Dion
The 60s teen idol on the blues, getting Dylan to write his sleeve-notes, and being blown away by Jerry Lee Lewis.
Words: Ian Fortnam
From fresh-faced Teenager In Love to mononymous King The New York Streets, street-wise Bronx Belmont to über-cool elder statesman of the blues, Dion DiMucci’s extraordinary career is so cool as to be almost beyond credence. Having dominated jukeboxes in the early 60s with Runaround Sue and The Wanderer, he embraced the blues, faced addiction and enjoyed spiritual rebirth before relaunching his rock career with the astonishing ’89 album Yo Frankie. Dion’s latest, Blues With Friends, features collaborations with Jeff Beck, Billy Gibbons, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Brian Setzer, Steve Van Zandt and Van Morrison, to name but a few.
Dion: singing rock’n’roll and blues across five decades.
ALLISON MICHAEL ORENSTEIN/PRESS
How did the
Blues With Friends
album come into being?
In 2004 I did a radio interview, punctuating every story with songs I grew up with - Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Hank Williams - and realised the blues was always my music’s bedrock. [Producer/ label executive] Richard Gottehrer heard it and said let’s do an album of those songs. So we did Bronx In Blue. With that album I realised the blues is what really comes natural to me. It’s at the centre of my being. And I’ve been writing these songs ever since. In the four years since New York Is My Home, I accumulated twelve songs and decided to go into a local studio to cut them. Joe Bonamassa heard one of the songs and said: “I want to play on that.” Joe’s such an ensemble player that when he played on Blues Comin’ On he responded to every inflection I sang. So he was the catalyst for this album.