The Snapper Music Box Set - The Project Review - Part One

When as as longstanding Four Seasons fan you get an invite to a Record Company in London with the offer to help with a Mega Box Set of their catalogue including any unreleased tracks you could find!!!!!…you are not going to say NO …...BUT it happened and we thought [Lynn Boleyn and I] we were in dreamland…..particularly when you have loved and collected the music for nearly 60 years.

But for us, it had been an idea back as members of the Four Seasons UK Appreciation Society [FSUKAS] in 2006 to find a way to rescue the catalogue from vinyl. The Four Seasons Partnership at the time were totally locked into the success of ‘Jersey Boys’ and unfortunately the ‘Jersey Beat’ Box Set [June 2007] was not up to the sound quality we expected. I had agreed with the late Stefan Wriedt [renowned German Mastering Engineer] that the Four Seasons Catalogue needed to be 'salvaged' from either Master Tapes, vinyl or CD. The search by 2011 resulted in a plan…...but with Stefan passing away in 2015…..it was very much a ‘lost dream’.

https://thatfourseasonssound.typepad.com/seasonally/2011/05/the-search-for-the-masters.html

After the offer by Snapper Music in August 2018, the project plan we and they implemented (and supported by Warner-Curb, Rhino, Universal and the FSP) was to ‘interrogate’ the FSP tape storage to produce new digital transfers for Snappers UK based Sound Engineer to re-master based on selections conducted by Bob Fisher and I from transfers [analogue tape to digital] by Bill Inglot and his engineers. With John Pingree’s memorabilia, Rachel Gutek’s design and UK collaborators Ken Sharp and Paul Sexton, the aim was to get the BIG PICTURE on a big career of Frankie Valli and all of his Four Seasons since the year that name was settled upon for them[well almost!!] . They did appear again as Billy Dixon and the Topics between the release of ‘Bermuda b/w Spanish Lace’ and SHERRY.

The BIG picture regarding the compilation and sound quality involved 2 objectives for Bob Fisher and I, to assist Bill Inglot and Peter Reynolds, who has mastered the set.

1. To find and decide upon the BEST Masters to be used in the Box Set....for each of the albums. ‘Compilation’ albums were only ‘raided’ for ‘unique’ alternative mixes [except for the never before ‘properly’ released Bob Crewe Masters 2 LP set ‘Edizione D’Oro’ from 1968]. We had to check the tapes were complete with no tracks 'pulled' and not returned. Also with other non-LP tapes we had to establish if the versions were unique and alternative to the album versions

2. To find as many Unreleased Tracks as possible...from ‘sessions’, LIVE Tapes or ‘other sources’ so that the Box Set was sufficiently different to past releases....and was as comprehensive an Anthology as is possible

This was also necessary to justify the price as the aim was ‘top quality’ re both artwork and sound quality. A daunting, and some would have said impossible task given the years and sessions since 1961.

Obviously we did not completely achieve this given the fact that virtually all of the 1960s multi-tracks have been lost or destroyed. Also, of the number of tapes in the FSP Storage examined, 95% proved to be ‘Safety Copies’ at 15 ips, or lower [rather than the studio session tapes at 30 ips] and in some cases they were clearly 4th/5th Generation copies. With ‘tape baking’ necessary for many tapes it is a wonder that Analogue to Digital transfers were possible.

Then even scouring fan archives and the limited number of known 'other sources’, less unreleased tracks were found than we hoped for. No ‘studio based’ [e.g. Philips, Private Stock, Sigma Studio etc] ‘other sources’ could be researched [although we tried] and the rest of the content came from the FSUKAS Digital Archive of tracks salvaged from a network of Collectors. This included cassette tapes of former Four Seasons, now sadly no longer with us. Unfortunately, we did not get to interrogate the Motown period archive [1971 to 1973]. BUT we knew from over 10 years of searching paper records within Universal that this archive of 29 Multi-track session tapes contained potentially 30+ completed tracks and alternate mixes. These were the only ‘known’ remaining 16 track session tapes still existing from Frankie Valli’s whole career. The project involved getting copies of these to Bob and Frankie for review which we did, but they only approved 13 for release. These plus the ‘unheard’ Bob Crewe ‘LOST DISCO ALBUM’ remained our key finds for the unreleased content. Fortunately the quality of content and sound for these was the best we could have hoped for.

Adam White did a good review of the 3 Motown Discs here.

But what of the rest?

With the 60s album tapes being such a risky venture ‘sound wise’ we found that the BEST sounding quality tracks from the Vee-Jay era were on the ‘Delivery Tapes’ from the ‘Masters’ surrendered when the company went bust in 1966 and Bill Inglot had in previous work in the late 1980s created a ‘RECONSTRUCTED’ version of the ‘Sherry and 11 Others’ album in STEREO. We asked Reynolds Mastering to re-construct all of the Vee-Jay albums from these excellent Master Tape copies [both MONO and STEREO]. As for all of the Philips albums from the 1960s we discovered and also included all of these in MONO for the first time. We even replaced ‘lost’ 45 Masters from MINT collectors vinyl at high sound quality capture.

After 4 years work and 2,000 plus hours of track reviews and salvage work by Bob Fisher and I, a final list of MASTERS was approved by Bob Gaudio.

But then my good friend and co-compiler Bob Fisher suddenly passed away and with production delays, the project was at risk during Covid and pushed to its limits by the sheer size and licensing requirements. Inevitably in such circumstances some tracks were cut due to space limits and quality issues and ua handful of previously ‘unreleased’ tracks were accidentally omitted.

My ‘post project reviews’ will document these few ‘errors’ as well as final sound quality results/limits we were able to achieve as a team. And then there are the ‘Out-Takes’ DISC’s 45 and 46, which Bob Fisher and I started work on before his untimely passing. All tracks are fortunately digitally stored for the future. Whether ‘licensing’ and funding will ever see these released ‘commercially’ remains to be seen?

What we have however in the newly released BOX SET, is a massive achievement like nothing before…... celebrating a great career. Sometimes achieving 98% of your objectives in a ‘project’ has to be very satisfying given the problems the team faced. Happy listening and reading. The REAL story of the Four Seasons and Frankie Valli is here.

More soon.......Ken Charmer