Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Hi, glad to have you with me today. If I play you this, can you name the band? Of course, it’s Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, one of the very biggest rock and roll groups of the 60s.
The Four Seasons had been around for a long time before they had their first hit in 1962, thanks in part to producer Bob Crew, who’d go on to write much of their material in collaboration with group member Bob Gaudio. But it was Frankie Valli’s near-soprano voice that really set them apart, and their winning streak continued through to 1967, when the times started to catch up with them. Our guest today is Lee Shapiro, who was a long-time keyboardist and musical director for the band.
Lee went on to have a very successful career doing jingles. He created the rock and roll Elmo doll for Fisher Price. He also collaborated with Barry Manilow on Copacabana, the musical, and formed the group The Hitmen, a brand of supergroups featuring session and touring musicians.
I hope you enjoy my chat with him. Hello. Hello, Lee.
Fabulous to meet you. Let’s start where it all began. Well, actually, I was going to Manhattan School of Music to be a composition major.
And on the weekends, we fortunately, back in the 70s, people still did this, had a 17-piece big band jazz. And my aspiration was to be an arranger and an orchestrator for the big band sound. We had a Monday night gig at a club, and it turned out that Bob Gaudio from the Four Seasons, the original guy who wrote all the songs, was going to leave the road and leave touring so that he could continue to produce music, which he did.
And they needed a replacement. But they figured, while they’re looking for a replacement for Bob, maybe get someone who can arrange, because Charlie Colello, he was the arranger, but he didn’t travel either. To do a new song, the guys had to all come back to New York, couldn’t do it on the road.
So the road manager came in and saw me and recommended me for an audition. And I went in. And this is if you’ve seen Jersey Boys, some of it is true.
And they were $4 million in debt. And they were rehearsing at the Fountain Restaurant in the catering area. And I went into that place and they were all set up to play.
And they gave me music. And Frankie walked in and I played a chord, bling. And he sang, Pretty as a midsummer morn.
Pretty as a midsummer’s morn. They call her Dawn. Dawn.
Dawn, no way I’m no good for you. Oh, Dawn, stay with him, he’ll be good to you. I stopped.
And he said, what’s the matter? And I said, man, you sound just like the radio. And they all had a real good laugh at my expense, but they gave me the job. I don’t think I was shaving every day yet.
Don’t go away. Please go away. Oh, no, I know.
I want you to stay. Don’t go away. Please go away.
Baby, don’t cry. It’s better this way. I really must have seen something in you to trust you.
Well, first of all, everyone in my family is blessed with a bit of a gift of gab. And my dad taught me that you are what you say you are. Then you have to carry the ball.
But nobody cares how good you are if you don’t get the job. So Frankie said to me at that very audition, if I wanted to do a new arrangement for the band and I told you about it in the morning of a day, how long would it take you till we could do it? And as I said, I was kind of an outspoken 19-year-old. And I said, Frankie, if you want to do a new song, tell me in the morning and we’ll do it that night.
And the very first job, he called me on it. And he said, Lee, tonight we’re playing at the Airy Crown Theater and 3,000 seaters sold out. And we always traveled.
We always had five horns. So it was the Four Seasons of Percussionists and Five Horns. And it was kind of that Chicago-y sound that was popular in the day.
And he said, I want like a fanfare and an overture and something and it comes into a thing. And I’m like, you know, okay. And so I go to the hotel room and I write it.
There’s no kick piano, no nothing. I’m just writing out of my head. And I said to Frankie, I said, I think you’re missing an opportunity, if you don’t mind me starting the show a little different.
They used to start with Dawn when I joined the band. They always started with the song Dawn. And there was a little opening part, like I just sang to you a minute ago.
And then it went in with the drums. And it’s in. And they started, ladies and gentlemen, Frankie violin in the Four Seasons.
And I said, I think you’re missing the best part of the song. I said, what do you mean? I said, well, my overture that I wrote for you, at the end of it, it comes down. I said, and from offstage, I’d like you to sing pretty as a midsummer morn.
They call her Dawn. And you walk out to the drums, bang, bang. And we did it.
And the people went bananas. And he kept it in for pretty much my whole stay. Dawn, go away.
I’m no good for you. What I’m saying, basically, is he threw me in the water. And I swam.
And the rest was my career. So many people don’t get thrown in the water. They can swim.
But the planet’s just on the line. So you can’t take yourself too seriously. Even if you have the ability and you’ve got everything going for you, sometimes it’s just, you know what I mean? You can’t think it’s all you.
It’s not all you. It’s your situation, other people who remember you, how you impacted someone five years ago. And do you have time for me to tell you another story? Absolutely.
Please. Love it. When I was 11 years old, and we tell this, or we did tell this in The Hitmen as reflecting back on my career with The Four Seasons.
And this is an absolutely true story, my hand to God. I’m 11 years old. It’s 1964.
And I’m watching black and white television with my mother. And Ed Sullivan comes on, and it’s The Four Seasons. And Gaudio is there, and he’s playing a grand piano.
And the guys are standing around him and singing. And I say to my mother, because it’s all about The Beatles and everything else, and I love The Beatles. But I said, look, this band has a piano player.
And I’m taking lessons. And maybe someday I could do that. I never thought about it again.
Never thought about it. I was into jazz. I like big band.
Rock and roll, yeah, I like The Beatles. But I like The Doors and Frank Zappa, all weird stuff. But eight years later, I replaced that guy in that group and became one of The Four Seasons.
It’s like my personal beliefs when people ask me what I believe, what my faith is. I say, I don’t know. And they say, what do you mean you don’t know? I said, no, I know.
The name of it is I don’t know, because I don’t know. I don’t need a story to validate. Do you know if it’s going to rain tomorrow? You don’t know.
Lee Shapiro, you started off playing piano and arranging for Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. How many years did you do that for? I did that from 73 to 81. You were responsible for many of their biggest hits, right? Responsible is a big word.
I was the collaborator. I was proud to be a part of. There’s no discounting Bob Gaudio’s, not only his genius pop ear, knowing what will help with the public, not only that, but also his tenacity of doing stuff that I thought was stupid and doing it anyway.
And some of the stupid stuff was stupid. And some of it sold around the world. And if you’re not willing to swing the bat, then you can’t get in the game.
And I always admired him for that. So the fact that I was the arranger and the orchestrator on these big hits, Who Love You and I Want to Die and all that, I’m thrilled to have been a part of it. But I was so young that it was just like what I was doing.
They didn’t become a hit because I was on them. And then all kinds of business took place, and they got released, and someone promoted them correctly, and boom, they were the right thing. Which ones did you think were stupid that really went gangbusters? I wasn’t a big fan of Who Loves You, only because the things that I was judging it on, I learned later on, weren’t the things that it was made for.
So for instance, the chord structure of it is pretty much like Sherry. You know, da-da-da-da. Who loves your pretty baby? It’s the same chord structure.
And then it was like, oh, come on, man. That’s how I felt about it. I was like 20.
And now it’s like, yeah, so what? It’s a hit. And then Frankie said, Lee, remember this. He says, if it feels good, it’s good.
That’s a way of saying, don’t go past it. The best thing happened to me when I went to the session in 74. Here’s who’s in the room.
Me at age 21. Bob Crew. Charlie Colello.
Frankie Valli. And all of New York’s biggest top horn section. They’re doing My Eyes Adore You, and it’s all done except for the horns.
And we’re in the biggest studio. I mean, it was like I had to pinch myself just to find myself standing there in this workplace, this place where hits were made. And I’m listening.
I’m the huge speakers. And all of a sudden, Bob Crew, who has left us, what a unique genius. Unique.
Didn’t play an instrument and produced a billion hits. He yells out, stop. Stop.
Someone rewind. Someone write this down. Well, I was the only guy that was schooled.
I’m the only guy that could notate. And I had my pad with me. And so he ran the tape back, back then, the tape.
And everything is back then. So they’re playing the chorus. My eyes adore you.
And Bob Crew starts to sing. Da, da. Da, da.
Da, da. Da, da. He’s writing it down.
And I’m writing it down, writing it down. And it’s on a little scrap of paper. He just run it out to Charlie.
Run it out to Charlie. Because Charlie, of course, could notate. But he was in the other room conducting.
So I ran into the performance room with my little piece of paper. I can see myself there now. And Charlie handed it to each of the five guys.
And they each whispered to each other. And one guy got out his clarinet. And they came into the room.
And they started the chorus. And they played exactly what Crew sang to me and what I wrote and what Charlie orchestrated. And if you listen to My Eyes Adore You, in the horn section, they’re playing the old song, Baubles, Bangles, and Beads.
Baubles, bangles, oh how it ring-a-lingles. Da, da. The horns are playing.
And that was Crew’s idea, because the song is nostalgic. So he brought it back another generation, not just 60s. And we were, you know.
But he brought it back to the, he just had a sense of it. It would pull at your heart, you know. I mean, here you are listening to My Eyes Adore You in 74, which then, for us, was a contemporary record.
All of a sudden, it creeps up the big band sound. It was so old that it was new. My eyes adore you, eyes adore you.
Like a million miles away from me, you couldn’t see how I adore you. So close, so close, and yet so far. Carried your books from school, playin’ make-believe you’re married to me.
Here you were fifth grade, I was sixth when we came to be. Walkin’ home every day, over Barnard Creek, Till we grew into me and you, who went our separate ways. My eyes adore you, oh, I never laid a hand on you.
My eyes adore you. Like a million miles away from me, you couldn’t see how I adore you. So close, so close, and yet so far.
Ready for city lights, climb the ladder up to fortune and fame. Poke my fingers to the bone, make myself a name. Funny I seem to find, that no matter how the years unwind, Still I reminisce about the girl I miss, and the love I left behind.
My eyes adore you. At the time, it’s all just happening, and in retrospect, you could almost plot it with pins, the evolution of everything. The very session I’m talking about with Charlie Coelho, we’re recording, this is another part of the date.
They were running the song, and I had a suggestion. And I blurted it out, and I felt pretty good about it. And Charlie takes me over, and he takes me by the arm, and he walks me into the corner.
He was a shorter man. He said, well, you know what you should do really right about now? I said, what’s that? He said, you should shut your mouth and sit over there and listen. And I did.
And I was a bit stung at the time, but we’ve been friends since then. And he was right, because to quote Larry King, I’ve never learned a thing while I was talking. He was the guru, and we ended up being very close to this day.
And frankly, my music emulates Charlie, because since then, if I go to a session, even now, and it’s not my session, and I’m just visiting, or I’m not performing, and I’m just seeing someone there, I sit in the corner until someone talks to me, because that’s what I learned. Because that’s what professional recording acumen is. You don’t walk in and then break whatever is going on that you’re not aware of.
There may be magic happening that you just walked in on.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons achieved 71 chart hits, including 40 in the top 40, 19 in the top 10, and 8 number one hits, all of these during the 60s.
But what actually makes a hit? We don’t know what makes it. How come this guy writes a song and it sells 10 million pieces and I write a song and it sells, you know, my sister bought it. You play it for the same people, it’s, ooh, I love that, ooh, I love that.
Like with Frankie Valli, people love the big hits. People love the ones that weren’t big hits. It’s very interesting as to what makes it commercially successful.
Some things just strike an attitude. I’ll be easy when you’re down. You were with them for seven years.
Why did you leave them? Two reasons. One, I felt, and I unfortunately was right, but short of Jersey Boys, but I felt that the, Greece is the word, which was Frankie’s solo record in 78, I really felt that with the advent of the police and Devo and Oingo Boingo and those kind of groups, that the recording success for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons was over. Not that that matters because he’s always performed and he’s performing now, but for me as a young man, my dream was to be a producer in the studio and it was difficult to leave something that successful.
And I had just met my wife. How did you meet her being part of the Four Seasons? There’s a story there. She was the personnel director at an outdoor concert facility in North Carolina and we would play there.
And very, very pretty. And every year I would ask her out. I was 21, she was 18, then 22 and 19, then 23 and 24.
I actually called her from Paris and said I would fly her there and she wouldn’t go. And finally, when I was 24 and she was 21, I got a little note. I had broken up with my boyfriend, if you’d like to have a coffee.
Never went back. Just with one loss. Lee Shapiro was right.
The Four Seasons had limped their way through the early 70s but briefly returned to the top of the charts in the middle of the decade with a couple of major hits like Who Loves You and December 1963 Oh What a Night. Frankie Valli had had a resurgence as a soloist, reaching number one with My Eyes Adored You and making the top ten with Swearing to God. I’m over with joy from your hair that touched me again I’m king of all men and reigning from above Swearing to God, Swearing to God You’re the mistress of my world and all I am Swearing to God, Swearing to God You’re where I want in paradise But it didn’t last.
The band couldn’t turn back the clock to December 1963 when they reigned as the most successful white rock group in the world. Music was changing and Lee Shapiro wanted to be part of it. I did and I produced music and I ended up going into the media area where I was writing music and producing music for TV commercials and even though I wasn’t making hit records at the time I played on some I was on the album that had Buster Poindexter Hot Hot Hot because my friend Sandy Linzer who wrote Let’s Hang On and Working My Way Back to You he produced those records.
The 80s music scene was a period of significant change marked by the rise of electronic music, the dominance of MTV and the emergence of new sub-genres. Synthesizers became commonplace and artists explored a wider range of sounds and styles including new wave, synth, pop, metal and hip-hop. But were these changes for the better? No, but I wouldn’t disagree either.
I would say that it changed for other years. Like for instance today with all of the looping and sampling and I love it, I love the electronic music. I don’t think it’s composing, I think that it’s more of if I can make my own phrase, audio assemblage.
And that’s like the difference between painting and collage. Painting is your own stroke. Collage can be ripping off pieces of a magazine and put it as one art and one not.
I just like the painting one better because I just do. But that doesn’t mean, I can certainly appreciate what it takes to be. I’m not an Eminem fan, but I was an Avicii fan and I’m definitely a Bruno Mars fan and a Mark Ronson fan who produces those records.
And they’re magical and they’re just pristine. But I also favor live music because it’s what my childhood was. We’ve got it between us.
Hang on, hang on, hang on. Do what we’ve got. Gonna chuck it all and break our love to bits.
Wish you never said. Breaking up. No need to try and.
Stay here. After leaving The Four Seasons, Lee collaborated with other songwriters. In 1991, he began working with Barry Manilow on Copacabana, the musical.
So the musical thing actually happened because while I was doing jingles, this is a very odd story, but I knew who Barry Manilow’s people were. I didn’t meet Barry. Other than having him follow us into Vegas.
Is that a police or an ambulance going past? They’re coming to get me. I remember that song. You’re right.
You could never release that song today. No. Politically incorrect.
They’re coming to take me away. Ha ha. They’re coming to take me away.
Ho ho. Hee hee. Ha ha.
To the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time. And I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats. And they’re coming to take me away.
Ha ha. You thought it was a joke and so you laughed. You laughed when I had said that losing you would make me flip my lid.
Right? You know you laughed. I heard you laughed. You laughed.
You laughed and laughed and then you left. But now you know I’m utterly mad. In any case, Barry called me to do some demos on my equipment in my studio.
I’m so sorry about the bank job that’s going in the background. He called me to do some demos and I did them. And my studio was in another person’s facility.
I had a room. And he came in and we did it. And it was very successful.
It was good. So a year or so goes by and we move. My wife and I and things were doing.
I was doing nicely with my TV work. And my wife said to me, why don’t you call Barry Manilow? And I said to her, come on. I did one demo with the man and I’d have to call his management.
And I’m not going to call him. It’s Barry. So she said, why don’t you write him a letter? And I said, why do you want me to do this? I don’t have to make this stuff up.
This is for real. She said, I had a dream with Barry Manilow in it. So you’re kidding me, right? And she said, no, my wife is one quarter Cherokee Indian for what it’s worth.
So I don’t doubt anything. And I said, I wrote the letter. I went out to dinner with my wife.
We had a babysitter for my daughter, who’s 37 and was then seven. And when we came back, the babysitter was like white faced and said, talk to your daughter about the phone call. And I said, what about the phone call, Ariel? And she said, you had a phone call, daddy.
I said, who was it? She says, Barry Manilow. I said, you got to be kidding. I called back.
It was Barry. And we ended up doing Copacabana the musical together and co-produced the music for like two months with Barry. It was magnificent.
And while she tried to be a star, Tony, or eight till four, they were young and they had each other. Who could ask for more? They fell in love. His name was Rico.
He wore a diamond. He was escorted to his chair. He saw Lola dancing there.
And when she finished, he called her over. But Rico went a bit too far. Tony sailed across the bar.
And then the punches flew. And chairs were smashed in two. Barry Manilow can do everybody’s job.
He can sing lead. He can play piano. He can orchestrate.
He can produce. No, no, it’s unbelievable. First of all, he, as most people know, he was Bette Midler’s musical director before he became Barry Manilow.
And before that, he wrote jingles that are still on the air. Are you familiar with the State Farm commercial? Do you have that there? Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. He wrote that.
That’s been running for 60 years. Wow. It’s unbelievable.
I mean, if Barry did nothing else but write Copacabana, if that’s all he ever did, he’d have multi-billions of dollars. And when I worked with him, I believe he was in his 40s, and now he’s pushing 80. And man, you know, he has it.
He’s still him. He’s got Vegas. He’s got the Barry Manilow room that used to be the Elvis room at the Elton.
You know, I’m friendly with a man named Larry Brown who wrote Tie a Yellow Ribbon with Irwin Levine. I’m coming home, I’ve done my time. Now I’ve got to know what is and isn’t mine.
If you receive my letter telling you I’d soon be free, then you’ll know just what to do if you still want me, if you still want me. Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree. It’s been three long years.
Do you still want me? If I don’t see a ribbon round the old oak tree, I’ll stay on the bus. He said, Leah, our job as creators, our job as songwriters is very, very simple. I said, what’s that? He says, we are to take nothing and turn it into something that the whole world will buy.
That’s what we do for a living. And when I have success, people say to me, I’m an orthodontist, I’m standing on my feet all day, and you come up with a ditty and have a hit. And I say to them, there’s nothing to it.
Go ahead. Go ahead, do it. Well, we all know that’s not quite as easy as it sounds.
So Lee found something else to get creative about. I found myself after Barry doing commercials, and one of my major clients was toy commercials for Fisher Price at the time. And I had a partner and we were doing these.
And I looked at him one day and I said, do you think this toy is fun? And he said, no. I said, well, what’s fun? And he said, rock and roll. I said, well, you know, there’s never been rock and roll in a toy because it’s always been looked down upon.
If you think about it in the 60s, you’d never have rock and roll. There’d never be an Elvis toy. It was too racy, shaking hips and jiggling.
We don’t do that. But this is the 90s. And I said to him, I don’t think it’s ever been done where rock and roll is in a toy.
So we got an Elmo and we took the mechanism from the shaky Halloween witch that cackles every year. We took that out and I cut the speaker wires and we stuck it into an Elmo. And my wife designed a lame costume with sunglasses and we glued a plastic guitar on him.
And we wrote music and we hit a button and he came to life. And we said, let’s take this to Fisher Price because we were working for him anyway. We went and showed it to the vice president of marketing.
And he broke out into a smile and we knew. Now this is 97. It didn’t come out till 99.
There were two years for it to screw up. Two years where there’s something else better could have come in. Two years where we’re like walking on eggshells.
And it came out and it sold 4 million units worldwide. The prototype cost us $60. It can’t happen today.
Now prototypes, they want you to do it. In other words, put the finished thing in front of me. You could spend a million dollars on pre-production and on development.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. While Lee Shapiro continued his entrepreneurial pursuits, the four seasons came together for several reunion tours in the 80s and 90s, some with Frankie Valli and some without.
The group also recorded, releasing Street Fighter in 1985 and Hope and Glory in 92, both of which contemporised the group’s sounds. During the 2000s, Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio involved themselves in developing the four season story into a Broadway musical, a stage biography based on the lives and careers of Frankie, Tommy DeVito, Nick Massey and Bob Gaudio. That play was called Jersey Boys and it became the hit of the 2005-06 season, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical.
The show helped revitalise the group’s career. Lee Shapiro didn’t give up performing. In 2010, he formed the band The Hitmen, which was initially conceived as a partial reunion of the 70s era four seasons line-up.
I’ll tell you what led to that gizmo. Honestly, I was enjoying the success of Elmo for a good 10 years and inventing more toys. And I had some releases, but nothing this big.
And people all that while were always asking me, how come you don’t go back on the road? How come you don’t perform? Well, Jersey Boys came out. And Don Saccone, the late Don Saccone, who I miss, called me and said, why don’t we put a band together and be like, you know, because Jersey Boys are so big and we’re really the guys from the 70s. So I said, I don’t know.
So I called Palchi, who sang Oh What a Night. I said, would you think about it? He said, yeah, I’d think about it. I said, you know, it wouldn’t mean too much unless there was Jersey Boys, but there is Jersey Boys.
So anyway, I went to a recording session with Frankie because he was recording something, I think his last album. And I said to him, what do you think of this? There’s all kinds of midtown men and under the lamp and four lovers and four dollars, whatever. I said, we don’t want to do that.
We’re really the guys. What do you think if we go out as a group? We would be doing your songs, but, you know. And this is what the man said to me.
He said, Lee, we limit, this is back then. He said, we limit what the midtown men and under the street lamp and all those, but we limit what they can do because it will detract from the show. If they’re doing, because they used to be in the show, then they take their roles and put them outside.
He said, it’s a distraction. He said, but you guys are the real Four Seasons from the 70s. So go out and do whatever you want.
And that’s what he said. And so me and Don Saccone and Jerry Paulche and my dear friend, Larry Gates from childhood, who I knew since I was eight, and Jimmy Ryan, who was the leader and founder of the Critters while he was with Carly Simons when I was with Frankie Valli all that time. So we got the band together with that configuration and we got one job.
Actually, the first job we played was at a place in New Jersey and we paid $1,200 for them to let us play there. And we filled it with all of our friends because we’d never played together anyway. So we did it and it was very successful.
So then a friend of mine got me a job for the guys at what was then BB King’s in Times Square. Christmas week on a Monday, no advertising. We played to 11 people, but of the people that were there, two of them were Ron Gardner and Fran Heller who together had a brand new agency called Bicoastal.
And they wanted to book talent and they wanted to have someone exclusive because they were booking the same talent as everyone else. And he came up to me and he said after the show, if you guys are serious about this, we would like to represent you because we think that this could be something. We were called the Hitmen and still are because everybody had hit records.
And I said, I’ll tell you what, represent us for six months with no contract. And then if we’re happy at the end, we’ll sign. And that’s 12 years ago because you never want to do business with someone that doesn’t want it as bad as you.
We actually built his agency and he built our brand by collaborating the way we did. And we went on all the way from 2010 all the way to 2020 or so with the pandemic as a version of the Hitmen. Guys left, guys came back, but it was still featuring the music of a lot of the seasons, Tommy James, all that kind of stuff from our history.
Who’s always there to make it right Who loves you pretty baby Who’s gonna help you through the night Who loves you pretty mama Who’s always there to make it right Who loves you Who loves you pretty baby Who’s gonna love you mama Who loves you Who loves you pretty baby When tears are over I’m feeling like you’ll never say that Come on, come to me Who loves you pretty baby Who’s gonna help you through the night The pandemic put a damper on it and then we had to reform. Not only are we back again, we’re back again with me as the manager and I’m not performing anymore. And what we’re back as is Jerry Polchi’s replacement was a guy named Steve Murphy who was with the Happy Together Tour and worked with everybody in the world, Three Dog Night and Grand Funk and The Turtles, Yardbird, everybody.
We made him the featured part of the Hitmen and the Hitmen now represent hits that they’ve played on with stars like Journey, Foreigner, Styx, The Hooters. We’ve moved it up a generation or a decade because frankly, everybody in the world has a Frankie Valli group so that’s silly to replicate that especially even if you’re a real guy because promoters can get it cheaper and they do. But these guys really have relationships with like Dennis Elliott from Foreigner performed with us and Steve has performed with Steve or Jerry from Journey and these are all real relationships so it’s the same template if you will but the set list is different but it’s happening big time now these guys are out there rocking and it’s very exciting because for me anyway, it started as one thing 12 years ago and it’s happening in classic rock land.
And again, you’ve reinvented yourself you’ve brought yourself up to the present time you’re attracting a whole new generation of fans Leif Shapiro, you have that gift. You know, honestly musicians will tell you this too in order to do what we love to do for a living you take what works first so in other words if you’re a sax player who doubles on flute and you’re not working and you’d rather play the saxophone and they need a flute player you take the job and you work your sax into it you know what I’m saying? I’ll tell you the truth when I got offered the contract for the Four Seasons I took it to my lawyer and he read it and when he was done he called me back in for a meeting and he was very high power he represented Yoko Ono and the John Lennon Estate Miles Davis, I mean, big and he said, Lee this might be the most one-sided contract that I’ve ever read I said, what do you mean? he said, everything is what they can do everything is what you can’t do you can’t call yourself this after you’re done you can’t call yourself that they have the right to use their likeness they have the right to use your name in any way you only get this much percentage and I said to him, what do you think I should do? he said, what are you, out of your mind? he said, sign it who else is asking you to be one of the Four Seasons? get in and change it from within get in and I did having been part of all those fabulous songs you’re still very much part of the music world and a whole new generation of songs is there one favourite one that you have? honestly from a commercial standpoint and the validation that comes from that I would say Oh What a Night because it was a major hit twice and I wrote the arrangement but on two other points one would be Twearing to God because of the arranging but the other one would be Under My Skin from 1966 because I wore that record out and I’m friendly now with again, 83-year-old Artie Schreck who was the orchestrator Charlie Colella orchestrated everything except two songs check out the two that he didn’t orchestrate Under My Skin and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You Artie did both of those and that arrangement still speaks to me the opening piano and I had the honour of being with him on a session and walking him over to the piano and say, check this out Artie and I played it and he kind of welled up a little bit and I said this is as important to the song as the song because as soon as you hear it the first five notes you know the song and that’s what it is Under my skin Deep in the heart of me But it’s pain when I see me Hurt so Not to give in Lin Shapiro, what a treat to chat with you Thank you so much for being incredibly generous with your time The last question I have for you though is when are you bringing the Hitmen to Australia? We would love it You know with Frankie we did in 77 We did Melbourne, we did Canberra We did Perth We did the country in and it is without a doubt if it was closer I’d live there It’s magnificent It’s the most magnificent and when I was there 40 odd years ago Perth, Australia I thought I had gone to heaven It was unbelievable In any case, thank you for being the professional that you are It was quite wonderful to speak with you and any time you want to talk to me again it’ll be $35 Now any time you want to talk to me again please feel free Thank you so much, really lovely to meet you Bye now Take care And just as a footnote as of 2023 Lee launched a second band under the Hitmen brand It’s called the Hitmen of Country which features, yep, you guessed it country musicians Seems you just can’t keep a good man down It’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kay Beautiful day Hope that you’re going away It’s a beautiful day