'Looking Back' to the future

A visit to New York for most people is about the city and its sights, sounds, shopping etc. OK it is a big brash noisy place that towers over you and runs at a pace that never seems to ease up. This post-Christmas visit by me to the ‘city that never sleeps’ was about enjoying ‘hidden gems’ …..from our ‘bijou’ hotel in the shadow of the Empire State Building and the nearby Macy’s department store, to Times Square in it’s New Year celebrations. These were however all secondary because the visit was really about meeting the friends that Frankie Valli has inadvertently created for me over the last 40 years. These friends mean such visits are always cherished and a reason to always want to go back.

As well as meeting Karen, my ‘Four Seasons’ pen pal since 1976 and 60s pop heroine Jean Thomas (lead singer of the ‘Rag Dolls’- more re this in my next blog post) there was the chance to meet up with top fans……Charles Alexander, Frank Rovello and George Juba. With the guys I enjoyed lunch and whiled away an afternoon reflecting on the Four Seasons releases of the last year and the research achievements of the UK fan group. What can we achieve by looking back I was asked?

Putting the past in its true context helps create the future I believe. And for the next generation of fans we owe them the history as accurate as we know it.

‘Looking Back’ was a 1964 Philips album by the Four Seasons that looked back at their releases whilst at Vee-Jay and their re-makes of classic 50s hits. But looking back is not something Bob Gaudio likes to do and he is not the only one.

"If you look backward in this business, you will be crushed. You have to look forward." These are the words of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs when asked about celebrating the Mac's 25th anniversary this week. "It has to do with Steve's values," said Andy Hertzfeld, a key member of the original Macintosh development team during the 1980's. "Apple is a reflection of Steve and he doesn't want to celebrate the past. He always said the important work is that which you do today and tomorrow, not the work you did yesterday."

Bob Gaudio has almost said the same thing himself and whilst we understand this perspective, the fans today have nowhere else to look. In business there are always lessons to be learnt from the past whilst the future can be what you make it. Apart from the prospect of the announcement of a film deal for ‘Jersey Boys…..there perhaps seems little to look forward to for Four Seasons fans. Now that (almost) the full Four Seasons catalogue is available on CD and with little prospect of any ‘previously unreleased’ material surfacing from the Motown or Philips vaults it is perhaps easy to assume there is nothing left to research. Well not for us.

As music historians we have always focused on the past successes and the story of how the music was created. The other key objective for fans has been to have the music re-mastered on CD to the highest quality. But that was never an objective of Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio as a recent article in Mix the on-line magazine demonstrates.

Mix is the world's leading magazine for the professional recording and sound production technology industry. ‘Rag Doll’s creation is described by Crewe and Gaudio in a fascinating article. "The overtones of the tom and hair drum were very pronounced," says Gaudio. "And the damn echo was slapping everything around. But it's interesting that we noticed it mainly in retrospect. The media of the time - like AM radio - simply couldn't reproduce it, so you didn't hear it over the radio. The same with the monitors of the time, especially in a demo studio. You play the CD now and you think, that's not what I heard back then." "There was a lot of generational loss on that record, because it was 4-track and we had to bounce," Gaudio notes. "But again, radio forgave a lot of that. And while we were sensitive to that, and often relied on mastering to fix it, ultimately we were always into the feel of the record. That always came first."

Like many recordings from that era and before, CD versions and FM radio reveal all sorts of anomalies on the tracks. You can hear the bangles of the tambourine being moved away from the microphone in between verse and chorus, and there's one spot where the tine sound is slightly out of time and sounds like it was accidentally hit. Recordings like "Rag Doll" were never intended for this kind of microscopic scrutiny, but Gaudio says it wasn't an issue then or now. "It really became part of the sound," he says. "It created a sound that was fresh and worked on radio."

Just the sort of analysis fans want to hear and although the suggestion that because the mix was rushed and intended for radio, we shouldn’t want to scrutinize the arrangements ………… well we don’t accept that. If Holland , Dozier and Holland can take their mixes apart and describe and illustrate the ‘feel’ in every track on the multi-tracks as they do in Free Detroit Press videos to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Motown…then why won’t Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio even if the multi-tracks don’t exist any more.? The Stereo masters still reveal a lot. And careful re-mastering today can correct and bring the best out of the studio work. That is the whole point of mastering.

In Europe, there are special young fans whose interest in the recordings and the music’s creation is strong and working with them we will help identify the ‘best mixes’ of all Four Seasons songs from 1961 to 1967 over the next year or so. And finding the best versions of the catalogue on CD is becoming a problem. With compression ruining the dynamic range on CD’s today ( e.g. Jersey Beat Box Set), the CD’s of the 80s and 90’s contain the best digital masters of their songs available….We'll ask the question to evaluate if today’s releases are  compressed for I-pod use and not of a sufficiently high audio quality. We’ll review all CD releases since 1986 and advise the ‘essential’ and ‘collectable’ ones. Unlike the Beach Boys we have no DVD-Audio re-masters…..but with advances in sound mastering it will soon be possible for enthusiasts to create these. It will be a case of re-creating a feel that maybe could be heard in the studio whilst recording the session….but was lost in the mono mix for radio. Only by re-mastering from masters can the ‘feel’ be re-created. Just listen to Holland-Dozier-Holland and you can see how..

In ten years time it is forecast all our domestic collections will be on home based servers transmitting via wi-fi to players that will create the best audio mixes that we could want. So preserving the best digital masters from CD and vinyl will enable fans to have the best sound.

And whilst nothing more is forthcoming about the creation of the music from the Partnership, we are researching how Bob Gaudio set-out to create a new sound for the Four Seasons in 1965 that would lead to the creation of a ‘NEW’ Four Seasons in 1976 that would storm back to the top of the charts with ‘Who Loves You’ and ‘December 63’. Based on interviews and articles we are able to trace the moves, decisions and recordings that led to this in ‘The Rise and Fall Of The NEW Four Seasons’. Our first chapters in this epic story will appear this year. An alternative story to the Jersey Boys distortion of the truth.

Finally we hear rumours of a salvaged ‘live’ recording of the group from the 70s which we hope will appear on CD sometime this year.

We’ll go on building on the network of friendships created, and strengthened by re-unions and the International Convention, and keep generating interesting and challenging commentary on the Four Seasons and their history.

So that is the point of ‘Looking Back’ to the future.

Ken Charmer