Dion DiMucci Quotes

It was a lot of fun in the back of that bus with Ritchie Valens, Buddy and The Big Bopper sharing each other‘s songs.

I don’t sing white; I don’t sing black – I sing Bronx. When I sing ‘Ruby Baby,’ I’m rolling like Jimmy Reed. I wanted to communicate like Hank Williams and groove like Jimmy Reed.

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.

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 feel really relevant and creative, and I don’t think I would‘ve made an album if I didn’t feel relevant. I wouldn’t have said a word.

In New York, if you go into an Italian–American neighbourhood, the code of the streets is respect and reputation.

With Del Shannon – and I’ve got to tell you this – there’s nobody probably on the face of the earth that I identified more with musically. We used to sit and sing George Jones and Hank Williams tunes.

1967 was the bleakest, darkest, most emotional period of my life.

I tell you, gospel music is very uplifting. It’s great. It’s just a lot of fun to write, and it’s wonderful for the heart, soul, mind, and spirit. It’s just great.

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.

I couldn’t sing like Mick Jagger, not that I wanted to.

That is amazing that a guy like St. Jerome who lived in the fourth century could bring people together. Sometimes you think people are dead and forgotten. But they can actually bring you together in the best way.

We all fled from religion. Living la vida loca, whatever. The ’60s, you know. But it always stayed in my heart. As I got older, I started coming back to religion.

I don’t believe in being a victim. I think with information and motivation, you can do anything.

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 never got into this business to do interviews. It was always about the music.

While Paul Simon is revered, I don’t think people get how deep he is. I love the guy. He comes from that early street-harmony, first-generation type of rock and rollers. He gets it.

Music is an expression. It’s almost like a diary in my life, you know. You express your perceptions and your view on life – your world view.

I just love to do the songs, and that’s what I’m still about – taking people on a trip. A good trip.

People didn’t know I played guitar on all the hit records I had. I’ve never been in an acoustic guitar magazine and I’d put myself up against anybody.

My first tour, for six weeks straight, was with Bobby Darin, in 1958. It was just fun hanging out with him. He was older than I was; he was a college guy. It was kind of a mutual-admiration society, I guess. He taught me how to pay taxes.

I show rock and rollers how to grow old gracefully.

Doo-wop was full of blues for me.

I come from this macho Italian neighborhood. When I was thirteen, during those real vulnerable, impressionable years, and a boy starts becoming a man, to make that transition, and you start making decisions, and you start developing virtue and principles – I never made the transition.

I never knew I was a songwriter. I didn’t even know I was a singer. My parents just got me a guitar ’cause my uncle told them to get me one, and I started fooling with it.

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.

I have a great band from Jersey and New York. I say that because they got great attitude, and we have a great time on stage.

I got a little advice for everybody: marry the girl who’s going to get you to heaven.

I was a weird kid. I loved music, and I loved reading about God.

The day I heard Hank Williams for the first time, my life changed.

Early on, I tried to sing, but sustaining a note was something I wasn’t comfortable with. So I tried to get off of the note as soon as I could.

Hank Williams seemed, like, so total to me, so committed to the lyric. He would actually rip the ends of the words off at the, you know – the end of the sentence. It sounded like he’d bite into the word and rip it off.

People were watching the TV set, and they said three rock-and-rollers died – Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, including the pilot. I walked out of the hotel. I got on the bus alone. Their clothes were hanging on the racks, their guitars on the seats.

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.

Be authentic, true to yourself, genuine. Question what you really love along the way. There are so many voices out there. And you can lose yourself.

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’s a lot of unreleased blues stuff I did with the Apollo Theater musicians, and there was of experimenting going on for me in the mid-’60s in that studio, which I think frustrated Columbia.

I moved my family down to Miami to stay with my father-in-law, Jack, for a while. Best move I ever made.

I used to think God only liked organ music.

Trains had the greatest bass sound in the world.

Life is full of awe and grace and truth, mystery and wonder. I live in that atmosphere.

I heard Robert Johnson way before I heard about Eric Clapton.

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.

Trying to explain what community is to someone who’s never experienced it is like trying to explain what an artichoke tastes like.

If you make excuses, you’re going to believe in a lie. And I don’t believe in that lie that you can’t make it, that somebody is trying to hold you back.