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In a rented house near the ocean, Dion lays down tracks" with his band for a rock an roll album titled Life Song, a musical odyssey from his bronx origins to the Present When he's not cooking up another exploration into his own psyche, he dashes down to the beach and paddles around in the pool with his daughters, Tane, Lark, and August.
For the past eleven years, Dion DIMucci and his wife Susan have lived in Miami. After last years "The, Return' of the Wanderer" (remember the 1961 "Wanderer," the lad renowned for his sexual escapades arid his brutal dumping of chicks?), he has put together the first band of his twenty one years of recording. Dion seems, bent on remaining an enigma, plotting a career defying categorisation or popular definition. His music and career have' taken So many turns into dead-end alleys, open roads, and abrupt halts, that when you have a fix on the man, lie skates off out of range and disappears behind the horizon. unknown -
He :started his career as the fine tenor of Dion and the Belmonts and followed that stint with a solo career in the early sixties with the Del Satins as backup. After a brief return to the Belmonts from a fading solo career, Dion stopped dead in his tracks and vanished from the scene only to startle the public with his late sixties comeback. as an acoustic guitar player and singer with "Abraham,, Martin, and John" and the anti-drug song based on his own experience, "Your Own Back Yard." Then, poof, Dion was gone again to recharge his batteries. Now the last three years find him at his most prolific and creative in over a decade.-
"My past is a part of me. I know the last album, Return Of The wanderer, was a conscious attempt to bridge the past and the present and bring it together for the people who1 stayed with me over the years through the many changes of music and styles. I know it's a problem because people tend to compartmentalise you. I'm not saying I have it made but I don't look at that past thing. It works for me, as you can see, and it works against me.
"when the new album comes out [Ed presumabley a reference to Fire in the Night not released until the mid 80's?], and it's bitching, cooking and full of life, some people will tend to say 'Oh WOW. he's an oldie, isn't he? But some people will give you the benefit of the doubt that he's alive, well, and living in the now. I feel fortunate that I'm still around and I'm very grateful just to be here doing what I'm doing. At one time of my life, I had mastered negative thinking and I didn't know why until I broke through that. I'll tell you the last twelve years have been the happiest of my life hey man, I got nothing to complain about."
Dion was born on July 18, 1939, in the Bronx. His father was a vaudevillian, a manipulator of marionettes, who, played Radio City Music Hall, the Roxy, and the Palace in the Donald O'Connor and Gene Kelly days. "When he got out In the late fifties, that's when I got In." At the age of eleven, Dion made his professional debut on the Paul whitman radio show in New York. But it wasn't until he was seventeen that Dion broke into the recording industry and formed the Belmonts from a group of street corner singers out of Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, who hung around Belmont Avenue, Garden street,' and Prospect Avenue.
"I had gotten a contract through a friend who knew a friend who knew a friend who knew a friend who had started a record company. They said, 'I know a kid who sings" and brought me down there and they liked what I did. It was when rock and roll was In its infancy. This company tried to hook me up with some studio singers,.' Boop, Boop,. Boop, Boop' stuff. They were these fifty five- to. sixty-year-old types who were working the Four Aces style. I said, 'Wait a minute. You want to hear something You wait right here. I'll be back Thursday.'
"I went back to my neighbourhood. There were little I gathering places in the bronx in the different neighbourhoods. I got the best street corner singers .There were certain guys who I would hang on the jukebox, literally hugged it all day, hung on it, and harmonised with every record, There was Freddie milano from Mapes Avenue, So was Carlo .Those guys were like Robert and jonny .Angelo was also from trenmont .He had an exceptional tenor voice. I gathered the guys and we put together '1 Wonder Why' and went downtown. That was the start, We were the best,' street corner singers in the Bronx, I know it, man."
From their first hit, "I Wonder Why," in 1958, the Belmonts continued with "No One Knows," "Don't pity Me, the Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman song, "A Teenager in Love," and their monster version of Rodgers and' Harts ,classic, "Where or When." In 1959, Angelo joined the navy. Throughout their two and a half years together dion and the Belmonts became famous for their flair for arrangements on their records.
But Dion remembers their stage act as something less than spectacular. we weren't a very visual act. We didn't do splits and steps because we were too damn lazy. But we sang our asses off. We were very creative on record and I that'.was where we put our energy. There was a group around called the Mellow Kings and they could do splits I loved to watch them hut I couldn't do that, 1 had two left feet. I couldn't get the Belmonts to move, To tell you the the truth, I can move pretty good. I like to move but I couldn't get them up in the morning to rehearse. Are you kidding? All they wanted to do was snap their fingers. That was cool enough. That's what they did. Everybody did what they wanted to.
So we went out as a record act and did "1 'Wonder Why "Teenager in Love.' some things from our album and ., and then picked up some instruments and did instrumental. Besides, In those days, you ran on for three numbers and left. Yeah, what act?"
Bobby Darin, who was older than Dion and the Belmonts, was making a big splash and became a good friend of Dion. "he was from East Harlem, down further from us. He! was a damn good friend. I did my first tour with him, ate, slept, and lived together for six weeks. He was truly an inspiration in my life because there are people 'who are damn healthy who don't do much more than sit around and complain. he lived longer than he expected 'to. He expected to die in his twenties because he had a rheumatic heart. Here's a guy who had a bad hand dealt to him and he made the best of it." After a mercurial career, a' reputation for arrogance and intense narcissism, Bobby Darin became withdrawn in the mid. sixties, emerging from seclusion to play an antiwar' act, a dramatic change from his Sinatra-style night-club routine. Then in 1973, he underwent seven hour's, of surgery for a rare heart disease and died on the hospital table at the age of thirty-seven.
In 1960 after recording the standards, "When You Wish Upon Star" and "In the Still of the Night," Dion went solo, leaving the Belmonts in good shape to Continue without him. In the mid sixties, they briefly got back together On a few albums which bombed miserably. Later, Dion made one appearance at a revival show with the Belmonts. "We got together to share some memories Some memories with old friends but it was no kind of career move. It was just to get together I had to move on and I didn't want to go back. I had to stay in the flow . The Belmonts did go back to record the same year an Acappella album, Cigars, Acappella, Candy, .
Dions solo flight got off to an auspicious start with Lonely Teenager' and then in fall of 1961 with his tune "Runaround Sue,' which he wrote with E Maresca. After I was born to cry his records started to get erratic suggesting his mind was elsewhere when he was in the studio. In 1963 he seemed to be playing out a string with Be Careful, Donna and Drip Drp. In 1964 his production of Jonny B Good suggested that even though his act wasn't quite together he was making a beeline for his roots.
Dion then made a conscious decision to Stop, regroup, and 'disappear into Bronx where he experimented with blues based material. "I was in a bleak period of my life In the mid-sixties. I was searching for me. Everyone goes through that and the mid. sixtiess was the time for me.
I don't have gone on without that breaking through and growing .For me theres a joy in growing . I'd rather pack it in than not grow. There were; of Course, those unfortunates who, maybe' were born that way. I cant say I got through it because I was any brighter,' It could have been me. Many time with too much of this or that .It was a matter of getting tapped on 'the shoulder, It was a "There but for the Grace of God" type of thing,
"A' lot of' people thought' the British thing the Beatles , Stones, etc. blew' a lot of people away, I don't remember it that way, 'It didn't knock me on the roadside, I remember stopping. It was a very conscious decision. It wasn't like anything overtook me, In fact, the British thing was very happening in one breath and intimidating In another, I'm dedicated to the living experience, When they threw that stuff over here, I wanted grab hold of it and throw it back, It was frustrating because you wanted it to Come out but it doesn't happen that way.
"But at that time I was getting into Lightnin Hopkins, leroy Carr, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith. I was more into Dylan than the' Beatles. I used to hang out at all those sessions when Dylan came up to Columbia. Kenny Rankin and I would Come in and there would be all kinds of musicians, Tom Wilson was at those early sessions, I heard he died recently. It really shocked me.
"In 1963, i got turned on by John Hammond up at Columbia. He called me into his office and said, 'I heard you singing across the hall, "The Wanderer," "Ruby," and things. I noticed you have a real flare for the blues.' He turned me On to Robert Johnson and all the guys Paul Butterfield, Eric 'Clapton, and the Stones later did. All that stuff really turned me around. I went back to the apartment with 'an armful of albums. Greenwich Village at that time was filled with guys like Tim Hardin Tom Paxton, and Dylan, I got hung up on finger picking on the guitar. It sounded like bells or chimes. Something,, happened to me. I felt that it brought me closer to the roots of what I was doing, I had been doing it but I didn't know where it all came from. I had cut my teeth on Bo biddley and Chuck Berry. That got me closer to where I waS coming from,. I got closer to the roots of my music and 'closer to what I wanted to say, closer to the guitar . I was getting out physically feeling and thinking 'Abraham, Martin, and john' was a result of working '0n those aspects of music
From 68 to 1970, when he released "Your Own Backyard dion followed the folk tradition of a man alone on stage entertaining the audience with his guitar and story songs, but, in a sense, he felt the need to put rock back in the repertoire. 'That was a great period of my life . I just threw myself into it. I grabbed mv guitar and had to fill the speakers for two or three hours a night solo.
I made so many good friends in that time period time Jimrnv Buffet, Melanie, and Bonnie Raitt. just good song writers. We'd trade off songs. it was a verv simple time for me because all I had to worry about was' 'putting new strings on my guitar and plaving.
Up to that point, it was a one-way street with audiences. Dig me.' and now' it got to be a two-way street. Now when I go out there, it's a culmination of everything I know what I'm doing. I enjoy what i'm doing and I have all that concentration left over to enjoy everybody.,
My senses were perking. But it's just another phase. It wasn't me 'to sit there with a guitar. It was only part of me. I used to sit there and pound on a guitar and sing rock and roll songs' I needed a rock and roll band."
After l970, Dion cut a few albums for Warner Brothers 'which didn't strike lightning from the sky" because he surrendered all control to producer-wizard Phil Spector, who was staging his own comeback at that time by ferreting out people who had grown up in the business with him the Crystals, Dion, bill Medley, and others. The second coming of the fifties and sixties didn't work out as planned the music industry had become more complicated since the days of walking into a studio and cutting a hit record in 2 hours.
Dion was stymied by cobwebs of business confusions and artistic conflicts of will, which left him in the role of song interpreter, not the rock and 'rolIer he wanted to become. Dion became skewered by the revivals which pegged him Into the Belmont days and the industry urging him to stick with the successful products of the late' sixties and early seventies. Finally, after two decades, Dion has a rock and roll band and continues on his unique musical and personal odyssey.
I've been around for a while and I never had my own band. It was very frustrating. I had vocal groups but I never had a band. Now I have both-a vocal band. That's why life is so new 'to me. I've gotten a second wind with the band. I feel good about it. It's hard work but it comes easy. I just love rock and roll. It's not something you hand charts out for., My music isn't like that. its home made music. It's great that the confidence I have stays with me because the music doesn't get all knocked to hell when you walk out and everything you want to happen isn't happening. This ban is self-contained.
"Hey, man, I am in the pool with my three daughters. I Just ran three miles. It's such a great day. On top of that I'm free of pain. I got nothing to complain about. But I've a lot of growing to do."
