Grease - From “Grease”

This was featured in the movie of the same name starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Valli was not in the movie, but another Frankie was: Frankie Avalon played the Teen Angel and sang "Beauty School Dropout." Valli would get a turn in acting: he appeared in seven episodes of the HBO series The Sopranos, which was about a quirky Mafia family.

This song was written and produced by Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees specifically for the movie. (Fun fact: in Mexico the film is called Vaselina). His music helped make Saturday Night Fever a huge hit two years earlier. That film was produced by Robert Stigwood, who was a partner in the Grease movie and got Gibb on board for the title song. For this project, Stigwood was interested in Gibb's pen, but not his voice, since The Bee Gees sound ingrained with Saturday Night Fever and he wanted Grease to have its own identity. Frankie Valli, who could sing in a similar high vocal range to Gibb, was asked to record it. Thanks to his many previous hits, Valli provided a familiar sound, but one that was not saturated on Pop radio, as he hadn't had a hit for a while. Gibb did sing backup on the track.

Speaking with Billboard magazine in a 2013 interview, Valli explained how he came to record this song. "Barry Gibb called and said, 'I wrote a song. I think it's for you. It's going to be the title song for this motion picture," Valli recalled. "My manager at the time was Allan Carr, who was partners in Grease with Robert Stigwood. He called and said, 'What do you want to do? Do you want to be in the movie? Or sing the title song?' Well, I had already heard the title song, and I loved it. I called [famed arranger] Don Costa up and told him to come over right away and hear this song. He said, 'If you don't record this song, you're crazy.' So I said, 'What's the song if I want to be in the movie?' And they said 'Beauty School Dropout.' It was done by Frankie Avalon. It never became a hit, but he made a lot of money from it being on the soundtrack. But 'Grease' was one of the biggest records I ever had in my career."