Dion's mid-'60s Columbia period was a strange and rather mysterious one. After notching up some solid hits that were more or less in his early '60s rock style ("Ruby Baby," "Donna the Prima Donna"), he dove into blues, folk, and folk-rock with varying degrees of success. Although the results were usually pretty interesting, commercially he seemed to have disappeared (a situation not helped by either his heroin problems or the failure of some of the material to get released). This is a good, if imperfect, two-CD overview of the Columbia years, moving from the expected early hits to quite a few tasty surprises, including covers of
Woody Guthrie,
Chuck Berry,
Willie Dixon, "Work Song" (penned by
Nat Adderley and
Oscar Brown),
Tom Paxton, and
Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." There are also a number of pretty fair self-penned originals in a folk-rock, slightly
Dylanish style, unsurprising considering that
Dion was recording with one-time
Dylan producer
Tom Wilson in late '65. It doesn't make a 100% convincing argument that
Dion would have matured into a top-rank blues-folk-rocker if not for his drug problems, but it has integrity, and the material is usually well-sung, whether pop or not. About half a dozen of the tracks were previously unreleased; there are also a couple of new recordings from 1996. This does not, by the way, make the 1991 Bronx Blues: The Columbia Recordings CD (much of it drawn from the same era) redundant. Almost half of the tracks from that disc don't appear, the most serious omission being the cover of
Dylan's "Baby, I'm in the Mood for You," which was probably
Dion's best mid-'60s recording of all. ~ Richie Unterberger