DIO ON DIO

DIO ON DIO

Gary Graff

Holy Spinal Tap, Batman!

Here we are at the Dio concert in Fort Wayne, or is it Cincinnati? Anyhoo, it’s somewhere in the vast Midwest, and these guys have been on the road too long for us to keep track anyway. But there’s something definitely wrong up on that stage.

There’s the flash and all the explosions, pyramids and sphinxes and all the medieval imagery Cecil B. Demille would cream over, maybe even make another film out of. You can see the marquee now—Samson, Delilah & Dio or The Ten Commandments According to Dio. Right.

But consider what would’ve happened if the Red Sea didn’t part for ol’ Cecil, or if the red dye no. 3 he used for the waterturned-to-blood scene didn’t work. Now you know what kind of trouble Dio is facing tonight.

There’s a pyramid at the center of the stage that’s supposed to open to reveal drummer Vinnie Appice, kid brother of Carmine and Dio’s chum from Black Sabbath. We're four songs into this show and it hasn’t happened yet. But Vinnie, trouper that he is, is pounding away back there in total darkness, and his bandmates, who looked mystified at first, are getting a few chortles over it.

“Definitely straight out of Spinal Tap,” one of the group’s publicists said.

But any resemblence between Dio— singer Ronnie James and his three aidesde-camp—and Rob Reiner’s cinematic British heavy metal band is purely unintentional. And wrong, for that matter.

Dio is hot, and the Tap, at least according to the screenplay, was not. There are no burnouts in Dio’s group, just veteran rock ’n’ rollers. And the word “comeback” hasn’t had a chance to enter the collective group vocabulary. During most of 1983 and the first couple months of 1984, the quartet ranked with Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Iron Maiden and the rest of their compatriots who bent that ears—and the abundant wallets—of the white teenage male populace that’s recovered its masculinity from Boy George and Duran Duran in a spate of metal, leather, studs, fire, smoke, blood, demonic symbolism and ultra-high volume.

In that 10-month period, the group’s first album, 1983’s Holy Diver, went gold. The latest album, The Last In Line, did the same in a significantly shorter amount of time.

Why all the success now, after Dio’s been shouting along the hard rock road for the past 12 years? Could it be because this time, for the first time since the mid70s, he’s in charge?

“I certainly figure that helps,” the 35-year-old Dio says in his hotel room in Charleston, W.V., a stop on the last leg of his Last In Line tour. “You really should have one head of state in this kind of situation. That has had a great bearing on this.

“But it’s more than just me and my leadership that’s making this work,” he adds. “We put out a good product, have proven talent in the band. Me and the people in the band have reached a level of perfection in our abilities. The timing was good, too, with the so-called resurgence of heavy metal.

“And with one head to guide it, it’s not hard to be successful.”

“I’m part of a special breed; I can sing anything. I’ve chosen to do this and it just so happens that I do it better than most. ”

This is, of course, the most success Dio—who founded Elf, was the first singer in Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath—has encountered. And it’s a long way from his early career leanings.

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Dio spent most of his youth in Syracuse, New York. At age five he began playing trumpet, learning the classics and playing in several school orchestras. To him, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ranks right up there with “Satisfaction” and “Love Me Do,” and he still professes a love of Bach’s work.

Athletics were also a passion in high school where, despite his diminutive build—he’s a slim 5' 4" now—he played for the baseball, football, soccer and wrestling team. “If I was seven feet tall,” he told one interviewer, “I’d be a basketball player.” He says he still writes many of his songs while watching sports on TV.

The first serious career choice, however, was pharmacology. He even earned a college degree in that field, but that time he was also involved with a hard rock band called Elf, playing bass and singing. The group’s first album was produced by Roger Glover and Ian Paice of Deep Purple, and the two bands toured together several times. When Blackmore decided to leave Deep Purple during 1975, he was impressed enough to ask Dio to join his new group as a vocalist and songwriter partner.

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“That was a big change,” Dio says. “Elf was my band, like what I’m doing now. Rainbow was Ritchie’s band. Without his reputation, we wouldn’t have had the instant recognition that we did.”

Rainbow, however, was Dio’s step to fame. In his black vest patched with crested moons, he established himself as one of heavy metal’s top singers. In fact, his booming tenor and a tendency to hit all the right notes—a rarity in his chosen genre of rock—hinted that he was a greater talent than the limitations of heavy metal would let him show.

But Dio rebuffs any notions—including one made last year in the Los Angeles Times—that he’s slumming by singing metal and will eventually turn to more “serious” forms of singing.

“I am a singer,” he explains with a touch of pique in his voice. “I’m not slumming. I’m part of a special breed; I can sing anything. I’ve chosen to do this, and it just so happens that I do it well—better than most, I think. Maybe that’s why people think I’m slumming.

“It’s aggressive music, and I’m an aggressive person. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

What didn’t make sense to Dio, however, was Blackmore’s sudden shift in attitude. Around 1978, the guitarist wanted to stop the long, driving eardrum assaults and start making short, glossy pop-rock tunes that would fit with everything else being played on the radio. “He perhaps had too many people breathing in his ear to write more love songs or sound more like Foreigner,” Dio told Bam magazine. “When he approached me with that, I said, ‘It’s just not my style.’ ”

So Dio left, with every intention to start his solo career then. Black Sabbath guitarist Tony lommi interrupted, though, telling Dio he was going to leave Sabbath and asking the singer to consider forming a band with him. A few weeks later, Dio found out lommi had been persuaded to stick with the group for a farewell album and tour, and rather than wait, he set out once again to start his solo career.

But those plans came to a halt when Sabbath kicked singer Ozzy Osbourne out of the band and asked Dio to join. At first he got along well with lommi and bassist Geezer Butler; during their first meeting they wrote “Children Of The Sea” in short order, and his two studio albums with them—The Mob Rules and Heaven And Hell—gave a boost to the sagging quartet’s career.

“I felt that it was the right career decision,” Dio says. “I had not established myself as being as good or as well-known as I should’ve been.”

But the Live Evil concert album pulled the group apart. Dio said he was put off by the other members’ determination to take the live tapes back into the studio to correct the mistakes. He got tired of flying between Miami and Los Angeles to hear guitar and drum overdubs. After he quit, lommi and Butler accused Dio of slipping into the studio behind their backs to re-mix the tapes.

But three years later, Dio admits the live album situation only pushed him over the edge after he’d already become disilllusioned with the band.

“Sabbath had always been a democracy and wanted to maintain that,” he says. “I disagreed toward the end. I think if everyone is making decisions, then eveyone should contribute. The only people contributing were Tony and I.

“Here again, my destiny was being controlled by people who had no opinion, couldn’t even make a decision. An ogre—that’s what it put me out there as. We really haven’t patched things up. I won’t attempt to. I tried to be fair, but then I listened to them saying bad things about me...

“I’m not the kind of person who sits back and listens to lies,” Dio explains. “I defend myself. I won’t forgive them for the bad—and false—things they said about me. They had the opportunity to split amicably.” Then he pauses, as if trying to decide whether to take another shot. Go ahead, Ronnie. “We can all see which careers have gone the right way, can’t we.”

Dio was determined to get his solo career off right by hiring the right bandmates. And in his case, after spending six years fronting British bands, it was no surprise his choices were from overseas— including ex-Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain and Irish guitarist Vivian Campbell. Only drummer Appice, another disgruntled former Sabbath member, is a fellow Yank.

“It’s always important to have people you like and who like you, so you all respect each other,” Dio explains. “My attitude has always been British in nature. The people who play in L.A. were not the people I wanted to work with.”

Of course, there’s a devil of an opportunity that hasn’t passed Dio up. The devil himself, that is. The self-appointed guardians of moral order—the ones who believe that anyone who plays an electric guitar and wears spikes must keep a condo in hell and report directly to Satan—think Dio is the latest disciple from Hades trying to pull minds of his abundantly teenage, white male audience away from God and Christianity.

They point to his earlier work with Rainbow and, particularly, with Sabbath. And then there’s Murray, a mascot much like Iron Maiden’s Quasimodo-ish Eddie, Murray has the physique of an Olympic gymnast and the head of a jackal, and he’s all over Dio’s album covers; on Holy Diver, he’s watching a priest being swept up in the undertow of some hellacious ocean and not doing much to help, and on The Last In Line he’s presiding over some intergalactic decadence.

And here’s the Devil himself, onstage in Cleveland now. Maybe he left his horns at home, but he’s conjuring up the dreaded heavy metal spell when a fan flings a banner onstage. Dio scoops it up, brandishes it in front of the audience, then offers it as a sacrifice to the darkness of the back of the stage.

It turns into a fire sacrifice, however, when one of the many pyrotechnics ignites. As fate would have it, the banner is also sitting next to one of the wire-andcanvas pyramids which seems more than happy to offer itself as well. Without one Satanic incantation, Dio tosses the banner around until it’s merely ashes while the roadies work on the pyramid.

“I’m not a satanist,” Dio screams in mock frustration. “Their souls are still intact when they come out of my shows.

“And the way things are going, the souls of this band will reamin intact—for awhile, anyway.”