The Four Seasons 60s Tapes: What Survives, What We Have Made of It, and Where to Look Next

The question every fan asks

Why are there no new mixes of the 1960s hits? Where are the multi-track tapes? And are the masters we hear today the best that exist?

The short answer is that no multi-track session tapes from the 1960s were ever handed to The Four Seasons Partnership. What the Partnership holds are finished master tapes and copies of them, of varying age and quality. From those it has built the library of digital masters that Rhino uses today on the Partnership’s behalf.

That is not a story of neglect by one company. It is a story the whole record industry shares, and it is worth telling simply: what happened to the tapes, what has been achieved with what survived, and where there might still be something to find.

A problem the whole industry shared

In July 1997 Billboard published Bill Holland’s award-winning report on the state of the record companies’ vaults, “Labels Strive to Rectify Past Archival Problems”. After talking to more than seventy people who knew the vaults, he concluded that untold numbers of recordings had been “thrown away, mislaid, left behind in warehouses, and even sold for scrap”. Several of his findings bear directly on The Four Seasons.

• Multi-tracks were routinely not kept. Holland’s sources named RCA, Capitol, ABC, Mercury-Smash and Philips-Mercury as labels with policies “throughout the ’60s and ’70s of reusing, scrapping or not storing multitrack session tapes, and just keeping mixed masters”. Philips was The Four Seasons’ own label.
• One copy was thought to be enough. Before the CD, nobody expected old recordings to earn again. “If they kept one copy, any kind of copy, then they figured they were cool.”
• Studios closed, and tapes went with them. Labels often left session tapes, and even masters, at the studios. Holland names Bell Sound and the Record Plant among the New York studios whose closure “added to the lore of lost tape stories”. When the Record Plant’s tapes were offered back to the labels for little more than the storage fees, few replied, and the unclaimed reels “went into the dumpster”. Both studios played a part in our story.
• Labels that changed hands lost the most. Small labels of the ’50s and ’60s that sold singles to teenagers, and were then bought, sold and moved from city to city, lost more than anyone. Vee-Jay, which went bankrupt in 1966, fits that description exactly. Its story, and how The Four Seasons’ Vee-Jay masters came back to the group, is told in the introduction to our Discography.

Tape itself is not safe either. A later report for the Library of Congress described how analogue tape sheds, sticks and breaks down with age, and how the machines and the people who can play it are becoming scarce. As one engineer put it, “The pool of expertise is shrinking every day.”

So when we look at what survives of The Four Seasons’ 1960s recordings, we are looking at what survived an industry that, for twenty years, did not think it mattered.

Motown: the exception that proves the rule

Not every label lost its past. Holland singled out Motown as a company that had kept “most of the masters and most of the multitrack reels”: around 30,000 tapes, with backup copies of nearly everything, through four owners and three cities. You can hear what that care made possible on A Cellarful of Motown!, the series of double CDs compiled by our friend Paul Nixon. Across five volumes, from 2002 to 2020, Paul brought out more than 200 recordings from the 1960s that had never been issued. A few came from Northern Soul collectors; many came through Andy Skurow at Universal’s Vault Services and the late Keith Hughes, who also researched unreleased material for Ace Records’ artist box sets. A good number were found on tapes in Universal’s Motown vault, now held at Iron Mountain, often on reels that were unmarked or in boxes with the wrong label.

Keeping tapes is one thing; knowing what is on them is another. Even Motown’s computerised tape index was typed up by interns copying whatever was written on the tape boxes. It is well known among Motown collectors, and Harry Weinger himself has admitted it, that you never really know what is on a Motown tape until you play it. In his own words:

“It’s not like taking the tape off the shelf, and just digitizing it… Is it the right tape? Is it mastered properly? Is it the right version?”

That has been the cornerstone of our own Motown tape research. One Four Seasons example shows why: a tape box marked “No Vocal — Assigned to The Commodores” turned out to hold a finished Frankie Valli vocal of “What Love Has Joined Together”.

The same care benefited The Four Seasons. When the Snapper box set was researched, the group’s Motown-era tapes from 1971 to 1975 were found at Iron Mountain, the storage company that now holds much of the industry’s past. Thirteen unreleased masters were cleared and issued for the first time, together with eight alternate mixes found in the Partnership’s own storage in Los Angeles, which Snapper chose to include when approval for further unreleased tracks could not be obtained.

The earlier years tell a different story. For the Vee-Jay and Philips recordings of 1961 to 1971 the session tapes were largely not kept, and the music survives mainly on mixed masters and copies. You can see the difference on our website. The Master Sessions pages for 1953 to 1971 can name each recording session and master number, but they can rarely point to a surviving session tape. The MoWest/Motown Session & Tape Trail can follow individual songs from session tape to storage copy, and sometimes on to a different artist’s record.

What the Partnership holds

In 1973 the Partnership won ownership of the Philips masters, and it has licensed them ever since. The research for the 2023 Snapper box set gave us a clear picture of what its own storage holds.

• The Vee-Jay recordings: ten delivery reels, five mono and five stereo, made at Bell Sound in September 1966 when the masters came back from the bankrupt label. They are copies of the finished masters, not session tapes, but they play well.
• The Philips albums: a mixture of masters, safety copies and file copies. A box marked “Original” cannot always be taken at its word.
• The Philips singles: reels headed “Orig Masters”, with a good part of the singles catalogue missing from them.
• Session tapes: almost none. In the words of the engineer who searched the storage, nearly everything there was safety copies.

That is the raw material. It is less than any of us would like, but it is not nothing, and a great deal has been made of it.

What has been achieved

Between 1987 and 1991 Bill Inglot transferred the known masters to digital for Rhino’s CD programme. Those transfers, and the work since, give the Partnership a library of digital masters drawn from the best tapes it holds. That library is what Rhino uses today on the Partnership’s behalf.

The Snapper box set, Working Our Way Back To You, released in June 2023 on 44 discs, took the work further. For every track we identified a named tape source, and where there was a choice we chose the best. For the Vee-Jay years that meant the 1966 delivery reels, chosen because they played best and measured best in their raw digital transfers. In doing so the researchers did exactly what Holland called “vault detective” work, only as fans rather than employees.

In 2011 we were impatient. The Partnership had said the unreleased tracks did not exist, but the paper records we had recovered showed they did, so back then our research was a campaign. The box set showed what was possible. Between us, the fan group researchers gave the Partnership more than 50 unreleased tracks for the set, and many came from outside the vaults altogether:

• cassette copies, such as “I Wonder Why”;
• lost vinyl pressings;
• demo acetates;
• recordings of live shows;
• television appearances with unique performances of songs never recorded in a studio.

In detail the figures speak for themselves. Of the box set’s 814 or so tracks, 271 (a third) were bonus tracks beyond the original albums, and 60 of those were alternative or unique single mixes. 129 previously unreleased tracks came from the Partnership’s and Universal Motown’s storage, and a further 82 were contributed by the UK Appreciation Society and its network of collectors. It took three years and, on my part alone, more than 2,000 hours, with Bob Fisher’s help day to day.

Not everything we found went in. On the small reels in the Partnership’s storage there were early studio development mixes of perhaps a dozen of the Motown-era songs, two unfinished Motown tracks, and one Frankie Valli vocal sung in a different key. We judged none of them good enough to release. In the final transfers we also turned down duplicates of versions already chosen and a demo that turned out not to be Frankie or the group at all. Deciding what to leave out was as much a part of the job as finding things, and it is the same judgement any artist makes about his own unfinished work.

Together we achieved something unique, and fans finally got to hear wonderful performances by Frankie and The Four Seasons, and by Frankie on his own. Everything we were sent in digital form during that research has been preserved in our own digital library, alongside the salvaged tape copies.

What collectors should know

Good tapes do not guarantee a good-sounding release. After the box set came out I measured the finished discs with a DR Meter, which shows how much of the music’s natural light and shade survives. Most of the first thirteen or so discs, up to and including New Gold Hits, scored lower than earlier CD reissues of the same recordings. They were just a little too ‘compressed and un-necessarily loud.

The tapes were not the cause. The Vee-Jay delivery reels chosen for the first five discs measured well in their raw transfers. Our belief is that extra compression was added at the mastering stage, and the finished discs were not checked against the sources before release, or with me as the set’s Master Track Adviser.

This is not a complaint about the original records. Bob Crewe mixed his mono singles with drive and density for radio, yet most of them still measure around DR9 to DR10; “Let’s Hang On” is a DR10 and “Ronnie”, on Edizione D’Oro, a DR10, and we kept our own transfers as close to the 45s as we could. The trouble is tracks squeezed well below that for no good reason, by poor transfers, worn tape or careless mastering. On the box set’s New Gold Hits disc, “Let’s Ride Again” measures DR6 and “Beggin’” DR7, [way too much compression] whereas the Ace CD of the same album gives DR10 to DR12 in stereo; the mono tape box in the Partnership storage itself was marked as ‘not suitable for mastering’. The same box set however also shows it need not have been so: its disc of 1966 to 1971 rarities, drawn from a mixed bag of tapes and years, measures between DR8 and DR12, DR10 overall. Around DR10 to DR12 is comfortable listening and leaves the volume to you. At DR6 or DR7, long listening becomes tiring. Our measurements and test records for every comparison disc are on file.

So for the 1960s recordings, the best-sounding versions are often still the CDs of the 1990s from Rhino, Ace and Collectors’ Choice. If you are building a collection, those are the discs to look for.

It is fair to add that the end of the project was a disappointment. After Bob Fisher died, decisions about the content were made without consultation. The superb instrumental versions of “Beggin’” and “I’m Gonna Change”, both great Northern Soul tracks, were left off, along with a few others we had found. No explanation was ever obtained from the Partnership as to why most of the unreleased Motown recordings were judged below the quality required. These were Snapper’s and Bob Gaudio’s decisions to make, since it was their investment. But the set could and should have had more, and that is why this blog, and the list that goes with it, exist.

When the set was being finished in 2022, I told Snapper I would be open with fans about its shortcomings, so that they could decide for themselves. This is me keeping that promise.

Where tapes could still be

We cannot say what survives beyond what we have seen. But there are places still worth checking, and each has a reason behind it.

• Universal’s vaults. The Philips and Mercury library moved from Chicago to New Jersey and now sits with Universal’s holdings at Iron Mountain. In 1997 a mono master of the unreleased song “One Man” turned up in that library, so not everything came back to the Partnership. Any request to search has to come from the Partnership itself.
• Copies sent abroad. Masters were copied and shipped to overseas companies for local releases. As Harry Weinger said, “If you’re shipping a master to Europe, it may be in a vault – but you can’t always find it.”
• What the studios left behind. Bell Sound traded until 1976 and the Record Plant until much later. Holland’s report shows that tapes left at closing studios were sometimes rescued by engineers and collectors rather than thrown away.
• Whoever holds the old Vee-Jay vault today. Vee-Jay’s own copies, and any three-track tapes it held, were never traced after 1966.
• The private collections of producers and engineers. Bob Crewe’s archive, as far as we know, holds his own productions for his own labels, but there could be more…...and that has never been confirmed.
• The Partnership’s own storage. There are hundreds of five-inch reels there, and many are unmarked. Bill Inglot, who searched the storage for the box set, told us he had already done “a pretty thorough search” of them: the vast majority were demos submitted to Bob Gaudio rather than Four Seasons recordings, mostly from the 1970s onwards, and in his view “it would not yield much… if anything.” He may well be right. But the same storage had surprised him and us before. A tape box from A&R Recording, typed with six Frankie Valli songs including the unreleased “I Was A Boy”, turned out to hold a different reel altogether: damaged mono session mixes from the Timeless album, which we salvaged for the box set. The reel the box describes has never been found. If one box can hold the wrong tape, others can too. And that tape with the lost unreleased tracks will probably be there[in and unmarked box?? After all original tapes newly found there in April 2021 gave the box set a 1966 demo of “Beggin’” by Peggy Farina and Bob Gaudio, identified by a handwritten note, and an unheard demo by Frankie Valli, “What Would I Do”. Until every reel is played, nobody can be certain, and playing them all takes a budget the box set never had.
• Fans’ collections. Cassettes, acetates, off-air recordings and live tapes have already given us some of the box set’s best moments. Holland heard the same from the industry: “There are people all over who have tapes that were thrown out in the trash… just holding on to them.”

The search goes on

Not everything we found made it into the box set. Our own collections still hold live recordings that were not available at the time, and Frankie and The Four Seasons’ appearances on The Mike Douglas Show in 1969 and 1975, kindly supplied by Bruno Gargano, can be seen on my YouTube channel. Click any title in the menu below to watch. The search is not only about finding lost tapes. It is also about getting what has been found heard.

Watch: Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons on The Mike Douglas Show, 1969 and 1975

No.	Show date	Performance (click to watch)	Notes
1	24 Nov 1969	Sherry Medley	First set; no new material during the Philips dispute
2	24 Nov 1969	(You’re Gonna) Hurt Yourself	Second set; an alternative live version
3	Mon 1 Sept 1975	Opening show	Two music sets and an interview
4	Mon 1 Sept 1975	All In Love Is Fair / The Way We Were	Stereo DVD transfer
5	Tue 2 Sept 1975	Medley	Full line-up before Joe Long left
6	Tue 2 Sept 1975	Love Theme	Isolated from the broadcast by John Paiva
7	Wed 3 Sept 1975	Part 1	Two songs plus interview
8	Wed 3 Sept 1975	Part 2: I Left My Heart In San Francisco	The only known performance
9	Thu 4 Sept 1975	Part 1: Stay / Silence Is Golden	With interview; arrangements by Lee Shapiro
10	Thu 4 Sept 1975	Part 2: Sherry Medley	The 1975 version
11	Fri 5 Sept 1975	Working My Way Back To You	Penultimate performance of the week
12	Fri 5 Sept 1975	My Eyes Adored You	Final performance of the residency
13	Sept 1975	Who Loves You	Day not stated; one of Joe Long’s last performances

For the recordings we know of, we have gathered the relevant data, where it is available, to enable the Partnership to ask the record companies to conduct a search. The companion list sets it out.

Today we are more relaxed Music Detectives. We follow the trail wherever we see a possible find, because we know what can be found.

If you worked with these tapes, or hold recordings of your own, please get in touch at mowestchameleon@gmail.com or through the Historical Society’s Facebook group. We are always hunting for more.

Postscript: a song that may be about to surface

As this was being written, Robby Robinson announced on his online show, Jam’n’Java, that he and Frankie had finished recording a new record, to be released soon. We understand the song is “I’d Rather Leave While I’m In Love”. At the time of writing, two weeks on, there has been no further news.

The song has a history. Charles Calello recalled that it was planned for the Lady Put The Light Out album in 1977, but the arrangement was left with the copyist and lost. It was still missing when the Reunited Live concerts were recorded in 1980, which is why the song is not among those recordings. When the arrangement turned up later, Frankie sang the song often in concert, yet as far as we know he never recorded it in a studio. The only copy we have found is an audience recording in poor quality.

Any good-quality recording is most likely to be one of Robby’s own tapes of a live show. Whether the new record comes from such a tape or is a fresh recording, we will have to wait and hear. Either way, it would be a song fans have waited almost fifty years for.

A companion post, “What We Know Still Exists”, lists the recordings we know survive but that have still not been released.

Sources

Bill Holland, “Labels Strive to Rectify Past Archival Problems”, Billboard, 11 and 17 July 1997 (archived at chezmarianne.com/bholland/words/vault.html).

Paul Kingsbury, “The Preservation Challenge: Changing Technologies for Recorded Sound”, in Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation, CLIR pub. 137 (clir.org/pubs/reports/pub137/part1/).

Harry Weinger, interview in The Second City, as quoted in Timepieces, “Motown Unreleased — 37 Years of Myths and Mis-information, Part 2” (2011).

A Cellarful of Motown!, Volumes 1 to 5 (Motown, 2002 to 2010; Caroline International, 2020).

Working Our Way Back To You, 44-disc box set (Snapper Music, June 2023), and our tape source list for it (final version, September 2022).