Saw two movies on Amazon Prime last night.  the first was the 2015  Love and Mercy,  the troubled life of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson.  Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 89/85.  It was a good film with their songs.  The one gripe I would have is that both Paul Dano and John Cusack play Brian, and they don't look at all like each other, or Brian Wilson.  I won't say much more except to indicate that  I saw the Beach Grandads perform at the Hawaii Theater last year, one of my highlights of 2024 .   But this was not one of the best films I've ever seen.  Maybe around #1500 of the 4000 or so movies I've watched in my life.  Sounds like a lot, and the number could well have been 3000, but I've seen a lot of them over the past 84+ years. So anyway, after watching  Love and Mercy , the time was past 10PM, when I normally go to bed.  However, just before turning off Prime, I noticed several films on the screen, and one was th...

The story of the  Jersey Boys  is the story of the Four Seasons.  Frankie Valli released a song,  My Mothers Eyes  in 1953 as Frankie Valley.  In 1954, he and guitarist Tommy DeVito formed The Variatones, which evolved into The Four Lovers.  All this occurred in Newark, New Jersey.  This photo was taken in 1954, with Valli to the left and DeVito in the middle.  The third person is Hank Majewski. The novelty was  Frankie Valli's falsetto .  Hawaiian music has long featured this form of singing, but Valli made it okay to sing pop music, with many others subsequently following. Of course, this is not new, for the use of falsetto has been traced back to the Middle Ages, and the Tokens had a hit in 1961 for  The Lion Sleeps Tonight , first made popular by the Weavers in 1951 as  Wimoweh , a 1939 African song. In 1959 the band began working with producer/songwriter Bob Crewe (on the right) when Valli was 25 years old.  The ...