If you could set this story to music, you’d need a snappy beat, sweet harmonies and don’t forget the doo-wop, doo-wop, dooooooo.
This, after all, is a story about Dion, king of doo-wop:
Dion, as in Dion and the Belmonts.
Dion, who growled his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with such musical wonders from the ’50s and ’60s as The Wanderer and Runaround Sue.
Dion, who’s out with his first new CD in eight years, Deja Nu.
Since many of today’s musical careers are measured in nanoseconds, let’s note that Dion is into his fifth decade of making music.
Aging Baby Boomers remember when he burst onto the national scene in 1958 with I Wonder Why, when rock ‘n’ roll was still considered a passing fad. A decade later, he had a string of hits that are staples on today’s oldies stations, including Abraham, Martin and John, which became an anthem for the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Though his counterparts, from Buddy Holly to Elvis Presley, died decades ago, Dion, at 61, is still recording, still touring. (Dion and Jerry Lee Lewis will perform at Sunrise Musical Theatre on Nov. 4.)
Dick Clark calls Dion “a true musical legend.” Rick Shaw, a DJ with a 40-year career playing music for South Florida, calls Dion a classic, part of the cornerstone of rock ‘n’ roll.
And Billboard recently described Deja Nu as “captivating” and “exceptionally marvelous.”
“Some people just stop,” says Dion, sitting in the den of his suburban Boca Raton home. “But I’ve stayed very much in the now. At the same time, I have perspective in my life. I know who I am. I know where I’m going.”
In his private life, Dion DiMucci is not what you expect in a rock ‘n’ roll icon. He’s a former junkie who got right with God. Married 37 years to Susan, his high school sweetheart.
And comfortable in his skin, away from mindless adulation and endless applause.
“He comes across as an everyday sort of person,” says John Miller, who owns the Record Museum in Hollywood. “He’s kinda quiet. Not a show-off. You wouldn’t know he’s Dion.”
For an interview, he’s dressed in his trademark black, a New York Yankees baseball cap covering his thinning hair. Though South Florida has been home for 32 years, his voice sounds straight out of his native Bronx.
But there’s no New-York-tough-guy attitude, no macho swagger in the private man. None of that hip, flip attitude that made the public Dion, Dion.
Home is in a gated community of large, two-story homes. Upscale, but not ostentatious. In the living room, a guitar rests on a sofa. On one wall, an artful sketch Dion did of his three daughters.
The den, with dark wooden bookshelves and soft leather chairs, is filled with photos of family and friends.
Eight years in this house and his dozen or so gold records are still in a box.
He shrugs. “Gotta get those up on the wall one of these days.”
Reaching back
When Dion made those early records, he didn’t know they’d be such mega-hits.
But sometimes, things just happen. As they did with his latest CD.
“I wasn’t making a new album,” he says. “I was writing songs to go with scenes.”
It seems that Chazz Palminteri, screenwriter and co-star of Robert De Niro’s 1993 film A Bronx Tale, had written a screenplay around Dion’s 1988 autobiography, The Wanderer.
Dion offered to write the movie soundtrack, plumbing his memories for tunes.
As a result, Hug My Radiator is a song on the new CD. Dion started it years ago on the ill-fated 1959 winter tour with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens, but never finished it until recently. The unheated school bus carrying them from gig to gig offered little respite from the icy cold. But a hotel heater did.
On that same tour, Holly, weary of the cold, decided to rent a plane to get the next gig. Dion didn’t want to pony up $36 for a seat. A month’s rent, in his eyes. He stayed on the bus.
Holly, of course, died in that plane crash. Dion went on to make rock history.
When Dion co-wrote Every Day (That I’m With You), a collage of images played in his mind. That frigid winter night. The plane taking off. And Holly, a Texas boy destined for greatness. Dead at 22.
“I don’t think I ever expressed my feelings about that,” he says. “It’s like, finally, getting the feelings out. Putting it all to rest.”
Dion recorded the CD using the same equipment and techniques that were part of his early career. The title came to Susan in a dream.
“It’s new, but it’s got that something from the past,” says Susan DiMucci, 58, a slender, pretty woman with shoulder-length auburn hair.
Though the screenplay wasn’t made, friends encouraged Dion to release the music anyway.
He shopped the CD without success until Jerry Greene, who runs Collectables Records, a label in Narberth, Pa., heard the music and liked it. But in this era of niche radio, getting it played is another story.
“Oldies stations say it’s a new record and contemporary stations say it’s an oldie,” Greene says. “But to me, it’s a hit record.”
The family man
In Dion’s den, a stack of CDs sits ready to entertain. He just got Fats Domino’s boxed set, and he’s a faithful fan of Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. Though Dion doesn’t watch MTV, he isn’t locked into music history.
He likes “girl rockers,” including Sheryl Crow and blues singer Susan Tedeschi, whom he and Susan caught the other night at the Pompano Beach Amphitheatre.
“Music is still a big part of my life,” he says. “But it’s not the center.”
His faith, family and friends come way before his music. They’ve helped him stay clean and sober for 33 years. They helped save his life.
On one wall, a photo of a dozen guys who live in South Florida, all good friends and all part of his spiritual community. All from different faiths but “all believers,” he says.
They talk about topics that were foreign to Dion when he was growing up. Things like how to be better husbands to their wives and how to communicate better with their families.
“You grow up being very selfish and very self-centered,” he says. “I already knew how to get angry and do all the jerky things guys do. I wanted to learn how to do it differently. I sought out men I could talk to who’d point me to a higher standard.”
Dion calls his wife “my helpmate” and a “godsend.” Together since she was 14 and he was 16, there isn’t much they haven’t shared.
In riding the roller-coaster ride that was Dion’s life during his heyday, she could have opted off, but she didn’t.
“You make a vow when you get married,” she says simply. “You’re together in good times and bad times. You fight together, you make up together. And you stay together.”
Today, they like going to Renzo’s for a good Italian meal. They love playing with their two grandkids or taking in a blues concert.
“He really is my best friend,” she says. “We laugh together and sometimes we cry together.”
As parents, they were conservative in teaching their girls values and morals, Dion says. The couple’s three grown daughters, Tane, Lark and August, are the first college graduates in his family. All three earned teaching degrees. Two are married.One daughter, Tane Bonham, teaches at Ramblewood Elementary in Coral Springs, where Dion has performed for her students.
In raising their family, neither Dion nor his wife forgot what it was like to be a teenager. In fact, his kids probably thought their father played music louder than any kid on the block, Dion says with a laugh.
As for fatherly advice: “I’d tell them everything is permissible, but not necessarily beneficial,” he says. “You’ve got free will, so choose well.”
And, on occasion, he’d admonish: “Don’t be like me!”
Dion remembers the day one daughter came home from high school with her hair buzzed off.
His wife asked, “How much did you pay for that?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, OK then.”
Dion agreed at the time and now chuckles at the memory. A radical hairstyle is not the end of the world; hair grows.
‘I know who I am’
He is, after all, a guy who understands the Big Picture. He has a perspective only time and painful experience can provide. As his fans already know, Dion’s music took him all the way to the top — and all the way to the bottom.
Though he doesn’t deny his past, he doesn’t want to delve into it either. There’s an unpleasant chapter dating back a decade when a Royal Palm Beach air-conditioner repairman named Dion Ambrogio claimed Dion was his biological father.
Ambrogio went to court to try to force Dion to take a blood test. But the statute of limitations was long up. On the wave of national publicity, Ambrogio tried launching a music career by billing himself as Dion 2, dressing in black and singing Dion’s trademark hits.
Dion shakes his head at the fiasco. “I wish you wouldn’t even write about that,” he says.
Dion’s hardscrabble youth, of course, is a hard-cold reality, if a distant memory. Dad didn’t work much, family fights were fierce, and there was never enough money.
Escaping his troubled family life, Dion discovered music. By 14, he’d discovered heroin. By 21, Dion and the Belmonts — three guys from his Bronx neighborhood — had their first hit, I Wonder Why. Dion quickly went solo, racking up one hit after another, including Runaround Sue and Ruby Baby.
By 27, he’d bought his parents a home. He’d married his childhood sweetheart. He was a bona fide rock ‘n’ roll superstar. And his life was coming apart.
In no time at all, Dion drank and shot up a goodly portion of his newfound wealth. He kicked the drugs, but with his career bottoming out, depression followed. Looking for a clean break, Dion, Susan and their 1-year-old daughter moved to North Miami in 1968.
Dion entered a spiritual-based 12-step program and six months later, at 28, released Abraham, Martin and John. It was a hit, his 10th Top 10 single.
Dion started singing gospel and, for most of the next three decades, he tried many different denominations before returning to his Catholic roots.
A dozen years ago, he moved to Boca Raton, where he faithfully attends Mass at a nearby church. But he doesn’t wave his faith like a flag. He doesn’t even touch the subject until he’s asked.
Years ago, Dion stopped scrambling to stay on top. He found something else to replace the adulation and applause, once as necessary to him as oxygen.
As Dion likes to say: “I know who I am.”
Liz Doup can be reached at or 954-356-4722.
