Doowop King, rock legend, Dion finds Florida revival | News, Sports, Jobs – FORT MYERS

Dion moved from New York to Florida in 1968 and has stayed here ever since though he still maintains a home in New York. Photo provided courtesy of Robert Merlis

Dion, the King of the New York streets, the leader of the Belmonts, the Don of Belmont Avenue, the Doowop King, the Godfather of New York rock and roll, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, The Wanderer, just turned 85 and is making some of the best records of his life.

“I feel great,” said Dion DiMucci during an interview with the Fort Myers Beach Observer.

The New York native turned Florida transplant known for his legendary doo-wop and early rock and roll hits “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer” has lately been putting out blues records with guitar legends like Bruce Springsteen, Peter Frampton and Paul Simon.

Sure, you might have known Dion was one of the greatest doo-wop singers and an early Rock and Roll legend, but did you know he can still sing the blues and recently had a blues album that was at the top of the blues charts? Or that the roots of his pioneering rock and roll swagger go back to the country songs of Hank Williams and the blues of Jimmy Reed?

Dion just released his third blues album in four years – this one titled “Girl Friends” featuring a bevy of female musicians from Rory Block, Sue Foley, Susan Tedeschi and Caroline Ohlman. The duets album follows his other blues albums where he teams with legends like Van Morrison, the late Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits.

Dion DiMucci, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, has released a series of acclaimed blues albums in the past four years including his latest this year “Girl Friends.” Photo provided courtesy of Robert Merlis

And now he is about to put out a musical on Broadway about his life.

Dion gives a hearty greeting over the phone as if you just walked up to him on the corner of Belmont Avenue in the Bronx with his old buddies Angelo D’Aleo, Carlo Mastrangelo and Fred Milano who made up the Belmonts – the group that helped make him famous.

After all of the fame and musical success Dion experience, it was a move to Florida in 1968 that saved his life.

“I love Florida. I raised my three daughters down here. I moved here in 1968 to North Miami and moved to Boca in 1989. I’ve been here since. It was rural when I got here.”

DiMucci said the change in atmosphere and some help from some good friends, stopped him from the substance abuse disorder he was going through.

Rock and roll legend Dion just turned 85 in July. “I feel great,” Dion said. “If somebody would have told me I would be writing the greatest songs I have ever written in my 80’s, I would have told them they were nuts. In the last three albums I did, I am writing the best songs of my life.”

“For me, it was a geographical cure. I was drinking and drugging in the 60’s. I wanted a chance. Of course I brought myself with me. I got clean and sober on April 1, 1968. I haven’t had a drug or a drink since,” DiMucci said. “I met the right people and I never looked back. I met people who had some wisdom and who I had great respect for. I became very respectful of hierarchy and age and wisdom and I listened and here I am.”

Dion still maintains a residence in New York though he lives in Florida full-time.

Dion grew up poor in the Bronx. His dad Pasquale worked jobs sporadically in the Catskills resorts upstate making mayonettes like skeletons that he would dance around and which would light up. “He would pull a string and it would come together again and start dancing,” DiMucci said.

His mother Frances worked two jobs and was the main provider for the family.

DiMucci’s love for music started young from hearing Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed songs. His grandfather used to take him to the opera and then his mom and uncle bought him a guitar – changing the course of his life in the process.

How did a kid living in New York City get into a country musician like Hank Williams?

“No one was listening to Hank Williams, no one. But I was in my own world. I fell in love with Hank Williams,” DiMucci said. “I learned how to live through his records. It started opening up my own world right there.”

His other young hero was the blues legend Jimmy Reed. “I heard a song that Jimmy Reed did and he said ‘you better take some insurance out on me baby because if you ever say goodbye I am going to haul right off on die.’ I thought that was the most clever thing I ever heard,” DiMucci said. “I ran up to the corner and I told my group of friends ‘I heard a guy who said this and he rhymed buzz with luzz. He said you’re the one who really gives me a buzz. I didn’t think I could last much longer but it shows you just how wrong I was.’ They looked at me like I was nuts. Like what are you talking about? So I had to go out and buy a guitar. My mother and uncle got me a Gibson guitar. It was an L1. It was like $8 from a hoc shop.” DiMucci said. He was about 14 at the time.

“They gave me some money to take guitar lessons but I spent it in the pool room. I picked it up. I don’t know how I did it. I went for one lesson and they gave me a picture book and I started learning it myself,” he said.

“My whole neighborhood was listening to Jerry Vale and Al Martino and you know Tony Martin – all these crooners, Tony Bennett, Sinatra. But vibrato – I didn’t like vibrato. My uncles, they used to sing at the weddings and it was disgusting. When I heard Hank Williams – he grabbed the word with his mouth and he kind of ripped it off at the end and just dug into it and ripped into it. It was just so appealing to me. It was so committed. Spiritually, emotionally, mentally – it just grabbed me. It just rang my bell. Actually, it took me to a place of enchantment – like a higher reality. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t explain it that way.”

DiMucci said his vocal style derived from Williams and Reed. “All I wanted to do and I still do it is I try to get a song and kind of craft a song that brings people to the same place when I experienced when I was a kid when I heard Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed and that same enchantment. And I am still like that. I am going to turn 85 and I still wake up with it.”

“I feel great,” Dion says. “If somebody would have told me I would be writing the greatest songs I have ever written in my 80’s, I would have told them they were nuts. In the last three albums I did, I am writing the best songs of my life. I don’t know. It’s just crazy.

By the age of 17, he was signed to Laurie Records and cut his first record “The Chosen Few” and “Out in Colorado” with the backing group The Timberlanes.

Unsatisfied with the group’s approach, he recruited his friends from the neighborhood – buddies D’Aleo, Mastrangelo and Milano.

“I knew Carlo from the pool room. I knew (Milano) from the candy store. Angelo (first tenor) had perfect pitch like an opera singer,” DiMucci said.

“I Wonder Why” was their first hit – a wild doo-wop song largely carried by the cracking bass vocals of Mastrangelo the smooth, sharp hard-hitting leads of Dion.

Dion believes the best song that captures the Belmonts was “That’s my Desire.” The song had previously been recorded by The Channels. “I think our record was better than the original. I didn’t know it. They (The Belmonts) knew it.”

The song features D’Aleo howling falsetto vocals throughout the song. Dion enters one minute in and takes over amid a bass-thumping breakdown. “I love backing him up,” DiMucci said.

Though D’Aleo is the only other surviving member of The Belmonts, Dion doesn’t see a reunion in the works. The group reunited several times after they parted at the end of the 1950’s over disagreements in musical approach.

Mastrangelo would later follow DiMucci, playing on his solo albums and touring with him on drums. DiMucci called Mastrangelo a “creative force” within The Belmonts.

Once, while in Chicago at a nightclub Dion was playing with the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, Mastrangelo asked if he could sit in on drums during the set. “He (freaking) killed it,” DiMucci said. “He could hear the arrangements coming.”

Though Dion would sometimes play guitar uncredited on his early songs, he would not showcase his guitar skills during television appearances.

“They said ‘take off your glasses,’ they said ‘put down your guitar,’” DiMucci said. He thinks his image might have been different if he had been playing his guitar on the Ed Sullivan Show instead of being presented as a crooner.

When Dion and the Belmonts went on the Winter Dance Party Tour in 1959, they never knew the tour would devastate them. Dion faced personal hardships after the 1959 plane crash that killed his friends Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper during a frigid winter morning in Iowa. He turned down a flight on the plane for $36 because it was the cost of rent for his parents.

Dion would eventually part with the Belmonts because he wanted to move away from the smooth-sounding vocals they were doing. He said some of the biggest hits he had with the Belmonts like “I Wonder Why” and “Teenage in Love” were “a stretch” for his vocals.

“I consider myself a rhythm singer, not like Vic Damone where I can hold notes,” he said.

After leaving the Belmonts, Dion recorded his biggest hits – “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer” (a combined 383 million plays on Spotify) in 1961 as a solo artist with a new backing group The Del Satins. DiMucci is still friendly with Del Satins singer Stan Zeska.

Dion’s “The Wanderer” is where his Hank Williams influence met his street upbringing with the new rock and roll sounds mixed with the blaring jazz saxophone of the Alabama-born Buddy Lucas. It cemented himself as the pioneer of early New York rock and roll.

Dion’s solo cover of The Drifters “Ruby Baby” was one of his biggest hits. He would also treat The Drifters “Drop Drop” to a re-worked bluesy version with some Dion-style lyrics.

While there were some slow years in the mid 1960’s as he battled addictions, Dion bounced back in 1968 after going sober with his hit “Abraham, Martin and John.”

His 1968 self-titled album featured a cover of the Jimi Hendrix classic “Purple Haze.” That was a bold move for not just Dion but anybody at the time as Hendrix was only emerging as the guitar hero he would be known for.

It’s just one of many chances Dion has took over the years. He joined forces with Beach Boys and Ronettes producer Phil Spector in the 1970’s on a monumental album “Born to be with You/Sweetheart” which had large ambitions.

“People say I recreated myself,” DiMucci said. “I matured. You’re an acorn and now you are an oak. I’m not the same as I was at 13 or 35. I don’t like the same.”

He is largely retired from playing live. “I am not a real road guy. Some people just stay on the road, I don’t know how they do it. I like creating. Maybe serving people that way. My friend Frankie Valli, he just loves it.”

He has been married for the last 61 years to his wife Sue, who he fell in love with in high school at PS 45 after she moved from Vermont. “To me she looked like Miss America. I don’t know, off the charts,” Dion said of his early impressions of his future wife. “I couldn’t hear the teachers, I couldn’t hear anybody.”

Dion said the key to being married so long is respect. “If you start taking your wife for granted – it’s over. If you get any of that contempt mixed in – you are gone.”

Despite her name, Sue was not the inspiration for his classic “Runaround Sue.” That was about a different neighborhood girl who took his love and “ran around with every single guy in the town” as the lyrics go.

As for the actual classic song “Runaround Sue,” Dion said “I did everything by instinct.” While Ernie Maresca is credited with co-writing the song with Dion, DiMucci said the background parts sung by the Del-Satins was all his.

“I arranged all the background vocals for my songs,” DiMucci said. “The Del Satins thought I was crazy. They didn’t know exactly what I was doing.”

Dion has said in interviews that back then he would just play with letters and make things up – ala the chorus background “hey hey amadayadayahey” for “Runaround Sue” – still unmatched by any group more than 60 years later for pure rock and roll group vocal joy.

These days, DiMucci stays in shape these days by going to the gym three times a week. “I like lifting weights. I like moving. I like doing something. I feel better,” he said.

DiMucci still goes to rehabilitation programs and works with those battling addictions. “I love it. You go to get and you stay to give.”

A musical about Dion’s career “The Wanderer” is set to be on Broadway. Playwright Charles Messina worked with Dion on putting it together. “He’s as good as Martin Scorcese,” Dion said about the playwright, who has previously worked on a musical on the life of Queen singer Freddie Mercury.

Dion said Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt worked with him on every song in the musical. “Every song moves the story forward,” Dion said. “We made sure the concept was right.”

“It’s a play that can not be denied,” Dion said. “It’s full of hope.”

Dion stays hip with social media pages on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). He occasionally goes on X and posts video of himself playing some of his old songs.

During an interview once, Dion described how his use of substances as a teenager was a way for him to escape his shyness.

“You’re on top of the world with that stuff but you are an illusion.”

Now, at 85, Dion is still on top of the world the way he always has been. A rock on top of the rock and roll and doo-wop mountain that can never be replaced. An icon to all wanderers. He is still making great music.

His 2020 album “Blues with Friends” spent nine weeks at the top of the Billboard blues charts.

“I can’t take any credit for it. I don’t think I can take a bit of credit for it. It just seems like these songs are being downloaded into my head,” DiMucci said.

“I think I am just being blessed I don’t know. I am grateful for it. I want to share it with people.”

Fort Myers Beach Observer Nathan Mayberg can be reached at NMayberg@breezenewspapers.com and on Twitter @MaybergNathan