Pop icon BOBBY RYDELL is back on tour after cheating death yet again!
The 72-year-old singer of ’60s hits “Dream Lover”, “Wild One” and “Volare” who also costarred with An- Margret in “Bye Bye Birdie” underwent an emergency double-heart bypass operation. And it was less than a year after surviving a double-organ transplant where he got a new liver and kidney.
“I feel like I’m reborn again. I have all new parts!” crows Rydell, who reveals his pals call him “Bionic Bobby.”
Singing with fellow ’60s teen idols Fabian and Frankie Avalon as “The Golden Boys” and doing solo gigs, too, the musical ironman just finished touring Australia. He is booked for concerts through next February.
That’s not bad for someone doctors said should be dead when it was discovered he had two severely clogged arteries in March of last year.
“I go in and take a stress test,” he recalls. “I was having (pain) in the back part of my mouth on the right side. It would go through my cheek, down my neck and wind up in the middle of my chest.”
Docs found a 95 percent blockage in the coronary artery, chillingly nicknamed the “widowmaker,” and 75 percent blockage in another artery.
Rydell recalls telling the doctor he had a show the next day in Biloxi, Miss., and the medic replied, “You ain’t going to Biloxi – you’re checking into” the hospital in Philadelphia.
The successful double bypass allowed Rydell to cheat death a second time in less than a year. In July 2012, he got kidney and liver transplants as time was running out on his own failing organs.
As we recently reported Bobby’s buddy Fabian just had an aortic valve replacement operation in early April.
Rydell says he’s amazed at how fast he’s bounced back from the surgeries.
“I’ve been very, very fortunate. I am truly blessed.”
The indestructible rocker also had hip surgery in 2009 and a plate and screws put into a shoulder broken from a fall on some ice in 2010.
Rydell, who battled booze demons and was busted for DUI in 2009, jokingly adds, “All I need is brain surgery – maybe a lobotomy.”
Still – he has a "lot of living to do!" — as Bobby sang in "Birdie".
