Meet The Most Successful Arranger In The History Of Pop Music

PART I

Steve Pomeranz: It’s funny that a person whose work is so familiar to us should not have the name recognition as others who have touched our lives. This is especially true in the arts. Think of the music business with its thousands of singers, instrumentalists, recording engineers, producers, songwriters, and more. Only a very small fraction are household names. This brings me to my special guest today. The man who sits across from me in the studio has had more top ten hit records than any other arranger in the history of pop music.

He has worked with artists ranging from Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons to Bruce Springsteen, Barry Manilow, Barbara Streisand, and Sinatra, to name just a few. And if you think it’s only the music of baby boomers in our generation, he’s also mentored Ariana Grande and helped point the way to her first recording session at age 12. Let me introduce Charlie Calello. Hey, Charlie, welcome to the show.

Charlie Calello: It’s nice to be here.

Steve Pomeranz: It’s funny because we met briefly a few years ago at the concert of my cousin, David Pomeranz, at the Black Box in Boca Raton, and I had no idea that you had produced and arranged that album. And I know, he’s my cousin and all of that, and I have had him on the show, but that was a wonderful album and he’s quite the artist.

Charlie Calello: He was a brilliant songwriter and he wrote one of my favorite songs that Barry recorded.

Steve Pomeranz: Barry Manilow.

Charlie Calello: Yeah.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, I know. So he had his touch with stardom, but as a solo artist, the light did not shine on him, in particular, right?

Charlie Calello: Lightning did not-

Steve Pomeranz: [LAUGH]

Charlie Calello: Was not caught in the bottle.

Steve Pomeranz: [LAUGH] So where were you from originally?

Charlie Calello: Originally, from Newark, New Jersey.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: And I grew up in an area called Down Neck.

Steve Pomeranz: Down Neck.

Charlie Calello: Yes.

Steve Pomeranz: Okay, all right, like Great Neck, Down Neck, Up Neck, I don’t know.

Charlie Calello: It was surrounded by railroad tracks, and it was also referred to as the iron-section.

Steve Pomeranz: Okay, yeah, yeah, and then it was Newark, right? So what was the condition of Newark back then?

Charlie Calello: Broken up into basically ethnic neighborhoods.

Steve Pomeranz: Ethnic, yeah.

Charlie Calello: And I lived in a Polish-German neighborhood, not really an Italian neighborhood. The Italian neighborhood was a little different section of where I lived.

Steve Pomeranz: So you were a Jersey boy, and that kind of played later in your story, for sure. But when you were growing up, your father was a musician, right?

Charlie Calello: Yeah, he was a club-date musician. He was probably one of the most in-demand trumpet players that did weddings, bar mitzvahs. And one of the reasons why he was used, he had a great sound, he knew all the tunes, and he could sight read.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, well, those are three killer characteristics for a musician, right?

Charlie Calello: Yeah.

Steve Pomeranz: He was also a jazz lover, right?

Charlie Calello: In his record collection, he was the one that had Miles Davis recordings. And as a kid, when I first listened to the record and I heard the record move, the first thing I looked at was who was playing on the record, who wrote the arrangement.

Steve Pomeranz: Oh, I see.

Charlie Calello: Must have been like four when I did that, I don’t really remember.

Steve Pomeranz: Well, that was the thing. Early on people started to realize that you had a way of putting chords together in songs and rearranging the chords in songs, and starting to this idea of kind of arranging. And so how did that develop?

Charlie Calello: I was a very poor student. I started as an accordion player and hated the accordion. I didn’t want to practice it [LAUGH]. And as a result of it, instead of practicing my skills and my arpeggios, I’d hear songs on the radio, and I’d want to play them. So I sort of learned how to play music and used my ear. And although I was learning to read music, primarily, everything I did, I did by ear.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: So I would listen to things and I’d say, oh, I like the way this sounds. I like the way that sounds.

Steve Pomeranz: So you’d take the record and you’d put it on and you’d get a couple of notes and then you’d put the needle back and over and over and over again.

Charlie Calello: Well, later on, I did that when I started to study arranging. I was mesmerized by the arrangements that were written for Sinatra.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, those beautiful, Nelson Riddle.

Charlie Calello: So then I started to listen to them and I started to write the individual parts, the trumpet part, the alto part, the trombone part.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, which really served you well later on as well because you were actually writing for pretty big orchestras later in your career.

Charlie Calello: It was a wonderful education because by listening and actually studying those recordings, you learn orchestral techniques that they just don’t teach you any place else. You just have to listen. Then eventually you find out what you like and you eventually start writing that way.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, so it’s kind of learning the business, training your ear from the ground up. Instead of necessarily going to school first and learning the theory, you listened and then you learned a lot from listening. And then that was reinforced later when you went to school.

Charlie Calello: Yeah, well, primarily going to school and learning, going to a music school, I went to the first music and arts school in the country, which was an advantage. But when I studied music I found out that a lot of the composers that we studied in school and they tried to analyze, as you took a look at the way that they worked, it was no different than the way we worked. They sort of got an idea, they developed it, and they wrote it.

Steve Pomeranz: And then they wrote it.

Charlie Calello: And basically, when you start to think about that, there was really no difference between them and us. All we had to do was do the same thing. And they wrote works of art. Now could we actually eventually have works of art?

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, yeah, I get you. So the idea is they’re sitting at the piano, kind of playing what they’re hearing and figuring this part out, figuring that, and then putting it down on paper. Whereas we, hundreds of years later, we look at this and go, oh, this is on the paper. It’s like paper is part of it.

Charlie Calello: Right.

Steve Pomeranz: But that’s not actually how it started. [LAUGH] That’s interesting.

Charlie Calello: Right, right.

Steve Pomeranz: Well, it’s kind of especially amazing, and this is definitely a digression, but Beethoven wrote, he was deaf. [LAUGH] As a kid I was always like how is that even possible that you can write these beautiful things and not even hear it? But, of course, he heard it inside his head.

Charlie Calello: What was intimidating about studying those works is that when you looked at them they were perfect. They were written perfectly, there were no mistakes. Your articulations were well-mentioned, the dynamics were mentioned. But then you think back over 2 or 300 years that these things were played, eventually, musicians kept on marking them up, marking them up. So when I would play the arrangement, I’d say maybe I need to write all this stuff. You find out that the musicians really would do it. And ultimately when they found the style that it needed to be in and you’d mark it up correctly.

Steve Pomeranz: Interesting, interesting. So as I mentioned before, you were a Jersey Boy. And you kind of fell in with an interesting crowd that really kind of defined most of your career. So tell us about that.

Charlie Calello: Meeting Frankie Valli?

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, just that, that little thing.

Charlie Calello: We had a band of music students from Arts High School, and they were all really good players, good musicians. And we started to sing, so we were singing four-part harmony like The Four Freshmen and The Hi-Lo’s. And Frankie was working with a group called The Four Lovers. They were sort of like a country Italian R&B group if you could imagine.

Steve Pomeranz: Is that possible? I don’t even know.

Charlie Calello: Yeah, it was a mixture, they played all those kinds of music.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: They did it with two guitars, a bass, and a cocktail drum. [LAUGH] So Frankie was quite famous in the city ’cause he had a hit record in 1956 on RCA called, You’re” The Apple of My Eye.” So here it was around 1958, and I was working in a club in New Jersey. He walked into the club. And he heard our band and heard us singing and he was impressed by what we did. And he asked who wrote the arrangements, and they pointed to me.

Steve Pomeranz: I see, I see, well, you were pretty young, though, right?

Charlie Calello: I was 20.

Steve Pomeranz: You were 20. But even before that, you were going to Atlantic City, I don’t know if you were playing bass at that time or accordion.

Charlie Calello: I played accordion in the Gin Mill on Kentucky Avenue, Atlantic City, called Eddie Shamrock.

Steve Pomeranz: An yeah, you were like 16 or something?

Charlie Calello: 15 going on 16.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, and how did your parents even ever let you go? You were on your own too, right?

Charlie Calello: Yeah, well, my mother didn’t want me to go, but my father who was a musician said, let him go, it’ll be good for him.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Calello: And it was really a great experience.

Steve Pomeranz: There’s this idea that developing any kind of skill like this takes thousands of hours of playing. Let’s say, in this case, the Beatles were in Germany before they became famous and they were playing six nights a week, two shows a night. So they had their 10,000 hours, as they say. So you really started early, I mean, you got a lot of those hours in pretty early.

Charlie Calello: Well, in Atlantic City, right up the street was where we used to go after work. We finished at 3 in the morning. And myself and a friend of mine, we were both about the same age, we found out that the entertainment went until 5 there. So we would go up the street, and we saw Al Hibler, Ray Charles, and people like this that were working up the street. And at that hour you could walk in and nobody would bother you. So we were exposed to a degree of performance at that level at the age of 15 that was not seen by many of the other people in our area.

Steve Pomeranz: The place and the times played a big role in this. We’ll be right back with Charlie Calello and hear more about his experience with the Four Seasons and the great, great career that he’s had—and also some advice for young people who are looking to get into the business. What does it take now to become successful in the music business? We’ll be right back.

PART II

Steve Pomeranz: I’m back with Charlie Calello, one of the great arrangers, and a little bit of songwriting, and a little bit of this and a little bit of that, has contributed to pop music in America. And we were talking about his time with the Four Seasons. So, Charlie, we started really early, you had met Frankie Valli and some of his crew. I want to mention some of these names, these are people who won’t know about the Four Seasons, who were they?

Charlie Calello: Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio, and Nick Massi and anyone who has seen Jersey Boys knows the four of them became the Four Seasons that were responsible for all those early hits.

Steve Pomeranz: They weren’t just musicians and singers, they were songwriters too, right?

Charlie Calello: Gaudio was the primary songwriter; Frankie, primarily the singer.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: Tommy, you’d have to see the play to see Tommy’s part. Nicky was really an amazing vocal arranger; he had an instinctive way of putting vocal parts together. So harmoniously the group worked, and when I got involved with Frankie four years before the Four Seasons, so we started to build this camaraderie before that period of time. And then, after “Sherry Baby,” when things started to become really hectic, when they had to produce at a large scale, they called me back to help them make the records because, A, neither one of them could read or write music, they knew that I had that ability.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: They also knew that I was able to do things that they weren’t able to do when it came time to even coming up with ideas.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: So I got started with them, and out of the first 26 chart records that we had, I was involved with 22 of them, I believe.

Steve Pomeranz: Chart record means you’re getting what, to 50, top-

Charlie Calello: Chart records, anything that can reach like top 20 in Billboard.

Steve Pomeranz: Top 20, okay.

Charlie Calello: And most of those records, I did 22 of the 24 or 26 records that they had.

Steve Pomeranz: Now back then, it was all four-track. It was just very simple recording, and one of the keynotes to the sound of the Four Seasons was them doubling their voices. So that took some doing, I would think, you’ve got four singers, and you’re doubling their voices. And so you’re kind of eating up the tracks, and that was before The Beatles and before a lot of the 8-tracks and the bigger mixing systems came in, and today it’s unlimited because it’s all digital, right?

Charlie Calello: Right.

Steve Pomeranz: But back then it was a physical impossibility almost to kind of do this kind of thing, but the Four Seasons was involved in that pretty early.

Charlie Calello: 1959, I started to make records with Frankie, and the guys that were in the Four Seasons and Bob Crewe. So three years before the Four Seasons hit, Bob Crewe bought a four-track tape machine and he introduced me to making records with very few musicians by doubling or using the musicians to play multiple parts. So the first record I made with him was a song called “An Angel Cried” which had strings, it had horns and everything. We did it with the band I was working with and three violin players that we hired.

Steve Pomeranz: And it sounded like a full orchestra pretty much, right?

Charlie Calello: Pretty much so and then when Bob developed, he developed the art of making the track. You would make the track on all four tracks, mix it down to a mono, and I explained all of this in my book.

Steve Pomeranz: Right.

Charlie Calello: That he would take the mono track, then re-record it back onto the four-track, then we would do the background parts with the Four Seasons, then we’d double the background parts, and then we put Frankie’s voice on. Now when we double the background parts, we use a technique called sound-on-sound. You take the recorded voice, play that through the system with the new voices so it would still be one track. You’d have double voices-

Steve Pomeranz: Oh, one track, one track.

Charlie Calello: On one track.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: And then we would record Frankie’s voice, and then double Frankie’s voice-

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: And do the same thing again.

Steve Pomeranz: All on four tracks.

Charlie Calello: Now that’s three tracks.

Steve Pomeranz: Three tracks. [LAUGH]

Charlie Calello: If we were going to do any over-dubs, we’d do the over-dubs on [CROSSTALK]

Steve Pomeranz: That’s amazing. By the way, Charlie mentioned his book, it’s called Another Season – A Jersey Boy’s Journey with the Four Seasons and Beyond-The Memoirs of Charlie Calello.  So where’s that available?

Charlie Calello: Barns and Noble.

Steve Pomeranz: Okay.

Charlie Calello: Amazon.

Steve Pomeranz: Sure, okay, Another Season – The Memoirs of Charlie Calello. So let’s move on a little bit because we know what the Four Seasons was all about during that period of time, but you had involvement with Neil Diamond, as well. And as a matter of fact, with the song “Sweet Caroline”, I want you to tell us about that.

Charlie Calello: In 1969, it’s been 50 years right now since we made that record and when I got called to make it, I was called as an arranger. So I heard the song, I went home and wrote the arrangement, went to the studio, and recorded the horns and the strings. And walked into the studio and asked Neal how he liked it, he looked at me and said, well, I didn’t hear anything wrong with it. So I walked out of the studio very depressed, I didn’t think I did a good job.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: And eventually, it turned up being his biggest record and later on he wrote about and turned out to be so good, so good, so good.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, yeah yeah, that whole.

Charlie Calello: But the interesting part about it is that when it comes time to singing the song, you can’t sing the song without the bomp, bomp, bomp.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: And it took me four seconds to write the bomp, bomp, bomp. [LAUGH]

Steve Pomeranz: So you’re the man behind the bomp?

Charlie Calello: I wrote the bomp, bomp, bomp.

Steve Pomeranz: [LAUGH]

Charlie Calello: [LAUGH]

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, I think that’s because, I mean that song has really spanned generations as well, I mean I’ve seen it in movies now and the like. Everybody says something about that, yeah, that’s actually pretty amazing. So just to kind of finish up this era of your work, you toured with the Four Seasons. You were working with all these other artists. You were doing a lot of the arranging.

You were getting the musicians in some of these cases, kind of putting the dates together. But all through that, the industry started to change with the invasion of the Brits. We had the Beatles, we had the Rolling Stones, and that must have shocked Tin Pan Alley, where all you guys were hanging out in New York, and you know the Brill Building and all of that. What was it like back then when the Beatles exploded on the scene?

Charlie Calello: The Four Seasons went to England in 1963. Frankie came back with a bunch of records. Five of those records were the first Beatles hits, and he went to Bob Crewe and said, we should cut these songs. We should cover these songs, and we should imitate these records, these are brilliant records and Bob said, we write better songs. At that point, we had the opportunity to record all of those hits that were released a year earlier.

Steve Pomeranz: Wow.

Charlie Calello: Now that’s something a very few people know.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: So the Beatles came in, the English invasion came in, and it affected many of the groups. However, what was still strong on the airways was Motown.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: So what we did, we came from the “Sherry Baby,” “Big Girls,” “Dawn Go Away.” What we did was we leaned into the R&B field by doing “Let’s Hang On,” “Working My Way Back to You.” And with the records after that, we sort of caught a niche making Four Seasons kind of Motown records.

Steve Pomeranz: Well, it’s interesting because really music came full circle there because The Beatles were basing their music on Motown or that kind of music as well. That’s where they started, same thing with the Stones, so everybody’s going back to the roots there.

Charlie Calello: Right, and then toward the end of the decade, it sort of fell apart a little bit because then it started with the rock bands. And once it started with the rock bands and the concept records, I think the concept of putting whole stories together started to become part of an album work. And the Four Seasons were not an album-oriented group, we were really a pop group and that transition sort of went by the wayside. It took them a long time before they were able to get back on their feet.

Steve Pomeranz: Well, that was like Sergeant Pepper’s was this concept idea that you listened to it, The White Album, you listened to it from beginning to end. By the way, you used two cigar boxes around your ears when you were a kid, I used to take my dad’s stereo speakers, put them together, and lay on the floor-

Charlie Calello: Right.

Steve Pomeranz: In the living room between them, and hear the sounds go from one ear to another.

Charlie Calello: Right.

Steve Pomeranz: Okay, so we had that in common, oh my gosh. So, moving on, you then got an opportunity to work at Columbia which was the big aircraft carrier. They had Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Barbara Streisand, Aretha Franklin. I mean the list is so amazingly impressive, and you joined that organization, but you didn’t really have the best of time there.

Charlie Calello: Well, when I joined them, I had “Lightning Strikes” as a hit record as a producer, “The Name Game” as a producer, plus I was making Four Seasons’ records. So when they brought me in, they wanted me to start to make pop records for Columbia Records. The funny part about it was, although they wanted to move in that direction, the resistance corporately was something I was not used to. So I only lasted there a little less than two years, but I did make the album of my life which is the Laura Nyro Eli record.

Steve Pomeranz: Yes, I didn’t know you were involved with that until I read the book.

Charlie Calello: And after I made that record, I was fired for making the record. David Geffen made his career off of it, Laura got a lifetime contract with Columbia, and I got fired.

Steve Pomeranz: [LAUGH]

Charlie Calello: [LAUGH]

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, there’s something just wrong with that I can tell you. Unfortunately, we’re low on time, so I want to move ahead. You said there are four stages to your career, to a person’s career. I’m going to read them for you if you don’t mind. Who is Charlie Calello?—that’s the first one. Who is this guy, right? Next one is, we got to get Charlie Colello. The third stage is, what we need is a young Charlie Calello, and now, whatever happened to Charlie Calello? So tell us what are you doing now? What’s happened to Charlie Calello?

Charlie Calello: Well, I found out that making hit records, I had a run of about 30 years, then after 30 years, what happens is you don’t speak the language anymore. You don’t speak the pop language. But yet still, as an arranger, I didn’t realize this when I was younger, that music is a lot more than just making hit records. So I continue to make records, I started to do what I really liked to do more was to write for orchestra.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: And to make records like that.

Steve Pomeranz: The work of a real arranger.

Charlie Calello: Exactly.

Steve Pomeranz: Not such as a pop and hip maker, right? So that’s the stuff you love.

Charlie Calello: Right, and making some of those records, I wound up doing an album like that with Ronnie Milsap. We went out and started conducting symphony dates.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: I came down here to Florida-

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: I got involved the Pops Orchestra.

Steve Pomeranz: Right, as a matter of fact, I was the president of the Symphonia here, which was kind of part of that whole process.

Charlie Calello: And I started writing for the pops orchestras, and many of the pops orchestras. I wrote for Peter Nero and then I started to conduct, and a friend of mine talked me into doing a live concert. And I said, what would I do? He says, no, your hit records.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: I said, well, what would I do? He says, well, you had about 35 top ten hits.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm. I think you could fill a couple hours, right [LAUGH]?

Charlie Calello: [LAUGH] So I started to do the shows, and right now, between doing the shows and writing, I’m having a great time because it’s so much fun to get up on stage, perform the hits and, as you perform them, I realize that I’m living the best part of the music business without the drama.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, yeah, without the drama, right, exactly. So finally, some quick advice for those young people who are trying to enter into this business which has totally changed, to say the least. But still talent should pave the way, what kind of advice would you have for a young person?

Charlie Calello: Well, making records is a business, and if you learn the business, you can really be successful at it. There is a simple formula, and it requires three things. You have to have a song, you have to have a song, and you have to have a song.

Steve Pomeranz: I think I’m getting your point there.

Charlie Calello: The other thing is that you have to become very conscious of what they’re playing on radio and to be able to anticipate the curve because, by the time your record gets out, the curve is going to change.

Steve Pomeranz: Yeah.

Charlie Calello: So what you need to do, the best thing for young people to do is try to write follow-ups to hit records that they hear on the radio now.

Steve Pomeranz: Mm-hm.

Charlie Calello: If you’re writing follow-ups, what happens, you’ll get an idea to study song form, you’ll understand what’s on the record, what synthesizers, what beats, how it’s structured, what kind of backgrounds. So it’s really an education. If you have the education and you have the talent to be able to put it together, can you catch the brass ring? Well, every year there’s a new artist, there’s a new producer, there’s a new group of people that make records, and you could always have a chance.

Steve Pomeranz: Charlie Calello, the book is Another Season -The Memoirs Of Charlie Calello, and you can see why I’ve asked him to come on the show and tell us some of his story. Charlie, thank you so much for joining me.

Charlie Calello: My pleasure.

Steve Pomeranz: Great. Don’t forget to hear this interview again, and any interview that we’ve had on this show or my commentaries. Go to our website, which is stevepomeranz.com, and join our conversation. While you’re there, sign up for our weekly update for all the upcoming live events that we have and the important topics that we’ve covered this week, straight to your inbox. That’s stevepomeranz.com.