THE LAST OF A GENERATION
Some 60 years on, Dion is still a-rockin’ and a-rollin’
There aren’t many original rock ’n’ rollers still standing. One of the very best, Little Richard, died in early May. But there’s Dion: If not quite the last man standing, possibly the last great U.S. musician from the dawn of the genre who’s still rockin’ and rollin’ as vigorously as ever.
Sixty years on from groundbreaking hits Runaround Sue and The Wanderer, the 80-year-old is releasing Blues With Friends. It’s a 14-track, self-written set that is what it says on the box: a tribute to the genre featuring Dion fans and acolytes including Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Paul Simon and Jeff Beck.
The album features sleeve notes by another old friend, Bob Dylan, who attributes Dion’s success to two teachers: his “vaudevillian father and the doo-wop street corners of the Bronx.”
The pair go way back, not least to sharing the distinction of being the only two contemporary artists featured on the cover photo of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — John Lennon was a huge fan of Ruby Baby, the 1962 Dion hit that was a mainstay of The Beatles’ Hamburg sets.
The all-star album is accompanied by a photograph in which the remarkably well-preserved singer-songwriter clutches a guitar. Its body is covered in the names of his friends, heroes and peers, from Duane Eddy to Johnny Cash to Elvis Presley. But scrawled at the top, first among equals, is Little Richard.
“He and Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley were the mainstays for me,” the man born Dion Dimucci says from his home in Boca Raton, Fla. “When I first started out, they were dancing across my living room on my TV set. For me, they were from outer space!”
Within a year, the scrappy Italian-american kid was sharing the stage with Richard at New York venue The Brooklyn Fox.
Still, by his own estimation, Dion is also lucky to be here. He’s dodged death on several occasions.
Before he was a doo-wop teen idol with The Belmonts, and before he was a 23-year-old signed to Columbia Records alongside Aretha Franklin on a deal worth almost $5 million in today’s money, there were the adolescent years running with Bronx gangs with names like the Fordham Daggers and the Fordham Baldies. In his 1989 memoir The Wanderer, Dion writes that to be initiated, you had to be punched in the stomach by all the gang members and hang from a ladder in a sewer for an hour.
Then there was the heroin addiction that had the musician in its grip for 15 years and that “almost took me out a few times.” It’s a high he revisits and reconceives, five decades down the line, in Blues With Friends track I Got the Cure: “I got no needles, I got no junk, I’m the drug you need, baby ...”
Dion got clean on April 1, 1968 — the date he attended a 12-step meeting — when he was 28. So if he was an addict for 15 years, he must have started taking heroin at ... “Fourteen, yeah,” he acknowledges, “I started at 14,” which tells you something about how rough those outer borough street gangs were in mid-1950s New York.
“I gotta tell you, I was taking drugs with Frankie Lymon,” Dion says, referring to the lead singer of The Teenagers, who had a smash with their debut single, 1956’s Why Do Fools Fall in Love. “And when he died in February of 1968 (aged 25), I just got very concerned. It threw me for a loop and I started asking questions. I’ll be honest: I got down on my knees one day, I said a prayer and when I got up I was changed. I haven’t had a drug or a drink since.”
His life was also in danger when he worked with producer Phil
Spector on the 1975 album Born to Be With You. “I had some problems with Spector in the control room ... ranting. There were like 10 guitar players, and three of them had guns,” he once recalled. “It was madness ... I’d get up eyeball to eyeball and talk to him, because I just had to walk out of there feeling like a man, you know?”
For obvious reasons, Dion says now, he felt negatively toward that album for a long time. But it is now considered a “lost” classic and, over the years, he has changed his mind. “I think Only You Know is freaking brilliant,” he says.
But Dion’s closest brush with death came in Clear Lake, Iowa, on Feb. 3 1959. Aged 19, he and his pre-solo band The Belmonts were touring the U.S. Midwest as part of The Winter Dance Party package. Their fellow artists were other young stars of the rock ’n’ roll explosion: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper.
The weather was grim so, rather than a freezing tour bus, Holly decided to charter a small plane to take them to the next show in Fargo, N.D. But there were only seats for three passengers. The other musicians opted to toss a coin, but Dion balked at the fare: $36, which was the same as his entertainer father paid for a month’s rent back home in the Bronx. He let Valens take his place. Within minutes of takeoff, the Beechcraft Bonanza crashed, killing all on board.
Remarkably, after the crash wiped out three-quarters of the headliners, Dion continued with the tour for another two weeks. That’s surely taking the showmust-go-on ethos to the extreme?
“I just felt like that’s what those guys would’ve wanted us to do, to just carry on,” he says with an audible shrug. “At the time I was young and I didn’t even know how to process it.”
It would take Dion until his 2000 album Deja Nu to make some sort of peace with the tragedy, with two tribute songs, Every Day (That I’m With You) and Hug My Radiator. Little wonder, perhaps: In the late ’50s and early ’60s there was nothing recognized as PTSD. Or, as he puts it: “There was no grief counselling in the Bronx.”
... I said a prayer and when I got up I was changed. I haven’t had a drug or a drink since.