ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter begins with a 1961 pop song (recorded by teen icon Dion DiMucci) called “The Wanderer.” The song implicitly evokes a long tradition of male Casanovas, but it also defines a significant moment of transition. Dion’s song, despite its follies, not only transforms wandering into an identity—a public persona—but also identifies male wanderers with a new technology of seduction: the car. The song and its transgressions seemed dangerous enough that record company executives insert a last-minute revision that, reviving the tradition of Cain, contains an implicit punishment for wandering. DiMucci later called attention to the revision. “But you know,” he says, “‘The Wanderer’ is really a sad song.” He attributes the sadness to the last minute change in which The Wanderer says he’s “going nowhere.” Dion’s wholesome smile kept him miles away from the smoldering rebellion of James Dean, an anti-hero truly going nowhere, but—if only in one song and in one ambiguous line—Dion brushes close to an emptiness that lies just beneath the happy-as-a-clown bravado of wandering males for whom pretty girls, as they say, are all the same.
