Interview: Dion and Girl Friends

Dion DiMucci

Interview: Dion and Girl Friends

By Nick Cristiano

The inspiration for Dion DiMucci’s terrific new album, Girl Friends, came from some of the work he did on his previous two.

“I had such fun working with Rickie Lee Jones and Samantha Fish – what a blessing she is,” the 84-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer says from his home in Florida. They were among the female artists who joined him on either 2020’s Blues With Friends or 2021’s Stomping Ground, star-laden affairs that also included Marcia Ball, Patti Scialfa, and Rory Block.

“For some reason, they walk into a room and the atmosphere changes,” Dion says of his female collaborators. “A friend of mine called it ‘the feminine genius,’ and I thought, that’s it, I’m doing an album.”

Girl Friends follows the framework of Blues With Friends and Stomping Ground. It features all new songs – in this case 12 – with Dion again working with co-writer Mike Aquilante and producer and multi-instrumentalist Wayne Hood, and it’s on Joe Bonamassa’s KTBA Records. There is at least one guest on each track, and they range from old friends like Christine Ohlman and Rory Block down through Susan Tedeschi, Sue Foley, and Shemekia Copeland, and on to Danielle Nicole and Joanne Shaw Taylor. It’s a robust set that exudes a lot of the old Bronx swagger that “The Wanderer” himself, still in peak vocal and writing form, has long been known for. (As he puts it in the set opener “Soul Force,” with Tedeschi crushing the lead guitar, “My trademark is my New York City charms.”)

“I know how to make a great record, always did,” says the singer whose life is the subject of a musical going to Broadway in October. “Ever since I listened to Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed, my whole life is to put together a song to take [listeners] to the same place Jimmy Reed and Hank Williams took me. It’s an enchantment.

“So I record the song, and I’m driving around in my truck listening to it, and I let the spirit kind of come to me as to who’s going to be on it. When I wrote ‘Dancing Girl’ [on Stomping Ground], I heard Mark Knopfler on it immediately, as I was writing it.”

In some cases, the guests also pushed him to places he didn’t expect to go. One of them was Ohlman, the onetime singer for the Saturday Night Live band who is the only one to appear on two tracks: “Do Ladies Get the Blues” (with Debbie Davies on lead guitar) and “Sugar Daddy.”

“She’s just so steeped in rhythm and blues,” Dion says of his fellow Bronx native. “You give her a song and she has the ability to get right inside it and create stuff. Like on ‘Sugar Daddy.’ This is the wonderful thing about asking a great artist to contribute to a song you wrote, because they come up with something that’s not on my radar at all.” (The song also contains a line that succinctly describes Dion right now: “I’m old school, baby, but I still got it going on.”)

Maggie Rose was another one. She duets on the acoustic-textured midtempo ballad “I Got Wise,” one of the album’s more somber moments. “She kills it, she was so good,” says Dion, adding that he ended up not singing as much of it as he had planned.

He had Danielle Nicole, formerly of Trampled Under Foot, pegged for “I Aim to Please.” “I wrote that basically like a ‘Shame, ‘Shame, Same,’ Jimmy Reed, or ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers.’ I always loved that feel. She couldn’t sing in my key; she could sing either high or she could sing low. We took a couple of passes in the low register. … I said, sing high, it will give it more contrast. Well, she brought so much energy to the song that I started changing the track, the band started playing differently. It got a little more forceful. If you listen to that song, I get higher in the second verse and higher in the third. She’s pushing me. Because if I came in the way I perceived the song and I sang the last verse the way I wrote it, it would have sounded like I was sleeping!

“One of the great things about doing an album like this is the surprises. I like to go with those things. They’re some of the best things that happen.”

Much of the album features such male-female jousting, and it can get pretty intense, as on “Don’t You Want a Man Like Me” with Rory Block.

“We did that song,” Dion recalls with a laugh, “and after we finished it, it reminded me of When Harry Met Sally, the restaurant scene. … We got so into it, her husband came over and said [conspiratorially], ‘Don’t play this for your wife.’”

One number that deviates from that vibe is “An American Hero,” which evokes Dion’s 1968 folk-rock hit “Abraham, Martin, and John” It’s the one time where he’s consciously trying to make a statement and it underscores how he has always been as much about heart as attitude.

“Look what’s going on in the country,” he says. “I thought, I got to write a song for the everyday man. … Be your own hero, to your wife, to your kids, to your friends, to the people you work with. If everybody could do that, it would be a better world. … Don’t look to cable news, or politicians, or Hollywood, or to tabloids or the Grammys. You’ve got to look inside your own heart.”

He sings “An American Hero” with Carlene Carter, whom he’s been a fan of since her days as “a punk-country singer,” seeing her at New York’s Bottom Line with her stepfather Johnny Cash and mother June Carter seated up front.

“You know, the Carter Family was so down to earth, they came out of the earth, so I thought she’d be perfect for the song. And she got it. She was on board with it.”

Staying true to his goal to serve the song at all costs, Dion also enlisted two artists not well known outside his home turf in Florida. Singer Valerie Tyson joins him on the rollicking “Stop Drop and Roll,” and Randi Fishenfeld displays her dazzling violin chops on the country-flavored “Endless Highway.”

“My record company was saying, get some names for Girl Friends,” Dion says. “But like I said, the song is the most important thing. I follow my heart and my mind and my spirit.” (He did try to recruit good friend Bonnie Raitt as well as Chrissie Hynde and Cyndi Lauper, but they were unavailable.)

Dion was speaking just a few days after the 65th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson). Dion was on that tour, and he easily could have been on that plane. In 2009, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recorded a video interview with him about that time. He says the session was “very cathartic,” and it’s a must-see.

“That plane crash with those wonderful, beautiful guys affected my life in a very deep way on a lot of levels,” he says. “They just enriched my life. I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing without their encouragement. I want to make them proud … that I carried the torch. Great guys, great brothers, great friends. I miss them.”

Not only is he carrying that torch as the last surviving star of that first rock-and-roll generation, but he’s doing it while remaining a prolific creative force, one who is still singing in close to his original keys, and one who remains determined not to lean on past glories like “The Wanderer” or “Runaround Sue” or his doo-wop hits with the Belmonts.

“The last three albums, they’re the best songs I’ve written in my life,” he declares. “This morning, I woke up hearing about a good friend, Toby Keith, who died at 62, and I’m thankful, wow, I’m so happy I’ve lived this long to be able to write all these songs in the last four years, make all these new friends, and do all this great music that I’m doing. I didn’t think I would make it out of my 20s the way I was living.

“Wherever the spirit leads, I just want to make the best record possible. I just want to transfer that feeling to people. I want to take them on a trip. It can’t be false. It has to be a record that can’t be denied.

“If it don’t come from the heart, it’s not going to get to the heart.”

Listen to “Soul Force” with Susan Tedeschi HERE