This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourcedmust be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2008)

Dion DiMucci
Background information
Birth name	Dion Francis DiMucci
Also known as	Dion
Born	July 18, 1939 (age 75) The Bronx, New York, United States
Origin	Italian-American
Genres	Rock, pop, doo-wop, R&B,blues
Occupation(s)	Singer, songwriter
Instruments	Vocals, guitar
Years active	1957–present
Labels	Laurie, Arista, Mohawk, Columbia, ABC, Warner Brothers, Dayspring, Blue Horizon
Associated acts	Dion and the Belmonts, Dion and the Del-Satins, The Timberlanes, The Wanderers
Website	http://www.diondimucci.com/
Notable instruments
Martin Guitars (acoustic)

Dion Francis DiMucci (born July 18, 1939), better known mononymously as Dion, is an American singer-songwriter whose work has incorporated elements of doo-wop, rock and R&B styles—and, most recently, straight blues. He was one of the most popular American rock and roll performers of the pre-British Invasion era. He had more than a dozen Top 40 hits in the late 1950s and early 60s. He is best remembered for the 1961 singles, “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer“, written with Ernie Maresca.

Solo stardom: 1960–1964[edit]

By the end of 1960, Dion had released his first solo album on Laurie, Alone with Dion, and the single “Lonely Teenager“, which rose to No. 12 in the US charts. The name on his solo releases was simply “Dion”. Follow-ups “Havin’ Fun” and “Kissin’ Game” had less success, and the signs were that Dion would drift onto the cabaret circuit. However, he then recorded, with a new vocal group, the Del-Satins, an up-tempo number co-written with Ernie Maresca. The record, “Runaround Sue“, stormed up the U.S. charts, reaching No. 1 in October 1961, and No. 11 in the UK,^[7] where he also toured. “Runaround Sue” sold over a million copies, achieving gold disc status.^[8]

For the next single, Laurie promoted the A-side, “The Majestic”, but it was the B-side, Maresca’s “The Wanderer“, which received more radio play and climbed swiftly up the charts to reach No. 2 in the U.S. in February 1962 and No. 10 in the UK (the 1976 re-release made the UK Top 20).^[7]

By the end of 1961, Dion had become a major star, touring worldwide and making an appearance in the Columbia Pictures musical film Twist Around the Clock. He followed with a string of singles – “Lovers Who Wander” (No. 3), “Little Diane” (No. 8), “Love Came to Me” (No. 10) – in 1962, several of which he wrote or co-wrote. He also had successful albums with Runaround Sue and Lovers Who Wander.

At the end of 1962, Dion moved from Laurie to Columbia Records. The first Columbia single, Leiber and Stoller‘s “Ruby Baby” (originally a hit for the Drifters) reached No. 2, while “Donna the Prima Donna” and “Drip Drop” (another cover of a Drifters hit) both reached No. 6 in late 1963. (Dion also recorded an Italian version of “Donna the Prima Donna” using the identical backup vocals.) His other Columbia releases were less successful, and problems with his addiction and changing public tastes saw a period of commercial decline.

While Dion’s career appeared to be nearing an end, he still retained enough credibility to be, along with Bob Dylan, one of only two rock artists featured on the album cover of the Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.

In April 1968, Dion experienced what he identified as a powerful religious experience. After getting clean once again from heroin addiction, an experience he documented in his 1970 song “Your Own Backyard”, he approached Laurie Records for a new contract. They agreed on condition that he record the song “Abraham, Martin & John“, written by Dick Holler (also the writer of the Royal Guardsmen‘s “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron”) in response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and those of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy during the summer of 1968. The success of this song – later recorded by many others including Marvin Gaye – which reached No. 4 in the US charts and No. 1 in Canada, resuscitated Dion’s career. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.^[8]

Mature and Christian period: 1969–1986[edit]

For the next few years, Dion’s music became radically different, moving to more contemplative and mature material. He released several albums essentially as a singer-songwriter, to moderate sales, moving to the Warner Brothers label in 1969.

There followed a live reunion show with the Belmonts at Madison Square Garden on June 2, 1972, which was recorded and released as a live album by Warner. A year later, in 1973, Dion and the original Belmonts performed once more, doing a sold out concert at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York. However, no recording of the 1973 reunion was ever released. This was followed in 1975 by the album Born To Be With You, produced by Phil Spector. The album was a commercial failure, but has been subsequently praised by such artists as Jason Pierce of Spiritualized and Pete Townshend of the Who.^{[citation needed]}

In 1978, Dion released an album drawing on many of his teenage influences, Return of the Wanderer, another commercial failure.

In December 1979, there was a radical spiritual change in Dion, who had become a born-again Christian.^[9] Thereafter, his recordings for several years were in a contemporary Christian vein, in which he released five albums on the DaySpring Recordslabel, a division of Word Records in Waco, Texas. These albums reflecting his evangelical Christian convictions were Inside Job (1980), Only Jesus (1981), I Put Away My Idols (1983) which charted at #37, Seasons (1984), Kingdom in the Streets (1985) and Velvet & Steel (1986). Several singles were successfully released to Christian radio, notably “Still in the Spirit” from Kingdom in the Streets.

In 1984, Dion won the GMA Dove Award (Christian Music Award) for the album I Put Away My Idols. He was also nominated for Grammy Award for Best Gospel Vocal Performance, Male for the same album.

On September 24, 1985, Dion was a guest on 100 Huntley Street.

Bobby Breen
Bobby Breen
Born	November 4, 1927 (age 87) Montréal, Quebec, Canada
Occupation	Actor, singer
Years active	1936–1964

Bobby Breen (born November 4, 1927) is a former Canadian-born actor and singer who reached major popularity as a child star in the 1930s.

Life and Career[edit]

He made his professional debut at age four in a night club in Toronto and was an immediate sensation. He made his radio debut soon after. He played in vaudeville and his sister paid for his musical education. Breen went to Hollywood in 1935. His first major appearance was on Eddie Cantor‘s weekly radio show in 1936, and he soon became the leading child star at RKO Radio Pictures. He is best remembered today for his films, and for the fact that he was a boy soprano. His first film was Let’s Sing Again (1936), followed by eight more, including Rainbow on the River (1936), Make a Wish (1937), Hawaii Calls (1938), Way Down South (1939), and his last film, Johnny Doughboy (1942). He was RKO’s biggest child star at this time and, while he played the leading part, his co-stars included famous actors like Basil Rathbone, Alan Mowbray, Charlie Ruggles, May Robson and Dolores Costello.

He continued working as a singer in nightclubs and a musical performer in stock theatre, later serving as a guest pianist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra on radio, and hosting a local TV show in New York. He also recorded briefly for the Motown label, singing on two singles and an unreleased album in 1964.^[1][2] In 1953, Breen appeared on ABC‘s reality show, The Comeback Story, to explain how his career nose-dived as he entered his teen years and how he fought to recover.

As of 2002, Breen was living with his family in Tamarac, Florida and worked as the owner/operator of Bobby Breen Enterprises, a local talent agency, and even appeared sometimes as a singer at smaller concerts.^[3]

Filmography[edit]

• Let’s Sing Again (1936)
• Rainbow on the River (1936)
• Make a Wish (1937)
• Hawaii Calls (1938)
• Breaking the Ice (1938)
• Fisherman’s Wharf (1939)
• Way Down South (1939)
• Escape to Paradise (1939)
• Johnny Doughboy (1942)

In popular culture[edit]

• Breen was one of the people represented on the cover of The Beatles‘ album Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.^[4]
• Lenny Bruce mentioned Breen in his comedy routines “Hitler and the MCA” and “The Palladium”.

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourcedmust be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (November 2008)

Larry Bell (born in 1939) is a contemporary American artist and sculptor. He lives and works in Taos, New Mexico, and maintains a studio in Venice, California. From 1957 to 1959 he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles as a student of Robert Irwin, Richards Ruben, Robert Chuey, and Emerson Woelffer.^[1] He is a grant recipient from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts and theGuggenheim Foundation, and his artworks are found in the collections of many major cultural institutions. Bell’s work has been shown at museums and in public spaces in the United States and abroad over the course of his 40-year career. Larry Bell is one of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cutouts.

Critical analysis of work[edit]

Larry Bell’s art addresses the relationship between the art object and its environment through the sculptural and reflective properties of his work. Bell is often associated with Light and Space, a group of mostly West Coast artists whose work is primarily concerned with perceptual experience stemming from the viewer’s interaction with their work. This group also includes, among others, artists James Turrell, John McCracken, Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman On the occasion of the Tate Gallery’s exhibit Three Artists from Los Angeles: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Michael Compton wrote the following to describe the effect of Bell’s artwork:

At various times and particularly in the 1960s some artists have worked near what could be called the upper limits of perceptions, that is, where the eye is on the point of being overwhelmed by a superabundance of stimulation and is in danger of losing its power to control it… These artists sometimes produce the effect that the threat to our power to resolve what is seen heightens our awareness of the process of seeing…However, the three artists in this show… operate in various ways near the lowest thresholds of visual discrimination. The effect of this is again to cause one to make a considerable effort to discern and so to become conscious of the process of seeing.^[2]

1960s[edit]

Bell’s earliest pieces are paintings in the Abstract Expressionist tradition. He began incorporating fragments and shards of clear and mirrored glass into his compositions. At the same time, he began in his painting to produce angular geometric compositions that alluded to or represented three-dimensional forms. These works frequently depicted rectilinear forms with truncated corners. Next there came a series of shadow boxesor “ghost boxes”, three-dimensional cases whose surfaces often featured shapes reminiscent of those in the preceding paintings. Of this transition, critic Peter Frank has observed:

The earliest boxes contained within them, coated onto the glass or even defining their parameters, the angled contours and beveled edges with which the paintings had inferred three-dimensionality; the illusion of volume was thus conflated with actual volume.^[3]

As happy as Larry
The American artist behind the ‘Light and Red’ exhibition now showing in Central speaks to Fionnuala McHugh about rage, age and hallucinations.
Bell in White Cube.

Larry Bell – painter, sculptor, long-distance driver, dog lover and 1960s icon – was in Hong Kong recently. Usually he divides his time between his studios in Venice, California, and Taos, in New Mexico, but he’d come here for the opening of his exhibition titled “Light and Red”. His work is being shown at White Cube, which seems appropriate because if there’s any shape with which Bell is associated, it’s a cube.

For years, he created boxes out of glass. If you look at them now, you eventually reach a point where you can’t quite decide if he’s trying to express the beauty of containment or if he’s signalling a desperate urge to escape. In 2011, as part of the 54th Venice Biennale, six of his 1960s cubes were set on six pedestals in one of the gilded rooms of the Palazzo Contarini Degli Scrigni. The photographs of the installation capture a wonderfully translucent zoo of caged light.

I’m unfit for employment of any kind – if I went into the army, everyone should sell their defence bonds
That exhibition was titled “Venice in Venice: Glow & Reflection – Venice California Art from 1960 to the Present”, and showed the work of a group of young, experimental Californian artists who hung out together in Los Angeles under a sky so perfect it had, 50 years earlier, attracted what used to be called the moving-picture industry.

The Light and Space artists, as they were collectively termed, aren’t internationally renowned – the most famous is probably James Turrell – but even if you’ve never heard of Bell, you’ll almost certainly have glimpsed him. He’s featured on the cover of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the 1967 Beatles album that became a defining moment of 60s iconography.
Larry Bell with pieces from his “Light and Red” exhibition at White Cube, in Central.

And the bronze stick-man outside Langham Place, in Mong Kok, which weighs an un-spindly 2,700kg, that’s by Bell. It’s No26 in a group of 27 works from his “Sumer” series.

The figures grew out of some electronic doodling on his Mac in 1993, which he initially sent to long-time friend, architect Frank Gehry, who wanted ideas for a client’s house. The series takes its name from the Sumerians, who lived about 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the cradle of human civilisation, and it has been interpreted as a commentary on “the post-human condition”. There may be those who wonder if this cultural reference in Mong Kok on a busy Saturday afternoon is, rather like the glass boxes, sending out a mixed message.

At any rate, it was the architect of Langham Place who called the figure Happy Man. Bell’s namecard has a whole row of them stick-dancing, stick-bending, stick-arms-akimbo.

IN A BACKROOM IN White Cube, in Central, early on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Festival, as the city prepares itself to focus on (moon) light, Bell – rather heavier than he was when a pal, the actor Dennis Hopper, took photos of him nattily dressed in striped trousers and corresponding shoes half a century ago – is craggily handsome in a red gingham shirt.

He’s now 74. Is he a Happy Man?

“I can’t tell sh** without these,” he says, holding out the two hearing-aids, like a pair of pink broad beans, he’s just removed from his ears to be admired. “Sometimes they work, sometimes they get plugged up with wax.”
The cover of the 1967 Beatles album “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was a defining piece of 1960s iconography and features a picture of Bell. Can you find him?

Bell bears an ironic name. When he was 46, he was told by a consultant that he’d had profound hearing loss his entire life. He’d only made the appointment because someone in Los Angeles, who collected his work, had slammed her cutlery on the table at a smart dinner-party and shouted, in frustration, “Larry, get your damn ears checked!”

…In 1962, he had his first show at Los Angeles’ influential Ferus Gallery. Shortly afterwards, three men in suits knocked on his door. Bell – in a response which may be familiar to some of Hong Kong’s creative residents – was convinced they were building inspectors and, as he wasn’t supposed to be living in his studio, hid. Eventually, after peering through a crack in the window, he invited the trio in, misheard the introductions, and only when the visit was well-established did he realise he was hosting artist Marcel Duchamp.
The cover of the 1967 Beatles album “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” features a picture of Bell.
The episode sounds appropriately surreal, although perhaps more Magritte than Duchamp – you imagine the men in bowler hats, the interior artist with his eye at a keyhole, the over-arching blue sky. When asked, Bell obligingly begins to paint a verbal picture of the return visit he made to Duchamp in New York a few years later.

First of all, what was he wearing? “Oh, I was pretty well turned-out,” Bell says, comfortably. “Duchamp was a pretty slick guy himself, a very conservative dresser. Formal. He was sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar. He did it very eloquently. Very elegantly. He smoked it like this.”

Bell borrows a pen, places it between the little finger and ring finger of his left hand, makes puffing gestures.

“I was 25, he was 73, 74. [Actually, Duchamp was 78.] It wasn’t a big room, about the size of this one” – a glance around White Cube’s back office – “but there was a Brancusi, a de Chirico, a Magritte. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Brancusi and he paid no attention to it. I thought, ‘I’m in a room with a guy who thinks being with a Brancusi is nothing.’ Brancusi was my great hero, everything he did was so simple.”

Teeny, Duchamp’s second wife (who was American and had been married to Matisse’s son, Pierre), brought in some food. The dazzled Bell, on the launching pad of his career, sat while Duchamp – who would die three years later – talked about a show he was planning of his early work. “I said, ‘Really, how early?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I was four or six.'”

Now the slim-hipped, fashion-plate dude he was is almost as old as Duchamp on that afternoon in 1965. As if reading my mind, Bell says, unprompted, “I’m not jealous of my age then. I like myself more now than I did when I was younger.” Why? He pauses. “I’m celebrating my 54th year of employment. I’ve managed to do my thing all of this time. I don’t feel any value in my trip other than working … I’m nothing but what I do.”

The reason he was in New York that year was to exhibit his work at Pace gallery. The show was a success: a West Coast statement of artistic arrival intended to be heard along the East Coast. At the time, Bell was paying to have his glass-coating process done in Los Angeles by a company he’d found in the phone book, but someone suggested that he start doing it himself; so he bought the necessary equipment second-hand in New York (it was huge enough to be nicknamed The Tank), plus an instruction manual titled Vacuum Deposition of Thin Films, and based himself in the city for the next few years.

In an interview in Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s book Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s, Bell is quoted as saying, “I made more money when I was 25 than my dad made in his whole life. I was totally unprepared … It gave me a nervous breakdown by the time I was 30 and turned me into an alcoholic.”

“There were hard times financially,” he admits now.

He was married (he’d met his wife, Gloria, at a Duchamp opening at the Pasadena Art Museum) but the money was flowing through his fingers and he was adrift. Success made him feel simultaneously guilty about those artists left behind in Los Angeles and baffled by those artists he met in New York. He returned to California and then, in 1972, to New Mexico. In deliberately-enforced isolation, the work – the muse, he calls it – kept him going.

His son, Oliver, is a videographer, and nowadays, of course, the whole world can watch short films of his studio on Vimeo. “I don’t believe in intellect,” Bell says firmly. “It has to be hands-on.”

In the clips, Bell and his assistants (he has five) move around wearing white face-masks: the vacuum process requires that the glass be spotlessly clean. There’s an iconic note to that, too. Hopper told him that the masked look he wore, to devastating effect, in his role as Frank Booth in the film Blue Velvet was partly inspired by Bell.

Time for Bell’s close-up.

“Squish your hair, Larry,” says Herskovic Ponder before he goes off to be photographed, adding, fondly, “These artists are such hippies.” (Bell’s sign-off to his emails is, indeed, Peace and Love.) Decades ago, Bell had been a customer at her parents’ photography store in Los Angeles, which had a stellar clientele; other customers bringing in their snaps for printing, in those pre-digital, pre-selfie days, had included Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis.

They met again several years ago, by which time Bell was divorced, had re-rented his former studio in Venice – “After 30 years, I needed a scene where there was some action”, he says – and was commuting there from Taos.

This is his third show with White Cube. At the London opening, last October, Sir Peter Blake – the British artist who co-designed the “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” cover with his now-ex-wife – came to say hello, and to show him photographs of how the image was created. In an early montage, Adolf Hitler (one of John Lennon’s choices) was standing to the right of Bell until wiser counsels prevailed. In the end, Bell was placed between Tyrone Power, the actor, and David Livingstone, the missionary explorer to whom Henry Stanley addressed his famously presumptive remark.

On the gallery’s walls are a series of scarlet-bordered collages he created on paper he had made in Japan. The red is the loudest red he could find. He was, he says, playing with the idea of strength. He points out the design of the glass boxes: they’re a little deeper at the top than the bottom to make them less reflective so what you see isn’t just surface light but the texture within. Downstairs, his “Light Knot” sculptures, made from polyester film, float calmly in space, as if they carry no weight at all. Those glass boxes have been specially designed, too; they’re wider at the top than the bottom, “to change the feeling of the container”. It is, he says contentedly, “a very good show”.

He always does the 1,000-mile journey between his Venice and Taos studios by car; he’s clocked up 400,000 miles in his Chevrolet Suburban. Until a month ago, when the coughing got too bad, Bell – like Duchamp – was a cigar-smoker and the only constant companion who would tolerate the auto-fug was Pinky, his bulldog. That’s when he does his meditating, when Pinky and he are on a road trip. He switches off the radio, takes out his hearing-aids and drives with his thoughts through the happy, silent night.