Thursday, May 15, 2008
His voice belongs not solely to the chart-making pop star but also to another, secret singer, who sang in the margins when practically no one was listening.
Aug 28, 2001 | "Dear Diary ... DION!!! Oh Help!!! I'm so excited, I think I'll just DIE!!! I was runnin' around, chokin' and cryin' and yellin' and screamin'. Wow wow cute cute CUTE!! you woulda died how he said 'dum didla dum didla dum didla dum.' I was rolling over inside, I was cryin', I love him so much ... "
-- Pamela Des Barres, diary entry, May 9, 1962
"I have always listened to Dion's voice. It's inside my body and my head forever."
-- Lou Reed
One of the great pleasures of pop music is surrendering all consciousness to it: Falling asleep to a voice drifting from the radio, the speakers, the headphones can make you feel as if it's soaking into your very bones. In all of pop music, there are many, many voices I'm happy to fall asleep to. But somewhere at the top of the list is Dion.
As most casual listeners know it, the story of Dion DiMucci goes like this: Born in the Bronx in 1939, he was first the lead singer of the late-era doo-wop outfit Dion and the Belmonts and later a solo rock 'n' roll star with the early-'60s urban-swagger hits "Runaround Sue," "The Wanderer" and "Ruby Baby." He dropped off the map around the time of the British Invasion and reappeared in 1968 with the top-10 hit "Abraham, Martin and John," after which he disappeared again.
If you listen to the story told by the charts -- never a good idea, but we all do it sometimes -- that's pretty much the story of Dion. But the voice that slips into my dreams belongs not solely to the chart-marking Dion but also to another, secret Dion, an artist who sang in the margins when practically no one (in his home country, at least) was listening. This Dion was an Italian-American New York tough guy influenced less by Frank Sinatra than by Hank Williams, who was his earliest and greatest idol. The finger-popping city sound of Dion and the Belmonts is magnificent, but Dion, a city kid by birth, knew intuitively that his sound came from deep in the country. And that's why, when I listen to Dion, even in the dead center of summer, with steaming city sidewalks right outside my window, I always smell fresh air, and I breathe it in.
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What does a city kid ever really know about the country? Dion couldn't answer that question himself. At age 13 he heard Williams on a radio show and fell in love. "I'd sing 'Honky Tonk Blues' or 'Jambalaya' on the stoop," Dion told Anthony DeCurtis in the New York Times. "My friends would go, 'What's honky-tonk blues?' I'd go, 'I don't know.' 'Well, what's jambalaya?' 'I don't know.' I didn't know what they were, but they sounded so good coming out of my mouth."
But you don't need to work too hard to figure out why a city kid like Dion would fall for Hank Williams. Dion lived in a tough neighborhood -- he ran with a gang called the Fordham Baldies -- and he knew the code of the street backward and forward. (He used heroin for 15 years, starting at age 14, and his father, a lackadaisical and largely unemployed puppeteer, taught him how to shoplift.) What kind of music do you make when it's OK to sing about your feelings but not to talk about them? Dion's first hit single, the 1958 "I Wonder Why," made with the incomparable Belmonts (Angelo D'Aleo, Freddie Milano and Carlo Mastrangelo), is by no means a country record, but it holds the answer.
Opening with the fusillade of word-sounds that's the currency of doo-wop -- the rat-a-tat that cupid's bow would make if it were a submachine gun -- "I Wonder Why" busts out of the gate. The Belmonts swing through a few bars of scatted harmony, talking to us partly in words but mostly in pictures of sounds; the clitter-clink of a toylike piano kicks in. The song's charm is instantaneous and vital. And then Dion appears, and forget how fantastically beautiful he looked at the time, with his sea-crest pompadour and daydreamy eyes: Here, he's the sound of a heartthrob.
How could any girl even think of doing him wrong? And yet it's his central worry. "When I'm away, I wonder what you do/I wonder why, I'm sure you're always true." He sings of doubt as if it were the glue that makes love work, and his conviction is strong. "I wonder why I love you like I do/Is it because I think you love me too?" For all the creamy smoothness of his vocals, he approaches this particular problem with the stance of a street tough. His assessment of what's worrying him is immediate and direct, not overwrought. He doesn't milk the song for sympathy -- you can almost see his brow furrowed as he tries to figure the damn girl out -- which is precisely what makes it so affecting.
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