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Sixties pop star Dion: 'I started taking heroin at 14'

Dion Dimucci performing in New York, 2018 - Getty Images
Dion Dimucci performing in New York, 2018 - Getty Images

There aren’t many original rock ’n’ rollers still standing. One of the very best, Little Richard, died earlier this month. But there’s Dion: if not quite the last man standing, possibly the last great American musician from the dawn of the genre who’s still rockin’ and rollin’ as vigorously as ever.

Sixty years on from groundbreaking hits Runaround Sue and The Wanderer, the 80-year-old is releasing Blues With Friends. It’s a 14-track, self-written set that is what it says on the tin: a tribute to the genre featuring Dion fans and acolytes including Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Paul Simon and Jeff Beck.

The album features sleeve notes by another old friend, Bob Dylan, who attributes Dion’s success to two teachers: his “vaudevillian father and the doo-wop street corners of the Bronx”.

The pair go way back, not least to sharing the distinction of being the only two contemporary artists featured on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – John Lennon was a huge fan of Ruby Baby, the 1962 Dion hit that was a mainstay of The Beatles’ Hamburg sets.

The all-star album is accompanied by a photograph in which the remarkably well-preserved singer-songwriter clutches a guitar. Its body is covered in the names of his friends, heroes and peers, from Duane Eddy to Johnny Cash to Elvis Presley. But scrawled at the top, first among equals, is Little Richard.

“He and Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley were the mainstays for me,” the man born Dion DiMucci tells me down the line from his home in Boca Raton, Florida. “When I first started out, they were dancing across my living room on my TV set. For me, they were from outer space!”

Within a year, the scrappy Italian-American kid was sharing the stage with Richard at New York venue The Brooklyn Fox.

Dion in the Sixties: - Getty Images
Dion in the Sixties: - Getty Images

“And we were friends since the first time I met him. I knew his mother, Leva Mae. She loved me. She always told me: ‘Dion, you got soul!’

“I knew a side of Richard that people probably didn’t know,” he continues in a gravelly voice still rich with working-class Bronx inflections. “He was very thoughtful, a selfless kind of guy when you were with him. If you watched him do his act on TV, people thought he was maybe always like that. But there was a very calm and thoughtful side to him. It definitely changed my life when I heard Long Tall Sally – he just ripped it up. I miss him.”

Still, by his own estimation, Dion is also lucky to be here. He’s dodged death on several occasions.

Before he was a doo-wop teen idol with The Belmonts, and before he was a 23-year-old signed to Columbia Records alongside Aretha Franklin on a deal worth almost $5 million (£4 million) in today’s money, there were the adolescent years running with Bronx gangs with names like the Fordham Daggers and the Fordham Baldies. In his 1989 memoir The Wanderer, Dion wrote that to be initiated, you had to be punched in the stomach by all the gang members and hang from a ladder in a sewer for an hour.

Then there was the heroin addiction that had the musician in its grip for 15 years and that “almost took me out a few times”. It’s a high that he revisits and reconceives, five decades down the line, in Blues With Friends track I Got the Cure: “I got no needles, I got no junk, I’m the drug you need, baby…”

Dion got clean on April 1 1968 – the date he attended a 12-step meeting – when he was 28. So if he was an addict for 15 years, he must have started taking heroin at… “Fourteen, yeah,” he acknowledges, “I started at 14,” which tells you something about how rough those outer borough street gangs were in mid-Fifties New York.

“I gotta tell you, I was taking drugs with Frankie Lymon,” Dion adds, referring to the lead singer of The Teenagers, who had a smash with their debut single, 1956’s Why Do Fools Fall in Love. “And when he died in February of 1968 [aged 25], I just got very concerned. It threw me for a loop and I started asking questions. I’ll be honest: I got down on my knees one day, I said a prayer and when I got up I was changed. I haven’t had a drug or a drink since.”

His life was also in danger when he worked with producer Phil Spector on the 1975 album Born to Be With You. “I had some problems with Spector in the control room… ranting. There were like 10 guitar players, and three of them had guns,” he once recalled. “It was madness… I’d get up eyeball-to-eyeball and talk to him, because I just had to walk out of there feeling like a man, you know?”

For obvious reasons, Dion tells me now, he felt negatively towards that album for a long time. But it is now considered a “lost” classic and, over the years, he has changed his mind. “I think Only You Know is freaking brilliant,” he says.

But Dion’s closest brush with death came in Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3 1959. Aged 19, he and his pre-solo band The Belmonts were touring the American Midwest as part of The Winter Dance Party package. Their fellow artists were other young stars of the rock ’n’ roll explosion: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper.

The weather was grim so, rather than a freezing tour bus, Holly decided to charter a small plane to take them to the next show in Fargo, North Dakota. But there were only seats for three passengers. The other musicians opted to toss a coin, but Dion baulked at the fare: $36, which was the same as his entertainer father paid for a month’s rent back home in The Bronx. He let Valens take his place. Within minutes of take-off, the Beechcraft Bonanza crashed, killing all on board.

Last year, to mark the 60th anniversary of the deaths, I visited Holly’s widow Maria Elena Santiago in Dallas. She said to me that her 22-year-old husband was a man in a hurry, forever rushing to complete songs, so much so that, in retrospect, she believes, “he knew he was going to die”.

When I relay this to Dion, he agrees, and says the sentiment, or impulse, was shared with other long-gone peers.

“Bobby Darin was like that, Buddy Holly was like that and Ricky Nelson was like that. They always used to say: ‘I don’t picture myself growing old.’ I said: ‘I do!’ ”

Remarkably, after the crash wiped out three quarters of the headliners, Dion continued with the tour for another two weeks. That’s surely taking the show-must-go-on ethos to the extreme?

“I just felt like that’s what those guys would’ve wanted us to do, to just carry on,” he says with an audible shrug. “At the time I was young and I didn’t even know how to process it.”

Not least, it’s clear, because Holly had a profound influence on him.

“Buddy used to tell me: ‘I don’t know how to succeed but I know how to fail. You wanna know how to fail? Try to please everybody.’ I thought: ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ I think in a way he motivated me to do The Wanderer, Runaround Sue, Ruby Baby and even Abraham, Martin and John,” he says of his huge 1968 folk-rock hit which memorialised the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy. “Let the music talk for itself, you don’t have to sell it to anybody or anything. Either it’s there or it’s not.”

It would take Dion until his 2000 album Déjà Nu to make some sort of peace with the tragedy, with two tribute songs, Every Day (That I’m With You) and Hug My Radiator. Little wonder, perhaps: in the late Fifties and early Sixties there was no such thing as PTSD. Or, as he puts it: “There was no grief counselling in The Bronx.”

How did that trauma and loss affect his substance abuse? Did it push him over the edge?

“It did confuse me,” he begins. “I kind of spun out of control for a while with that experience, just not knowing what to do with the emotions, how to move forward. No one asked you what you went through, nothing. I did the best I could with it.”

Like the blues and his wife Susan to whom he’s devoted – they met in The Bronx when he was 16 and she was 14 – Dion’s Christian faith has been with him for most of his life. It’s obviously at the heart of a run of evangelical albums he made during the Eighties, and it also colours the ministry work he undertakes in prisons, particularly with inmates battling addiction.

“I just love talking to men, trying to get them to a higher ground, because somebody did it for me. I like passing it on, just sharing with guys. So, yes, I’m always into that.”

All of this, he notes, is distilled in The Wanderer, a jukebox musical of his life that was due to open on Broadway this summer but is now scheduled to premiere next April.

“The play is about transformation and redemption – it’s very uplifting,” he says. “It’s got betrayal, overcoming, action, romance, laughs and, of course, it has the early street rock ’n’ roll. I tell ya, if you’re ever in the States, give me a ring, be my guest. You’re gonna really like it.”

Dion’s Blues With Friends is released by KTBA Records on June 5. Further info: ktbarecords.com