The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette
How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it."
The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment.
In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette.
Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-wop" for satire (and his response was "well, duh"), and i'll argue any day of the week that Frankie Valli and friends said "you want to hear what it sounds like from the real deal? Ok, we'll tell you exactly how it feels to sympathize with nobody." Nobody understood this album, and that means they succeeded big time. I seriously don't know how it got released. The only possible explanation is that everbody said "it's The 4 Seasons, we aren't going to argue."
Well, let me tell you a secret. This isn't just a 4 Seasons album. This album literally influenced everyone, John Lennon, Jethro Tull, Jefferson Airplane, and even bands that don't start with "j." The statement this album makes isn't about "appealing to the psychedelic audience" like everyone thinks, it isn't an "experiment," it's straight up "we taught you everything we know, we raised you, of course we are a facade, go out and be who you know you should be and don't make us turn the car around."
Seriously, go listen to some early Mothers of Invention then really listen to The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. The back of Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers doesn't look like that for no reason, and Paul and Grace didn't suddenly wake up with the urge to give Country/Folk Music a try only to have the band break up and eventually write Blows Against the Empire. They got backhanded across the face by The 4 Seasons and started being adults instead of the mewling children who made Crown of Creation. Lennon told Gaudio face to face it was one of his favorite albums, and to put it mildly the use of the "Hey Jude" outro and the cartoon of The Beatles and Ravi Shankar are anything but nice.
Whether or not you've even heard of this album, my statements might seem strange. 4 Seasons fans simply didn't understand it, didn't buy it, and the writers got a lot of grief for this album and the next (Frank Sinatra's Watertown). The band wasn't unhappy with the material, they were unhappy that it wasn't Top 40 material. Like i said, this wasn't a 4 Seasons album, it was a statement about the country in 1968, about where the money comes from, and how you take a bit of a hit (pun intended) when you forget which side of the entertainment line you stand on.
People do mention the lavish packaging, but they understate the sheer scope of detail, the inside jokes, the clear references to the bands and artists with whom their sympathies actually lie. And, they fail to appereciate the real gravity these songs had in the context of January, 1969.
In my little blurb about Classics IV, i hinted that The 4 Seasons as a business didn't take kindly to people imitating them, and this album drives that point home like a stake into a vampire. The 4 Seasons were a big deal before The Beatles, Stones, Hermits, etc. even bought a plane ticket, suffered no loss of popularity while said bands scampered around the country, got tired of zipping their lip and keeping up appearances for a brief 2 years, then went back to being The 4 Seasons.
Every track is pertinent. Yes, the opener is "about race relations," but that's not its actual meaning. The subtext of that song, and the album as a whole, is what i described above: we are The 4 Seasons; we tried to stay out of it, but you all clearly misunderstood; we don't like it any more than you do, but we live over here in the big house you're trying to light on fire. By all means, fight your fight, but don't pretend that we can fight it for you (we're one of those gaudy trinkets in the shop window on Main Street). Idaho is a lovely place, but musically speaking, fuck Idaho.
Contrary to what anybody says, no one made them do it. No one was sitting around saying "we have to appeal to the youth of today, get with the times, broaden our audience." When Gaudio says this album disappoints him but that it was something he "had to do," he's poilitely saying he shouldn't have needed to write this album, he shouldn't have needed to create an elaborate and expensive fake newspaper concept for everyone to latch onto, he shouldn't have needed to point out that everyone was acting like naive children coming of age in a mean old world, but clearly he did, and boy did he do it. He knew full well that the only way to firmly cement his band against the tsunami was to beat everyone to the punch.
The hard part about this album is that you have to really ask yourself how you feel about the subject matter, because Gaudio isn't spoonfeeding you any moral signposts. Do you like a world where parents get divorced and kids see their dads one day a week? Do you like a world where women find value in themselves only in terms of being the object of a man's affection? Do you actually think having money makes this charade more meaningful? Is it possible that you are just as much to blame for all the no fun we're having as your supposed enemy? Are you actually teaching your children to love, or are you just teaching them to hate each other the same way you do?
What this album really says is grow up, and actually do what you say you want to do. Want to drop out? Go right ahead. Want to play pretend? Fine. Wanna see us drop a ton of our own money just so you can feel validated? Bombs away. Now, if you don't mind, we'd like to go back to collecting our hard earned royalty checks from the head in the clouds pop we're known for making. Peace and love, don't touch my wallet.
My analysis may be contradictory to what you know or read, and that's because my analysis isn't newspaper critic/A&R blather. You can argue that Jake Holmes played a pivotal role in shaping the concept and story, but at the end of the day Gaudio hired him to help write it, Valli, DeVito, and Long helped make it good, and mild mannered don't rock the boat 'cause i'm secretly a shark Gaudio handed it to the execs at Philips and said "write the checks."
I'm glad he did, even if it didn't accomplish what he really wanted it to accomplish, which is secretly "GET OFF MY LAWN!"
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