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The Roger Scott Interview

By Stephen Islip

Over the years Dion has undertaken many interviews which have subsequently appeared in magazines or on collectors tapes. One of the best is the BBC Radio 1 Roger Scott interview, recorded in 1989 when Dimucci visited London to promote his new album.

Sixties and seventies music had been going through the doldrums, never recovering from the punk assault. Then in the late 80's along comes The Travlin Wilburies, Neil Younge trashing his fender like Hendrix was still alive , Orbison making one last major contribution and then Dimucci demonstrating that 50's music could still be more than just a revival show. Scott followed all these trends sounding like a 16 year old just discovering rock and roll.

Roger Scott was a DJ with a love for all eras of rock and pop who through London's capital Radio had championed Springstein in the early 70's .He is perhaps best remembered for his Crusin' Show where he regularly featured Dion and The Belmonts as one of his favourite acts.

By 1989 Scott had come to attention through his Saturday afternoon show, where he quickly picked up a national following, with his eclectic taste and constant enthusiasm. He took the opportunity to invite the new Dion band into the studio for a live broadcast and followed this up with a detailed recorded interview, over the following 2 weeks. His enthusiasm and detailed knowledge brings out the best in Dion.

This also represents the end of radio 1 for many listeners. Anybody who can remember where Oasis got their song ideas from, is now condemned to listen to either Radio 2 or a super gold station.

One sad note to report, is that within a very short period of time, Roger Scot died of cancer. As a tribute to him Radio 1 rebroadcast the Dion live interview and the following articles are also an appreciation to one of Dions long term UK supporters.

The Interview - part 1 (broadcast on 24 June 1989)

RS How are you ? I've been looking forward to this , I can' tell you for how long. This is really exciting stuff.

DD Its good to be here. I haven't been here in so long.

RS How did you enjoy the show the other night? They went crazy.

DD I had a great time that was something.

RS You actually had the ticket touts out there. That's a sign you got the scalpers out on the street.

DD That's wonderful to really have a lot of fun.

RS How's it feel being out on the road with a rock and roll band again.

DD Its exciting. Its great just to see the response from the people. If you could do that a little more often than travel and wait around

RS We need a time machine - Beam me up Scotty then there we are on the stage.

DD Like Keith Richard's or Bill Wyman said 25 years in the business - 5 years rock and roll 20 years waiting around.

RS Well there were a lot of people around the country the other night who would have given a lot to be there. Sadly they couldn't be , you just did the one show this time round- for whatever reasons, but your gonna make up for it this afternoon by playing with the band and giving us some live songs

DD Well I hope everybody enjoys it.

....... RS Dion and the band playing live for us this afternoon. Phoor that was terrific. Listen Dave Edmunds was telling me about this package tour your going out on in November with him, a couple of the Stray cats the thunderbirds and a couple of other people. Is that still happening?

DD Oh man that's gonna be fun.

RS What's the story on that.

DD I think we're going out in December . I'd love to come here . We not only had fun recording the album but we had a lot of fun between the takes. Just playing some songs - it would be nice to go out on tour like that - I've never done it .

RS Well this sounds like the old package tour - everybody on the bus and off we go to the next gig.

DD Well this will be like everybody playing for each other. I could play with the thunderbirds or the stray cats.

RS We'd love to see that. Well what you gonna do?

DD Well Roger this is just for you.

RS Hey I'm not the kinda guy who likes to roam around.

DD Hey listen I saw you in America , I flew down to Miami

RS It was crazy, I spent 5 hours in Miami

DD You are the true Wanderer. We know it so this is for you. ......

RS Hello Dion

DD How about if we do King of the new York streets for you?

RS Great we're all going to be der-der doing.

DD See why we did that - It's a poor mans horn section. We didn't have horns on the streets when we started this music so - der-da-der we thought we were horns - what did we know - so here we go.

........ RS Did Robert Plant come up and see you the other night after the show?

DD No he was there - hey we did an album - I thinks its coming out on January 8th - Elvis - no I'd better not...

RS What... come on .. come on ..

DD Well we all did Elvis tunes, Springstein, Robert Plant , we did mean woman blues, it was like - its a compilation album for a charity here and their putting it together.

RS This is already recorded ?

DD Yes , we've been listening to some of the stuff.

RS You did mean woman blues?

DD I think Robert did lets have a party and Bruce did Viva Los Vegas and Geoff Healy did down in the Alley. Yeah Robert Plant was there the other night.

RS He's a big fan of yours ?

DD Yeah I remember him coming to er.. when Jimmy Page ... when I was at the Bitter End in the Village, New York and they stopped by when I recorded a song called Abraham Martin and John. I was working in these very intimate coffee house settings, and to see a group that was so dynamic to listen to a guy on a nylon string guitar.. but we had a good time. If he's listening he encourages me and supports me .

RS and so he should

RS lets go right back to the beginning . Now what do you remember about this recording session when you and the Belmonts were in there doing I wonder why ?

DD I tell you Roger I got these 3 guys together and I said to the guy who was gonna sing , whose name was Carlo "You sing Oh Wella Wella , I don't know why " and he said " I don't wanna sing Oh Wella Wella , I don't wanna sound dum" . What we were doing was listening to a lot of horn players, big Al Sears and Ray Prosoc, King Curtis and so he said "let me do dum, der ,dun dun der " so ...

RS History was made

DD And we couldn't think of any words anyway !

RS He was right. Wella Wella would have been wimpy.

......... RS Hey Listen, What can I say , on behalf of me and everybody else whose enjoyed this so much this afternoon. Thank you Dion and thank you to the band. It's been an absolute delight.

DD Thank you for asking us

RS Are you kidding ? Any time Look forward to seeing you again soon.

The Interview - part 2 (broadcast on 1 July 1989)

The neighbourhood

It was like a neighbourhood celebration. Even to this day when I go back there, I am treated like a folk hero. Not in an egotistical sense , that's just the way it is . They must have told stories to their children and their children's children and if I walk down the street the merchants come running out , they feed me and give me those Italian cold cuts, the bread and say "Dion Eat.. come on ". It's like their favourite son has come home. I get a kick out of it, because they get so excited. But that was the romantic part.

For me in reality it was hard growing up, because I come from a family that was very rigid emotionally, they loved expressing themselves, but real emotions.. was very hairy. I come from a family where it was .. "you shouldn't feel that way...don't feel that way ... it's crazy to feel that way"... and how the hell do you feel ?

Hank Williams

Yeah Hank Williams, its a funny thing he was incorporating black music into country music and I must have for some reason picked up on that because my music is black music, filtered through an Italian neighbourhood and it came out with an attitude. It just had a different edge. Hank Williams is honkey tonk blues but when I started listening to him I didn't know what blues meant. I know Mick Jagger found out later on but an Italian kid from the Bronx did not know what honkey tonk meant - it blue my mind.

The Blues

The attitude

RS Before we go any further can you tell me your favourite Hank Williams song ?

DD Well I think the first one I ever heard - Honkey tonk blues. You know what I liked about Hank Williams , he was so committed to the song he was singing , he'd bite into the words and at the end of the sentence he would rip off the word - he would just tear it off like he was biting into something. He was so committed I never heard anything like that. The authority he had behind it.

The career starts

DD What I was doing was listening to the street corner groups, there weren't many around but basically the elements of my music were horn sections, like der da der der and I couldn't afford a horn section , so I'd recruit some of the guys, who would bang on cardboard boxes and we'd have - Ruby Ruby Ruby Baby . Instead of havin the horn section play it we get some syllables and - hey hey hey... and we'd get a rift going for 45 minutes and have a ball. It was a poor mans horn section. We were the only white group I knew for miles. In fact I recruited the Belmonts from different neighbourhoods, because they were the best street corner singers in their particular section. But we'd go down to the Apollo Theatre and hang out back stage, when the cadillacs come to town. We would try to cop some rifts from them, but you know who we ended up copying more rifts from, it was the horn players. We'd hear big AL Sears , Red Pricesock and he'd playing ...... so if you go back to one of Dion and the Belmonts records, I wonder why , starting the record out like wella wella I don't know why ... we thought we were saxophones. What did we know we were only 17.

The first Record Sessions

DD There was a fella in my neighbourhood that knew somebody that was opening a record company and brought me down and they wanted to put me with this group and they were kinda like an elevator music group. I said let me go back to my neighbourhood and recruit some guys cause we could do the job. I went back and I formed the Belmonts - I knew a few guys who really sang, and we got together 2 kinda auditions for Laurie Records . We always had fun singing, at that time, there was no fear or pressure - you didn't feel that. We had a lot of fun. We'd go down to the session with our tee shirts - spaghetti stains on them, bottles of soda and hero sandwiches on them. It was like a party to us and the record company would be shouting at us "how you gonna sing - you can't eat and sing " - Don't worry about it , but we didn't know better , it was a lot of fun.

RS It was just round 1 microphone when you did I wonder why ?

DD Yeah, you'd position yourself accordingly to how loud your voice was, and around 1 microphone - its for later generation rock and rollers , like third and forth generation rock and rollers to appreciate a time when there were no expectations , no rules, nothing to go by, we were just winging it as we went, and not to mention we didn't have any monitors and we didn't get paid, or we didn't get production credit or producing credit, arranging credit or song writing credit, but that's terrible but I've learnt something since then. It was an exiting time musically and creatively.

Bobby Darin

RS Cause he knew he wasn't going to live to a ripe old age?

DD The first day I met Bobby Darin he had just come from the army physical , he was late for the tour , and he said they were checking me out. He says I had rheumatic fever when I was a kid and he starts to tell us he doesn't expect to make it through his 20's. He says "Boys I gotta a lot to do in a short period of time and I'm gonna accomplish it ", because he laid it out. He was very out front, a positive guy a hard worker, no drugs no drinking - the guy was just straight ahead - he knew what he wanted and he went straight for it.

Bobby Darin snag rock and roll - he was a rhythm singer ... he sang drip drop , splish splash - he was a great rhythm singer so he could do it well.

RS He was another finger snapper ?

DD Yes he was .

RS Give me your favourite Bobby Darin track so I can play it ?

DD Queen of the hop .

Sam Cooke

DD Well you know you'd eat together, you'd sleep together, you'd sing together, you were literally on the buses and had to entertain each other and share with each other. Sam Cooke, he was smooth as glass vocally just kinda like a gazzel , kinda floated over the rhythm track and we would back him up on those tours on the bus and we did a lot of singing, over the many miles we travelled together and he had an extensive gospel background . He'd get into a lot of gospel songs, he was easy to take. I miss him he was a real gentlemen. Whereas at the time there was segregation, so Sam .. when your that close and the guy feels like a brother... then you'd have to get off the bus and he'd have to hide, while you went to get him a sandwich in the restaurant. While travelling south we'd have to get on separate buses and they weren't allowed in restaurants and we'd have to bring the food out .. a very kinda shocking thing for me, I'm from the north and I understood what bigotry was cause I had it in my own neighbourhood but it was very obvious in the south, and I remember him for that ... there was a lot of tension.

DRUGS

RS At the age of 14 you started snorting heroin ? Now this is unthinkable because nobody knew it at the time, all we saw was the superficial glossy shinny rock and roll singer. We thought this was amazing .We didn't know what was going on behind the scene ? Why how briefly did you get into that cause it went on for the next 13 years ?

DD My problem was never drugs, my problem was I didn't know how to handle my emotions, my emotions handled me. When a kid is at the very tender years , impressionable years of 13,14 he starts to make the transition to becoming a man - I never made that transition , I thought of using drugs, I just did not know how to handle my emotions and I just needed some comfort, and that became it. I thought well this is where its at , I feel peaceful , but I thought I'd found heaven but later on I knew what I'd found - I'd found hell and thank god I got out of that , there were people around me who loved me and told me the truth, instead of yessing me to death . That was my salvation, people being honest with me and really loving me and telling me what I had to hear, so thank god for that .

RS At the time was it that that was pushing you onwards and giving you this enormous confidence in yourself in what you could do with yourself, your life and your career?

DD Oh yeah, I think the day I more or less discovered drugs was the day I really started dreaming about what I could do and really taking a step towards that because it gave me the courage and the confidence and the strength wasn't there. I had the dream but I did not have the foundations - unfortunately I picked the wrong foundations - you can't plant your feet firmly on a cloud , so eventually it fell through .But it did help me make that initial step, even though I was living in a illusion. Yeah drugs can be very stimulating and you think they're giving you the creativity. I hear a lot of people say "I feel creative " but that's not where creativity comes from. Creativity does not come from drugs - drugs will kill you as you know.

RS It didn't take long for the records you were making to become less fun because you were being pushed in a certain direction with which you weren't very happy - I'm thinking about Teenager in love - me and my friends at the time thought what a great record . We stood round in the front living room being Dion and The Belmonts Teenager in Love , but that was a record you weren't very happy with - it wasn't the direction you wanted to go in, was it ?

DD When I first heard it, I knew it was a hit, and when the Belmonts sang that background just made me want to weave a tune in and out of it , but no it was a wimpy song and I wanted to get some guts in the song, some kinda attitude, so it was a little out of my backyard. So those are the songs you have second doubts about when they become hits. Later on the Belmonts wanted to get more into standards. We had a song come off the album called Where or When that we did out of respect for a man - as a kid he was a real inspiration in my life - his name was Alan Sussel and this was his favourite song , and we worked up an arrangement for him. After we did that song and it was a hit The Belmonts wanted to sing more and more standards, but that was our swan song because that was really getting away from what I wanted to do. Because I started out listening to Rock and Roll - Maybellene - Chuck Berry - you know these are what was happening around me at the time and I identified with it .

Buddy Holly

DD Buddy Holly was 22 and we were on that tour - The Winter Party Dance Tour - and he was from Lubbuck Texas and Ritchie Vallence was from the San Fernandoe Valley and I was from an Italian neighbourhood in the Bronx , When we got together the world was much smaller - I never met people from Texas and from California, let alone who played and sang the way that these guys did. It was very stirring and very exciting and probably they felt the same thing from me because we all had these new fender guitars, and we got into this competition on who could make then ring the longest . We were sharing music and digesting stuff - it was a tour that was just perky with music and ideas, because I would be singing my new stuff for Holly and he would be writing songs on the tour .

Even the cultural differences between us and the way we played the guitar and the way we played music . For instance in my neighbourhood the Bronx in the 50's if you carried a gun , you were a gangster, but Buddy carried a gun , he had a shoulder holster with a gun . I said "what are you doing with a gun " - "nobody's gonna steel my money ". It wasn't until later on that I realised everybody in Texas carries a gun. They even mount them on the back of their trucks - you don't do that in New York - so it was those little things. We were on a tour but the heater kept breaking down , but Buddy and I would get under these blankets . Just to keep each other warm we would tell each other stories. I'd be telling him about Frankie Yunk Yunk and Vinnie Mouch and he'd be laughing like crazy because he knew nothing about Italians and Catholics - he knew about Baptists maybe. So we were sharing those kinda things with each other - it was very exiting and we became very close.

When that plane took those guys from me, in a way I was very devastated.....baffled ...he was a beautiful guy . Buddy holly to me, even when I think about him today I think of him as very decisive and very mature - he knew exactly what he wanted to do . That's the way I remember him, he was incredible, because at 19 I was insecure, I was just gone into the business and I had just recorded Teenager in Love - he just seemed so decisive and so definite about everything he wanted to do, he definitely liked getting out there, you know he was like - the kid is here - Dranggggg- he was a very exiting guy.

Ernie Maresco

DD He lived a stones throw away from my house. The first time I met Earnie, he knew I bought a guitar and was interested in music and he walked up to me and sang (Dimucci sings a song) and I said what is this?. He was big on Ar Har har - he had no rhythm , but he just loved writing and he had a flair for it and we got together and he was my partner in crime. I don't think I could've recorded all those songs without Earnie - he was a big help in that area.

Now the Wanderer was written about a guy named Jackie Burns - he dated a girl named Flo, and he had Flo tattooed on his left arm, and he had to get the tattoo covered with a panther, because he started dating this girl named Mary, and he had Mary tattooed on his right arm. Then he had to get to Mary covered up with a pair of dice or something because he started dating this girl Janey, and he had Janey put on his forearm. Then Janey was covered up and finally he was going out with this girl Rosy and he had Rosy tattooed on his chest. Then he had to get Rosy covered up with a battleship and sailed away somewhere. He was in the navy - thats who the wanderer was written about. People don't know that. He was a guy in our neighbourhood who, as I say was in the merchant navy and he had tattoos all over him.

The Void

DD Well you know I think a kid like myself growing up on the streets from a poor neighbourhood, my idea of success maybe would be fame fortune and romance. If I could get a nice roll of cash in my pocket, the right car and the right chick and just get the respect of the guys , I'd have it made. So here I am, I've got 8 gold records, I made a couple of million dollars by the time I was 21, just reached the top of my profession, married my childhood sweetheart and had a penthouse in manhattan, a 5 year contract with Columbia and I'm lookin out the window and sayin', "what's missing - there's something missing, there's a piece missing ". In myself I sometimes tried to fill that void with alcohol and drugs and more excitement, but there was something more missing. I had the esteem of others and the respect of others, but they talk about today's self esteem, corny but I had no self esteem. I had others esteem, but it was coming from the outside, but from within, so I had to work on that - I had to get quiet for a while and find out what Dion was all about, because I was listening to a lot of voices at the time, and had kind of lost listening to myself. Thank god that I got back to the simplicity of knowing who I am.

RS None of that showed - you hid it away. You put on this fassard that nobody knew ?

DD Well I come from a show business tradition, which at the time, right before the Beatles, if you took a picture you had to put the cigarette down, you had to comb your hair, you had to tidy up your neck tie, you had to get dressed and put on your make up. Today most of the rock and rollers second generation are doing away with that show business tradition. If they're into it they don't take it seriously or they understand it a little more. But there are a lot of people doing beautiful work who are them selves off stage and on stage, they don't even change their clothes. So thank god they did away with that dual, that Hollywood set mentality. It was like here I am, it was like a Hollywood set, put the front up and there's nothing behind it. Well you put it up there and people think they know who you are, by looking at the surface and they don't know what's happening, underneath the surface . So if you don't know who you are you're in trouble. In my case the bottom fell out and I had to go back to first base and work it out.

RS Ruby Baby, a great song, you don't seem to have had any problems cutting these songs.

DD When you are doing something you like and it comes from your heart, you could sing it with one lip tied behind your back. The thing just rolls out of you, because your trying. That's the kind of stuff I like to do. Why not enjoy it.

RS Donna the Prima Donna - Easy ?

DD That's a song about my sister and to this day she hasn't changed. I rib her about it.

Columbia Period

DD Yeah. John Hammed Senior had his office right across the hall from where I'd bring a lot of my songs and work them out. He heard me and called me in and said "Dion you got this Bronx soul- Bronx blues, do you want to hear this interesting records ". He was a very laid back guy and he started pulling out Ley Roy Carr Records , Mississippi John Hurts and Lightening Hoptkins , Robert Johnson and he started playing me some songs. Man when I started listerning to this stuff, it went back to Willie Johnson whose on the stoop and I said yeah I never heard this and I remember feeling resentful that I never heard this . Like whose been keeping this from me why haven't I heard this . It was I like discovered in a sense the routes of my music , the real routes of my music for the first time. Yet I felt resentful and excited - like give me these records - I ran home with an armful of records and just buried myself in them for the next couple of years.

Dylan

DD Well Bob Dylan was just recently signed to Columbia and I liked it because I had that Hank Williams tradition - that rural kind of blues tradition - he was exciting . There was just an urgency about his music and that same commitment that I heard in Hank Williams, where he'd tear off the end of the words and bite into them. It was like somebody let him out of a cage . It was just stirring to me. I took to it immediately.

RS So when you discovered all these blues records, and taking these armfuls of records home and listening to them, did you realise you couldn't continue doing what you were doing , making the record you were making

DD I didn't think of it in terms like that, it was so exciting, digesting this rural blues folk music. It just took me - kind of overtook me in a way . To this day there must be a lot of sessions just buried on Columbia's shelves , with Stix Sevens and Buddy Lucas - most of the guys who did the wanderer, probably just doing a lot of blues stuff that was never released. Like Hoochie Coochie Man which I know was released - I just got into a different period - they just didn't take to it . The guy who was producing Dylan and John Hammond thought it was great. The section of Columbia records I don't think they understood what I was doing, or trying to do so that kinda got lost. It was a lack of understanding and a lack of encouragement and I guess I was pretty hard to talk to on those days. I don't know exactly what I wanted to do , I was soaking it up and it was coming out.

I think Abraham Martin and John in 1968 was the result of maybe working quietly all those years on the guitar, finger pickin', going out and getting myself some finger picks and getting closer to expressing myself more fully.

RS Abraham Martin and John that's Dion. Part 2 of that interview you will be able to hear next week.

The Interview - part 3 (broadcast on 7 July 1989)

DD Yeah, 68 I think I was emotionally at the bottom, it was a real bleak period in my life and I just was stuck and didn't know how to get unstuck. I was using a lot of drugs and it got worse and worse - it was a merry go round I couldn't get off , a bottomless pit and I'd say tomorrow I'll get it together, and it got worse. Thank god I ran into some people who really cared and talked to my heart and didn't talk down to me, and I had respect for, so I started listening and from that I made some decisions , I don't even think consciously. I thank god for it. I was very confused in those days, but I didn't like what was happening to me as a person so I said god help me and I changed.

RS He did help ?

DD Yes he did. Well I realised I always believed in God because I saw the sun rise and set and always sensed god in nature and children and just the aura of it all. I didn't know if there was any way to row spiritually, I didn't know how, I think that was just the beginning of it, which put me together as a person, mentally, spiritually emotionally and physically. Maybe I was just living in my mind and trying to find it out and when I took a step in faith I think my whole world just opened up. I started to see things from a different perspective. From a perspective of solutions and I think Abraham Martin and John was a result of seeing things like that, a terrible situation in this country , a restless period and it was a time of just ripping away and growth and pruning and a painful time in this country. Robert Kennedy was shot, it was a very frustrating thing in this country and Abraham Martin and John was my attempt at saying hey these guys had a dream, they knew there was a state of love, it exists , we have to work at it to make it real, but it does exist and even though they didn't live to see it realised, they could pick up on a dream and take it a little further. That was that song, it was very simple but the intent was to be part of the solution not part of the problem.

The Folk Years

DD No. Well, Abraham Martin and John did something different for me, it put me in coffee houses across the country, little intimate club situations, where I sat with the guitar and I sang to a small group of people, and you'd have to fill the speakers for 2 hours, with guitar and your voice and your stories and even listen to people. It would help me to get out of myself, it was almost like therapy in a sense and coming out of isolation from all the drugs ... and isolation from myself. It was a very exiting time, it was like starting over and re-construction.

I met people like Bonnie Raite who was coming on the seen and Hall and Oates , Gordon Lightfoot and Cat Stevens. People would open for me like Sills and Croft and Melanie . A lot of writers like Tim Hardin they wrote with a passion, that was the time of the singer songwriter. So here I was again in a community of people with passion - I always loved that. It was like a second wind . At that time my peace of mind wasn't dependant on a hit record, because I just started because I loved it.

I disconnected the approval meter. I would find the next record the next fix , success could be a narcotic, the applause the next accompaniment, the next hit record or album. If you tie your piece of mind or self worth onto that, your in bad shape because its gonna change. So I had disconnected that whole thing and started singing for myself, not ignoring people, I want the songs to connect, but I was experimenting, years of experimenting and learning. Learning how to write better and play better.

RS Lets fast forward this to 1988 and your victorious return to rock and roll. So tell me (A) why you wanted to make a rock and roll album and (B) why you went to Dave Edmunds.

DD I did a show in New York, sought of what you were saying the Who coming back and Pete Townsend realising that something happens within you and you say, gee I should play these songs for these people, I owe it to them. There's something about it that you break through and you realise that there's a connection - that you've touched peoples lives and touched their spirit and their minds and their life and it's a beautiful thing . That happened to me somewhere along the line. I went up to New York and did this concert and Arista records was in the audience . First of all the night was extraordinary , what happened that night was it put what I had done, what I was doing and what I wanted to do - Putting me all together, and Arista came back to me, Clive Davis , Roy Lock , Mitchel Colne. They said Dion we'd love to do an album with you, you sound better than ever, you have a lot to say. We'd like to do an album. I said I'd love to if I could do a rock and roll album and I started talking to them and they said fine. Dave Edmunds name came up and I said you got it. I was happy that he took me on, that he said yes to the project and that it worked out that way.

RS Did it surprise you finding all these people because you'd buried yourself away in the club circuit... coming out and finding people who said Dion what your records meant to me, how they affected them . It must have an effect on you when people say that to you ?

DD First of all for somebody like me who comes out of the time period that I come out of, there wasn't much validation, because the jazz, especially the white jazz music couldn't stand us, because we were 17 year old punk kids and all the girls were yelling at us, making these rock and roll records, so they hated us. But the black musicians always encouraged us. The jazz musicians from the Apollo theatre were always encourage by what we were doing and helped us out. So coming around all this time and hearing that validation or confirmation to say yes, what you were doing was valid and touched my life, it makes you feel good and not only that over the years I think I stayed away from performing my hit records because of this Sha Na Na mentality - the way they presented a lot of these songs and the concept behind it. To me it looked like bullshit .

RS It was cabaret ?

DD Well no, Sha Na Na that whole type of thing, you see that kind of presentation of songs that came out of that era, it hurts me, its an insult to my younger years, and it just turns me off. I don't want to make more of the songs than what they are, I certainly don't see them that way because I was serious. I might have been young and nieve maybe, but on that street corner when I got into that music I was serious. I still have the same feeling for that . You see there were people from that era were exploited and sometimes they perpetuated that exploitation themselves, like Presly . If Presly really understood and knew who he was, he would have gone to Woodstock and sang with the Rolling Stones, or went on tour with the Allman Bros. , stayed connected with his routes, but I think he got caught up in that show business mentality.

RS You've written these biographical songs before about yourself, but especially the songs on this album, they conjure up those pictures, they conjure up those scenes and your life. You look at King of the New York Streets and you say "there I was 16 , and I was IT " ?

DD When I decided to do this album, I wanted to connect it in the tradition of The Wanderer and Run-around Sue and Donna The Prima Donna - See I like writing about strong characters and a guy like king of the new York streets that a great character to get behind. I was excited about that song, I liked the way it came out, we had a good time cutting that .

RS That was king of the new York streets from the Yo Frankie album. You've actually come to terms with that past and especially the records you made. As you were saying there was this show , where the realisation came upon you that the effect these records had had and that you shouldn't disown them anymore. You have now come to terms with that and can completely enjoy what you did ?

DD Yeah, definitely. I don't know what that was, I think I'm at a period of time in my life that, I feel I am exactly where I'm supposed to be and I accept myself completely - good and bad. I mean I have a lot of growing to do, don't get me wrong, but I do accept myself, as being fully human, fully alive. I think there were a lot of times when I was just fighting a war going on inside me and maybe running from a lot of things, and I've come to terms with a lot of those things. I think its freed me and I can really proclaim that individual freedom which rock and roll is all about, in rock at its best - to claim your individual freedom and be truly who you are.

RS Are you gonna go out and do this live, with a rock and roll band ?

DD Yeah, I just put my band together, its gonna be exciting just going to rehearsals and getting out there. That's what this is all pulling to, is to get out in front of people - I love taking people on a trip, I always knew I had that gift, from the very beginning when I was sitting on street corners, on a stoop with my guitar, and a bunch of guys would gather around me and I'd sing a song and they'd say sing that again. I always knew I had that gift, that's what I love and that's what I'm gonna be doing . I'm just really lookin' forward to it. I'm like a racehorse, just biting at the bit . Thats gonna be exciting because I'm gonna feel the peoples response - that's a kick .

DD Subway wall is a song about my younger years and its a song you approach with a lot of pride and because these memories mean a lot to me and yet you can't go back .

RS You know there's nothing wrong with being nostalgic ?

DD No - No as long as your not living in it. Its great to sit around with a bunch of friends and say remember this, as long as you stay in the present.I think it's dangerous to live back there - you can't .

RS Let me close with this Tom Waite song, because you've done Tom Waites things before, so what's it about him that appeals to you ?

DD Well this particular song, I tried to write something around it, because I think we could all identify with it, you don't know what you have sometimes until you loose it and this song says it so well- perfectly and tom just has a gift of nailing it. This is a song that I carried in my heart and in my spirit and always played over the last 17 years. God knows why nobody has recorded it but maybe it was just waiting for me to give it a shot. Its a beautiful song.

RS It has been a pleasure Dion for taking us on this little trip here.

DD Thank you Roger.

RS Serenade. That's Dion, the albums called Yo Frankie and it deserves to do well because it is great