After the commercial failure of his 1976 album, Valli,
Frankie Valli seemed to have gotten the stars aligned for another comeback with his 1977 follow-up,
Lady Put the Light Out. He assembled a studio full of high-priced New York session players and chose good songs by such notable songwriters as
Eric Carmen,
Paul Anka,
Carole Bayer Sager, and the team of
Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for a collection meant to compete in the adult pop market with the likes of
Barry Manilow. Private Stock Records, his label, released as singles the
Anka song "Second Thoughts,"
Carmen's apparently specially written "I Need You," and
Sager and
Albert Hammond's "I Could Have Loved You." And nothing happened. Why? For one thing,
Valli was still dividing his time between his solo career and
the Four Seasons, touring with them to promote their Helicon album, although this was his farewell outing with them and he would formally announce his separation from the group at its end. Still, he may have taken his eye off the ball when it came to promoting
Lady Put the Light Out. Curiously, the hit he needed was right there on the album, but it went to somebody else. The disco-inflected "Native New Yorker," at the end of side one, had been written by longtime
Valli associates Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell (who had written hits for
the Four Seasons back in the '60s). But
Valli's version remained buried on the LP, while
Odyssey recorded it and took its version into the Top 30 of the pop charts and the Top Five of the disco charts. So, instead of marking a career resurgence for
Valli,
Lady Put the Light Out was another flop that unfortunately came just as he was preparing to turn his full attention to his solo career. ~ William Ruhlmann