‘We Said We’d Walk Together . . .’

 by whiteray

Despite the many, many albums he’s released in many genres over the years, despite the folk-rock phase, the countryish phase, the Christian music phase, and the current blues phase, despite even “Abraham, Martin and John,” which went to No. 4 in 1968 – despite all that, Dion DiMucci to me has always been an inhabitant of a mythical 1960. He’s on the corner and under the streetlight, standing hipshot and snapping his fingers, singing doo-wop to the night: “Teenager In Love.” “Where or When.” “The Wanderer.” “Ruby Baby.” 

Not all of those, and maybe no more than half of Dion’s hits, were doo-wop, of course. His solo hits – “The Wanderer” and “Ruby Baby” among them – inhabited some odd place between pop and R&B and most were tougher than most anything else that showed up in the Top 40 during the first years of the 1960s. His softer songs, like “Ruby Baby,” were served atop a plate of stoicism, which made their tenderness all the more persuasive. But all of his hits, even those that were not doo-wop, carry in them an echo of neighborhood nights and street corner harmonies. 

It’s sometimes hard, then, to reconcile that mythical figure with the performer who has never stopped working, never stopped singing, never stopped recording and releasing albums. Some of those albums stood out: His 1968 album, Dion, which included “Abraham, Martin and John,” was, if not a masterpiece, at least a fascinating and sometimes very good exploration of folk rock. Suite for Late Summer, which came out in 1972, has Dion in singer-songwriter mode, and that album, too, is interesting if not a classic. In 1978, Dion released Return of the Wanderer, maybe the best thing he’d ever done, highlighted by the great song, “I Used To Be A Brooklyn Dodger.” And though critics disagreed, I thought 1989’s Yo Frankie was pretty good. 

The releases continued. Since the dawn of the new century, Dion’s found his way to blues, releasing Bronx in Blue in 2005, Son of Skip James in 2007, and three more mostly blues-based albums since then, including last year’s Blues With Friends. All of them work, with some original songs added to material pulled from the catalogs of Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Hank Williams and more. They’ve likely found a relatively small audience, as has been pretty much true for Dion since 1968, whether the albums were those I’ve mentioned here or any of the roughly twenty other albums he’s released since then. 

That includes the album I’m thinking about today, one that I skipped over in this brief chronology: Déjà Nu, which came out in 2000. Among the batch of songs Dion wrote for the record nestle three covers, one of them a song by Scott Kempner, with whom Dion collaborated on a couple of other songs on the album. The other two covers were pulled from Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 album, Lucky Town: “Book of Dreams” and “If I Should Fall Behind.” 

The second of those is the more interesting, as Dion takes the song and pulls it back to that mythical 1960, standing under the streetlight with his pals. As AllMusic Guide notes, the song “seems like it was written with this arrangement in mind.”