Together Again

by Richie Unterberger Although Dion had disappeared commercially in his dark pre-"Abraham, Martin & John" days, he was continuing to make some interesting, if erratic, music. This little-known 1967 LP saw him team up, unexpectedly, with the Belmonts again, though his material and artistic direction remained contemporary and forward-looking. Indeed, other than Bobby Darin and the Everly Brothers , he was the only original 1950s rock star to grow and explore creatively to such a degree in the 1960s, and was probably the most adventurous of such artists. That doesn't mean that this album is brilliant, just that it's certainly worth checking out if you're a Dion fan. It must have been a hard sell, though, due to its eclecticism and variable quality. There was jazz-like scatting on "Berimbau"; fairly strong blues-folk-rock on Dion's original compositions (which numbered just four); and a solid folk-rock cover of Bob Dylan 's relatively little-known composition "Baby You've Been on My Mind," which was the highlight of the disc. The contributions of the Belmonts , though, while not exactly superfluous, were of rather curious value. They sounded more like session singers than the backup harmonizers that bounced riffs off Dion and each other in the 1950s. They did figure strongly in the best Dion original here, "My Girl the Month of May," and Dion and his friends made an odd regression to something close to straight doo wop on their interpretation of George and Ira Gershwin s' "But Not for Me."