Tommy DeVito of the 4 Seasons: How Rock ’n’ Roll Helped Rescue a Jersey Boy
Rock ’n’ roll probably saved Tommy DeVito’s life.
In return, as the lead guitarist and baritone of the Four Seasons, he helped create some of its foundational sounds. That’s Tommy DeVito on “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Rag Doll,” “Dawn” and more than a dozen great radio records of the 1960s.
The Four Seasons were one of those bands that “just” made great singles, which was plenty, because rock ’n’ roll was built on great singles.
Tommy DeVito died Monday from complications of Covid-19. He was 92, an age he very likely would not have reached had he not, in the early 1950s, formed a New Jersey band that a decade later would ascend to world fame.
In contrast to artists who would like the world to think they grew up on mean streets with tough guys up every alley, DeVito did.
He grew up in Belleville, next to Newark, with pals and associates who included the future actor Joe Pesci and Mob boss Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo.
Gaetano “Tommy” DeVito, the youngest of nine children from a working-class family, quit school after the eighth grade, hustled and worked the streets a decade, then in the early 1950s formed The Variety Trio with his brother Nick and their friend Hank Majewski, playing the music of the day for a few bucks a gig.
In 1954 they added a vocalist, their Jersey neighbor Francis Castelluccio, and by 1956 had become the Four Lovers. They had a minor hit with “You’re the Apple of My Eye,” a chirpy tune on which Castelluccio, now Frankie Valli, showed off his falsetto. That earned them an invite to the Ed Sullivan Show. Then they fell off the radar for the next six years.
That was not good for their financial well-being, but it was great for their musical chops, particularly after Nick DeVito and Majewski left and DeVito and Valli added bass Nick Massi and Bob Gaudio, a singer, keyboardist, arranger and songwriter.
In 1962, Gaudio wrote “Sherry,” which launched a run that would eventually sell 175 million records, land the band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and inspire a massively successful Broadway bio-drama, “Jersey Boys.”
Valli, the vocalist, and Gaudio, the writer, got most of the attention in the Four Seasons. DeVito was not unimportant. While Gaudio wrote songs that featured percussion, DeVito’s guitar remained an integral part of the sound.
The Seasons’s vocal mix was also underrated. It wasn’t as silky as the Beach Boys, but a rougher mix that created a sound not quite like any other band’s. Particularly in the early days it owed considerably to the rhythm and blues harmonies of the ’50s, the kind that DeVito was playing in some of his first bands.
DeVito stayed in the Four Seasons until 1971. In “Jersey Boys,” his character leaves because he has run up massive gambling debts and the Gaudio and Valli characters buy him out so those debts don’t suck the whole band into the control of the shady characters to whom DeVito owed the money.
DeVito said in 2008 that this wasn’t true, that he left because “I’d had it up to here” with the traveling and everything else that goes into a show biz life. One can believe here what one will.
Show biz life very likely did, however, save him from the alternative. During his Newark street days, and even after, he was arrested and jailed, by his own count, “eight or nine times.”
It was mostly petty stuff, relatively speaking, like breaking and entering. “I’m not proud of it,” he said. “But I’m not ashamed of it. My neighborhood was rough. If you come out of it alive, it’s an achievement.”
Like Valli, he described Gyp DeCarlo as “a good friend” who helped the band in ways that have been never been fully clear. It is clear that when Gyp went to prison in Atlanta, the Four Seasons flew down to play a show for him and his fellow inmates. You do that for friends.
DeVito always said he knew some Mob guys, because those were people he grew up with, but that didn’t mean they ran him.
Valli, who is still performing, and Massi, who died in 2000, also had encounters with the law. Perhaps the one that provides the best perspective was Gaudio, Valli and DeVito being arrested in Ohio in 1965 because they had failed to pay a $375 hotel bill the year before.
“Jersey Boys” dramatizes that scene. In real life, what apparently happened was that DeVito was supposed to have paid the bill, but had other debts for which he needed the money more urgently.
Whatever the nuances, it’s said that Gaudio never forgave him and that resentment eventually helped lead to Valli and Gaudio freezing him out of the band. The deal there was that they picked up his $150,000 gambling debt and in return he sold them his share in everything — royalties, name, all of it.
What’s also fascinating is that the hotel problem arose two years after “Sherry” made these guys big successful stars. A $375 hotel bill wouldn’t seem to be a budget buster, which suggests DeVito was having serious problems even at this height of success.
So was DeVito a classic loose cannon? He always said no, but that discussion got an interesting footnote in 1990, when DeVito’s old pal Joe Pesci played a character named Tommy DeVito in the Martin Scorsese movie Goodfellas.
Pesci’s DeVito was a memorable psychopath, and while the character was not based on the real Tommy DeVito, the character and the Pesci connection were not widely viewed as total random coincidence.
In any case, leaving the band for DeVito meant mostly leaving music, though he released a solo album of Italian folk songs in 2006. In 2009 he told the Las Vegas Journal-Review that he became a hustler again, this time a more legitimate one who did things like clean houses to pay the bills.
“You’re brought down to your knees,” DeVito told the Journal-Review. “It’s like going to hell six or seven times. … That feeling is rough. You say, ‘What the hell did I do with myself? Here I am a celebrity, and I wind up being a guy that’s cleaning houses, dealing (cards), doing anything to make $5.’ It’s a horrible feeling.
“But let me tell you something. You can always learn, no matter how old you are. And I learned pretty fast.”
Spoken like a street kid — which is what he was before music and almost certainly would have remained had he not found something that afforded a legal living.
Contrary to what rock ’n’ roll critics of the 1950s often declared, the music was not synonymous with juvenile delinquency. But it had a little of that element — and for Tommy DeVito, imperfect as his life might have been, it may have also had a touch of rehab.
