https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtud5juBncg
As of today Dion DiMucci is an eighty year old rock and roll legend that helped create the foundation of all the popular music that has evolved over the past sixty years. His career began as a doo-wop singer in the 1950’s with his group the “Belmonts.” He survived the tragic winter rock & roll tour that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper in an airplane crash that Dion narrowly avoided in 1959 and went on to become a solo star. The 1960’s saw Dimucci re-invent himself twice, first as a blues rock artist with “Ruby Baby” and then as a folk singer with “Abraham, Martin and John.” After surviving and cleaning up a heroin addiction he became a “born again” Christian and released some gospel albums. By the 1990’s he returned to the Roman Catholic church and continued to perform all the music of his career. After the turn of the millennium Dion found himself more involved with preserving the blues and early rock & roll history with a series of albums and even DVD’s. I had the privilege of being able to conduct two different interviews with Dion, one in 2005 and one in 2008. They were originally published in Blueswax/Blues Revue and the Wittenburg Door Magazine and are reprinted here with permission. I broke the first interview into two parts because we went into two different subjects. First we talked about his new blues album and the influence of music on culture and society and then we talked about religion which will be interview #2.
Interview #1
Dion Dimucci (rock & roll pioneer) Born: 1939.
Interview Date: December 8, 2005
Bob Gersztyn For Blueswax: First of all, why did you decide to do a Blues album?
Dion Dimucci: It just wasn’t in my head, like a cerebral decision. I just think that it’s such a part of my makeup. I wrote a little letter along with the album (Bronx In Blue) stating that people think that I grew up to Rock & Roll, but I didn’t. I grew up listening to Jimmy Reed, and Lighting Hopkins and Hank Williams, a big influence, Howlin’ Wolf. I combed the Southern radio stations late at night to find this kind of music. These songs have been in my head for like fifty years, and in my guitar. I’ve done some of them at Columbia. People think it’s kind of a new thing, but it’s just part of me. It’s the cause of me getting in the business. It’s the cause for me doing the records I did. It’s the cause for me being who I am, so to speak. It’s the cause of my love for music. It’s the undercurrent of all the hits I’ve had, but I never thought that I’d make a blues album, because in the fifties you just didn’t do that. For me to show up at the Brooklyn Fox with Allen Freed and immitate somebody Black, like doing a Mick Jagger thing, it would have been like black face. It just wasn’t the time to do that, as an art form. I didn’t understand that as a kid, but it was always there, it was just part of me. I was doing an interview sort of like this, on National Public Radio, and I was punctuating my stories with some songs, and Richard Gottier, an old friend, who I wrote songs with back in the fifties, called me up and said, “why don’t you record some of those things. I said I could do that with one lip tied behind my back, that’s what I’m made out of. I went in and I did it in two days. I did eight songs one day, four songs the next. I just did the songs that I grew up to. When you hear the album you’ll see.
Blueswax: I’ve listened to the album many times since it arrived, and sensed what you’re saying the first time I heard it.
Dion: You can see it’s not a false thing. You can see how comfortable I am.
Blueswax: That’s what impressed me about it right off the bat. The first time I listened to it was when I went for a walk after dinner one night and put it in my portable CD player. After a while I was just listening and got so into it that I forgot who I was listening to. Suddenly I thought, wait a minute, who am I listening to, because what I was hearing sounded so authentic and natural that I had to remember that they weren’t your songs. Repeated playing doesn’t change the way that it sounds to me. They flow in a natural uncontrived way, as if you wrote them.
Dion: Like I said before, it’s a funny thing, it’s like what I’m made out of so to speak. Everything that I do comes out of that kind of ground, fertile ground. It’s what I digested. I know that people like Eric Clapton have paid tribute to Robert Johnson, and I was thinking about how I was listening to Robert Johnson when I was at Columbia Records. When John Hammond gave me his album, before the 1960’s, he said “Dion, this album is by the king of the Delta Blues, a guy named Robert Johnson, and I’m so proud of this album, it sold twenty-five thousand, by word of mouth.” I went home and digested that whole thing. So I’ve been singing Walkin’ Blues, ever since 1959. Britain picked up on the roots of rock & roll. American’s dropped the ball. People that grew up in the fifties didn’t even know. A lot of them didn’t even move past that.
Blueswax: I’m originally from Detroit, Michigan, and there’s a lot of blues there, but I really didn’t even know what the blues was until about 1965, when I saw John Lee Hooker, at a coffee house that probably only had about thirty people in it.
Dion: I have to tell you that I wrote a song that’s on the album that’s coming out. I added it. I sent it up to Richard Gotterier, from Dimensions at Orchard Records. I sent him a couple of additional tunes that I did, because I went in and did a few more. I said Richard, you’ve got to put these on, they were so much fun. I wrote one called If You Want To Rock & Roll, but it’s like a John Lee Hooker tune. So when you get the finished album you’ll hear it. It has a kind of John Lee Hooker thing. I grew up with him. In fact, I don’t know if you read the letter I wrote, but I did a song called Ruby Baby.
Blueswax: Yeah, I remember when Ruby Baby came out. The first time I heard it I wondered to myself, “where did he get that from?” It was different than the other things that I had heard, like Runaround Sue or The Wanderer. You were going in an entirely new direction.
Dion: There’s no drums on that record. There’s very little drums. It’s a lot of foot stomping. I picked that up from John Lee Hookers natural foot stomping, on his recordings, like Walkin’ Boogie, that he probably made in about 1950. I’m not sure of the dates. This stuff is what I grew up to. I always say that it’s Black music, filtered through an Italian neighborhood, and it comes out with an attitude. If somebody was listening to me they would say, you don’t sing Black, you don’t sing White, you sing like the Bronx. So that’s why I called it “Bronx in Blue”.
Blueswax: At what age did you first really get into music?
Dion: I was, let’s say ten. I mean I probably was always into it, but I remember around ten years old I heard a Hank Williams song. It was playing in the back room of this little apartment my mother and father had. There was a radio in the back room and I heard Honky Tonk Blues, and that was like the first record that I said, what is that? I didn’t even know what Honky Tonk meant, but for a ten year old kid, in 1950, from the Bronx, to hear Honky Tonk…. I said, what the Hell is that? Then I heard Jambalaya, and I got a guitar. My uncle bought me a guitar for eight dollars. It was a Gibson. Somebody saw a picture of me playing it. It’s on the back of the album. They said, oh I saw you when you were a kid, you had a toy guitar. I said, what toy guitar? If I had that guitar now, I could sell it for fifteen grand. It’s a vintage authentic thirties Gibson. I forget what the model is, but it says, The Gibson, on the head of it. It’s an authentic kind of thirties guitar. You get that sound out of it, but when I heard Honky Tonk Blues, it threw me on the road, I was hooked. I would go up to Lou Cheketies store, on Fordham Road. It was called Cousin’s music store. They mentioned it at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame one day. I was knocked out. I said wow. I used to run up to Fordham Road to ask Lou if a new Hank Williams record came in. Then he finally got my phone number and used to call me when they came in. I would run up and get them. I had a collection of about over seventy-five songs, when I was about thirteen. “There was a record store on Fordham Road, Cousins, and the owner, Mr. Donatello, took a liking to me New York Times.
Blueswax: What year were you born?
Dion: I was born in thirty-nine. Just before it turned nineteen-forty.
Blueswax: The thing is you were buying and listening to Hank Williams records while he was still alive.
Dion: I was totally into Hank Williams by the time that he died. When was that?
Blueswax: Fifty two or three.
Dion: I would sing in the neighborhood, and I’d carry the guitar everywhere.
Blueswax: What was your first paying gig?
Dion: I wouldn’t say that it was like a check at the end of the week (light laughter). My uncles would take me to a night club in the Bronx, called Armondo’s, on a Saturday night, late, and I would sing these songs, and the people loved me. When the cops came around they would hide me in the kitchen and the Armondo Brothers who owned that night club, gave me twenty dollars. I mean I would get tips, but he would hand me a twenty dollar bill, and that was like more than half the rent that my mother was arguing with my father about every day. We were paying thirty-six dollars a month rent.
Blueswax: I remember reading about how you didn’t take the plane with Buddy Holly because you didn’t want to spend the thirty-five dollars.
Dion: Exactly. My mind didn’t stretch to accept things like that at the time. It seemed absurd. He was trying to recruit people, because we were going to charter the plane. I said, Buddy, that’s a month rent. Of course, the more people you got on the plane the less it would cost.
Blueswax: The extra weight is probably what did it in anyway.
Dion: No! You want to know what did it! The pilot flew the plane right into the ground. At night when it’s snowing, and you don’t know how to read the instruments, you could be on a slight slant towards the ground, where you think it’s level, and eventually you drive it right into the ground. It’s kind of like what JFK Jr. did. He didn’t understand how to read the instruments. You think you’re level, and sometimes you’re not, because up there you don’t know. You have to be level to keep that thing flying. If you think you’re level and you’re not, you go the wrong way you could put the plane in a spin, and you’re in the fog.
Blueswax: So the fatal Winter tour pilot was inexperience?
Dion: Yeah. He was a new pilot.
Blueswax: When the British invasion first happened and kind of put an end to the reign of American Rock & Roll, what did you think about that?
Dion: I was five years into a career that was kind of a whirlwind, and I was kind of woodshedding at the time, and listening to different stuff myself. I was hanging out in the Village with Richie Havens, and John Sebastion. Dylan was down there at the time. I was at Columbia records, and was the first rock & roller signed to Columbia Records. I knew something was changing, but I didn’t look at it so much like a business. It almost seemed more like I embraced it as like an artist. I know now that I did, but it was a little frustrating, because of the adulation and the high profile that you have with hit records and being a star, which I was at the top of my profession. So some frustrations come with that, but I was like really into the music. I would hang out in the Village. I got a place in the Village and I would hang out with Tim Hardin, and learned how to finger pick. When I learned that, I put out Abraham, Martin and Jonn, because that was the kind of folk/blues ground, that it came out of. A lot of people don’t know that. They just think you made a record. They don’t see the cause, or the deposits that you’ve been making in the bank when you buy the house.
Another thing that I wanted to know your views about is the period of the 1960’s, especially from a 21st century point of view. How do you see it today?
Dion: With all the drugs and the sex revolution, and all that kind of stuff? I don’t see that as freedom anymore, at all. It was so surface. In fact I was talking to my wife about it, because I’ve been married for forty-two years. I’ve known Susan for like fifty years. But I was saying, you know, I never learned this in the Bronx. I never learned what John Paul taught about the theology of the body, because Christ came in the flesh, and how sacred and the beauty of life, and how to see a woman, and what covenant is, self donation. It’s not a contract to be taken lightly. So the way I see it is that the music was fabulous. The expression. There were so many good things, but like I said, it was like an honest cry of desperation. I think deep down it was on the wrong premise. How do you see it?
Dion: Oh boy, but you had Timothy Leary leading them with Hugh Hefner. I think that it was very mixed, because some of the masks that people were wearing, maybe in the fifties…, or they were trying to rip those down. I think some good stuff came out of it, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that it was all negative, but on the most part, I wouldn’t want to go back there. Like they say, if you remember the sixties you really weren’t there.
Blueswax: When Abraham, Martin and John came out, I loved it, but at the same time, it was kind of like Ruby Baby. All of a sudden I go, what happened? How did this happen? Where did this come from? It was out of the Blue to me, because I was used to doing acoustic message oriented music. To me it was out of the blue, but it was right in step with the times.
Dion: The funny part about it. It’s really funny. I’m doing a showcase on this album in New York, so I was like, I got the guitar, and I was thinking about what strings to put on it, and how I’m going to do this, and I’m running over some songs. Now if you sat in the house with me, in my studio, and I sang Abraham, Martin and John, and I sang, I Let My Baby Do That, and then I sang Ruby Baby, it sounds like Dion music. It’s seamless, the blues, it seems seamless. It’s just the production and the window trimmings that sound very different. I did an album with Phil Spector, and I went from that album to doing an album with Michael Omartian, and Steve Barry, and it sounded like two different people, but if I sang songs off both those albums, it would just be like Dion music. It’s funny. I tried different stuff. When some producers wanted to produce me I said yeah, let’s go. So I sang over what some of them were doing. Some of them I had a hand in creating some of the stuff. Especially the early stuff. I did it all.
Blueswax: What connection do you see between Blues and Gospel?
Dion: A lot of Blues music seems like it’s moving away from God, or the center, and Gospel music is moving towards it. It’s embracing a higher reality. When you look a little closer, the way that I define it or explain it, is that the Blues is the naked cry of the human heart, apart from God. People are searching for union with God. They’re searching to be home. There’s something in people that seek this union with their creator. Why am I here? Where am I going? What’s it all about? Who am I? All this kind of stuff, but the Blues is a beautiful art form. It’s incredible that you could express such a wide range of feelings. You could use it to sell hamburgers or cars, or to cry out in sorrow, or joy. You could express yourself totally within the Blues. So there’s some kind of connection, but if you ask me exactly what it is, I think that it all comes out of the same place, so to speak. What do you think?
Blueswax: I have a friend who wrote a book about Gospel Music and it’s roots. His name is Robert Darden, and the book title is “People Get Ready – A New History Of Black Gospel Music”. In it he traces the music back to it’s African roots and presents verifiable evidence that demonstrates how the music evolved over a five hundred year period. It was always spiritual, even when it dealt with the mundane and ordinary aspects of life. The actual differentiation that we see today didn’t start come about until after the Civil War. Many Blues artists also play Gospel, and some songs even have interchangeable lyrics depending on the context. Sometimes Blues artists would begin the concert with a Gospel song, which was explained to me as giving one to the Lord. It was like the first fruits, or tithe, and through it the entire concert was dedicated to the Lord.
Dion: That’s the human experience. I was talking to my priest the other day, and I said, what do you think of this music? And he said, well you’d have to be comfortable singing it in front of the Lord. I said, I’m uncomfortable playing it for you, what do you mean singing in front of the Lord (laughter). I approach it like an art form to capture it, with integrity. To be authentic in it, and not approach it with any agenda. Because we all get the blues. You don’t have to be walking on the streets of Mississippi in the thirties to have the blues. Although that will help. We’ve all felt betrayed and abandoned. It’s all part of the human experience. I always say that it’s the naked cry of the human heart apart from God, because we lost that connection in the garden. People sometimes don’t know it, but they’re looking, and sometimes it comes out in sexual metaphors. I think that the higher reality of it is that everyone is looking to get there, get that connection. I love it. For some reason I guess when I first heard this kind of music, it did something to me. I wrote a song called, Born To Cry, when I was about sixteen. When I look back on that song, in fact the group called “The Hives” do it. They end their concert with it on a couple of videos. They’re a popular group now. What inspired me to write it was that I was in a synagogue, so I heard a guy cantoring. You know going, criiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie….. So I wrote this song called Born To Cryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, doing like a cantor. The last verse goes, “I know someday, and maybe soon, the master will call, and I’ll tell you something, I won’t cry at all. Until it happens friends I’ll sail with the tide, and I know that I was born to cry.” It’s like I’m a sixteen year old kid, and I wasn’t writing about cars or girls, but I was talking about the world we’re living in. What I was seeing. When I look back on it I go, wow, where was I?
Blueswax: That is very heavy for a sixteen year old.
Dion: Yeah, even back then you feel that pull, that urging to either fight it, or embrace it. To move towards it, or move away from it, but it shows you that there’s a center. If you’re moving away from it, or moving towards it, at least you know that there’s a center. Both prove there is a God. So that’s what I see in it, and some of the Blues artists have a hard time singing this, so that sometimes they give it up and they start doing Gospel music. Which I did, I had about five Gospel albums out.
Blueswax: I remember when you did. It was another change.
Dion: Music tided me over, in a lot of cases, where was just like a prayer. It pulled me forward and upward. It soothed my soul.
Blueswax: I’d like you to talk a little about the instruments that you used on “Bronx In Blue”. Why did you use an acoustic guitar on all the songs, and no electric?
Dion: I don’t know. I just brought a couple of guitars to the studio, and I ended up doing all the songs with those particular guitars. You know what it is about an acoustic instrument? When it’s sitting on your knee, or on your lap, it plays into your gut, and an electric guitar doesn’t, it comes out of a speaker. An acoustic guitar makes your whole body resonate. To do some of these songs, I think that the acoustic guitar works better for them. I play a telecaster when I do my shows.
Blueswax: When are you going to be doing some shows.
Dion: I’m doing a “House Of Blues” on December 17, up in Atlantic City. I’m going to be showcasing this album in New York, on January 9, at Joe’s Pub, and another place that eludes me right now.
Blueswax: We have the second largest Blues Festival in the country here in Portland, Oregon, on the West Coast. You should come play here next summer.
Dion: That’s beautiful country, isn’t it?
Blueswax: Yeah, that’s why I live here.
Dion: Where are you from?
Blueswax: I’m originally from Detroit, Michigan, but I lived in Los Angeles for eleven years before I came up here in the 1980’s.
Dion: Do you know Jack Hayford?
Blueswax: Yeah. He was President of the Bible College I graduated from, and is the denomination’s President today.
Dion: There’s a beautiful guy. I love listening to him. There’s a guy who can bridge it for you. It’s guys like that who were my foundation too. Remember Ogilvie, Swindell, Chuck Smith and all those guys. I went to Israel with Chuck Smith and Greg Laurie back in the early 80’s.
Blueswax: I used to go to Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, where Smith was Pastor, for their concerts, back in the 70’s, when Jesus Rock was just beginning there. The church that I was involved in from 1971 – 1980 was first pastored by one of Smith’s friends, and we’d bring speakers and musicians from Calvary Chapel for services.
Dion: Wow! You were there in seventy-one?
Blueswax: Yeah. I moved out to L.A. in June 1971.
Dion: When did you first embrace Christianity?
Blueswax: The week after I first moved to L.A..
Dion: So you know Greg Laurie.
Blueswax: I’ve heard him speak, but I’ve never met him.
Dion: He’s a good friend. Also Richie Furray, who became a Calvary Chapel Pastor, is a good friend of mine, up in Boulder, Colorado.
Blueswax: Yeah, he started putting out Jesus Rock albums, after leaving “Poco”, the group he helped form after “Buffalo Springfield”.
Dion: I wouldn’t be where I’m at today if it wasn’t for Calvary Chapel. It was a real blessing the way that Chuck taught, and still does.
Blueswax: A lot of the musicians had a lot of influence as well. Did you know Chuck Girard, who had a group called “Love Song” back then?
Dion: I dont know him too well, but I’m going to mention some people that I know down there. There was Michelle Pollard, Kelly Willard, Bob Bennett, and many others.
Blueswax: I remember Kelly Willard. Did you know Tom Stipe? He used to lead the Saturday Night concerts at Calvary Chapel.
Dion: Yeah, but not well. You really stepped into it when you asked me what does it mean in my life. You can see how passionate I am about it. I just love the church, and I love the people in it. It’s changed my whole world view. I’m sure that you would agree with this that it gives you a sense of peace, in spite of everything. Life is tough sometimes. It throws you left’s and right’s, but at least somewhere down in you, you never have to doubt that you’re connected. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Blueswax: Hey! We’re supposed to be the one’s asking the questions. Let’s talk a little about the Blues again.
Dion: A lot of artists, they die, never coming to the knowledge of the truth, or they die never appropriating, or understanding their own message. They’re trying to preach truth and freedom, which rock & rollers pride themselves on. We’re all about, hey, I got the truth, and we’re all free. Turn up the amps.
Blueswax: That’s like U2 singing about three chords and the truth.
Dion: He’s pretty cool, Bono. He’s got a good foundation. He’s a believer.
Blueswax: He does a lot of good with helping to relieve the third world’s debt load to the industrialized West. Another thing that I wanted to know your views about is the period of the 1960’s, especially from a 21st century point of view. How do you see it today?
Dion: With all the drugs and the sex revolution, and all that kind of stuff? I don’t see that as freedom anymore, at all. It was so surface. In fact I was talking to my wife about it, because I’ve been married for forty-two years. I’ve known Susan for like fifty years. But I was saying, you know, I never learned this in the Bronx. I never learned what John Paul taught about the theology of the body, because Christ came in the flesh, and how sacred and the beauty of life, and how to see a woman, and what covenant is, self donation. It’s not a contract to be taken lightly. So the way I see it is that the music was fabulous. The expression. There were so many good things, but like I said, it was like an honest cry of desperation. I think deep down it was on the wrong premise. How do you see it?
Blueswax: I think that all the drugs, ideas, art, music and politics finally culminated in a tremendous interest in religion that the Jesus movement was part of. It was a religious revolution that swept us both up.
Dion: We were all hungry, but you and I really came into the banquet. We didn’t walk away with a pretzel and a soda.
Blueswax: When I look back on that time period I see searching and hunger, but I also see a lot of attempts to fill the void. Take Woodstock as an example. It was thoroughly documented, and the film is a record of the peak of all that energy. I like to watch the movie every so many years, because each time I see it, I look at it differently. I see something brand new, especially when I watch it with my kids. I begin to see how this transition period, where we become adults includes our searching for spiritual answers. So we have a record of this search, for the baby boomer generation, with all these people in the film searching. They were looking for answers.
Dion: I have kind of a like a very joyous feeling down inside me, that I could participate in passing on, or pointing to the guys who blessed my life so much. Like Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Hank Williams, and Jimmy Reed, who were the cause for me getting into this business, and loving music, and moving me and stirring me, and learning about life just listening to them. Just listening to their songs, like Hank Williams. As a ten year old listening to Be Careful Of Stones That You Throw, or The Funeral, or The Pictures From Life’s Other Side. I feel very joyful that I could be part of passing that on in some small way in the chain, and saying these guys were great artists, and gifted, without judging, because I didn’t know them. I never met a lot of them, I just listened to their records, you know? They were the masters, and the foundation for a lot of the music that we listened to, and they grabbed it right out of the air. I feel like I’m paying tribute in a way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu2EBYyPns0
Blueswax: The thing that I found very interesting when I was reading Robert Dardens book on the History of Black Gospel Music, in relation to your comment about grabbing it out of the air, was really brought to home for me, when I was watching Martin Scorsesee’s Blues series on PBS. In them both, the roots of Black music are traced back to their source in Africa. Many of the riffs that we associate with Blues or Gospel are in actuality ancient folk melodies. The lyrics and song structures have evolved, but they are still identifiable in the villages that they originated from. So the slaves were playing their music, and it evolved over five-hundred years into today’s Blues, Gospel, jazz and even rock & roll.
Dion: Something very strange happened to me, just this week. I gave a girl all the lyrics that I sang, because I hand wrote them to remember, and I said could you print these up for me. When she faxed them back to me, she said, Dion, what you’re singing isn’t on these sheets. She said, like look at Crossroads. What are you singing? Some of them I just blew up the lyrics on a copier, like from the Robert Johnson album. She said, you’re not singing anything on here. I sang a couple of verses, but I didn’t realize that I’m so used to improvising over the years that I was writing verses and putting stuff in it. Especially with Crossroads. In fact if you go on the “Bronx In Blue” website, there is a painting I did of Robert Johnson, it’s life size. It’s sitting in my den. It’s on there. I explored the spiritual aspect of that song, because he does say that I’m going to the crossroads and I fall down on my knees, and I ask the Lord above have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please. So I said, there’s this whole myth about him selling his soul to the devil, but the crossroads is kind of a mystery.
Blueswax: As I was listening to “Bronx In Blue” the first time, and your version of Crossroads came on, I didn’t recognize it. Then I realized what it was, and as I asked myself why it sounded different, I realized that it was because it was a different version than what I’m used to hearing. The song is usually sung as a cry of pain. Your version was sung more like a Gospel song than Blues, but that’s just my opinion, and others may disagree. It wasn’t just the lyrics, but the way that you played it.
Dion: That’s interesting that you said that, because I need to hear that from you, because I don’t know what I’m doing sometimes. It’s interesting to hear feedback from the ears that it falls on.
Blueswax: To me it sounds different than the other versions of Crossroads that I’ve heard over the years. It doesn’t express the same kind of pain that the other ones do. If I listen to “Creams” crossroads as an example I can see a pact being made with the devil, but when I listen to yours I hear a prayer being lifted up to the Lord. The same emotion is expressed, but the direction is changed. It would make a good song to play during an alter call, where people are coming forward to give their lives to God. To me it’s a different version of the song, not only in the lyric changes, but in the actual strumming of the guitar.
Dion: That’s interesting that you see it that way. I just thought of myself playing crossroads. I never thought anything more of it. Maybe it comes out a certain way, because of who we are. Just like the way that things come out when you write. It’s like there’s an unwritten verse, and that’s you. It’s like the person doing it. It’s like the invisible verse.
Blueswax: You made the song yours. It was natural to do what you did. You didn’t have to force anything. It just flowed out of your spirit.
Dion: But it’s funny, you sit in a room with a guitar and you know the song chorus and you start playing it. You’re not listening to anybody to do it, you’re just doing it. So you go into a studio and you do it. I don’t remember the “Creams” version actually, I really don’t, and I don’t remember Robert Johnson’s. I met a guy from Acoustic magazine and he said, “you don’t do that thing that Robert Johnson does. He does that – ‘dhown, dhown’, on the guitar”, and I said, I guess not. But I don’t remember it. But it’s a great song, and a great song is a great song. Everyday we’re at the crossroads making decisions.
Blueswax: Are there any of the new artists that you listen to that are part of the new music out there?
Dion: I do listen to Sheryl Crow. I’ve gotten to the point now that I’m buying a lot of old albums. Like I’m going back. I used to stay up with the young groups. All the two guitars, bass and drum groups. Like “Little Steven and the Underground Garage” but I’ve stopped, in a sense. Maybe that’s why this album is part of where I’m at. Like revisiting, and taking a trip through my life, and seeing all the music that influenced me. I always very much a Bob Dylan fan. I thought that he was a great writer. Some of the people that love Blues like I love Blues, like John Hammond and Rory Block, I’m friends with them. I like listening to Buddy Guy, and I went up to see Delbert McClinton the other night, and Springsteen a couple of weeks ago. Little Steven used to play in my band, we go way back.
Blueswax: What time period was that?
Dion: In the seventies he was with me.
Blueswax: Was it just before the Gospel albums?
Dion: Actually just before that, and after that, and we’ve been friends ever since. We’ve been friends since the early seventies, I’d say. But I kind of went back to my roots and pulled out all my Blues CD’s and bought some new one’s. So I’ve been listening to that. I’ve been listening to all the stuff that I grew up on, and it’s kind of like, hey I remember this. It’s kind of nice to revisit, you know. So I’ve been doing that lately.
Blueswax: Do you like any rap music?
Dion: I listen a guy like M&M and I know he’s talented, and I hear what they’re talking about, maybe I don’t get it, but I know something is going on there. It’s not fake. You know what I mean? I can appreciate it, but I don’t have to know how to do it. Like a lot of Jazz artists that I listen to. Basically I’ve always loved Blues, Rock & Roll and Country, and everything in that area. I’ve always loved music that I knew there was a person behind the lyric. Somebody that was expressing something. It could be all kinds of people and all different approaches, but there was a person behind the music. Like Merle Haggard and Joan Baez, even though they were so different, I knew somebody was saying something there. Maybe singer songwriters, because of the sixties. I’ve always appreciated Jackson Brown and Bob Seeger. I mean, even though they were like grandchildren to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj6EndhnGKM
