#1451: Purple Haze by Dion

Peak Month: February 1969
Peak Position ~ #16
5 weeks on CKLG chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #63
YouTube: “Purple Haze”
Lyrics: “Purple Haze”

Dion Francis DiMucci was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1939. His parents named him Dion in honor of the French Canadian Dionne quintuplents who captured the interest of millions around the world after the five infants were born in May 1934. Dion’s dad, Pasquale DiMucci, was a vaudeville performer and Dion accompanied him to see his dad on stage. As a child he was given an $8 dollar guitar by his uncle while he lived on 183rd Street. Dion’s childhood was set in the midst of conflict between his parents. In an interview with New York Magazine in 2007, Dion remembers “…There was a lot of unresolved conflict in my house… My pop, Pasquale, couldn’t make the $36-a-month rent on our apartment at 183rd and Crotona Avenue.” He was a dreamer, a failed vaudevillian, and sometimes Catskills puppeteer. He’d talk big and lift weights he’d made from oilcans, while Frances, Mrs. DiMucci, took two buses and the subway downtown to work in the garment district on a sewing machine. “When they’d start yelling, I’d go out on the stoop with my $8 Gibson and try to resolve things that way.”

Dion began singing in Bronx bars at 13, doing a Hank Williams nasal twang imitation fused with street-corner aesthetic. As a teenager growing up in the Bronx, Dion DiMucci began singing on street corners at the age of 13. By 1954 Dion had dropped out of high school. He made a demo record that heard by producers of a Philadelphia teen variety show called the Teen Club. Dion appeared on the show and released some singles with his group the Timberlanes. In 1954 Dion also began to do drugs. In an interview in 2007 with the New Yorker Dion said he began hanging out at the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street in Harlem at the age of 14. It was there he’d hear group like the Cleftones singing “Little Girl Of Mine” and the Cadillacs singing “Speedoo“. From these black doo-wop groups Dion got some ideas for making harmony and choreography moves.

In 1957 Dion and the Timberlanes single, “The Chosen Few” made it to #7 in Boston on WCOP, spending three months on the Boston pop charts. Later that year Dion DiMucci joined a Bronx group called The Belmonts. The group was named after a street in a Little Italy named Belmont Avenue. They released “Santa Margherita,” a tune with a more traditional Italian-American sound. A follow up single, “Tag Along”, had a rockabilly influence. They kept on experimenting with their “sound” as a group. The next single, in 1958, was “I Wonder Why” which peaked at #8 in Vancouver and #22 on the Billboard Hot 100. They fused doo-wop with a Johnny Mathis piano sound with their Top 30 follow up, “No One Knows.”

The followup single by Dion and The Belmonts was “Don’t Pity Me”, which stalled at #40 on the Hot 100. Next up, the group had their first Top Ten hit in America in 1959 with “A Teenager In Love.” The song climbed to #2 in Toronto and Calgary, #3 in Ottawa, #5 in Edmonton (AB), Vancouver and on the Billboard Hot 100, and #9 in Winnipeg (MB).

Dion and The Belmonts were soon on stages shared with Gene Vincent, Bobby Darin and Eddie Cochran. In January 1959 Dion and The Belmonts were part of a fall tour in 1958 with Buddy Holly titled “The Biggest Show of Stars.” Buddy Holly and Dion got along well and Holly invited Dion and The Belmonts to join him on his upcoming “Winter Dance Party” tour. Dion and the Belmonts, Buddy Holly and His Crickets, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper were the headliners. After enduring bus travel with poor heating systems, Buddy Holly arranged for a flight to get three people from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Moorehead, Minnesota. Dion and The Big Bopper both won a coin toss to join Buddy Holly on the small three-seater. But when Dion learned from Buddy Holly that the plane ticket would cost $36 dollars, Dion let Ritchie Valens have his seat on the plane. The flight ended in tragedy and Dion was the only headliner that was still alive at the end of February 3, 1959. At the time he was 19 years old.

While their second Top Ten hit in the USA, “Where Or When,”climbed to #3 in the USA Dion’s drug dependency worsened, and he was in the hospital detoxifying from heroin when “Where or When” peaked.

Released from hospital, Dion pursued a solo career. His first solo release was “Lonely Teenager”.

Dion teamed up with Ernie Maresca to write “Runaround Sue,” which became one of the top selling singles of 1961. The song was inspired by Susan Butterfield, who he married in 1963. In the winter of 1961 “The Wanderer” put Dion back on the top of the charts. Vancouver made his B-side, “The Majestic” also a Top Ten hit. Dion appeared as himself in the 1961 film Twist Around The Clock, along with Chubby Checker and the Marcels. In the film Dion sings “Runaround Sue”, “The Wanderer” and “The Majestic”.

Almost all of Dion’s solo singles were more mainstream rock ‘n roll than some of the doo-wop ballads he sang when he was with The Belmonts. Dion’s solo career garnered two more Top Ten hits in 1962: “Lovers Who Wander” and “Little Diane”. He appeared again in the Top Ten in 1963 with “Ruby Baby”, “Drip Drop” and “Donna The Prima Donna”. The latter song, written as a song about a romance was inspired by Dion’s sister Donna DiMucci. Part of the lyrics described his sister’s interests: “She always wears charms, diamonds, pearls galore/She buys them at the five and ten cents store/She wants to be just like Zsa Zsa Gabor/Even though she’s the girl next door.” Only, in the real life Donna’s case, she was actually the girl in the bedroom down the hall in the family home.

Dion DiMucci married Susan Buttefield on March 25, 1963. He recalls, “things went from bad to much worse. I had no idea drug and alcohol abuse was a progressive disease.” In 1964, the combination of the British Invasion and a growing heroin addiction began to derail Dion’s music career. Nine of ten single releases between 1964 and 1967 failed to crack the Billboard Hot 100. He went on tour to the UK in 1965 and appeared on Dick Clark’s Where The Action Is. In 1967 Dion, along with Bob Dylan, were the only rock ‘n roll recording artists to appear on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, besides the Fab Four. It was a nod to the impact Dion’s music had across the Atlantic.

In 1968 Dion recorded “Abraham, Martin and John”. It was his first Top Ten (and Top 40) hit since 1963. The song was a tribute to the memory of four assassinated Americans. Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States during the Civil War and abolished slavery. Martin Luther King Jr. was a civil rights leader whose “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington D.C. in 1963, inspired the nation to pass the Voting Rights Act and other social legislation in the mid-60’s. John F. Kennedy worked to find a diplomatic solution to avoid a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the October 1962. On August 5, 1963, after more than eight years of difficult negotiations, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Robert F. Kennedy was a champion of civil rights and ran to become the Democratic candidate for President in the 1968 election, promising to end the Vietnam War. The song was written in response to the assassination of King on April 4th and Robert Kennedy on June 5. “Abraham, Martin and John” marked what music critics considered a maturing of Dion’s subject matter.

On his 1968 folk-pop album Dion, the track “Purple Haze” was the singer’s followup single release.

“Purple Haze” was written by Jimi Hendrix. In 1942 Johnny Allen Hendrix was born in Seattle. His grandparents, Nora and Ross Hendrix immigrated from America to Vancouver in 1911. There they raised Jimi’s father, James Allen Hendrix, who moved to Seattle in 1941 where he met Lucille Jeter, Jimi’s mother. In 1946, Johnny Allen Hendrix’s name was changed to James “Jimmy” Marshall Hendrix. As a child when he was asked to sweep the floor with a broom, his parents and grandparents would find him in his room strumming the broom like he was playing a guitar. He was given a guitar when he was 15 years old. His grandmother Nora Hendrix ran Vie’s Chicken & Steaks near the corner of Main and Union streets in Vancouver. In addition to numerous summer vacations, Jimmy attended school in Vancouver for a brief time. Vie’s hosted a number of visiting black performers such as Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. These artists would eat at Vie’s after concerts once the restaurant had closed to the general public. Jimmy and his cousins would stay up late helping their grandmother serve these famous musicians. James “Jimmy” Marshall Hendrix joined the US Army in 1961, and after being discharged from the Army, he returned to Vancouver during the winter of 1962- 1963 to practice his music. He played in a couple of shows on Granville Street during this time.

Hendrix moved to Nashville in 1963, and the following year was in the backing band for the Isley Brothers. In 1965, he was in the band fronted by Little Richard. In 1966, he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The 24-year-old Hendrix appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 to rave reviews. He showcased songs from his forthcoming album Are You Experienced, including “Foxy Lady”, “The Wind Cries Mary” and “Purple Haze”. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was booked as the opener for a concert tour with The Monkees. The tour opened in Jacksonville, Florida, on July 8, 1967. Hendrix played at eight of the first 29 scheduled concerts, in the first nine days of the tour. But, at the July 16 concert in Queens, Hendrix walked off stage when crowds of Monkees fans kept singing “Foxy Davy” to the Hendrix tune “Foxy Lady”.

Jimi Hendrix (1968)

While “Purple Haze” climbed to #3 in the UK, the single didn’t crack the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA. Hendrix’s first single titled “Hey Joe” reached #6 in the UK, but also failed to make the Hot 100. While “The Wind Cries Mary” peaked at #6 in the UK, it stalled at #65 in the USA. His best chart performance in the USA was “All Along the Watchtower” which reached #20 on the Hot 100, and charted to #4 in Winnipeg (MB).

Hendrix was featured a headliner at the 1969 pop festival in Woodstock. Hendrix played “The Star Spangled Banner” during the set and used feedback and sustain to replicate the sound of rockets. The media quickly branded Hendrix’s treatment of the national anthem as a political manifesto against the Vietnam War. Jimi Hendrix was put on file by the FBI in the late 60s. In 1979, college students at the campus newspaper of Santa Barbara University (USB) were able to confirm as much after they filed for release of FBI files on Hendrix. Six heavily inked-out pages from Executive Order 11652 were released to the student reporters, with deletions “in the interest of national defense of foreign policy.” On appeal, seven more pages were reluctantly turned over to the UCSB students. The file revealed that Hendrix had been placed on the federal “Security Index,” a list of “subversives” to be rounded up and placed in detainment camps in the event of a national emergency.

Jimi Hendrix died on September 18, 1970. The press reported the singer had died from drugs. In 1992 the UK Attorney-General’s office ordered Scotland Yard to reopen the investigation. Page 163 of Hendrix biographer Tony Brown’s 1997 book, Hendrix, The Final Days, he cites the seven month inquiry by Scotland Yard acknowledging the medical examiner in September 1970, “Professor Teare made no attempt to ascertain the exact time of death. The inquest appeared to be conducted merely as a formality and had not been treated by the coroner as a serious investigation.” The lack of thoroughness in the 1970 inquest omitted calling upon the following key persons to give evidence: the ambulance drivers, the police who attended the 911 call, the doctors who attended Hendrix in the hospital room.

Doctor Bannister, the attending Resuscitation Room physician at St Mary Abott’s, came forward in 1992 to tell Scotland Yard he’d witnessed lungs and stomach full of wine in Hendrix like he had never seen in his medical career. Instead of choking on vomit Jimi Hendrix Bannister believed Hendrix had died from being drowned in red wine. He estimated the amount of wine he witnessed in Jimi to be “bottles worth.” This was forensically incompatible with the 5mg/100ml blood alcohol content recorded at the autopsy. In the room where Hendrix was found quantities of red wine were spilled his bed and clothes, as well as soaking a scarf around Jimi’s neck. Bannister estimated that when Hendrix’s body arrived at the hospital for examination there was “a half bottle of wine saturating his hair alone.” Bannister swore under oath that “Jimi Hendrix had been dead for some time…Red wine was coming out of his nose and out of his mouth. It was horrific.” He described how he tried to clear Hendrix’s windpipe with an 18-inch metal sucker but finally gave up due to the inexhaustible volume of liquid. Dr. Bannister concluded, “Someone apparently poured red wine down Jimi’s throat to intentionally cause asphyxiation after first causing barbiturate intoxication. Without the ability to cough he was easily drowned.”

As a fan of science fiction, Jimi Hendrix frequently incorporated its imagery in his songwriting. Hendrix read Night of Light, a 1966 novel by Philip José Farmer. The novel was set on a distant planet, sunspots produce a “purplish haze” which has a disorienting effect on the inhabitants. An early handwritten draft of the song by Hendrix, titled “Purple Haze – Jesus Saves”, uses dream-like imagery where the sense of direction and time is distorted. In an interview on January 28, 1967, before the song was completed, Hendrix was asked how he wrote songs. He responded, “I dream a lot and I put my dreams down as songs. I wrote one called ‘First Look Around the Corner’ and another called ‘The Purple Haze,’ which was about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea.” You know the song we had named ‘Purple Haze’? [It] had about a thousand, thousand words … I had it all written out. It was about going through, through this land. This mythical … because that’s what I like to do is write a lot of mythical scenes. You know, like the history of the wars on Neptune.”

After the release of “Purple Haze”, Hendrix offered another explanation: “He [the song’s protagonist] likes this girl so much, that he doesn’t know what [state] he’s in, ya know. A sort of daze, I suppose. That’s what the song is all about.” This draws on an experience Hendrix had while still in New York, where he felt that a girl was attempting to use voodoo to trap him and he became ill. And so the lines:

Purple haze all around,
don’t know if I’m coming up or down.
Am I happy or in misery?
Whatever it is that girl put a spell on me.

In which case, Hendrix’s narrator in “Purple Haze” might be “acting funny” and doing unexpected things: “Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” because he’s under the spell of a woman he’s in love with. In the outro of the song, Hendrix sings “You make me blow my mind mama,” a likely reference to a sexual encounter. Jim Hendrix’s single release of “Purple Haze” had the best chart run in Canada in Saint-Jean-Sur-Richelieu where it reached the Top 20.

Dion’s cover of “Purple Haze” climbed to #2 in Cleveland, #3 in Tulsa (OK), #9 in Honolulu and San Diego, and #16 in Vancouver (BC).

In 1970 Dion wrote and recorded “Your Own Back Yard”, his final appearance in the Top Ten in Vancouver (BC).  The song was about kicking his addictions. In one of his autobiographies, Dion recalled, “There was never a word of praise in my house… A lot of demeaning talk and criticism. I never felt good about myself – and the success didn’t change things. I made $2 million by the age of 22 . . . had 10 Top Ten records… was at the height of my profession, I had all the bases covered… Fame, fortune and romance. I had even married my childhood sweetheart. But I was empty. I was looking out the penthouse window and saying, ‘What the hell is wrong?’ What I finally discovered was that I had others’ esteem, but I didn’t have self-esteem.”

Dion was a perfect example of someone who might have ended up doing drugs in the 50’s and 60’s. He lived in a troubled household. He was out on the streets to get away from the demeaning, critical tone from his parents each time he went home from school. He dropped out of high school and spent a lot of time on the streets and got involved in a gang in the Bronx by the age of 14. He became famous and was making $500,000 a year and had more money than he could ever imagine. After all, when he was 19, he decided not to get on a plane with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper on February 3, 1959, because the plane ticket cost $36. With all that disposable income, Dion knew he had some extra cash to support his addiction to heroin.

In 1972 Dion and The Belmonts played to a sold out audience at Madison Square Gardens in New York and another sold out reunion show on Long Island at Nassau Coliseum in 1973. In 1979 Dion became a born-again Christian and proceeded to record five contemporary Christian albums into the late 80’s. In 1983 his album, I Put Away My Idols, climbed to#37 on the Billboard 200 Album chart. The album earned Dion a Grammy Award nomination for Best Gospel Performance, Male.

In 1987, DiMucci sang “Teenager in Love” at Madison Square Garden with an impromptu backup group that included Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Lou Reed, Ruben Blades and Billy Joel. In 1989 he co-wrote an autobiography with Davin Seay titled The Wanderer: Dion’s Story. Bruce Springsteen has called Dion “the bridge between Frank Sinatra and rock ‘n roll.” Jerry Lieber, a songwriter for Elvis Presley, The Coasters and others said of Dion was “the best white blues singer he had ever heard.”

Dion and Susan will celebrate their 65th anniversary in 2026. They’ve lived in Boca Raton, Florida, since 1968 and have grandchildren. A play about Dion’s life called The Wanderer, was reviewed by the New York Times. Though the critics liked the production, jukebox musicals were not getting the ticket sales they got before 2020. As a result, The Wanderer didn’t get the investment money to mount a successful play on Broadway.

November 29, 2025
Ray McGinnis

References:
“Dion DiMucci” 1950s-2012, The Pop History Dig.com
John Lombardi, “Dion DiMucci, Teen Idol: A Seminal Bronx Rocker, Inspiration for Lou Reed and Springsteen, is Coming Back to His Roots.,” New York Magazine, New York, NY, December 30, 2007.
Dion – bio, Dion DiMucci.com
DiMucci, Dion with Aquilina, Mike. Dion: The Wanderer Talks Truth. St. Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2011.
“Celebrating Seniors – Dion DiMucci is 76,” 50 Plus World.com, July 18, 2016.
DiMucci, Dion and Seay, Davin. The Wanderer: Dion’s Story. Quill Press, 1989.
Tony Brown, Hendrix, The Final Days, (Omnibus Press, Oxford, UK, 1997).
Cafewha.com
FBI Records:The Vault, James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix, FBI, Washington D.C., (files from 1968 to 1991)
Adrian Mack, “Jimi Hendrix Haunts Vie’s Chicken and Steak House,” Georgia Straight, Vancouver, BC, July 15, 2009.
John McDermott and Eddie Kramer, Hendrix: Setting The Record Straight, (Grand Central Publishing, 1992).
Harry Shapiro, “Who Killed Jimi Hendrix?” Classic Rock Magazine, London, September 18, 2015.
Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, Black Strathcona.com.
David Comfort, “The Man Who Murdered Jimi Hendrix,” The Wrap, Los Angeles, September 17, 2010.
Steven Roby, Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix, (Chicago Review Press, 2016).
“Boss 30” CKLG 730-AM Vancouver (BC), February 21, 1969