I was installing Mint 18 Cinnamon on HDD that had 17.3 partitioned w/LVM. 18 was going to be the only OS on the drive - no dual boot. I did "Something Special" Install so I could partition it the way I wanted. Could not completely get rid of LVM. I right clicked on the remaining partition but "delete" was greyed out. I tried to unmount, but got notification that it was unmounted, I tried dd but drive was still LVM. I finally did the default install. That got rid of LVM. I then installed again partitioning the way I wanted to. Is there a way to wipe a LVM drive from the command line?

The answer to yoru question is "yes", but I am not sure that is really what you want.
What you should be looking for is the way to make a device or partition no longer aan LVM object. There are multiple steps to do that right.

dd is the old-school way; you apparently didn't do it correctly.
wipefs is a safer option.