It was one of those days that leaves rock ‘n’ roll fans reeling with fly-on-the-wall fantasies. Dion DiMucci, the original Wanderer, was hanging out in Paul Simon’s New York home a few years back, talking like old friends do.
But this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill visit. Simon was playing Dion material from his then-upcoming Broadway debut, “The Capeman” — a seven-years-in-the-writing, $11 million musical that was ultimately snuffed by a blanket of protests and poor reviews. Soon it would be the unsightly stain on Simon’s otherwise acclaimed career.
Dion knew a thing or two about career-be-damned impulses to follow the muse. After conquering the charts in the late ’50s and early ’60s, first with the Belmonts and then with “Runaround Sue” and other hits, he spent most of the next four decades diving deep into blues, folk, gospel, singer/songwriter and bar band material — effectively dashing easy comeback opportunities and the cash that comes with rocker emeritus slots on the nostalgia circuit.
Dion recalls telling Simon he liked “The Capeman”‘s doo-wop and salsa sounds, but he couldn’t get past Simon’s moral ambiguity in a story of murder and redemption for a Puerto Rican gang member.
“I couldn’t understand why he would leave the subject so open and not resolve some of those questions,” Dion says by phone from his home in Boca Raton, Fla. “He said, `I just want people to leave and let them think about it.’ I felt like saying” — he pauses, and inhales deeply — “I really believe when you fall in love with something and find something that’s so beautiful — it’d be like choking me not to share it with you. You’d have to kill me.”
That sense of conviction — of doggedly pursuing, and standing by, truth and art, even when your search leads you to down lonely avenues — courses through Dion’s new three-CD box set, “King of the New York Streets.” While his excursions have long banished him from the pop charts, they’ve also yielded work that’s more consistently compelling than anything attempted by Dion’s early rock ‘n’ roll peers like Jerry Lee Lewis and even Johnny Cash.
The favorites are here, of course: the doo-wop of “I Wonder Why” and “Teenager in Love,” the rock shuffle “Ruby Baby” and the 1968 folk elegy “Abraham, Martin & John,” his sole hit after the initial years of fame.
But to take in the sweep of Dion’s career, you have to drink the dirty blues of “Daddy Rollin'” and witness both the junkie penance of “Your Own Backyard” and the kneeling confession of “The Truth Will Set You Free.” You have to rock with his ’90s band the Little Kings and marvel at his recent knack for peeling back layers of synthesizer in Bruce Springsteen songs to unveil their doo-wop cores.
You have to be prepared, as Dion himself is, for songs such as the reflective, reconciling “Soft Parade of Years” to reveal new truths on the hundredth listen.
“Sometimes I’m singing about it before I actually get it,” he says. “There’s a lot of artists I know who sing about a lot of ideals, and they don’t even get their own message. But that’s like a lot of us: We get it up the line, or sometimes we never get it.”
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Dion’s is unquestionably a path chosen rather than fated. The narrative of his life (a phrase he likes to use), could have followed any number of less intriguing roads.
He was born in 1939 in the Bronx. As a kid, he studied a cavalcade of sounds, from Hank Williams’ emotionally direct country to the Rev. Gary Davis’ street-corner gospel. He ran in the kind of tight-knit neighborhood where fellow Bronx native and Little Kings guitarist Scott Kempner says, “You can have a lifetime of worldly experiences.”
Along the way, Dion managed to avoid several dead-ends. At home, his thirst for new experiences unleashed him from the Fordham Baldies street gang. On the road, his frugal instincts kept him from buying a ticket on the charter plane that crashed killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper aboard (a decision that carried with it a raft of guilt).
But he didn’t slip past the seductions of drugs, and for most of the ’60s, Dion’s loyalties lay with heroin and alcohol. He finally put down both in ’68, escaping what would have been in all likelihood an early death.
Six years later, in “New York City Song,” he wrote from the vantage of someone who quits the city that gave him life, rather than let its bright lights and parties empty him as they’ve drained his girl. “That’s the year my dream died in New York City,” he sings, “That’s the year I had to leave that town.”
Those moments of honest choice — leaving the Bronx, leaving easy fame, leaving his drug habit — are the benchmarks that define Dion’s career, says rock writer Dave Marsh, who penned the liner notes for “King of the New York Streets.” “New York City Song” is about discarding all you know in order to survive.
“And the song is not a complaint,” Marsh says. “It’s the most matter-of-fact way that you can conceivably put it: `That’s the year that I had to leave New York City.’ As if, we reach these moments in our lives and we do what is necessary. There’s a name for that attitude — it’s called being a grown-up. That is a healthy adult attitude about how you deal with moments of crisis in your life. You do what needs to be done. I hear this guy, the one guy who wasn’t afraid of losing his rock ‘n’ roll cajones by growing up.”
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In the mid-’90s, at age 57 or so, Dion picked up the phone and called Scott Kempner, whose resume included an ’80s stint leading roots-rock’s Del Lords and time with ’70s proto-punks the Dictators. Together as the Little Kings, a two-guitar, bass and drums bar band, they played in Philadelphia and New York, and cut “You Move Me” and “King of Hearts,” which appear on the box set.
It’s a fascinating move for a guy who could just as easily have coasted. But listen to Dion talk about the Little Kings’ impetus: “I just loved the expression of what was happening in Seattle” at the time, he says.
In other words, Dion formed this band not just to get back to clubs, but because Seattle neo-punks like Nirvana and Pearl Jam put the fire in his gut. That’s like Chuck Berry taking his cues from Public Enemy. It’s unheard of.
And even amid the guitars’ clang, he made room for subtleties.
“In a movie, you can make a tiny little gesture, and all of a sudden all those words you just said have this tremendous meaning that transcends just the meaning of the words themselves,” Kempner, 46, says. “That’s how he is as a singer. He needs to cut out syllables and cut out words and somehow you’re not left with less information. By the time he gets through singing it, you have more information.”
That’s what you hear in “Runaround Sue”: the choppy phrasing of an angry, hurt soul (“People let me put you wise”), the gritty intonation in “Sue GOooeeesSS … OUT with other guys!” That shout on “out!” defines rock singing as much as any syllable can, and it echoes through bands from the Beatles to Nirvana.
If you stitch that together with “Daddy Rollin'” and “Sweet Surrender” and “Shu-Bop,” you’ll begin to see the outline of someone searching, asking, choosing.
What “King of the New York Streets” reveals is a guy who refuses to be deceived by the relatively small stuff, be it bright lights, others’ expectations or “Why me?” wondering.
“If you don’t ask yourself the right questions, people get stuck,” Dion says. “They loose the narrative of their life, they loose that thread. You could blow your brains out doing that. So asking questions is important, especially asking yourself the right questions.”
