Bob Crewe obit

Bob Crewe obituary

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Songwriter and record producer whose work with the Four Seasons led to many top 10 hits 

He was not on the list.

For a while in the hectic mid-1960s, the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys, respectively the champions of America's east and west coasts, were all that seemed to stand between the Beatles and the wholesale capitulation of the US pop music industry. For stubbornly maintaining their run of hits in the face of British invasion, the Four Seasons were indebted to the songwriter and record producer Bob Crewe, who has died at the age of 83.

Crewe had already written and produced a hit record – The Rays' Silhouettes, a doo-wop classic that reached no 3 in the Billboard charts in 1957 – when he met the Four Seasons. Starting in 1962 with Sherry and Big Girls Don't Cry, his relationship with the group and their lead singer, Frankie Valli, fellow natives of New Jersey, led to more than a dozen top 10 hits in the US and around the world. Crewe would become one of the most influential back-room figures in 60s pop: among the many compositions on which he shared the credits were Rag Doll (1964), Let's Hang On! (1965), Can't Take My Eyes Off You (1967) and My Eyes Adored You (1974).

He was born in Newark, New Jersey, Valli's birthplace, and grew up in nearby Belleville, the home of Tommy DeVito, another member of the Four Seasons. He had no musical training but displayed an enthusiasm for both classical music and the big-band sounds of the late 1940s while studying architecture at the Parsons School of Design in New York. A notably handsome young man, he attempted without success to launch a career as a singer, but a songwriting partnership with Frank Slay Jr, a young pianist from Texas, laid the foundations for a different kind of career in the music industry.

Silhouettes gave the duo their first hit, to be followed in 1959 by Tallahassee Lassie with the singer Freddy Cannon. But it was Crewe's chance meeting with Valli and Bob Gaudio, another member of the Four Seasons, at a music publisher's office on Broadway that was to shape his destiny.

Previously known as the Four Lovers, the group were struggling for recognition. Crewe offered them a contract, but provoked frustration by using them mostly as background singers for other artists until the day in 1962 when Gaudio presented him with Sherry. A stomping beat and Valli's distinctive piercing falsetto, rising above the group's harmonies, made it the first of the group's string of worldwide smash hits.

Gaudio and Crewe became regular writing partners, the latter contributing a gift for editing a song, the shrewd recognition of a hook phrase, and lyrics that commanded attention. Deploying the skills of a cadre of top New York session musicians and a gifted arranger, Charlie Calello, who had been a member of the Four Lovers, they created records to which teenagers loved to dance at high-school hops. Crewe would help them navigate their voyage from doo-wop through blue-eyed soul, folk-rock and flower power to disco.

UK cover versions of Crewe's co-compositions included the Tremeloes' Silence Is Golden (1964), the Walker Brothers' The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore) (1966), and the Bay City Rollers' Bye Bye Baby (Baby Goodbye) (1975). Later, collaborating with Kenny Nolan, he wrote Lady Marmalade, a hit for Labelle in 1974, during the disco era. Can't Take My Eyes Off You, covered by Andy Williams, Shirley Bassey, the Pet Shop Boys and many others, was given an extra lease of life when fans of the Welsh national football team adopted it as their anthem.

Crewe also started several record labels in the 1960s. In 1966, New Voice featured Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the hard-rocking Detroit band whose hits included Jenny Take a Ride and Devil With the Blue Dress, and Norma Tanega, whose fey, enigmatic Walkin' My Cat Named Dog gave the Californian folk singer her only chart entry. On a sister label, DynoVoice, Crewe released A Lover's Concerto by the Toys, an effervescent girl-group record – its tune adapted from Bach's Minuet in G – that reached no 2 in the US charts in 1965. Two years later, he used the same label to release an instrumental version of a tune from a Diet Pepsi commercial: Music to Watch Girls By, by the Bob Crewe Generation, which became an easy-listening favourite. A follow-up, Birds of Britain, did less well, although the Bob Crewe Generation contributed to the soundtrack of Roger Vadim's film Barbarella in 1968. When the musical Hair became a Broadway smash in 1968, Crewe produced a hit version of the song Good Morning Starshine with the singer Oliver. In 1985 he was inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame.

Crewe was gay. Earlier this year he was portrayed in Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood's cinematic version of the successful stage musical based on the story of the Four Seasons, although some felt that Mike Doyle, the actor in question, had exaggerated his character's flamboyance. Credited as the musical's lyricist, Crewe used the proceeds to start a foundation helping people with Aids, supporting gay rights and bringing music and art to children in poor communities.