He's the type of guy who will never settle down. They call him The Wanderer. Yeah, The Wanderer. He roams around and around and around and around.

That's pretty much everything we know about Dion. Sure, we could tell you a few things about his gal Runaround Sue (she goes out with other guys -- you better keep away). But as for Dion DiMucci himself, we're sadly uninformed. In fact, we didn't even know his last name was DiMucci until now. We had to look it up. That's how bad it is.

Truth is, we never thought there was much to know about Dion. To us, he was just another two-hit wonder from the '50s whose songs turn up in bad old movies where girls in poodle skirts hang out at the malt shop and guys drag-race down Main Street after the prom.

Turns out there's more to Dion than that. As the new three-CD set King of the New York Streets makes clear, DiMucci's career extends far beyond the American Graffiti era -- both in terms of his own work (he continues to record to this day) and his influence on other artists from Bruce Springsteen to Billy Joel, who have spent years trying to duplicate the flawless simplicity and timeless perfection of Runaround Sue and The Wanderer.

Those songs and that sound grew out of the close doo-wop harmonies the young DiMucci honed on the streetcorners of the Bronx with the childhood pals who became his backing combo The Belmonts. As Disc 1 tells us, the group issued a slate of servicable but uninspired cuts (A Teenager in Love, Where or When) before capturing lightning in a bottle with Sue and Wanderer in 1961. They never managed to rekindle that spark, although lesser hits like Ruby Baby and Donna the Prima Donna kept The Belmonts popular until The Beatles came along and killed doo-wop.

But as Disc 2 informs us, Dion kept going, transforming into a Dylanesque troubadour, recording mellow acoustic versions of Purple Haze and Abraham, Martin and John -- and, surprisingly, picking up a nasty heroin habit. Even stranger, he chronicled his (eventually successful) battle with addiction on a tune called Your Own Backyard, a frank folk confessional ("My idea of having a good time was sitting with my head between my knees") that serves as the set's centrepiece and the best evidence here that Dion still had something to say after the '50s.

Unfortunately, Disc 3 proves it's been mostly downhill since then. Like a lot of '50s and '60s stars, Dion struggled through the '70s and '80s, penning the occasionally great number that nobody heard (the nostalgic Midtown American Main Street Gang) along with clunkers nobody should have heard (Guitar Queen, a Johnny B. Goode-style ode to Bonnie Raitt), covering tracks that just weren't his style (Tom Waits' Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night) and generally being too old to be cool but unwilling to quit. Since being inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in '89, Dion's enjoyed a resurgence by covering Springsteen tracks like Book of Dreams and If I Should Fall Behind and enlisting young bucks like Dictators guitarist Scott (Top Ten) Kempner to beef up his band.

Sure, it's still a long way from The Wanderer, but you gotta give Dion credit. Four decades after The Wanderer, he still hasn't settled down.

Friday, February 16, 2001

Box set shows range of Dion