Can't Take My Eyes Off You

Go ahead, admit it. Whenever this song comes on you roll the car windows up and scream it.

It’s a classic. 

It’s rock. It’s pop. It’s tender. And it bangs. 

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” is beloved by wedding couples and wedding guests alike. It’s truly the best of both worlds. 

Few songs can suck you in with romantic lyrics one minute, then get you bouncing to a hard-charging horn section the next. Top it off with Frankie Valli’s signature vocals, and you’ve got yourself a fan favorite when it comes to first dances. 

CTMEOY was released in 1967 as a solo venture by Valli. According to Frankie, it was unlike anything else being played at the time. And if you’ve seen the Broadway smash Jersey Boys, you know it was a song that almost never saw the light of day. 

At the time, Valli was working a club in Detroit called the Rooster Tail. The song had been recorded and sitting in the can for over two years so the group brought to the big radio station just outside the city. When Valli played it for Program Director Paul Drew, his response was, “I don’t hear it.”

Think about it. Weddings everywhere could have been totally deprived for eternity if it had ended there. But Valli and company persisted.

They persuaded Drew to come down to the club to hear it live. That night the audience’s reaction to the song was so strong that Drew came backstage to talk to the band. “I still don’t hear it, but there must be something to it to get that kind of reaction. So I’ll play it for a couple of weeks.” 

He did and consequently changed our lives forever. The song blew up, the iconic chorus became part of the zeitgeist, and the rest is history. 

If that story’s not intriguing enough, try this one on for size. What if I told you that the musical Jersey Boys was partly inspired by Robert Deniro and Christopher Walken? Yep. Mind Blown. 

Check this out:

In the movie The Deer Hunter, Walken and Deniro are playing a spirited game of pool in the bar while “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” is playing on the jukebox. When the song hits the chorus, Walken starts belting out “I Love You Baby” and the rest of the bar patrons join in.

According to an interview with the song’s writer, Bob Gaudio, when he saw the visual energy in the scene it inspired him to come up with the idea for a musical stage production, which later became Jersey Boys.

“That was the spark way, way, way back then that made me think something could happen visually,” Gaudio said in the interview. “And the first thing that crossed my mind was a Broadway show.”