A biography for Dion DiMuccihasn’t been written yet.
“I serve up the hits, and I enjoy doing it.”
“I want to rock till I drop. I love rock and roll music. It keeps you young.”
“A lot of my friends, they think I grew up to rock and roll, but I didn't. I grew up to Hank Williams, Jimmy Reid, Howlin' Wolf, listening to a race record, blues.”
“Songs, to me, have always been kind of like a diary, you know - and, say, when I did 'Teenager In Love,' maybe I was 16.”
“There were a lot of bad relationships that got very convoluted up at Columbia with me, what they expected from me.”
“The form of the blues helps us express our joys, our fears, our - anything you want to express. And it helps you get it out instead of it spiraling inward, and you're getting twisted up and exploding. So it's a bit of salvation.”
“The day I heard Hank Williams for the first time, my life changed.”
“A rock-and-roll group needed a name that fit criteria in three areas: It had to be great for a bowling team; it had to be great for a gang; and it had to be great for a rock-and-roll group. So we called ourselves Dion and the Belmonts.”
“I show rock and rollers how to grow old gracefully.”
“I got one of the best sax players in the business - Arno Hecht. He plays with the Uptown Horns and all the great blues bands. He expresses the heart of the Apollo Theatre, let me tell you.”
“It's hard to explain music when it goes in your gut and makes left and right and turns and moves you and resonates with you.”
“I thought you had to be humble to become a saint, but a priest told me it takes all kinds to make it to heaven.”
“Life is full of awe and grace and truth, mystery and wonder. I live in that atmosphere.”
“When you're a kid, you get all these rules and regulations coming down on your head. You've got a need to be recognized. But as time goes by, this stuff, if it remains, can kill you. The attitude alone can't sustain anyone forever.”
“The point here is that I enjoyed singing. I enjoyed the rhythm of it. I grew up listening to Louis Prima, who was also rhythmic.”
“I was a weird kid. I loved music, and I loved reading about God.”
“I left Columbia in the mid-'60s. I had a guaranteed contract for, like, $100,000 a year. And I just let it go. And I wasn't a rich man. There were a lot of bad vibes around the whole thing.”
“1967 was the bleakest, darkest, most emotional period of my life.”
“I grew up with my parents screaming and yelling at each other for the rent in Bronx, New York City at the time. It was $36. So my mind hadn't stretched out to that place where I could spend a whole month's rent on a 45-minute plane flight to Fargo, N.D.”
“I couldn't wait to get out of school in junior high to get with Willie Green to pick up some of the riffs he knew.”