Top 40 Dion DiMucci Quotes

I was playing with Chuck Berry, who sounded like an English teacher. Did you ever listen to his records? He pronounces every word.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

When I didn’t do ‘Runaround Sue’ on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show,’ for example, I didn’t listen to my inner voice. I should have.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I could sing and play like Lightnin’ Hopkins, I would.

I used to think God only liked organ music.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Trains had the greatest bass sound in the world.

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 thought you had to be humble to become a saint, but a priest told me it takes all kinds to make it to heaven.

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.

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

Doo-wop was full of blues for me.

By the age of 15, I knew over 40 Hank Williams songs.

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

I’ve got these die-hard fans on Facebook, and you’d swear they haven’t heard anything I’ve done since 1962, 1963.

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

I know they call it the British Invasion, but musically, I call it the British Infusion.

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

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.

You constantly have to take inventory, not get on someone else’s agenda. You want to write something that’s poignant and moves people.

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.

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