Dion rocks the blues with Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Rickie Lee Jones and more on new album

Dion DiMucci was a kid from Bronx when in the late ’50s the vocal group Dion and the Belmonts and songs such as “I Wonder Why” and “A Teenager In Love” made him a star of early rock ‘n’ roll.

As a solo artist in the early ’60s, songs such as “Runaround Sue” “The Wanderer” and “Ruby Baby” built a legacy that in time landed Dion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But if you ask Dion why, at 82, his new album “Stomping Ground” continues a recent run of blues-based records, it’s simple, he says.

“That was always the foundation of everything I’ve ever done,” Dion says. “The first song that got me on this road was ‘Honky Tonk Blues’ by Hank Williams. Then I heard Jimmy Reed’s ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do.’

“Which made me want to communicate like Hank Williams and groove like Jimmy Reed, you know,” he says. “So it was always the foundation.”

Of course, that didn’t sway the record companies who released Dion and Belmonts and later Dion albums. They wanted something a bit smoother than the rock built on the blues that Dion loved to perform.

“The record companies were saying, ‘Do one for us, and then you could do one for you,’” Dion says. “So they’d make me do an Al Jolson song, and then I could do ‘Runaround Sue.’ Or make me do a standard, and then I could do ‘The Wanderer.’

“So I’m all over the place,” he says.

On “Stomping Ground,” as with its 2020 predecessor, “Blues With Friends,” Dion is making exactly the kind of music he’s always loved most.

The songs here, like his early solo hits, are almost all cowritten by Dion. And they’re recorded with a host high-profile collaborators, including on the new album artists such as Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Rickie Lee Jones, Boz Scaggs, and Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa.

“Nowadays, what’s happened is people will say to me, ‘You’ve recreated yourself,’” Dion says. “And I say, ‘No, I’ve never created myself in the first place, so I’m not going to recreate myself.’

“I just think I’ve evolved, I’ve developed,” he says. “It’s like an acorn, and now you’re an oak tree. It’s the same DNA.”

Playing with friends

The catalyst for “Blues With Friends” and now “Stomping Ground” was a happy accident, Dion  says.

The blues rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa, a longtime friend, came over to his house not long after Dion had recorded the early versions of 14 bluesy rock songs.

“I played him ‘Blues Coming On,” and he said, ‘I’d love to play on that,’” Dion says. “And when he played on it, I never heard anything like it in my life. I thought I could never think of anything like this.

“He maybe made me very aware of how limited I am with putting window trimmings on anything I write or produce, like a record,” he says.

In a way, it reminded him of how his best songs had always been made better by a musical contribution here or there.

“I did ‘The Wanderer,’ Buddy Lucas stepped up to the mic and played that (tenor sax) solo,” Dion says. “It’s the same kind of deal. You’re getting a great artist contributing what they hear in the song, and they’re playing what they’re hearing, not what I’m hearing.”

“Blues With Friends” eventually paired Dion with artists such as Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Jeff Beck, and Brian Setzer of Stray Cats. And Bob Dylan wrote the liner notes.

“Stomping Ground” wasn’t intended to be “Blues With Friends Part II,” but Dion says as he listened to the rough tracks while driving in his car, in his mind he could hear how different artists might sound in the mix.

“On the way home, again I’m thinking, ‘Wow, you know Eric Clapton would rock this thing, man, or Mark, I hear Mark Knopfler on this song, nobody else. So it started up again.”

This time, Pete Townshend of the Who did the liner notes, though Dion wrote an introduction in which he speaks of finding more satisfaction in making music with with old and new friends than he did as a young man seeking fame and fortune.

“It’s a great thing, making great music and making friends, you know?” he says. “I thought, ‘Man, I’m pretty fortunate to get to do this.’”

Mix and match

Many of the artists on the new album were people he’d known. Billy Gibbons, Joe Bonamassa, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa all were also on the earlier one. But others he simply sought out, sending invitations through whatever contacts he had.

“The thing with Boz Scaggs that was a little crazy, because I wrote the song, I heard it with a sense of urgency: ‘I’ve Got To Get To You,’” Dion says. “And Boz heard it with a sense of humor.

“So I decided to sing the first two lines of every verse, because I had this intensity about me, and I left him like almost answer, putting that sense of humor on it,” he says. “It just worked out perfect.”

“I’ve Been Watching You” was originally going to go to a guest guitarist, but after co-producer and engineer Wayne Hood played a solo on an early version Dion says he loved it so much he decided to make it a vocal duet and reached out to Rickie Lee Jones through her producers Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, who’d earlier given her “Blues With Friends.”

“When I went to her she said, ‘I’ve been listening to you,’” Dion says. “And she said, ‘My mother, we would dance to ‘The Wanderer.’ Every time I hear your name I’m like full of joy.’ She was just on board.

“Now I say you haven’t lived until you sing a quirky love song with Rickie Lee Jones,” he says.

When he sent Springsteen and Scialfa a track with only his voice and guitar on it, Scialfa asked if he had other instrumentation planned for it. He did not, and when she offered to add a few things, he said sure.

“Well, she sends me back 64 tracks,” Dion says. “None of the same thing. Of stacked vocals, harmonica parts, guitars, bass, drums. Everything you hear on that record is a Patti Scialfa production.

“Bruce told me, he said, ‘Patti’s good at this,’” he says. “If you ever want to feel loved, somebody sending you back 64 tracks, it’s like wow. My whole career is not 64 tracks.”

Carrying a torch

Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonk Blues” left an indelible impression on the boy who still remembers listening to it on a Newark radio station while his mother cooked dinner one night, and then running down to the record store to buy it the next day.

No matter the source of the blues music — country artists like Williams, electric blues like Jimmy Reed, who moved from Mississippi to Chicago like so many others — there was a simple purity that always appealed, Dion says.

“That’s what’s so beautiful about the blues,” he says. “It’s a God-given form where you could express anything in that: your joys, your loneliness, your betrayal, your tears. You could bare your soul, you could be honest, you could be truthful, you could be real.”

In addition to writing and recording, Dion says he’s also been working with the producers of “The Wanderer,” a musical set to open for a trial run at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey in March 2022 before a planned move to Broadway.

And, he says, he’ll continue make music for as long as he can, something he sees almost as his duty as a performer who survived everything from the ill-fated flight that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper — the $36 ticket was more than he wanted to spend — heroin, booze, and age.

“I think knowing Buddy Holly, and a lot of the artists that are not with us any longer, Sam Cooke and Bobby Darin, guys like Jackie Wilson and Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, I almost feel responsible for the gifts God has given me,” Dion says. “I just can’t sit and drink it away or let it rot away.

“I feel that I have a responsibility to use it and hone it and respect it and honor it,” he says. “And I feel like I’m honoring them doing that.

“You know, I almost feel like I’m being cheered on by guys that have left, and are telling me not to blow it.”