Ronnie James Dio Memories
By Steven P. Wheeler
In the Spring of 1978, my 14-year-old self was sitting on the piano bench in the family living room with the Sunday Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times in hand, my Sunday ritual prior to this internet thing. As always I skipped to the Pop Music section to see what new albums I could learn about.
On this day, there were two brief album reviews stacked on top of one another. The first one was about the debut album from a band in Pasadena called Van Halen. The paragraph-long review boasted of this young six-string wunderkind named Eddie Van Halen who was seemingly reinventing hard rock guitar.
The next one was about the fourth album from a band called Rainbow, Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll. The focus of this little review was about that band’s veteran guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who I of course knew about from his days in Deep Purple. Not a huge Purple fan but their Machine Head and Made in Japan albums were of course in my rapidly growing vinyl collection.
Intrigued by these two competing guitar heroes—one new, one old—I walked the mile to my home-away-from-home; my personal and most holy Mecca, better known to the outside world as The Wherehouse. Within a few hours I was home, two new albums in hand, tossing them on the turntable, slipping on the headphones and drifting away.
These two hard rock albums couldn’t have been more different to my young ears. Van Halen was bristling with energy and vitality, while Rainbow was much more adventurous with a blues-based foundation that married fantastical lyrics with an almost medieval power that was unrestrained, with echoes of Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” in songs like “Gates of Babylon.”
Oddly enough, after a few hours, it wasn’t Eddie or Ritchie that had grabbed me most. It was the ferocious vocal sneer of this guy in Rainbow with the name of Ronnie James Dio, who apparently also wrote the lyrics that I read along to in its Renaissance-styled font.
Over the course of several weeks, I had gone back and picked up the band’s first two studio albums—Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and Rising—although their live album would have to wait. Neither The Wherehouse, nor the second-choice stores Licorice Pizza and Tower Records, had it in stock. No Amazon.com in those days, kids.
So while Zeppelin was more of my brother’s hard rock band in those days, I was determined to find my own. Rainbow became mine for a very short period of time. Because almost as fast as I had gotten caught up with all they had to offer, Dio quit the band! This would become par for the course over the years as I would come to learn.
Then in June of 1979, barely a year after first discovering his golden hard rock voice, Dio had joined the ranks of Black Sabbath replacing their iconic frontman Ozzy Osbourne; 30 years before Ozzy became better known as a bumbling reality tv star to an entirely new generation. Other than loving the brilliant “Paranoid,” Sabbath was never in my wheelhouse and by the late ‘70s the band’s platinum-selling days were nearly a decade behind them.
But with Dio in the fold I waited with eager anticipation for their first album, which arrived as Heaven and Hell in 1980. One of the best albums of Sabbath’s lengthy career, Dio had single-handedly rejuvenated the group and brought them back from the dead with this platinum-selling classic.
Still, his stint with Sabbath was even shorter than his tenure in Rainbow and by 1983 it was time to embark on his own solo career which was even more commercially successful than his previous work.
“I don’t sing about politics much because it’s a mess and there are no absolutes within it. It’s like religion, you have to take them both on faith. I like to say that in terms of politics, we have a lot of third world attitudes in a first rate nation.”
Ronnie James Dio
Fast-forward a decade to 1993 and I found myself sitting down with the metal icon. The first thing that strikes you when you meet Dio is that one of hard rock’s most powerful and earth-shaking voices comes from a man who stands only 5’4”. Perhaps it explains why his first band was called Elf, but more on that later.
We talked about songwriting, politics, his days with Rainbow and Sabbath, as well as the real story behind the “horns” symbol that he made famous.
(Photo: Chiaki Nozu/Getty Images)
With this weekend marking the 44th Anniversary of the release of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, which introduced lyricist/vocalist Ronnie James Dio to the masses for the first time, I once again dusted off one of my old interviews. I was immediately reminded of the brief time I spent with this candid, charismatic and personable character from America’s East Coast. It was a joy to spend time with the man who gave voice to metal fans throughout the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. Unfortunately, heavy metal lost this pioneer in 2010 after a horrible and brief battle with stomach cancer. RIP RJD…
The Early Years
Born in New Hampshire on July 10, 1942, Ronald James Padavona grew up in Cortland, New York. Known as the Crown City, in retrospect, Cortland seems like the perfect birthplace for the future songwriter who would go on to paint magnificent lyrical pictures of shadowy and mystical netherworlds filled with crowns, witches, swords, spirits, fire and rainbows. His words would wind their way first through Rainbow (four albums between 1975-78), then Black Sabbath (three albums from 1980-82 and another in 1992) and of course his own platinum-selling band Dio (11 albums from 1983-2004).
Starting out in doo-wop groups, the rock & roll teen played his way through a series of local bands until forming The Electric Elves in 1967. Eventually this band transformed into Elf and they were signed to Deep Purple’s record label in the early ’70s.
Purple’s rhythm section of Roger Glover and Ian Paice co-produced Elf’s self-titled debut album in 1972, and Glover produced the band’s final two albums in ’74 and ’75. While Elf never found any commercial success, they did serve as the opening act for Deep Purple and when guitarist Ritchie Blackmore quit that group, he hired Dio and Elf for his new band, Rainbow.
Rainbow
Dio’s tenure in Rainbow brought him worldwide recognition as one of hard rock’s most dominating vocalists. The band’s first album, which included the classic metal track “The Man on the Silver Mountain,” introduced Dio to the hard rock world. But before going out on tour in support of their debut, the temperamental Blackmore fired everyone in the band but Dio and a new Rainbow was formed, and it wouldn’t be the last.
During his time with Rainbow, Dio was equally well known for his lyrical approach, which harkened back to his childhood. “I was always a dreamer type of kid,” he told me. “I immersed myself into fantasy situations by reading science fiction and things that would let my imagination run somewhere.
“I like to create things that don’t necessarily have conclusions, but are rather float-away, dreamy kind of things,” he explained. “I think there’s a tremendous kinship between science fiction and the mythological era, and I applied all of that to my lyrics.
“All the songs I wrote during the Rainbow period had a much more Renaissance kind of attitude. They were not so much mythological, as they were songs about situations, which could have been translated into today’s time, if I hadn’t used flowery words.
“Because Rainbow was a much more flowery band than Black Sabbath ever was, joining Sabbath actually took away that flowery imagery from my lyrics. It sounds strange but when I joined Sabbath, I felt free to pursue the things that I wanted to do all along, which were the dark, mysterious and heavy themes.”
End of the Rainbow
Following 1978’s powerhouse album Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll however, Dio and Blackmore fell prey to the rock & roll cliché of musical differences. But Dio seemed to hold no grudges towards his former band mate, saying: “Despite what the press says, I don’t carry around any ill feelings towards Ritchie. I mean, he gave me my first huge break with Rainbow and that led me to Black Sabbath and then my own band.
“We just disagreed with the direction of the band at the end. He wanted to go in a more pop direction and become a pop star, which I had no interest in. I learned from him what to do and what not to do, which are lessons you can’t buy.”
Black Sabbath
Within months of leaving Rainbow, the now unemployed vocalist met Black Sabbath’s guitarist Tony Iommi who had just lost his own lead singer Ozzy Osbourne, who left for a solo career. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what happened next.
In 1980, the newly revamped Sabbath, with Dio front and center, released the classic metal album Heaven and Hell. “Tony liked what I had done with Rainbow, so that was injected into Sabbath, which made the melodies go off to stranger places than they did with Ozzy. I think I brought a different dimension to Black Sabbath.”
Ironically, Dio downplayed the poetic aspect of his lyrics, explaining that he has always worked with the musical foundation of a song before penning his words. “I’m always inspired by the music. I don’t consider myself to be a poet. If I was, then I could be like Bernie Taupin [Elton John’s longtime lyricist] and write lyrics and have someone put music to them, but I’m not.
“I’ll work with a band on a musical structure, then I’ll go away and get inside the music, which will give me an indication of a lyrical direction. Generally, I have a list of song titles that I’ve come up with before the musical aspect has been done, and then I’ll use those as a starting point.”
The “Horns” Debate
Throughout his brief time as the frontman of Black Sabbath, Dio was known around the world for his finger-flashing symbol of what became known as the “devil horns.” That this occurred at a time when the heavy metal genre itself was rife with accusations of satanic worship by its critics only made Dio a major target of the bible-thumping crowd. The funny thing about all the devil-horn hype is that it really had nothing to do with Satan in the first place.
When it came to the topic of the “horns,” Dio laughed at the suggestion that he invented the now-famous “rock on” symbol: “No one can claim that they were the first one to do that, and I certainly don’t. That would be ridiculous. I think people may think that because I became known for it when I started using it during my time with Sabbath.”
As for the origin of it all, you can actually blame his Italian grandmother. “It’s an old superstitious symbol I got from her,” he said. “It’s to protect you from the Evil Eye, it goes back centuries. The whole satanic thing was a joke. Like I’m a devil worshipper,” he said disgustedly. “[The symbol] just seemed to work well with what I was doing during Sabbath and it has grown to become this all-encompassing symbol of metal or rock & roll.”
From Sabbath to Dio
Like his short-lived time with Rainbow, Dio’s time with Black Sabbath encompassed only two studio albums and a live release, which signaled the end of his first tenure with the band. An internal war developed between the two Brits [Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler] and the two Americans [Dio and drummer Vinny Appice] during the mixing of the 1982 concert collection, Live Evil, and Dio and Appice were out.
This time around the singer put together his own band and Dio was born. The band’s namesake brought along his Sabbath drummer, his former Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain, and guitarist Vivian Campbell, and huge success was immediate.
Dio’s first two albums Holy Diver in 1983 and The Last in Line in 1984 went platinum and the vocalist turned band leader had exceeded the success of his previous successful groups.
“I never ever disbelieved in myself, but I had only worked in bands,” Dio said about the initial transition to forming his own group for the first time in his lengthy career. “So once I got out of that security blanket, I began to feel more confident with myself. I knew that with the people I put around me, especially Vinny, I just knew it was going to work.”
And work it did. Dio released three more albums before he was asked to rejoin Black Sabbath again in the early ’90s.
Black Sabbath: Take Two
The result of this Dio/Appice/Iommi/Butler reunion was 1992’s Dehumanizer, which echoed the magic of their albums a decade earlier. But things came to a grinding halt during the tour that followed. It all came to a head when Iommi and Butler agreed to have Black Sabbath be the opening act for former Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne for two dates in Southern California.
Dio refused to put Sabbath beneath their former singer’s solo career and his Sabbath tenure ended right then. Former Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford was asked to take Dio’s place at those concerts, but he wouldn’t do it without RJD’s explicit approval. Dio gave the go-ahead and another Sabbath/Dio era was over.
In discussing it with me less than a year later, Dio said: “Those guys just were hoping to hook up with Ozzy for another Sabbath reunion with him. Here’s the thing: when I agreed to come back to Sabbath, I was back in this Sabbath thing for the long haul. I wanted do a couple more albums and tour everywhere. But they wanted to get back with Ozzy. They didn’t care about my opinion or anything, so that was it.”
The Final Sabbath
But it wasn’t really it-it. The singer went back and restarted his own band Dio in 1993 and released another eight albums over the next 14 years, but then in 2007 it was announced that once again the Sabbath quartet of Dio, Iommi, Butler and Appice would get together again. But this time it would be under the band name of Heaven & Hell since Iommi was also still playing in the reformed Black Sabbath with Osbourne. Confused yet?
Heaven & Hell released their one and only album, The Devil You Know, in 2009 and it immediately became a Top Ten hit on the Billboard Charts. Sadly, it would also prove to be Ronnie James Dio’s final appearance in a recording studio. The massively influential metal legend was diagnosed with stomach cancer that same year.
Ronnie James Dio performed for the last time on a stage August 29, 2009, before succumbing to cancer on May 16, 2010. Ronnie James Dio was 67.
Last Words
Throughout his career, RJD took part in many charitable causes, including organizing the heavy metal genre’s answer to the Ethiopian famine relief projects Band Aid and USA for Africa in the mid-‘80s. In 1986, Dio’s Hear ‘n Aid project featured the metal ensemble song, “Stars,” which he wrote with his band mates Vivian Campbell and Jimmy Bain. An all-star compilation metal album, Hear ‘n Aid, followed later that same year.
Following Ronnie’s death, his widow and longtime manager, Wendy Dio, started the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund, which has raised more than $2 million to date. The organization supports research and education that furthers early detection, prevention and treatment of prostate, colon and stomach cancers. You can donate to the fund here: http://www.diocancerfund.org