Dion DiMucci: what a dude. It's not just this writer who thinks so - last night he played his first gig in the UK for 17 years at Blow Up Metro on Oxford Street and among the couple of hundred greying punters were Bobby Gillespie (what do you mean of course he was?) and also Robert Plant. So what's Dion's appeal?
1. His first US hit, with the Belmonts, 'I Wonder Why', was 49 years ago. He was supposed to be on the plane carrying Buddy Holly which crashed and killed him. As he regaled the audience last night, he once shared a piano stool with Fats Domino at Ricky Nelson's birthday party (Dion was a kid from the Bronx; Fats, as he reminded us, was Cajun, and he didn't understand a word he said). Those early doo-wop records are stone-cold classics. When he sang 'The Wanderer' last night, accompanied by a group of British doo-wop enthusiasts he'd dug up from somewhere, you could hear all the innocence of that tough teenage kid still intact. It all but made you forget him singing it for Chicken Run.
2. In the early Sixties, he was introduced to the blues by Columbia producer John Hammond, and through Hammond got to hang out at some of the young Bob Dylan's sessions. There's even the suggestion that it was Dion who inspired Bob to go electric. His new blues album, Son of Skip James, is really rather excellent.
3. Along with Dylan, he was the only pop star to be featured on the cover of Sgt Pepper. 'Probably why it sold so much,' he quipped last night.
4. In 1968, he recorded the song 'Abraham, Martin and John', written by Dick Holler in response to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Marvin Gaye later famously covered it. Dion played that song, too, last night. Right on! Only, he dedicated it to the troops in Iraq, 'fighting to defend my freedom.' Brave chap.
5. He made the album Born To Be With You with Phil Spector, in 1975. On it can be found the astonishing cut 'Your Own Back Yard', most likely the best song about drug addiction ever - reflecting Dion's addiction to smack since he was a teenager. Confusingly, this was one of a couple of cuts on the album which Spector didn't produce. But if you're wondering who's scrawl signature that is on the picture of the inside sleeve accompanying this posting: yes, it's a personal message from Spector to this writer. (An autograph procured shortly before Spector didn't apparently kill that poor gal by his biographer Mick Brown, who also came with me to the gig last night, and joined in enthusiastically on the chorus to 'Runaround Sue'.)
As for Robert Plant: he's a dude, too, with his hair like Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. You might have read that he's not a diva; that was very much the impression last night also. In this Sunday's OMM, he's also the subject of our Soundtrack of My Life feature.
