Frankie Valli: A Lifetime of Music

A 'Jersey Boy' Looks Back, 2013

In late summer of 2013, I spent a few hours noshing and drinking iced coffee in a diner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with Frankie Valli, lead singer of the Four Seasons. The focus was a freelance trade magazine story I was assigned on his more than 50 years of show business, and the perennial appeal of their music and story in Broadway musical Jersey Boys, then entering its tenth year. As these things often go, once the interviewer has shown proper respect to the current projects, you might hit a groove with the person with whom you are speaking, and the roles become reversed: Valli would ask me some questions, or we could go outside the story lines and talk about my favorite subject, which generally boils down to songwriting.

At one point Valli, then 80, asked me to name the most perfect song ever written, or at least of our shared musical lifetimes. I played dumb, and stayed in my place: I wasn't going to say, for example, Bob Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately." If I had, the …