The year is 1967. Frankie Valli was trying to be known as more than just the guy from the Four Seasons with a falsetto voice. He wanted a romantic song that allowed him to sing normally.
The song that he chose was Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. It became a monster hit, peaking at number two. It was one of the songs that differentiated the solo Valli career from his Four Seasons career.
You can watch him sing the song on youTube. In his hands, it’s a strictly romantic, pretty treacly song. You can just imagine bobbysoxers swooning over his soft tones. The fact that it came out in 1967, the same year as the Doors’ Light My Fire, Jefferson Airplane’s Somebody to Love, or even The Beatle’s All You Need Is Love, should tell you that Valli doesn’t have a whole lot of time left at the pinnacle of fame, but he does have his moment.
Can’t Take My Eyes Off You has been covered many times, probably most famously by Lauryn Hill. I would submit that the most interesting cover of the song is by Hillbilly Moon Explosion, in 2019.
Who, you ask? That’s a great question. Many years ago, probably about fifteen years or so, I got into a genre of music known as psychobilly. Weirdly enough, the term psychobilly first came into being in the silly (but fun) Johnny Cash song, One Piece At A Time, which is very definitely not a psychobilly song.
Psychobilly can best described as a cross between rockabilly and punk rock. Picture rockabilly, but way louder, way faster, and with themes of death and destruction. You might not be able to tell from that description, but it’s actually quite a fun form of music. It most recently got momentarily famous again from the song that Wednesday Adams danced to in the Netflix series. That song was Goo Goo Muck, by one of the most famous psychobilly bands, The Cramps.
Well, somehow, in the psychobilly bunny trail that I found myself on, the Hillbilly Moon Explosion popped up. Bear in mind that very few would consider them psychobilly. They have a much more conventional rockabilly sound. What makes their sound unique is the vocal stylings of Emmanuela Hutter. She has an almost unearthly ethereal quality to her voice. Behind the sounds of a rockabilly melody, her voice just kind of floats above it. I find their music to be quite compelling. Who knows, but maybe the fact that the band is actually Swiss is one of the reasons why their rockabilly music seems so unconventional.
They released an album in 2019. On it was their cover of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. This album was called The Sparky Sessions. It was called this because they recorded the album with the vocals of Mark “Sparky” Phillips.
Now, probably most of you are thinking, who is Mark Phillips? I’m so glad you asked. Mark Phillips (I’m just going to call him Sparky from hear on out) was one of the founders of the band Demented Are Go. The band was formed way back in 1982. Starting out as the drummer, Sparky quickly became the front man singer.
Hillbilly Moon Explosion might not really be psychobilly but Demented Are Go is without question one of the OGs of psychobilly. In their case, the emphasis is way more on punk rock than rockabilly. It can be said that they have a checkered background.
Sparky apparently liked to combine LSD and alcohol. In Japan, there was controversy during their shows when Sparky, and here I’m just going to quote their wiki page, “showed up naked and did strange things with a rubber fish”. On other tours, they’d apparently would have sex with a vacuum cleaner on stage. Walking around a mall in the US after a sound check, Sparky pinched a woman’s butt. Well, that woman was actually a sixteen year old girl and Sparky was arrested. The tour was cancelled and the rest of the band went back to England, leaving Sparky in jail. Years later, they tried to tour in the US but Sparky was barred because of the sex conviction.
As I said, a bit more punk rock than rockabilly.
Now you’re caught up. On their cover, Emmanuela and Sparky perform Can’t Take My Eyes Off You as a duet. As I’ve mentioned, Emmanuela has the voice of an angel. I have not mentioned this, but Sparky has the voice of a child molester. It’s a low, gravelly voice that makes Tom Waites sound like, well, Frankie Valli.
It’s a fascinating juxtaposition. One voice in the song is the voice of an innocent woman/girl. The other voice is that of a man peeping through the bedroom blinds with his pants around his ankles.
It gives an interesting new interpretation to the song. In the still kind of innocent but changing mid 1960s, you can have a boy (even though by now Valli is in his 30s) singing about an innocent teenage crush.
However, in 2019, if you think about it for just a minute, Can’t Keep My Eyes Off You is creepy. It’s the song of a stalker.
Just look at some of the lyrics. “You’re just too good to be true / Can’t take my eyes off of you. ” “Pardon the way that I stare”. Every other line in the last verse is some version of the infantilizing word baby (really strong creative songwriting there).
Hearing Sparky croon (and, make no doubt, even though it’s in his whiskey / cigarette wreck of a voice, it is a croon) these words to the lilting voice of Emmanuela really highlights the eerie, obsessive, creepiness of the song.
Given how the world has changed over the last fifty years, this version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You is exactly appropriate to the times.
dorkenstein 