In 1959, Dion, with the Belmonts, sang “I Wonder Why”, a song with the off-to-the-races doo-wop intro of “Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun”. It’s as if the narrator is stumbling over his words when speaking to his lover, who he can’t look in the eyes, let alone articulate—the truth of the universe within those monosyllabic and mellifluous moans. Or not. When performing “Tower of Song” in London 49 years later, Leonard Cohen reveals that the “do dum, dum dum…”—sung by his backing vocalists—are the answers to the mysteries. We’ll take him at his word as, after all, he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk. Thus, he understood a thing or two about staring into the void and finding answers. Did he ever reach enlightenment? Leave that to the dark night-of-the-soul Van Morrison.
In January 1959, 19-year-old Dion, with the Belmonts, along with Ritchie Valens, JP Richardson (The Big Bopper), and support from Frankie Sardo, were part of Buddy Holly’s Winter Dance Party Tour. Yes, the fateful tour that claimed the lives of Holly, Valens, and Bopper when, on board an airplane flying from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Mason City Municipal Airport, they crashed in a frozen cornfield—two nights after a 17-year-old Bob Dylan locked eyes with Holly at the Duluth Armory, as if passing on the torch. “Buddy took us into this room, and he said, ‘Listen, there’s only four seats on the plane’,” Dion said to Jim Clash of Forbes in 2023. “The pilot would take one, and there was room for only three others. One of the headliners couldn’t go.”
Beginning singing on street corners and in clubs in the Bronx, Dion DiMucci became a rock and roller; he had an attitude, a toughness, and a street swagger and, in 1959, had a hit with the doo-wop ballad “Teenager in Love”. Rock and roll was at its lowest ebb. It barely shook, let alone rolled. It nearly crawled to an early grave, a fad here to die, until the British Invasion picked it up by the scruff of its neck and injected it with an intensity, a joie de vivre, a lust for life—saving it from a premature death.
However, in 1959, there were teen idols. Bobby Vee sang “Suzie Baby”, a desperately beautiful song with a flamenco-like acoustic guitar. Bobby Darin had the ghosts of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill haunting him on “Mack the Knife”. Ricky Nelson had—not to mention those sparkling blue eyes and puppy-fat cheeks—that melancholic voice on “Lonesome Town”, a song that would have made Hank Williams cry if he was alive—first out of pride, then sadness—with its melody that seems to drift within its brooding mood, delivered by a voice that seems to scare the singer, as if it reveals a side of him that he rather not know.
Like Jerry Lee Lewis, Dion had a country side, and Hank Williams was a favourite, as heard on Tommy Collins’ country boogie “You Better Not Do That”, where, with a Southern drawl, he sings, “Ammm just a country boy”. He would speak of the country artist George Jones to Del Shannon, a wrongly thought of one-hit wonder with the 1961 chart-topper “Runaway”, who had the face of a gargoyle with a high-pitched voice of a tormented choirboy.
Dion’s lifelong fascination with the blues can be heard on the 12-bar blues “The Wanderer”—the one with the sledgehammering beat that strikes you down, leaving you unable to saunter. In 1987, Paul Simon organised a star-studded benefit concert at Madison Square Garden in aid of medical care for homeless children, where Dion, introduced by Lou Reed, performed two songs: “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue”. “Springsteen was listening to me do ‘The Wanderer’,” Dion told Jim Clash of Forbes. “And came over afterwards and said, ‘You know, if people ever grabbed on to that couplet—‘With my two fists of iron / But I’m going nowhere’—they’d find out what a man should be.’ It’s the idea of this macho guy getting some insight into himself for a split second, but then it quickly goes away. In those days, we had to do everything upbeat, but this song is darker if you really listen.”
After splitting with the Belmonts, Dion had a number-one hit with “Runaround Sue”, an infectious 1961 song about an unfaithful girlfriend inspired by Gary US Bonds’ lo-fi “Quarter to Three”, where Bonds searches for the beat, then finds it—and carries it home, with a voice that is ballsy and gritty, swinging like a wrecking ball. (In the early 1980s, Bruce Springsteen and his stalwart bandmate Steve Van Zandt helped revive his career by writing songs and producing two of his albums: Dedication and On the Line.)
As the 1960s progressed, Dion’s popularity declined. First taking root in his teenage years, he was battling a heroin addiction, as well as fighting to be relevant in the aforementioned post-British Invasion world. His blues recordings failed to achieve commercial success, some of which were under the supervision of in-vogue producer Tom Wilson (producer of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”, and Dylan’s studio albums from The Times They Are a-Changin’ to Bringing It All Back Home, including the single “Like a Rolling Stone” from Highway 61 Revisited), with Al Kooper, the immortal organist on the aforesaid “Like a Rolling Stone”, playing keyboards.
In 1975, the same year Springsteen released his make-or-break, Phil Spector-esque Born to Run, Dion released Born to Be with You, actually produced by Phil Spector, who kept it back for 12 months. Although a commercial failure—surprising given Spector’s name attached to it—the album had a comeback in the 1990s with Bobby Gillespie extolling it, and in 2006, Jarvis Cocker sampled “Only You Know” on “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time”. Listening to the former track, you would be right in thinking that Father John Misty is on vocals, bolstered by its sweeping arrangement. In 1979, the world was introduced to Bob Dylan’s first born-again Christian album, Slow Train Coming. That same year, Dion became a born-again Christian and released a string of Christian albums throughout the 1980s.
Fifteen years before a 20-something Springsteen—skinny, swarthy, curly-haired, with a lifetime of desire to fulfill—sweated out his original sin in clubs along the Jersey Shore, there was the rock and roller Dion, brought up a Catholic in an Italian family. If Dion has a doppelgänger, it’s Bruce Springsteen. “Dion DiMucci evolved throughout his career, changing outwardly but maintaining recognizable characteristics across every iteration,” Bob Dylan writes in his The Philosophy of Modern Song, published in 2022. “Not reincarnation in the strictest sense but an amazing series of rebirths, taking him from an earnest Teenager in Love to a swaggering Wanderer, a soul-searching friend of Abraham, Martin, and John to a hard-edged leather-clad king of the urban jungle who was a template for fellow Italo-rocker Bruce Springsteen.” (On a superficial level, in the 1980s, Dion wore a grey tweed cap—somewhat tilted—akin to Springsteen circa 1975.)
Van Zandt was the first to meet Dion. Backing the doo-wop group the Dovells as a guitarist in 1973, as part of the “oldies circuit”—when mostly 1950s rock and roll stars, still in their 30s and 40s, were supposedly superannuated, reduced to singing their hits for a nostalgia-baiting audience, perhaps best encapsulated by Ricky Nelson’s 1972 “Garden Party”—Van Zandt was in Vegas for a stint of shows at the Flamingo. After presumably watching a concert by the Dovells, Dion asked Van Zandt to play alongside him at the remaining shows of his tour.
At the start of “Quarter to Three”—a live version recorded at Hammersmith Odeon London on 18 November 1975, a concert which could be significant for the sole reason that Springsteen felt self-conscious onstage, not losing himself in the moment, with wild abandon, sculpting time out of thin air, with the press both skeptical and ready for a conversion at his first European gig, as he recalls in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run—Springsteen shouts “one, two, one, two, three, four”. Then Max Weinberg pounds a kick drum to the point that it could rupture, and Roy Bittan hammers out gigantic chords on a piano as if it is a boogie-woogie shuffle by Meade Lux Lewis, or, rather, imitating the New Orleans R&B sound of Fats Domino. Augmented by backing vocals, Springsteen begins singing, “Don’t, don’t” as if he cannot finish the sentence, as if he can picture his awkward preadolescent self in his bedroom in 1961—or forward in ten years as a brawny rocker, a spokesman of the working class, a Woody Guthrie figure with sex appeal, singing like a revved up deuce burning down the circuit, with the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand, while at back of his mind grappling with the potential loss of his working-class authenticity.
But don’t worry Springsteen—Guthrie was a bit of a pretender, too. Following the intro arrives Clarence Clemons’ squealing saxophone and Garry Tallent’s rumbling bass—and, if that isn’t enough, Springsteen sings with his heart on the line, a soul possessed, a soul that can never be satisfied. In the video of Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75, released in 2005, Springsteen looks around: his eyes purely on the music, as if it can be touched, felt, and reshaped. There, he steps inside the music like entering a room—and the band play the instruments with such force that you would believe the instruments are playing them. For all they care, the stage could collapse, and they would still carry on in the depths of hell. Or so it seems.
Van Zandt, a musician who knows a tune when he hears one, who can separate the wheat from the chaff, replicates Dion’s lilting “la, la’s”. Until, that is, Springsteen puts a halt to it with a guttural soul shriek, a scream for joy, a scream like Clyde McPhatter’s in “Money Honey”. At this point, the music is swinging and careening, with lust and death, glory and suppression, a fate of a thousand lives, lived or unlived, told or untold, desired and broken, while Clemons blows into his saxophone with religious ecstasy.
At the breakdown, it sounds like Dion is singing through Springsteen, or Springsteen is singing through Dion; their identities are entwined, a fate coalesced. It is the voice of a blue-collar worker at the end of a working week: strife and exultation. Then, there is a suspenseful pause before a jackhammer piano pummels through; it is a hell-bound performance, a performance that even history trembles to contain. But, like everything, it must come to an end—which it does, with Tallent’s descending bassline, Weinberg whacking his tom-tom, and Clemons wailing as if the musicians are dancing to the end of the world, dancing to eternity.
Dion, perhaps, couldn’t have written Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, or Devils & Dust. But the fun side of Springsteen, when he is goofy and silly, a prisoner of rock ‘n’ roll, can be found in Dion. Of late, Dion has reinvented himself as an old blues guitarist. To come full circle, he released the albums Blues With Friends and Stomping Ground in 2020 and 2021, respectively, featuring Patti Scialfa and her husband, Springsteen. The last song on the former record, “Hymn to Him”, features a chomping guitar played by Springsteen, who, for a brief moment, perhaps thought he caught a glance of himself when looking at Dion. Maybe remembering a part of his past self.
CITATIONS
Clash, Jim. “Dion DiMucci: Who Were ‘Runaround Sue’ and ‘The Wanderer’?” Forbes, 26 August 2023.
Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.
Springsteen, Bruce. Born to Run. Simon & Schuster, 2016.
Van Zandt, Stevie. Unrequited Infatuations. White Rabbit, 2021.