Dion DiMucci - The Wanderer Checks In

Dion DiMucci – The Wanderer Checks In

The Wanderer – Dion’s Story (Beech Tree Books, William Morrow Press, NY, 1988)


If you remember the Sixties they say, then you weren’t there. It’s a cliché that holds true, at least in part for Dion DiMucci.

The Wanderer, who is still married to his high school sweetheart, Runaround Sue, is still wandering and playing rock & roll, but the wonder years are a thing of the past, and mostly a blur in his memory banks that were shortcircuited by booze and drugs.

Dion, who had ten songs in the top ten charts in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, hasn’t had a drink or a taste of drugs since April 1, 1968, and hasn’t had a hit song since then either. He’s a survivor however, and he’s lived to tell the story of the heydays of rock & roll, at least what he remembers of them.

I caught up with Dion at the Island Highroller longe, just off the Sands casino floor, shortly after a Labor Day weekend performance. Most people didn’t recognize him since he was wearing a baseball hat instead of his trademark floppy Andy cap. The Papparazi Queen noticed him though, tugged my arm and said, “There’s Dion over by the jukebox.”

Dion and the Belmonts – Dion’s original group of singers included Freddie Milano, Angelo D’Aleo and Carlo Mastrangelo, all kids from the hood – which in his case was centered around the corner of Crotona Avenue and 187th Street, near Belmont Avenue in the Bronx.
They fused a motley conglamoration of R&B, country, side walk acapella and doo-wop into a new stream of rock & roll. While most of the Belmonts drifted off into a jazzy acapella realm, Dion stuck with rock & roll.

Since I had him cornered I went up to the Juke Box and put some more money in and he looked at me as if to see if I wanted to fight, and then smiled. I introduced myself and he asked us to join them at his table.

Asked how it differs today from touring in the early days of rock & roll Dion said, “I think it’s difficult, sometimes for the later generations of rockers to appreciate a time when there were no rules, no expectations, no luxury busses, no stage monitors. We were just a bunch of street singers who were regarded by society as degenerate infidels, one small step away from jail or the gutter, you know? But it was a lot of fun because it was a very creative time. Rock & roll didn’t exist, since we were making it up as we went along. And it was very cool traveling with guys like Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly.”

He’s been on the road since he was 14 years old, playing honkeytonks, roadhouses, school auditoriums, arenas, concert halls and casinos. He was Bobby Daren’s roommate on one tour, and was with Buddy Holly, Frankie Vallens and the Big Bopper when they decided to get off the bus and rent a plane, but Dion didn’t have the $38 a seat.

“It was sub-zero degree weather and we didn’t have those beautiful luxury converted touring buses that we have today,” he recalls. “It was just a school bus, and we slept in the luggage racks, and it kept breaking down. I was supposed to be on the plane, we were recruiting people, the more people the less the fare would be, and when I found out it was $38, I bowed out. My parents were paying $38 a month rent in New York City at the time, and it was a lot of money.”

“I was baffeled. I was 19 at the tiem, Februray 1959, and we were riding on top of the world at the time, and the rug was pulled out from under me.”

Like Runaround Sue, there really was a Wanderer, a guy by the name of Jackie Burns. “He was a real character,” Dion explained, “a real guy with a lot of swagger. He had Flo tattooed on his left arm. When he broke up with Flo, he had it covered with a panther,” and he kept going until he had to cover them all with a battleship. “I like writing about strong characters,” Dion quipped.

Besides a 1987 tribute concert at Madison Square Garden that featured Billy Joel, Paul Simon and Bruce, and a tribute album that features Brian Adams, Phil Spector and Patti Smyth, getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was his biggest thrill. “That meant a lot to me. It was a great night. I was inducted with Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, the Temps and Otis Redding.”

“And to look out into the audience and see Sprigsteen, Bob Seeger, Paul Simon – they came there to honor me. It was a wonderful feeling.”

Does he ever get tired of the old songs? “Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. You’d think I’d be tired of them, but those particular songs, those hit records have become more valuable to me as time moves on. They mean more to mean, and I think they mean more to the people that come and see our shows. I see the response. We hold these songs in a very fond place in our hearts and I enjoy singing them today.”

I had bought a copy of his book at the concert, so I asked him if he would sign my copy of his book, and he was happy to oblige.

After telling him that “Runaround Sue” was one of the most popular songs on the Anchorage Tavern jukebox he looked up at me and smiled before writing, “To Bill Kelly and the gang at the Anchorage – Dion,”

He then wrote down September, and looked up and asked, “What year is this again?”

The Wanderer – Dion’s Story (Beech Tree Books, William Morrow Press, NY, 1988)

[Bill Kelly – billkelly3@gmail.com]

Tony Summers' The Eleventh Day

Tony and Robbyn Summers' new book - The Eleventh Day - The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden will be out on July 19, and excerpted in the August issue of Vanity Fair.

Synopsis

September 11 2001 is a date no-one can forget. On that day, the largest terrorist attack the world had ever seen sent two passenger aircraft crashing into New York's famous twin towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, believed to be headed for the White House, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Three thousand people lost their lives that day. And the world changed forever. The consequences of those attacks have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century. The world is a less safe place because of them. War in Afghanistan and Iraq followed. Thousands more have now died. But what exactly happened on that day ten years ago? Reports have been written and dismissed. Conspiracy theories abound. This book has been four years in the writing. Leading investigative writer, Anthony Summers has pored through thousands of documents, hundreds of hours of interviews, and examined all possible testimony and evidence to produce this definitive history of what really happened on that tragic day.

On Sale: July 19, 2011

Writing with access to thousands of recently released official documents, fresh interviews, and the perspective that can come only from a decade of research and reflection, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan deliver the first panoramic, authoritative look back at 9/11.For most living Americans, September 11, 2001, is the darkest date in the nation's history. What exactly happened? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved? What is certain: Discord and dissent continue to this day.


Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and introduces the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the ground. Drawing on previously classified records and raw transcripts, Summers and Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, as a counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 truth" movement. With meticulous research, they examine the personalities of the men behind the onslaught, analyze the motives that drove them, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward—without good evidence—the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the question the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in another foreign nation—one the U.S. had long viewed as a friend?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal event in our history.

September 11, 2001 is the darkest date in the memory of most people alive in the West today. The day ten years on when Osama bin Laden was killed was one of jublilation in the United States, yet uncertainty about what may come in the future.

What exactly happened on 9/11? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved?

Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and follows the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the gound. Drawing on previously unreleased records and raw transcripts, Anthony Summers and his co-author Robbyn Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, by counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 Truth" movement. They analyze the motives that drove the men behind the onslaught, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward - without good evidence - the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the questions the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in other foreign nations - including some that have long been treated as friends?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal episode in our history.

Anthony Summers - Home

Bestselling biographer and journalist Anthony Summers has covered the pivotal stories of the past hundred years, and in many cases forced a rethink.

He has reported onthe conflict in the Middle East; the Vietnam War; the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations; Watergate; the rise and fall of the American Mafia; the Hiss and Profumo espionage cases. He has explored the lives and deaths of the powerful and the famous: from Tsar Nicholas II to Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Now in 2011 he brings the sharpest focus yet to a full account of 9/11, the events that led up to it, and the troubling questions that remain.

Somers Point Ghost House

Somers Avenue, Somers Point (NJ) Ghost House

Gregory Young and other people who have lived in the old house thought they were going crazy, or at least some crazy things were happening to them.

The house on Somers Avenue in Somers Point doesn’t stand out among the other quaint bayside cottages, but what happens inside has spooked residents and visitors alike.

When the current residents began to experience some unlikely events, and began to think the house was haunted, they learned that a previous owner thought so to, and even wrote a book about it, that’s now a series of books.

Gregory Young’s “A Father, A Son and A House Full of Ghosts” was first published a few years ago, but since that was published, he’s also written, Book II, “the continuation of a true story of the paranormal events that a father and son experienced after purchasing a house which was occupied by ghosts.”

And now we have book III to complete the trilogy, and compliment his other books, “Kindred Emotions: Quotes of Wisdom,” “10 Holiday Plays for 4th,5th and th Graders” and “Over 100 Reasons Why Men Should Never Marry,” all privately published and available from Jetty Books (http://www.jettybooks.com/events.htm) or Infinity Publishers (http://www.buybooksontheweb.com/peek.aspx?id=3329).

The strange events began when he first bought the house in 2000 and began renovating it. As the bizarre occurrences began to add up, he investigated, and learned more of the history of the 100 year old house and who had previously lived there. Giving the accounts of others as well as his own experiences and those of his son, his books document the events while he speculates on the possibility of reincarnation and of angels watching over us.

As Gregory Young puts it, “The unexplainable occurrences in this house were happening more and more frequently. I couldn’t go on living like this. No matter where I was, I would be thinking about it. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. None of it made sense. I would tell these stories to people and they would look at me like I was crazy. I Must Be Crazy. They thought something was wrong with me. I began to think it myself. Was I losing my mind? Was this all in my head? Or, was I going through something extraordinary, something so rare and unbelievable that there just isn’t anyone to talk about it with. I was becoming more and more confused. I constantly though about it and I never knew what was going to happen next or when. I needed some answers.”

“The stories were adding up,” says Young. “There was certainly something in this house. There had to be. Both my ten year old son and I were becoming increasingly convinced. This is nothing that I would have ever wanted to expose him to, but he was here a lot of the times when these strange occurrences occurred. He witnessed them too. He could see the fear in my face and hear the panic in my voice. He and I would talk about it and try to come up with explanations, but just couldn’t.”

Lucky for them, the ghosts appear to be friendly, and only play with the electric, appliances and moving inanimate objects about. “With the many strange occurrences that have happened in this house, I don’t remember a time when either one of us were truly scared. It was more a case of being shocked, shocked at what we saw or what had happened. I didn’t have any answers, but I had a lot of questions, and the most formidable question was, is there something living in this house with us?”

Young says he eventually figured out, with the help of psychics, there are at least four ghosts, including Danielle, a fifteen year old African American slave from the 1700s and two mischievous children, Sarah, a four year old girl from the 1920s, and Jonathan, a ten year old boy who died of measles, and is dressed as a Boardwalk Empire extra.

Young has actually seen Agnes, and who hangs out primarily in the kitchen, and based on her behavior, wasn’t too keen on the recent renovations.

“Actually, I’m flattered,” noted Young. “I feel blessed to have such an extraordinary experience happen to me. It was nothing I was looking for, nothing I had planned. I guess I can say I enjoy it. It’s very friendly, nothing mean going on. It’s very good natured.”

“I was documenting all of the occurrences,” said Young. “I just kind of kept quiet and kept moving forward. Then I thought the best way to get this out would just be to write it all. I realized I had a great story here and I decided to publish it.”
With the complaints of strange events by the current occupants of the house and the publication of the latest edition of his book, Young has embarked on a local book tour of the area that includes the Cape May Farmer’s Market (July 12, 19, 26, Aug. 2, 9, 19), Cape May Tomato Festival (Sept. 3) and Jackson St. Fair (Oct. 1), Absecon Historical Society (Oct. 3), the Cape May Lima Bean Festival (Oct. 8) and Atlantic City Teacher’s Convention (Nov. 10-11).