The Four Seasons ‎ - Sing Big Hits By Burt Bacharach, Hal David, Bob Dylan / New Gold Hits (1996)

The seventh in a series of two-fer reissues of the 1960s albums by the Four Seasons and their lead singer Frankie Valli on the British label Ace, this disc combines the group's ninth studio album, The 4 Seasons Sing Big Hits by Burt Bacharach...Hal David...Bob Dylan (originally released in November 1965) and its eleventh, New Gold Hits (May 1967). (For good measure, Ace has tossed in two Four Seasons singles from 1966, "Opus 17 (Don't You Worry 'Bout Me)" and "I've Got You Under My Skin.") These may be the quartet's two most misunderstood albums; for one thing, despite the presence of the word "Hits" in both titles, neither was actually a compilation. Bob Hyde's liner notes suggest that the Bacharach/David/Dylan album may still be misunderstood, even by a nominal Seasons expert. Hyde's comments are remarkably negative for a person hired to explicate the group's recordings, who might be expected to be sympathetic to them. He just doesn't get the album, writing, "For the life of me, I can't imagine what they were thinking...." Yet what they were thinking seems obvious enough. First, for a group that had captured the singles market, they were thinking of coming up with an album concept. And second, they were focusing on two songwriting combines, Bacharach/David on the one hand, Dylan on the other, that were enormously successful at the time. Bacharach/David placed eight records in the Billboard Hot 100 during the calendar year 1965; Dylan had nine. If the Four Seasons' brain trust understood anything, it was hits. Certainly, their New York-based pop style was not that far removed from Bacharach/David's, and as for the folk-rock protest bard Dylan, if Cher and the Turtles could score with his songs, why not the Four Seasons? The real oddity may come in combining Bacharach/David and Dylan on a single album, but recall that it was actually an LP with the former on the first side and the latter on the second. In the days of LPs, people often would play one side of a disc as a separate entity. The album might best be understood as two thematic EPs rather than as a whole statement, and it makes more sense that way. Of course, in the middle of the Dylan side comes the "love it or hate it" send-up of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," sung by Frankie Valli in his falsetto impersonation of Rose Murphy and, as credited to the Wonder Who?, a Top 20 hit. Those who hate it tend to be humorless Dylan acolytes who consider it sacrilegious; but the reason it was a hit in the fall of 1965 was precisely because the Dylan phenomenon had become so overwrought by then; it was a balloon that needed to have a little air taken out of it, and the Wonder Who? came along at just the right moment to do so. Thirty years later, the rendition remains amusing, and it demonstrates that a good song can be interpreted many different ways. Much the same thing can be said about the album as a whole.
New Gold Hits was actually the Four Seasons' new album of 1967, consisting of seven newly recorded numbers; both sides of the February 1967 single "Beggin'"/"Dody"; and an alternate take of the November 1966 single "Tell It to the Rain." That the album was billed as a hits compilation was a marketing misjudgment; the group seems to have wanted it to be taken as part of a trilogy following the real best-ofs Gold Vault of Hits and Second Vault of Golden Hits, spawning a series of singles successes beginning with "C'mon Marianne," which was issued on 45 simultaneously and promptly made the Top Ten. But the idea probably just confused consumers, given that the Four Seasons had so many compilations in the marketplace, and also given that the marketplace had long-since recognized the value of albums as albums, not just as collections of hits and B-sides. The month following the release of New Gold Hits, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared, as if to drive home the point. Even if it had had a more appropriate name, New Gold Hits really was a collection of recent, current, and future singles along with some also-rans. It marked the end of a golden era for the Four Seasons.