Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.
Frankie Valli – “My Eyes Adored You”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #1 in March 1975
Suffering in silence is the queer way. To covet from a distance is the school of hard knocks we gay men and women attend. For the Catholic supplicant, this is nothing new. Valli’s tenor suggested a detachment from sex so complete that he might have been a mushroom in the forest issuing a sound, and it’s this virtue that gave “Big Girls Don’t Cry” their mild charm in the pre-Beatles early sixties. But the rock revolution was hard for Valli and doo-wop groups. He and the Four Seasons persisted with their sound for the rest of the sixties until he went solo with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” which my generation knows as a Lauryn Hill cover; and “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night),” which hit #1 in 1976 and re-charted in 1993 in a Ben Liebrand remix that added drum machine and smarm.
A hired gun waiting to be fired, Frankie Valli is one of the last of the old crooners, and it’s hard to dislike him for singing the hell out of what he knows. The problem with “My Eyes Adored You” is how Valli and songwriters Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan, who wrote many Four Seasons hits, fumble with pre-rock values of virginity affirmation without the wordplay or musical sophistication to make sense of the post-Watergate scene. When I heard “My Eyes Adored You” on easy listening radio in the early eighties, its commitment to an eighth grade vision of romance struck me, an eighth grader, as stunted. “And I never laid a hand on you!” Valli insists, like a defendant pleading the Fifth.
But 1975 marked the High Seventies: the billowing curtains, Benson & Hedges, and variety show ethos I’ve mentioned in earlier entries. This and “Swearin’ to God” (the apostrophe was as much a sign of rebellion as the draft card burning for a draftee) delineated what the mainstream seventies sounded like to the kids who endured their parents that decade. The harmonica and strings, while well-balanced, buttress a fable about commitment so total that it encompassed grade school. Higher and higher the key changes ascend, with Patti Austin leading them, bored and impatient; louder and louder the drums tap. This moment is the only one in which I sense “My Eyes Adored You” lifting into the stratosphere of batshitness; instead, it settles into mulch.
Frankie let his hair creep over his ears long enough for The Mike Douglas Show, slipped into a pair of bellbottom formal pants, and scored a number of follow-ups: the #6 adult contemporary disco “Swearin’ to God,” of which I have a stronger memory than “My Eyes Adored You”; a cover of “Our Day Will Come,” also with Austin; and contributed harmonies to “Who Loves You” and “Silver Star” before scoring a massive hit in 1978 with the Grease theme, composed by Barry Gibb. Then he settled into casino fever.
Humanizing The Vacuum 