Jersey Boys Natl Tour Plays Greensboro Today through Sunday; Check Out Interview with Rick Elice in JournalNow.com!
April 1st, 2014JERSEY BOYS national tour plays Greensboro beginning tonight through Sunday at the War Memorial Auditorium. Check out this marvelous interview with the one & only Rick Elice with reporter Lynn Felder:
It was during that time that Elice heard from another former ad client who floated the idea of a script for the Four Seasons show and invited him to have lunch with Valli, the lead singer, and Bob Gaudio, the group member who wrote most of their songs.Elice invited his friend, Brickman.
“We went to lunch thinking, ‘This is not going to amount to anything,’” Elice said. “But in the course of this luncheon, we said something like — ‘So, what was it like growing up in New Jersey?’ And they started telling us what it was like with 1,000 different anecdotes that were either astonishing or heartbreaking — and we found ourselves responding the way an audience would.”
The Four Seasons had the dubious fortune of being on the Top 40 at the same time as the Beatles and the Beach Boys. Sandwiched between the good vibrations of surfer pop and the glamor of the British invaders, they had a slightly grittier image, being from Jersey.
“The Beatles songs were songs about love that were written for girls. They were troubadours,” Elice said. “The Four Seasons songs were written about girls for boys and what it was to be somewhat marginalized.”
They had lots of hits, but not much was written or known about them — to some degree because they wanted it that way. Some of them had police records and rumored mafia connections.
Click HERE to read the whole interview.
