing live. They also appreciated that, whatever he may have been doing as the band played, he did offer between-songs banter that was clearly live.
“You go and see a 90-year-old guy who is performing, what do you think you’re going to get?” fan Kevin Smith said after watching the show from the 11th row. “He’s giving it his all and putting on a show. It’s like going to wrestling … Is it a real wrestling match, or are you going to be entertained? And my son and I were thoroughly entertained from start to finish.”
Still, the New York Post and the Daily Mail have run stories with video clips from recent concerts portraying Valli as a disoriented pop prisoner of the stage. The singer even had to issue a statement, through a spokesperson, in which he declared, “Nobody has ever made me do anything I didn’t want to do.”
But he hadn’t addressed the questions personally until a recent morning in Los Angeles. That’s when Valli, after a charming discussion with The Washington Post about his decades as a performer and his love of music, grew quickly frustrated when pressed to talk about the recent online attacks. He made clear that he’s the one who decides whether to tour. For him, the stage remains central to his identity.
He doesn’t need the money. Jersey Boys and his catalogue continue to pay out. The interview took place in one of his homes, a nearly 1900 sq m house in the city’s Encino neighbourhood that he shares with his fourth wife, Jackie. They appreciate the proximity to Los Angeles International Airport.
As for the performance itself, Valli would not even hint at the possibility that the flawless falsetto that flows over the speakers is anything but authentically live. No recording. No auto-tune. Nothing but him and the energetic men in black ties (Justin, Noah, Aaron and Craig) who make up the umpteenth edition of the Four Seasons singers. The criticism, he says, is rooted in envy.
“I haven’t had a problem, an audience problem, for my whole life,” Valli says. “And if I can’t make a note, I don’t sing it.”
We are a culture steeped in sonic nostalgia, with superfans willing to spend whatever it takes to hear their favourites perform. We catch the endless farewell tours (the Eagles, Cher) as well as the recurring concerts from the ones who don’t even pretend they’re saying goodbye (McCartney, the Stones, Dylan). We take cruises featuring croaky-voiced hair metal bands, boy bands huff-puffing their way through old dance moves. Even death isn’t a permanent condition, thanks to holograms.
Valli certainly isn’t alone. Kiss fans posted a potential Paul Stanley flub during a show in Belgium. Seemingly everyone saw Mariah Carey’s infamous appearance on New Year’s Eve.
“You go see Pink in concert and she’s swinging upside-down on a rope and the vocals are perfect,” says Jamie Kime, a guitarist who was in Valli’s touring band a few years ago and admits he had no idea whether his boss was singing live.
It feels almost sacrilegious to doubt Valli. He’s an American legend, the son of a New Jersey barber who got the music bug as a boy when his mother took him to see a Frank Sinatra concert. Years later, a neighbourhood buddy named Joe Pesci - yes, that Joe Pesci - introduced him to Bob Gaudio, a founding member of the Four Seasons.
The Four Seasons were the East Coast answer to the Beach Boys, steeped in doo-wop and a kind of street sense that wasn’t interested in surfboards or Daddy’s T-Bird. Gaudio was the studio mastermind, but it was Valli’s voice that defined the group on a string of No 1 hits, including Sherry, Walk Like a Man and Rag Doll. He was a natural tenor with a gritty edge that could slide on up to a powerful falsetto. And except for a short period in the late 1960s and early 70s, Valli, either with the Four Seasons or alone, remained a star.
Late in Valli’s career (or what might then have been considered “late”), Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees wrote a song for a movie adaptation of a musical about high school students in the late 1950s, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Grease worked as a kind of bridge, linking the bobby soxers to the disco generation. What audiences heard in the song depended on who they were at the time: those who knew firsthand what it felt like to put another dime in the jukebox or someone who yearned to know.
Grease is the opener from Valli’s current show that was captured on August 3, an afternoon gig at the Mountain Winery in California, and posted online, spawning a slew of comments that included “Who is doing this to Frankie Valli?” and “Let the man retire.” The New York Post ran its piece and the comments exploded, with one from singer and longtime fan Frank Stallone (brother of Sly): “Frankie has had a phenomenal career,” he wrote on Instagram, “but … it’s time to call it a day.”
Valli doesn’t scour TikTok and Instagram, but his wife, Jackie, 62, has seen the chatter.
She notes that, in the Mountain Winery clip, Valli is simply standing to the side of the stage as he always does as the band kicks into Grease. He moves slowly because he is 90.
“They were saying he doesn’t know where he is,” Jackie says. “Which is crazy. He was waiting for the band to start its cue.”
As for the voice or, more specifically, the powerful vocal that emerges as Valli’s lips rarely move in sync to the music …
“He wants to give the audience the full experience,” Jackie says. “Once you hit a certain point, you can’t hit all the high notes. And Frankie wants to give the audience, his fans that he loves so much, everything. He wants to give them a show that they love.”
During the interview at Valli’s home, it’s clear that one tabloid accusation is unfair. Nobody is forcing him to perform. He’s also sharp enough to make his own decisions. He effortlessly quotes lyrics from his favourite songs and talks about how seeing his favourite singers - Little Jimmy Scott, Dinah Washington and, of course, Sinatra - shaped him creatively before he became a star. Jazz remains his great love, but he got into pop because, when he turned on the radio and heard the top songs of his day, he knew that he, too, could crack the charts.
Valli is asked about his friend Sinatra, who stopped playing concerts at 79. They were close. In the 1970s, Sinatra saved Valli’s career by referring him to the doctor whose operation helped Valli overcome the otosclerosis that left him struggling to hear many nights.
Late in Sinatra’s career, Valli remembers going to a show.
“He wasn’t singing like he did when he was in his 40s and 50s,” Valli says. “And the people next to me were making comments about how he sounded … Like he doesn’t sound the same. And I turned and I looked at them and I said: ‘Do you realise that you’re here and this could be his very last performance? And you are here watching it.’”
So when do you retire? That question has plagued entertainers and athletes from the start, whether it’s the once-graceful Willie Mays stumbling in the outfield grass or Phil Collins, unable to grip a drumstick, pushing through the final Genesis tour. It’s also not just a conflict for those in the spotlight. Teachers, lawyers and electricians experience it, the question of how to step away when your identity, everything you’re known for, is connected to the thing you do for a living.
“He cannot stop performing and having the interaction with the audience,” says keyboardist Lee Shapiro, a member of the Four Seasons during the 1970s who still talks with Valli regularly. “And, frankly, he does lip-sync. Not all the time. But at 90 years old, if you’re destroyed and you’ve got a concert you’ve got to do, what are you going to do? It’s ridiculous to make that an issue if the show’s entertaining and you got your money’s worth and you saw the big star that you wanted to see.”
“I don’t care if he’s lip-syncing,” says Rosanne Kinley, 63, a South Carolina fan who saw Valli in 1975 for the first time and recently went online to defend him. “I love his energy,” she says. “I love his karma. I love the fact that he loves what he does. So he’s 90 years old. He still loves to do it, and it shows when he’s on stage.”
Not everyone feels that way.
Robin and Gary Rosenthal went to see Valli and the Four Seasons at the Music Centre at Strathmore in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2014. Even then, 10 years ago, Robin thought Valli was lip-syncing. She felt lied to.
“If you are going to see a hologram concert, you know what you’re going to see,” she says. “If you go to see Frankie Valli, you expect to hear him singing. I don’t go to see his face and his body. I don’t need to look at him.”
Other singers also questioned Valli’s performance.
The lead singer of Heart, Ann Wilson, who is a longtime critic of artists who use technology to mask vocal limitations, watched a clip of a show provided by The Post.
“Oh, my God,” she says. “His face is completely still. He looks like he’s not even there. I suppose he’s not.”
For Wilson, 74, there is nothing like being on stage. That feeling kept her on the road even when knee surgery forced her to sit during part of Heart’s recent tour. But faking it is simply not an option.
“I think that’s the moment when you have to decide whether to walk off stage or not,” she says. “You really have to look at your morals and go, ‘Do I just want to go up there and phone it in, give a bulls*** performance because I’m me, or do I take the high road?”
Graham Nash, who still tours and records at 82, said he was offended by Valli’s performance.
“Frankie Valli is not singing,” he says. “He’s just lip-syncing badly to a tape. As a musician, if you’re not singing, you shouldn’t be on stage.”
That doesn’t mean you have to quit when you get older.
Nash watched Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson return after decades off the road to play live in the 1990s. Wilson had less range than on the band’s classic records, but instead of masking it, he sang the lower parts in his songs and assigned parts to backup singers in sections he couldn’t handle. There is also Joni Mitchell, once a mezzo-soprano, now singing in a voice more reminiscent of Nina Simone.
“She certainly doesn’t have the top-end range that she used to have,” Nash says. “But, at the same time, there is a beauty. What we are getting instead of a top range is incredible phrasing in a lower range.”
Valli does not like others speaking for him, and they don’t. This includes Dean Egnater, his longtime manager, and Gaudio, his partner in the Four Seasons. Gaudio stopped performing years ago, though Valli says they talk regularly as they manage the group’s legacy. Both Gaudio and Egnater declined interviews.
After 15 minutes of discussing the viral vocal debate, Valli grows weary.
“If I say I’m not, you either believe me or you don’t,” he says.
Valli does say he has been contemplating coming off the road. His main frustration is travel. He doesn’t like it. To lighten his load, Valli generally plays shows Friday through Sunday and takes weekdays off.
Covid-19, which he’s had twice, left him feeling much weaker. But performing still calls to him. The hits are still legend. The fans are still eager. It is, as the song still goes, a lovin’ thing.
As he sips his coffee, he looks out onto his lush backyard.
“Out there, on the lawn, there’s no audience.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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