ALBUM: Bob Crewe, ‘The Complete Elektra Recordings’
In theory, full-time songwriters should understand music enough that they could find success themselves. Many try. Sometimes it leads to a successful career — Carole King and Neil Sedaka did pretty well for themselves. Other times, it just falls flat; nobody ever mentions Bernie Taupin’s solo albums, and Jim Steinman’s solo album is a curio at best.
Bob Crewe — the songwriter and producer behind almost everything the Four Seasons have ever done, many memorable pop songs of the ’60s and disco innovator of the ’70s — tried his hand at a few solo records, and never had much success on his own. The test of time aside, many weren’t even hits in their day, but he was a big enough success as a writer and producer that he wasn’t going to go broke.
Much of Crewe’s discography is so out of print that it might as well not exist; check the discography section of his Wikipedia and Google what you see. Some of it is so stunningly hard to find that there’s scant a mention of its existence outside of the occasional catalog. Reissues are rare — there are a few CDs of his work, mostly his orchestral work, but if you want most of those CDs, you better be willing to pay for imports. A smattering of his albums are available on Spotify, and that’s about it.
Thanks to the fine folks at Real Gone Music and Second Disc Records, though, we have our first-ever, serious reissue of two of his major works, Street Talk and Motivation, his entire discography from Elektra Records.
The first album, Street Talk, was Crewe’s attempt at a “Broadway bound” disco-concept album, credited to the Bob Crewe Generation. In theory, it’s the story of how innocent young “Cherry Boy” finds his way through the sexuality-dripping streets of Hollywood. In practice, it never quite feels like that. There’s a clear story to the song “Cherry Boy” itself, but after that, any and all story and/or concept gets lost in a giant vortex of self-indulgence and relatively pedestrian disco music. The tracks go on too long, they don’t offer much, and lyrically they seldom leave the land of double-entendres. It’s a middle-of-the-road album at best and might have worked well as an official soundtrack, but it doesn’t hold up too well on its own. The production is solid, though, I’ll give it that.
Motivation is by far the more substantial of the two albums. Crewe had to overcome some hangups on his voice while recording — understandable, when words you’ve written have been belted by the likes of Frankie Valli, Patti LaBelle, and Maxine Brown — but turned out to be quite the fine singer in his own right. As the title implies, the album is full of motivational and inspirational songs. They’re mostly love ballads, which should come as no surprise to anyone remotely familiar with his songs, and there’s a certain showtunesy-ness to them. The arrangements are large and varied in scope, and Crewe’s voice is as full of as much genuine passion as he can provide. Songs about working through adversity (“Give It Hell”), marriage (“Marriage Made in Heaven”), and simple love (“Lady Love Song”) populate the album. Motivation features some of Crewe’s most substantial lyrical work, both of the era (I can’t imagine that for a veteran songwriting, it was too taxing writing lyrics for Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes) and of his career.
That said, it’s understandable why this wasn’t a commercial success. None of these songs offer anything new, there’s a lot of redundancy in material, and some of the songs just go on too long. “Give It Hell” is one of the better songs on the album, but it also overstays its welcome at just under six minutes and has a completely out of place tempo change at the four-minute mark. It’s never Bad with a capital B, but sometimes you just wish Crewe would go onto the next song. It’s a fine album, but you need to know when to stop. Sting tried that with “Message In A Bottle,” and I change the radio station whenever the outro starts because enough is enough, even when the rest of the song is good.
Besides the obvious practical aspect of bundling Crewe’s Elektra recordings, pairing Street Talk with Motivation provides an amazing summation of Bob Crewe. He was a solid producer, songwriter, and musician, able to work just as well with disco as he was with more tender material. There was a degree of verisimilitude to every ballad he wrote, and his own vocal work proves that.
Crewe mostly stopped working after the ’80s, and died last September. Nothing new is coming from him; to the best of our knowledge, there’s not some Hendrix-esque amount of unreleased material to release every year until the end of time. That’s why preserving the past is so important. Since Jersey Boys took the world by storm in 2005 and Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation reached a wider audience last year, Crewe has become a household name again — at least in musically inclined households — and there’s an actual demand for his work now. As mentioned earlier, little-to-nothing of what he’s done has been given a proper reissue. Real Gone and Second Disc have provided us with just that, including fantastic liner notes by Joe Marchese. (For the sake of full disclosure, I’m actually pals with the founder of the Second Disc, Mike Duquette, and only realized they were involved when examining the CD casing. Solid work, guys.)
Bob Crewe’s solo work may not be his best work, but it’s fascinating material just the same, and it’s worth preserving. The Complete Elektra Recordings won’t reveal a side of Crewe that you didn’t already know, but it’s a solid and necessary addition to the music canon and nearly a must-buy for fans of the Four Seasons, disco, or singer-songwriter material. It’s more than a curio — it’s living history.
To purchase your two-disc set of Bob Crewe’s The Complete Elektra Recordings, visit the Real Gone Music online shop!
