Dion: Return of the Wanderer
By Ken Shane
What does Dion see when he looks back over his career – a trek that lasted throughout most of the second half of the 20th century and shows no signs of abating. Just last year Dion paid homage to his first love, the blues, by releasing the critically acclaimed album, Bronx in Blue. Despite all the years and all the miles, Dion is still very much of the Bronx, right down to the familiar “Yo” with which he greets a caller. It could be 1957 all over again.
Alan Freed was on the radio back then and doo-wop could be heard on every street corner. Blues and country had a shotgun marriage and they called it rock-and-roll. Dion headed to the Apollo on Manhattan’s 125th Street because that’s where you could hear the real thing. He remembers seeing King Curtis, Sam “The Man” Taylor, and Red Prysock, and taking their music back to the Bronx where he used the horn parts he’d heard in Harlem to inform the vocal harmonies on early recordings such as “I Wonder Why.” The result, as he describes it, was “Bronx-filtered black music.”
“It was a revolution,” Dion told me. “We were breaking showbiz tradition. There had never been teenage music until the ’50s. There were no role models. We were just grabbing a handful of notes and doing what we wanted.”
He recalls heading to the Fox Theater in Brooklyn (“a foreign country”) where Alan Freed presented shows that included Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent – bringing all the different cultures together in a way that makes today’s music world look segregated by comparison.
It was in connection with the Winter Dance Party Tour in 1958 that Dion DiMacci made a choice that saved his life. He was offered a seat on a chartered airplane instead of having to ride the bus to the next engagement. He recalls that the price of the plane ticket was $35 – roughly the same amount his parents paid to rent their Bronx apartment every month. Unable to spend that kind of money in good conscience, he passed. The plane crashed in Clear Lake, Iowa, taking the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper.
Dion speaks with disdain about seeing contestants singing bad versions of Buddy Holly songs on American Idol, as if that’s what the ’50s were about. He points out that even Rolling Stone magazine seems to think rock-and- roll started in the ’60s, although artists like Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf were making music that could be considered rock-and-roll years before that. Indeed, it was a neighborhood janitor, Willie Green, who first introduced Dion to music by those artists and others like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson over the radio, WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia.
A fellow named Don Larkin had a country-music radio show that was, somewhat incongruously, broadcast from Newark. Years later, Dion found Larkin and thanked him for “opening up my whole life,” because it was over Larkin’s program that he first heard the artist who would influence him more than any other – Hank Williams. Dion would run home from school to preserve the music on his little tape recorder.
At around that same time, a guy named Lou Chiacetti owned Cousins Music, a record store on Fordham Road. Chiacetti was well aware of young Dion’s interest in the music, and would call him whenever there was a new record by Williams, or his alter-ego, Luke the Drifter. Dion would run the mile and a half to Cousins Music as soon as the call came. It was from those records that he learned “how to live,” studying the messages about heartbreak, gossip, and betrayal. By the time Dion was 13, he could play about 60 Hank Williams songs, and play them he did, at church dances and around the neighborhood.
Dion’s first recordings in 1957 were for a local label called Mohawk Records, founded by Bob and Gene Schwartz. They gave him a background track featuring vocals by a group called The Timberlands, and the session yielded the Dion & The Timberlands single, “The Chosen Few.” It was big in the Bronx and Boston, and kicked off a career that would yield many more hits. But to Dion it sounded like a barbershop quartet, and he was confident he could find 20 guys in the neighborhood who could do it better. So when the time came to do a follow-up for Mohawk in early 1958, he went down to 186th Street and rounded up the three best singers he could find.
Freddie Milano, Angelo D’Aleo, and Carlo Mastrangelo named themselves after a Bronx boulevard and became The Belmonts. For them, there was little difference between the street corner and a recording studio; it was all about the love of singing together. Dion didn’t really consider himself a doo-wop singer, but he felt he could do anything.
“I Wonder Why” hit the top-30 in the spring of 1958, but even then, Dion had a different idea. The popularity of doo-wop had started to fade with the ’50s, and he knew it was time to leave The Belmonts behind. What didn’t fade, however, was Dion’s ability to make hit records, and he scored with classics like “Runaround Sue,” “The Wanderer,” and “Lovers Who Wander.”
Columbia Records signed Dion in 1962, probably thinking they were getting the next Bobby Darrin, and the relationship started off great. “Ruby Baby” was a hit in early 1963, and two more hits followed later that year. While Dion was at Columbia he met the legendary A&R man John Hammond. Hammond would play him records by Leroy Carr, and Furry Lewis, as well as the recently released recordings of Robert Johnson. What Dion heard in those recordings was “the cry of the human heart apart from God. A longing for home.” This, he knew, was the real thing, and it put the pop music that Columbia wanted into perspective.
Columbia didn’t want R&B from Dion, so they eventually lost interest in him, and dropped him. He had been using drugs for years, and it was beginning to catch up with him. When he couldn’t score drugs, he would drink. He hit rock bottom. He didn’t have another hit until 1968.
“I was taking drugs. I wasn’t even in the business,” says Dion.
On April 1, 1968, he stopped using. He was scared. Frankie Lymon, a guy he had shot up with, died. An acquaintance told Dion about a spiritual 12-step program. Now he’s thankful that his three daughters never saw him drink or drug.
In that same apocryphal year of ’68, Dion had a hit with “Abraham, Martin, and John,” which was just what he needed to resurrect his career. Suddenly he was in demand on college campuses, playing solo and acoustic, and he became a staple on the folk scene at clubs like The Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Soon the singer/songwriter era was in full bloom, and he was signed by Warner Bros., home to some of the biggest names in the genre.
He made a few albums for Warner Bros. in the early ’70s, and then it seemed like a good idea to work with legendary producer Phil Spector. It wasn’t. “Phil wasn’t at his best. He seemed very distracted. His energy was all over the place,” Dion says now, while at the same time expressing confidence that they could have made a great album together in their heyday. The album they did make, Born to Be With You, was thought to be a dismal failure upon its release. Lately, however, it has been getting a second look, and some positive press.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Dion recorded a series of highly regarded gospel albums. But all the while the blues were within him, waiting to come out. Now he speaks of people like Bonnie Raitt, whom he would run into from time to time. She would always ask him when he was going to finally make that blues album. What she and most people didn’t realize was that he had been playing the blues all along.
“I’m playing in my house,” he says. “How can they not know it?”
The sound of Bronx in Blue is Dion saying thanks to the great masters. Paying tribute. Keeping connection. “I’m glad I could thank them. It’s a labor of love. These songs have been in my head, in my heart, and in my guitar, for 45 years.”
s