Frankie Drake Msyteries

The Four Seasons, featuring the remarkable and unmistakeable voice of Frankie Valli, were one of the most popular and successful groups of the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic, and one of the few American groups to withstand the onslaught of the British Invasion to carry their chart career through into the 1970s. When they had their first big hit as The Four Seasons in 1961 with “Sherry”, they were by no means new to the pop scene and both Frankie Valli and the group had paid their dues for the best part of a decade, honing their skills in a variety of guises on an equally bewildering array of record labels. This great-value 58-track 2-CD set features most of Frankie Valli’s early recordings, both solo and with various groups before they became The Four Seasons in 1960, and then presents their early successes under that name. It comprises selected A & B sides as Frankie Valley, Frankie Valley & The Travellers, The Four Lovers, Frankie Valli & The Romans, The Village Voices, Billy Dixon & The Topics, Johnny Halo, Hal Miller and The Rays, and The Four Seasons for the Corona, Mercury RCA, Epic, Okeh, Cindy, Decca, Topix, Gone and Vee-Jay labels. It also features the tracks from The Four Lovers album “Joyride” and the Four Seasons album “Sherry &11 Others”. Quite apart from setting the scene for the rest of their career as the Four Seasons, this collection of doowop and rock ‘n’ roll from the era when Frankie and his colleagues were exploring the potential of their talent, is hugely entertaining and offers a real insight into what lay behind The Four Seasons’ success.

Having collected Frankie Miller's records since the late 1950's here in Britain, he's never once turned out a bad record totally reliable for 'Pure Traditional Country' with a voice that holds you to his every word. Many Country Singers along the way sold out to 'Commercial Pop Country'. but Frankie has stayed true to the cause. This is a brilliant album presented by a great singer who treats every song with that wonderful traditional feeling in his voice.

British folkster Nick Drake's gorgeous, melancholy, tantalizingly ambiguous songs have been covered often, but not perhaps with the range of interpretive powers & depth of emotional commitment that these (mostly) Vancouver & Seattle artists bring to bear in re-imagining his music…

In the wake of the success of Jersey Boys, the theatrical production based on the Four Seasons' lives, Rhino issued this impressive three-CD, 76-track box set, which also includes a DVD of a dozen film clips from 1962-1975. It's never been hard to find a Four Seasons best-of that includes all their big hits (which are all here as well), but for those who want a bigger collection of the group's material, this fills the bill well. The usual intelligence Rhino brings to such large career retrospectives is in force here, the songs including numerous low-charting singles that usually don't make the cut for best-of anthologies; various LP-only tracks, and B-sides; Frankie Valli solo efforts; singles they released under the pseudonym of the Wonder Who?; and much more material from their post-1967 era than is found on most compilations. In fact, most of the really popular stuff is on disc one and the first half of disc two, though the box runs all the way through their comeback hits in the mid-'70s and a few stray releases from subsequent decades.