Bob Gaudio & Frankie Valli’s Enduring Partnership
May 2nd, 2010
Frankie Valli & Bob Gaudio at the Jersey Boys Las Vegas Second Anniversary Celebration (Photo by: Erik Kabic/Retna Digital)
Mike Weatherford of the Las Vegas Review-Journal interviewed Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli when they were in town last week to celebrate the Palazzo’s second anniversary of JERSEY BOYS. Here’s a preview of what the two pop music icons had to say:
A handshake deal between Valli the singer and Gaudio the songwriter led to Valli’s solo hit, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” and a future beyond the original quartet.
“It’s been a terrific relationship,” says Valli, who turns 76 on Monday. “We’re tuned into each other, and we’re not afraid to express opinions and not feel as though we’re attacking each other. Sometimes you get the best work done that way.”
“Maybe that’s why we didn’t do a lot of interviews about our past,” he says at another point. “We just kind of kept it under the carpet.”
But everyone knows the story now. So we can guess why the third surviving Season, Tommy DeVito, isn’t sitting here with them, even though he lives in Las Vegas.
The musical depicts DeVito as the group’s bad boy, gambling them deeper into debt until he is exiled to Las Vegas. “You see the show, you kind of get a vibe on what we’ve been through,” Gaudio says, before taking the diplomatic route: He and Valli are “more involved in the actual day-to-day ‘Jersey Boys’ stuff.”
Gaudio figures the gambler in DeVito decided the run was over and that it was “time to leave the table.” And he wouldn’t have been alone in that opinion. “What happened to us after Tommy left? That’s got to be against all odds. Who would have thought this would still be going on?”
Read the full interview with Gaudio & Valli on LVRJ.com.
