Bob Crewe (co-writer, record producer):
The boys became savvy rather quickly. You never had the feeling you were dealing with amateurs. They were all about making the music. Bob and I were constantly looking for material, something to break the group with. But we had no idea the sound would evolve because of this one weekend. I grew up in Belleville, and my mother and father had a house down on the Jersey Shore. The boys were playing a nightclub in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. They did their thirty minutes and when they were done, the place cleared out and there was a little bit of jazz jamming going on. Frankie picks up a napkin and makes a babushka for his head, takes two maracas, holds them up to his breast, and starts singing, “I can’t give you anything but love, Chichi,” a là Rose Murphy. I thought, What is that voice?! So I said to Bobby, “You’ve got to go home and write a song. I don’t care what it’s about, just incorporate an octave jump from the high falsetto to the low baritone and back, low to high. It will be phenomenal.” And he came back with “Sherry” three days later.

Bob Gaudio:
I wrote “Sherry” at the end of a string of rehearsal days before we were going to record three or four songs for Bob Crewe. I had fifteen or twenty minutes of nothing to do, and I just sat at the piano and it popped out—literally. I just wrote down some silly lyrics to make sure I could remember it as I was driving down the Garden State Parkway to Newark, to Frankie’s house for rehearsal. I guess it’s a little bit of a B-movie story, but that’s the way it happened. Who’s Sherry? She’s the objective correlative, just like the show says. She was everyone that I knew, any girl I had dated.

Bob Gaudio:
Crewe said, verbatim, “If I don’t fuck this up, that’s a Number One record.”
I’ve heard there’s an original handwritten lyric at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame somewhere, where “Sherry” is spelled “Cheri.” In some archive. But I’d have to see it to believe it. One thing is for sure, it was never called “Perry” or any other name. One time, there was a wealthy real-estate person who wanted to get in the record business. He wanted to buy the master—and I think his daughter’s name was Perry. Would I change it to “Perry” instead of “Sherry”? That’s the only truth to any of those myths.

Bob Crewe:
We did go into the studio, and cut an incredible track. I took the finished product, which I knew was hot, down to a music industry convention in Miami. That track just burned a hole in my soul.

Bob Gaudio:
Although we did come up through the Dick Clark world, we were considered a white R&B group for about an hour at the start, until they figured it out. Most of the stations that started playing us were R&B. Ewart Abner was vice president at Vee Jay Records at the time; it was shocking to him that it became an R&B record first. Essentially, it started with Jocko Hender-son and other deejays at the black stations, and then crossed over and went into the more sanitized world of TV.

One of the things that I remember vividly is the first time we visited Vee Jay Records, which was our first label. We pulled into the parking lot, and it looked like a Cadillac dealership because there must have been twenty new Caddies in there.

Frankie Valli:
I was at the point of not knowing where my next dollar was coming from. And then “Sherry” happened. I wasn’t sure whether I was having a dream or what. But I took a leave of absence from work. I took two years before I bought a car. Took three years before I bought a house. I was afraid that if this all went away, how would I be able to pay for anything? I had no college education. Right from high school, I had to go to work. So I renewed my contract at the maintenance job six months after “Sherry.” Just to be sure.