And this fall the Fugees’ Lauryn Hill - like Valli a proud New Jersey native - is on tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of her 1998 solo debut, which includes a rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”Īs with the Davis gala, Valli says he’s been surprised by the outpouring of interest. Last year the Yeah Yeah Yeahs interpolated a bit of “Beggin’” for a cut from their latest album. Not long before Måneskin’s “ Beggin’” cover took off, the L.A.-based DJ and producer Surf Mesa borrowed the chorus of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” for his laid-back house track “ ILY (I Love You Baby),” which exploded on TikTok in 2020 and has racked up nearly a billion streams on Spotify. More happily, the Four Seasons’ music has taken on something of a life of its own, raising the possibility that the group’s catalog - already familiar to a generation of younger listeners thanks to the smash Broadway musical “Jersey Boys” - might continue to thrive into the future without Valli’s having to pound the pavement. Now everything is one-nighters, which means you finish the show, get to bed, get up at 6 in the morning, go to the airport, go to the next job and do the same thing all over again.” A small, birdlike guy dressed in skinny jeans and dress sneakers, Valli sighs. Back in the day, you went to a job and you stayed there for a week. “It’s not so much the work - it’s the travel. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he continues, his whaddya-want-from-me accent softened slightly by his years living in California. The house on a quiet cul-de-sac is tastefully decorated in gray and white a book of Bob Dylan lyrics sits on an end table amid family photos and a plaque commemorating the Latin-airplay success of “ Te Quiero Baby,” Valli’s 2020 collaboration with the Cuban American rapper Pitbull. “I’m not sure whether I’m gonna keep going out,” he says on a recent morning at the Encino home he shares with Jacobs, 60, a former CBS marketing executive whom he met at dinner one night at a Los Angeles restaurant. This month Valli announced that he’s planning to cut back his live work by about half in 2024 he swears he’s not saying farewell, though he is calling his next run of concerts the Last Encores tour. So then why is he threatening to hang it up soon? (Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy) “They probably all would have, as long as I paid for the plane trip and the rooms.”įinancial considerations aside, Valli is hardly wanting for crowds these days: With a set list chock-full of AM radio classics like “ Sherry,” “ Walk Like a Man,” “ Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “ Working My Way Back to You,” “ Rag Doll” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” - each a compact marvel of lush vocal harmony and rough-and-tumble rhythm - Valli plays 75 or 80 well-attended concerts every year, including a gig in May at Inglewood’s YouTube Theater in which that last tune sparked a singalong so robust that Valli told the audience, “They can hear us in Sacramento.” “We both have families from back east, and afterward everybody said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us? We wanted to come!’” He laughs. “Oh, it was terrific,” he recalls of the very private ceremony at Las Vegas’ Westgate Hotel, where Valli and his fourth wife, Jackie Jacobs, tied the knot in June, more than half a century after he set out toward becoming one of the 1960s’ most reliable pop hitmakers as the falsetto-voiced frontman of the Four Seasons. Nobody came to Frankie Valli’s wedding over the summer, which was exactly how the 89-year-old singer wanted it.
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