Dion

Imagine being in love with the wrong woman. Imagine picturing her, thinking of her so intensely that she materializes right there before your eyes, within reach. You're with her, in the car, maybe on the way home from a perfect evening. Along the road you notice a bar, one of those places for lonesome night-sniffers that exist only in film noir, in Hopper paintings and, of course, in your head. You decide to stop. More than empty, it's desolate. The ideal spot. Lovers arrange to meet where desolation dwells. The tables are shabby. Still, you sit down, because the music playing is excellent and — as everyone knows — when the music is right, everything else is beside the point. The voice coming from the speakers moans seductively: "Little girl I was born born born to be with you". The string backing is a torrent of caresses, the sax lets out sensual wails. It's the moment: you smile at her, take her hand and invite her to dance to that gorgeous slow number. As you're pressed chest to chest, the song — "Born To Be With You" by Dion, the opening track of the 1975 album of the same name — begins to fade out. A poignant chime of guitars strikes up to introduce the next song: "Make The Woman Love Me". You wake up, finding yourself dancing alone in front of the stereo. And praying, because she's elsewhere.

"Make The Woman Love Me" is, in all likelihood, the greatest song of unrequited love ever recorded (Dion performs it masterfully, but it was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). It's sweet, so sweet it borders on sentimentality. But the kind of sentimentality that winks at the debauched, the decadent, and saves your face when one of your metalhead friends catches you listening to it. It's melodramatic, theatrical, even Hollywood-esque. Because despair — to leave a lasting mark — must consecrate itself in grandeur, must be shamelessly put on display. Baroque painting teaches us that. It's authentically romantic, since every romantic knows perfectly well that he'll never get what he wants, and — even if he does — it won't last forever, and yet he persists anyway. All things considered, it's also ironic, since in the end — Shakespeare was right — no one has ever died of love. An unacceptable truth for those who insist that certain feelings should tear us apart, leaving us half-dead on the edge of a couch. Instead, luckily, we always come out of it alive, even if missing a piece that no one will ever give back to us.

If matters of the heart stand this way — and they do, since we've all been through it — then one can even grant pathos the right to stand as the last bastion of purity. Which is exactly what "Make The Woman Love Me" does. The song's protagonist addresses the Almighty, trying to open negotiations in the most reasonable of terms. He's never bothered Him before (except that one time as a child when he asked for a pair of fashionable shoes), so for once he feels entitled to make a request. He doesn't want to be a bother, he knows perfectly well that running this ramshackle contraption called the world involves far more taxing troubles, but for someone blessed with the gift of omnipresence, what could a few minutes of attention possibly cost?

“Dio non ti ho chiesto nulla per molto tempo/ Niente da quella volta che a otto o nove anni/ Ti chiesi un paio di Levi’s nuove/ …Lo so che hai molto da fare/ Ma se dovessi trovare due minuti/ Ti prego, fa che quella donna mi ami”. The vocal crescendo kicks in, followed by an instrumental unison that's the trademark of the wall of sound built by Phil Spector, the album's producer. Tears fall like on the face of a fifteen-year-old at the end of one of those sappy, dreadful Richard Gere movies. You should be ashamed, but the thought doesn't even cross your mind: the grandiloquent choirs recall a sacred hymn, the orchestral crescendo enlists an army of hormones and sends it off to the slaughter, Dion's vocals rise into a heartfelt, majestic gospel. It's the moment when martyrdom shades into ecstasy. They're Wagner's Valkyries laying down their spears to pick up Cupid's bow, forgetting to load the arrows. Love doesn't strike, but it still remains music's eternal glory. Dion Di Mucci's is a gift that the Seventies revoked the very instant they granted it.

In 1975, the thirty-six-year-old Dion already looked like a survivor. Up to that point, his career had been a mix of adrenaline, hits, ruinous falls, a rootless life and a stroke of insane luck that had saved his skin. On February 3rd, 1959, he should have been on the same doomed plane that cut short Buddy Holly's life: the Belmonts, his first band, had been chosen as the support act for the Winter Dance Party Tour with the Crickets, but Dion, unable to afford the plane fare, decided to settle for a cheaper — and, as it turned out, life-saving — bus instead. Having dodged tragedy, he rose to stardom as a talented interpreter of doo-wop and soul songs, to the point of being signed by Columbia and placed on the cover of the Beatles' “Sgt. Pepper's” (alongside Tony Curtis and behind Oscar Wilde). In 1968, after growing close to the Scriptures, he got clean from the heroin he'd started using at fourteen, hanging around the rough neighborhoods of his native Bronx. The words of the Evangelist John infused his vocal delivery with a renewed spiritual fervor, promptly picked up on by producer Phil Gernhard, who had him record “Abraham, Martin & John,” the song — written by Dick Holler to commemorate Bob Kennedy in the wake of his assassination — later made immortal two years on by Marvin Gaye.

Clean and redeemed, between 1970 and 1974 Dion recorded four albums for Warner Bros, colossal commercial flops soon joined by “Born To Be With You”: one of the most wonderful failures pop history can recall. The man himself would disown it, accusing Phil Spector of having turned those eight songs into “funeral music” with his maximalist arrangements (apparently there were two vibraphones, two drum kits and as many as ten guitars in the studio during the sessions). In truth, the overloaded production fits Dion's interpretive dynamics perfectly, steeped as they are in a sense of peaceful surrender, in a pathos left to run its own course until it reaches sheer exhaustion, a placid letting-go. Perhaps that's why so many consider it the ideal album to shoot heroin to. Perhaps that's why Pete Townshend, Jason Pierce and Bobby Gillespie count it among the records of their lives. Perhaps that's why “Make The Woman Love Me” wraps around us even as it pierces us, warms us even as it strips us bare, protects us even as it hurts. It's one of the most staggering and overlooked songs of the Seventies. A miracle no one noticed, and therefore unfinished. Like every great love, after all.

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08/03/2026