How Was This Ever Thought To Be Rubbish?

In 1975 Phil Spector decided that he was the person who could revive the flagging career of Dion DiMucci. At the time Dion was thrilled to be working with one of his heroes but by the time it was completed he all but disowned the album saying " it was basically Phil's album". The decision not even to release the album in the US and it's negligible impact in the UK can't have boosted Dion's confidence on the release either.

However listened to now, it is an absolutely astounding album where Spector's production shines but does not overwhelm DiMucci's vocals and the whole thing could sit proudly beside the best works of Scott Walker and Brian Wilson.

The song Born To Be With You is actually a cover having been a top ten hit both sides of the Atlantic in 1956. The Spector/DiMucci version although heavily produced, who would expect anything else of Spector, is an incredibly beautiful track which is interspersed with just the right amount of sax courtesy of Nino Tempo. I'm sure that Bobby Gillespie had been listening to this when he wrote Sometimes I Get So Lonely, well in my head anyway.

Dion - Born To Be With You

King Of The New York Streets

One of the best things about working in a pub is that you get to discuss the important things in life with all sorts of different types of people,  you know the type of things politics, sport, religion and music.

The last pub that I worked in had a very mixed clientele,  from people who were just having their first ever illegal/legal alcoholic beverage to those you wouldn't bet on it not being the last half they ever had. This meant that a hell of a lot of different views on the important matters of the day were expressed and I usually had an opinion on most of these, however I used to hold my own council when it came to golf as to me it was and still is the most pointless game in existence, where people with the most terrible fashion sense, arcane ideas all met of a Saturday or Sunday to try out do each other in the sport of social climbing.

As the pub had a high contingent of golfers I learned early on that they did not take too kindly to being called chauvinist dinosaurs and that the course that they played on belonged to the people of the town and not their elite band of not so merry men.

I will get to the point of the post now. On a Saturday evening a group of these guys would come in after a hard afternoon hitting a ball on a course that they would never stop telling anybody who cared was actually an Open qualifying course. They would have a few drinks, try to chat up any young ladies in the pub and then saunter home where they would expect their dinner to be on the table when they arrived.

One of the guys in this crowd would be forever telling me of how fabulous Daryl Hall and John Oates were and how "seriously, you need to listen to them they are amazing" to which I would always reply that I would rather have tinnitus than have to endure any more of I Can't Go For That or whatever else they sang. But the guy just didn't give up and one Saturday night he came in with a tape for me full of Hall & Oats, Luther Vandross and more of the like, for which I politely thanked him and put the cassette behind the bar.

The next day I came into the pub for a drink and S asked me if I had listened to the tape, I said no as I had left it behind the night before and again I got hit with the "seriously. you need to listen to it".

That night when I got home I decided out of courtesy and realising that I would get my heid nipped until I did, I  listened to the tape and as I suspected it was dross apart from one tune which I thought was brilliant, I checked the track listing which said the track was by Dion. I thought to myself this can't be the same guy who recorded The Wanderer and Runaround Sue, surely he must be dead by now.

The next Saturday when the golfers came in I had to ask S, who this other Dion was, as this was pre-internet days and therefore I wasn't able to find anything out about the track. S went into the history of the artist and the track at great length, it was indeed Dion DiMucci, of Dion and the Belmonts and the singer behind the Wanderer etc and the track came from the 1989 comeback album Yo Frankie.

That, those of you have bothered to read this far is the convoluted story of how I discovered this great track from a rather good album.

Dion - King Of The New York Streets.