The Four Seasons Recording Notes

CLASSIC TRACKS

“Rag Doll” by The Four Seasons

Valli had formed a nascent version of The Four Seasons, called The Four Lovers, which included DeVito, in 1956; Gaudio was a member of the Royal Teens, along with Al Kooper, and had penned the group’s biggest hit, “Short Shorts.” As The Four Seasons, they filled in small-time club appearances with studio work as background singers in the Manhattan studio scene.

But it was when the group connected with producer Bob Crewe that all four cylinders began to fire. Starting with “Sherry,” in 1962, The Four Seasons began a string of radio hits for the Vee-Jay label, until litigation kept the group out of the studio for almost a year before they were able to resurface on Philips Records, and “Dawn” put them back on the hit track. So, “Rag Doll” would be an important record for The Four Seasons—it was the follow-up to their first hit in a year. But the record, which would go on to spend 10 weeks in the Number One position on Billboard’s music charts, was anything but a major production. In fact, for a record that performed so well on the charts, it was completed very quickly—in a single session, in a single day.

“It was such a helter-skelter session,” recalls Bob Gaudio, the group’s main songwriter, vocal arranger and, later, its co-producer with Bob Crewe. “It was a Sunday and we were leaving town the next day for a lengthy tour. We couldn’t get into any of the usual studios we used in Manhattan, or get any of the engineers we usually worked with.” Those included Atlantic Studios and Olmstead Sound, and engineer Tom Dowd, who had engineered “Dawn.”

Scrambling to find a studio, the group located Allegro Sound, a 4-track demo studio at 1650 Broadway, on the ground floor of a midtown West Side hotel, not an unusual location for a studio in Manhattan in those days, when many studios of the previous two decades had used hotel ballrooms as tracking rooms. The group was also able to pull a favor from engineer Lenny Stei, who owned Stei-Philips Studios, where the group had recorded before. “It wasn’t our first choice of studio, especially since we had already moved to 8-track recording with ‘Dawn,’” Gaudio says. “And Lenny was more of a studio owner than an engineer and not our first choice—or even our twentieth choice—as an engineer, as I’m sure he would agree. It was really a favor on a Sunday morning, and we were getting desperate.”

Gaudio had written “Rag Doll” not long before this session: “I was driving into [Manhattan] for a session and I got stopped at Eleventh Avenue, which back then seemed like the longest traffic light in the world; like three minutes long,” he recalls. “If you got stopped there, you’d have these homeless people come up and try to wash your windshield for spare change. I saw this hand come up to my windshield and connected to it was a woman whose clothes were all tattered and who had this dirty face, like something out of Oliver [the Broadway show based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist]. I didn’t have any change on me. All I had was a ten-dollar bill, so I gave it to her. I drove off and saw her in the rearview mirror just staring at it. That image stayed with me. Within the next day, I had the chorus and the first verse. I couldn’t finish it, so I called in Bob Crewe to help and we had it done two weeks later.”

Convinced that “Rag Doll” was a smash hit and necessary to maintain the head of steam that “Dawn” had created, The Four Seasons and Crewe wanted to get it on tape before their tour began, prodded further by Philips Records’ desire to put out another song in its stead. Gaudio, DeVito and Massi, along with session drummer Buddy Saltzman, set up to play the basic track. Allegro had a small studio room, but it had what sounded like a huge live echo chamber, which would become part of the record’s sound.

“The overtones of that chamber were unbelievable,” Gaudio recalls. “We were concerned that it would be a bit too extreme, soundwise, especially if we also used it for the vocals. We really thought we were on thin ice. But we were stuck with that and the 4-track.”

NEXT

Reprinted with permission from