{"id":20387,"date":"2024-04-15T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-15T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=20387"},"modified":"2024-04-14T18:46:51","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T17:46:51","slug":"when-stars-lose-their-sparkle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2024\/04\/15\/when-stars-lose-their-sparkle\/","title":{"rendered":"WHEN STARS LOSE THEIR SPARKLE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WHEN STARS LOSE THEIR SPARKLE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every artist who becomes famous as a youngster singing young people\u2019s music sooner or later confronts some difficult questions: Paste on line magazine recently referred to this imevitable problem, and even suggested it is one artists such as Taylor Swift has had to address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you keep your music evolving in tandem with your accumulating birthdays? How do you resist the industry\u2019s pressure to stick to a proven formula? And if you do shift to a more mature music, what music is that? Artists such as Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Maren Morris and their fellow thirty-somethings are wrestling with those issues now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dion DiMucci and Bobby Darin and many others had to confront those choices while still in their 20s in the mid-\u201860s. How they handled that transition contains some lessons for today\u2019s young stars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The two men are back in the news. Last year, during the 50th anniversary of the 1973 death at the age of 37 of of Bobby Darin (left)<\/em><\/strong>, his estate began rolling out a digital reissue campaign. This featured the seven albums he released between 1966 through 1969\u2014including three of his American Songbook projects and four of his singer-songwriter folk albums. The last of those folk titles\u2014the rarely heard, entirely Darin-written Commitment <\/em>from 1969\u2014was recently released on vinyl with bonus tracks and deluxe packaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meanwhile, Dion, still going strong at 84, has just released a brand new album, Girl Friends,<\/em> a collection of blues-rock and country-rock collaborations with female singers such as Shemekia Copeland and Carlene Carter\u2014and also with female guitarists such as Susan Tedeschi and Sue Foley. It\u2019s his 37th album\u2014not including compilations\u2014and it continues the embrace of American roots music he made in the \u201860s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darin and DiMucci were both handsome, honey-voiced singers who grew up in the Bronx and had Top-10 rock \u2018n\u2019 roll hits in 1959: \u201cDream Lover\u201d by Darin and \u201cTeenager in Love\u201d by Dion & the Belmonts. These were great recordings, capturing the frustrations and longings of adolescence with luscious vocals that were as rhythmic as they were melodic. But it was music made by young people for young people. By the fall of 1965, DiMucci was 26 and Darin 29, both married men, and the pop world had shifted under their feet. Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and the Beatles had transformed the possibilities of a hit single. They were young adults making music for young adults. DiMucci and Dion were part of that demographic and wanted in on the action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Their handlers had different ideas. The new-school executives wanted them to stick to the early rock \u2018n\u2019 roll style that had made the singers famous. The old-school execs, by contrast, had never believed the first wave of rock music was going to last, and they had the same doubts about this second wave. They believed that the key to a long career was supper clubs, where attractive, tuxedoed men (and attractive, begowned women) crooned the American Songbook\u2014as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRock \u2018n\u2019 roll didn\u2019t exist before we came along,\u201d the 84-year-old DiMucci says over the phone from his current home in Boca Raton, Florida, \u201cso we didn\u2019t have models; we were just winging it. We didn\u2019t have mentors; we were taking it a day at a time. For guys like Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Little Richard, there was nothing the business could do with them, because they were from outer space. But Bobby and I were good-looking guys from New York, so they told us to put down the guitars and sing like Sinatra.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Darin, that had been the goal all along. As the son of a single mother (a woman he grew up believing was his sister) and one of the poorest kids in the hard-to-get-into Bronx High School of Science, he was eager to prove all the bullies and the doubters wrong. That desperate need to make it went all the way back to 1944, when at age eight he contracted rheumatic fever that damaged his heart valves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe overheard the doctor tell his mother that even with good care and good luck, Bobby was not going to live a full life,\u201d his son Dodd Darin says over the phone from his home in Malibu, California. \u201cThis was the key to his ruthlessness, his unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. He was always in a hurry to prove himself. If you weren\u2019t a friend, he could seem arrogant. Even if you were a friend, he seemed driven by ambition. When he was younger, he was worried about one thing\u2014when he walked down the street, he wanted people to say, \u2018Hey, look, that\u2019s Bobby Darin.\u2019 \u201cBobby Darin was more mature than most of us, very purposeful,\u201d adds DiMucci, his friend and frequent tourmate. \u201cHe was in a hurry. The first time I met him, he said, \u2018I\u2019ve got a rheumatic heart and I\u2019m not going to make it out of my 20s. So I need to be a star by the time I\u2019m 25.\u2019 And he did it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For Darin, at least, the move to Sinatra-style crooning made business sense. He had the biggest hit of his career in 1959 with an upbeat, brassy, big-band version of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht\u2019s dark satire, \u201cMack the Knife\u201d from The Threepenny Opera.<\/em> Darin also scored Top-20 hits with American Songbook tunes by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. Columbia Records filled DiMucci\u2019s albums with similar numbers, but his heart wasn\u2019t in it and none of them clicked as singles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was in the Columbia Studios,\u201d DiMucci recalls, \u201csitting on a piano stool with Aretha, playing my new song \u2018Drip Drop.\u2019 John Hammond came in and said, \u2018You know, you\u2019ve got a flair for the blues.\u2019 He took me into his office, where he had walls and walls of albums. He took out Lightnin\u2019 Hopkins, Leroy Carr, and started playing me stuff. That did it. It got into me. He was playing the roots of what I was about, though I didn\u2019t know it. I knew Jimmy Reed, but I didn\u2019t know who influenced him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meanwhile, the chip that Darin had carried on his shoulder ever since growing up in the Bronx\u2019s shabbier neighborhoods and feeling ostracized at his elite high school had inspired a growing interest in politics. He marched in the legendary Civil Rights rally, 1963\u2019s March on Washington. He began listening to the topical songs of Dylan and Charles and longed to do something similar. Later, he would become very close to liberal reformer Bobby Kennedy and campaign for him. \u201cMy dad did not come from money,\u201d Dodd Darin points out. \u201cHe came from the wrong side of the tracks. He was always an underdog, so he always related to underdogs. How could he keep singing the swinging crooner numbers, whose lyrics were out of touch with the times? How could he do the old songs when the news was full of the Vietnam war, the battle for civil rights and the war on poverty?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Both men could sense there was something important happening as folk music morphed into folk-rock. Here was a way to move beyond teenage pop into an adult music that wasn\u2019t as stuffy as their parents\u2019 anniversary parties. Here was a way to talk about the rapid changes in politics, romance and culture by marrying older music to newer instruments. Dion and Darin took off their ties and picked up their acoustic guitars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first fruit of Darin\u2019s turn left was to hire a young guitarist named Jim McGuinn away from the Chad Mitchell Trio to back him on a folk-music segment in his live shows. Before long, McGuinn founded the Byrds and changed his first name to Roger. Darin followed that up with a pair of folk-rock albums for Atlantic\u2019s Atco Records: 1966\u2019s If I Were a Carpenter <\/em>and 1967\u2019s Inside Out,<\/em> both key parts of the recent Darin reissue series. Of the 22 songs on the two LPs, seven were written by Tim Hardin, (left, and his music is still available on Amazon)<\/em><\/strong> four by the Lovin\u2019 Spoonful\u2019s John Sebastian and three by Darin himself. And Darin had immediate success in the charts with his new sound: Hardin\u2019s \u201cIf I Were a Carpenter,\u201d with its poor-boy-in-love-with-a-rich-girl theme, was a Top-10 pop single, and Sebastian\u2019s \u201cSittin\u2019 Here Lovin\u2019 You\u201d was a Top-40 hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, it\u2019s worth reminding people who Tim Hardin was. The opening night of the original 1969 Woodstock Festival was devoted to acoustic acts who included Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Melanie and Hardin. Today Hardin is the least remembered of that quintet, but he was by far the best songwriter of the bunch. He wasn\u2019t as good a singer as Havens or Baez, nor as charming as Guthrie and Melanie, but he wrote two-dozen songs that boasted the same kind of whittled-down elegance of language and melody that marked those of Townes Van Zandt<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, Hardin\u2019s drug problems were even worse than Van Zandt\u2019s. He was erratic in concert and soon exasperated record companies. But a song like \u201cIf I Were a Carpenter\u201d was not only a pop hit for Darin but also an R&B hit for the Four Tops and a country hit for Johnny Cash & June Carter. It worked in every genre, because it distilled the tension between lovers of different class backgrounds to a simple story as if it had been honed by generations of oral transmission into an anonymous folk song. Instead it was written by a rambling man from Oregon in a Greenwich Village flat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were more songs like that, and they\u2019ve been recorded by everyone from Willie Nelson and Neil Young<\/a> to Fleetwood Mac<\/a> and Okkervil River. But no one recorded more of them than Darin. The former teen dream and saloon crooner was no folk purist; he gave the songs chamber-pop arrangements executed by jazz musicians and string players. But Darin exercised tasteful restraint and kept Hardin\u2019s verbal wordplay and melodic leaps out front where they belonged. In 1969, Darin repaid Hardin by writing the tune, \u201cSimple Song of Freedom,\u201d which became a hit single for Hardin in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As early as 1964, DiMucci was releasing classic blues numbers such as Willie Dixon\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m Your Hoochie Coochie Man\u201d and Arthur Crudup\u2019s \u201cChicago Blues\u201d as singles, but they barely charted and Columbia refused to include them on an album. It didn\u2019t help that DiMucci, like Hardin, was struggling with a heroin habit. When he had finally cleaned up, in the summer of 1968 after Columbia had dropped him, his old label, Laurie Records, gave him the demo of a song by an obscure gospel songwriter named Dick Holler called \u201cAbraham, Martin and John.\u201d Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated, and the lyrics yearned for a time when it was still possible to believe in the idealism of those two\u2014and their predecessors Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DiMucci dialed back Holler\u2019s anthemic arrangement to an understated folk-rock treatment built around his acoustic guitar and wistful vocal. The single struck a chord and was soon a #4 pop hit. Laurie released an album called Dion,<\/em> which contained the single plus songs by Dylan, Lightnin\u2019 Hopkins, Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix (an eerily acoustic-ballad version of \u201cPurple Haze\u201d). Columbia put out its own album the following year, Wonder Where I\u2019m Bound,<\/em> finally letting go of Dion\u2019s unreleased folk-rock experiments for the label earlier in the decade: the Tom Paxton title track plus songs by Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Willie Dixon and three by DiMucci himself. Here was DiMucci as a full-blown folk-blues hero. If they\u2019d been released in 1965, when the Byrds\u2019 first album came out, maybe DiMucci\u2019s career might have been very different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI loved hanging out with Tim Hardin, Richie Havens and Tom Paxton at the Village Gaslight.\u201d DiMucci remembers. \u201cI loved sitting in on Dylan\u2019s recording sessions at Columbia. I was always interested in the life of the mind, but I never knew you could sing about this stuff. I fell in love with words. Eventually, when everyone leaves you alone, and you\u2019re not doing hit records anymore\u2014because hit records are a narcotic\u2014when you settle, you realize what comes out of you naturally. For me, when I was in my bedroom singing, what comes out of me naturally is the blues. \u2018Teenager in a Love\u2019 was a stretch for me; the blues were never a stretch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darin founded a new label, Direction Records, to release two albums filled entirely with his own protest songs: 1968\u2019s Bobby Darin Born Walden Robert Cassotto <\/em>and 1969\u2019s Commitment.<\/em> The first title was a reference to his true birth name, and the second to his dedication to his new cause. Unfortunately, the albums were flops\u2014both commercially and artistically. Darin\u2019s compositions were cute and clever, two adjectives that didn\u2019t serve him well in a genre dominated by Dylan, Hardin, Mitchell and Simon. One exception was \u201cSong for a Dollar,\u201d a revealingly personal song about his career problems. Over a push-and-pull rock \u2018n\u2019 roll shuffle, he seemed to address himself as he sang, \u201cHow many steaks can you chew, boy? How many cars can you drive? And how many moon \u2018n June tap tunes can you write before you\u2019re a lie?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another exception was \u201cLong Line Rider,\u201d a choppy blues about a real-life scandal over dead prisoners found on an Arkansas prison farm. As a single, it snuck into the top-80 on the Billboard chart, but when Darin tried to sing it on The Jackie Gleason Show,<\/em> CBS\u2019s producers wouldn\u2019t let him do it. Sticking to his principles, Darin refused to substitute another song, and walked off the show. For his live shows, he replaced his tuxedo with a denim jacket and his toupee with a black cowboy hat. \u201cBobby and Elvis were genuine friends,\u201d Dodd Darin says. \u201cIn 1969-70, Elvis was selling out the International in Vegas, and he would go to see my dad\u2019s shows. Bobby was doing all of his folk material and none of his earlier songs, and the Vegas audience didn\u2019t dig it. The hotel was paying him $40,000 a week, and people were walking out. Elvis went backstage and said, \u2018Bobby, do the hits.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darin got the message, and he retooled his show to reflect the various aspects of his career. Live! At the Desert Inn,<\/em> taken from a 1971 Vegas show, documents a typical set list: \u201cMack the Knife,\u201d \u201cSplish Splash\u201d and a Beatles medley. Tucked into the show was a three-song folk-music segment, surprisingly understated and effective, including \u201cIf I Were a Carpenter,\u201d \u201cSimple Song of Freedom\u201d and Dylan\u2019s \u201cI\u2019ll Be Your Baby Tonight.\u201d Two years later, the singer finally succumbed to his lifelong heart problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI turned 12 four days before he died,\u201d recalls Dodd Darin, who mostly lived with his mother, actress Sandra Dee, after his parents divorced. \u201cI had traveled with him a lot those final years. The time at his trailer in Big Sur was the best. He could be a celebrity in a tuxedo for 90 minutes and love it, but when it was over, he didn\u2019t care about all that bullshit. He could be a regular guy driving me in his Toyota to the library. I believe if he had lived longer, he could have been like Johnny Cash (right)<\/em><\/strong>, mixing his older hits with newer songs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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DiMucci never had another hit after \u201cAbraham, Martin and John,\u201d but unlike Darin, he lived long enough to collaborate with many of the artists he had influenced: Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Van Morrison (with his current well acclaimed, shown left)<\/em><\/strong> and Eric Clapton. When DiMucci entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, Reed gave the induction speech. His three latest albums have been devoted to duets with guest stars on blues songs, mostly co-written by the host and his sidekick Mike Aquilina. On Girl Friends,<\/em> released earlier this month, all the guests are female. It\u2019s not a great album but an enjoyable one; the anthemic \u201cAmerican Hero\u201d even offers echoes of \u201cAbraham, Martin and John.\u201d And the octogenarian DiMucci flirts persuasively with his much younger duet partners such as Shemekia Copeland on \u201cMama Said\u201d and Christine Ohlman on \u201cSugar Daddy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d he says with a chuckle over the phone, \u201cI may be old, but I\u2019ve still got it going on. I know how to write a song, how to sing it and how to ask the guitarist to play something. But when you ask a real artist to contribute to a song, they bring something to it I never would have imagined. I write a song like \u2018Sugar Daddy\u2019 and I ask Christine to sing harmony, and she brings something entirely different and that inspires me. Those surprises are the best.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One can only hope that some of today\u2019s younger stars will follow the lead of DiMucci and Darin and tap into older strains to discover something new, another way of growing up. One can hope that today\u2019s kids will heed the words of Neil Young, one of pop music\u2019s most famous shapeshifters. \u201cI used to be pissed off at Bobby Darin because he changed styles so much,\u201d Young told\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>\u00a0in 1988. \u201cNow I look at him and think he was a fucking genius.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

acknowledgements<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The primary sources for this piece was published at Paste on-line. media Authors and Titles have been attributed in our text wherever possible<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images employed have been taken from on line sites only where  categorised as  images free to use.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a more comprehensive detail of our attribution policy see our for reference only post on 7th<\/sup> April 2023  entitled Aspirations And Attributions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do you resist the industry\u2019s pressure to stick to a proven formula? And if you do shift to a more mature music, what music is that? Artists such as Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Maren Morris and their fellow thirty-somethings are wrestling with those issues now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,78,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-and-tradition","category-entertainment","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20387"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20540,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20387\/revisions\/20540"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}