I have a weakness for 50’s and 60’s rock’n’roll, not really much Elvis(some obviously), but Dion, Neal Sedaka, John D Loudermilk, The Big Bopper etc, but I really love Dion, I have always felt he was underrated as were the Everly Brothers…(another great love.)
But, Dion has never really left the scene, just faded away and kept making small records, and how comes another..
A King of the Bronx Reclaims His Country-Blues Heart
By FRED GOODMAN
Sometimes the unlikeliest record is the catalyst in a career, and even the artist isn’t sure why. Dion DiMucci, the Bronx-born singer known simply as Dion, whose doo-wop and rock hits of the late 1950’s and early 60’s included “A Teenager in Love,” “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue,” is, with Frankie Lymon, one of the defining bookends of the New York style of street-corner singing. Yet the record that set the course of his life was Hank Williams’s “Honky Tonk Blues” – a song as far removed from the life of an 11-year-old growing up on 183rd Street as you could find.
“I had no idea what a honky-tonk or jambalaya was,” Dion said of hearing the record on Don Larkin’s country music radio show out of Newark. “When you’re a kid, and your mom is cooking sauce in the kitchen on a Sunday, and this song comes on the radio, and all you can say is, ‘Who is that?,’ it’s hard to say how that stuff moves your insides. But I liked that he sounded so committed. At the end of a sentence, he almost dug into the last word and ripped it off with his mouth.”
That was 1949 – two years before the disk jockey Alan Freed coined the phrase “rock ‘n’ roll.” Now 66, Dion has come back to his prerock roots with “Bronx in Blue” (Dimensional Music Recordings), a spare collection of acoustic blues standards which might be compared to Johnny Cash’s last, stripped-down recordings for Rick Rubin’s American label.
It might also prompt a reconsideration of Dion’s already impressive career. His impact on New York rock is enormous: Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel have all acknowledged a stylistic debt, and Bob Dylan has cited him as a spur for his decision to go electric. But there’s nothing parochial about the album.
Accompanying himself deftly on acoustic guitar – one of the album’s surprises – he added only occasional guitar overdubs and minimal percussion, trying to replicate the feel of blues classics like John Lee Hooker’s “Walkin’ Boogie” by miking his foot. Though the album was recorded in a Miami studio, Dion sounds as if he were sitting in his bedroom playing for himself. He will seek to replicate that ambience when he performs songs from the album at Joe’s Pub on Monday and the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe on Tuesday.
With Dion’s reputation as one of New York’s great street-corner singers, his obvious comfort with material associated with rural America seems contradictory – but not to him. “I don’t sing black, I don’t sing white, I sing Bronx,” he said. “There was a record store on Fordham Road, Cousins, and the owner, Mr. Donatello, took a liking to me. He would call me when a new Hank Williams record came out.”
Armed with an $8 Gibson guitar his uncle found in a pawn shop, Dion began learning the songs and writing his own, some inspired by the blues songs that a building superintendent, Willie Green, introduced him to. “My home was filled with unresolved conflict,” he said. “And you could write a little song where the world made sense and resolve it. Sitting on the stoop, I found you could sing things you couldn’t say otherwise. That’s why guys sit in bars and play the jukebox and say, ‘I like the way he sings that song’: it’s full of the things they can’t say.”
After his early hits, Dion became the first rock performer signed to Columbia Records. While his 1963 recordings of blues songs like “Spoonful” and “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” made him one of the first white rockers to tackle the music, Columbia pushed him to develop a nightclub act – with a result that the same albums also featured Bobby Darin-type arrangements of standards. “They used to say, ‘You’ve got to do some legitimate music,’ which implied that what I liked was illegitimate,” Dion said. “That was when I really started freaking out. Aretha Franklin was there at the same time, and they had her doing Al Jolson songs. They didn’t know what to do with us.”
One of the positive aspects of that period was meeting John Hammond, the storied Columbia executive who signed Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Mr. Dylan and Mr. Springsteen. As he had with Mr. Dylan, Mr. Hammond turned Dion on to Robert Johnson. “He said, ‘We sold 25,000 copies of this record by word of mouth,’ ” Dion recalled. “I was selling a million copies of ‘Ruby Baby’ at the time, and I thought, ‘Gee, he seems excited,’ so I listened to it and it got me excited, too. Some of the guys I played it for couldn’t hear it, but I heard it. It’s the naked cry of the human heart apart from God, wanting to feel at home.”
Dion said that despite being urged at various times by Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison and Steven Van Zandt to make an album of blues, he never seriously considered it until a record producer, Richard Gottehrer, heard him talking about his early influences and performing examples on the National Public Radio program “Fresh Air,” and suggested a session on his Dimensional Music Recordings label. And it wasn’t until Dion actually began working on the record that he realized how these songs had been “the undercurrent of everything.”
“You can’t hear me thinking on this record,” he said with a laugh. “I guess when you’re an adult, things don’t affect you like they do when you’re 13 and vulnerable, and I didn’t realize how much Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed were a part of me. It’s all the music that kept me honest through the years. You can learn how to sing rock ‘n’ roll, but I don’t know if you can learn how to sing blues because you have to sing without an agenda to capture it. It’s so beautiful; you can express anything. I think it fell out of the sky.
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