By John Ruch
Photo: Detail of the Dio logo on the cover of Holy Diver when turned upside-down. (John Ruch)
Ronnie James Dio, the legendary metal vocalist and songwriter, died five years ago today. The following is an edited version of a memorial essay I wrote at that time.
Heavy metal may hail Satan, but it is performed by popularly elected gods, and this week marked the black art’s first divine death. Ronnie James Dio, who succumbed to cancer on Sunday at 67, was a metal god metaphorically and literally—“Dio” is Italian for “God.”
With a ridiculously tiny body and a stunningly gigantic voice, he looked like a cathedral’s gargoyle and sounded like its pipe organ. His lyrics were the Bible abridged to Ecclesiastes and Revelation, and Lord of the Rings read by skipping to the end. Dio is the reason so many metal vocalists attempt four-octave disquisitions on magical diabolism; he is also the measure by which most of them just sound like piano movers herniating a disc. Metal is blue-collar opera, and Dio was its prima diavolo.
“Metal” is ultimately another term the ad-man and the tribalist have for rock ’n’ roll. Dio knew it; he had at least half a friggin’ dozen songs with “rock ’n’ roll” in the title. Rock is still a young artform in every sense of the word; Chuck Berry, who basically invented it, has now outlived another of its latter-day legends. But within its own frenetic evolutionary pace, rock is a wizened artform, and Dio was one of its transitional fossils. He was cutting doo-wop 45s in the 1950s, singing in a blues-rock band in the 1960s. Metal only came much later, and only after Dio helped invent it from the crucible of psychedelia with the band Rainbow.
Yeah, like the New York Times obit will tell you, Dio popularized metal’s devil-horn salute; but that’s like noting that Hendrix popularized the Strat. Guys like that added to rock’s fashion only because they added to its craft. Dio was a hell of a rock singer, songwriter and arranger. He egomaniacally gave himself “melodies by” credits on his albums, and he deserved it. Kill the King with Rainbow; The Mob Rules with Black Sabbath; Rainbow in the Dark with his own band—it’s cheap to call them great metal songs. They’re great rock songs, period, and whoever the backing band happened to be, they all sound unmistakably Dio.
Not that there’s any shame in being metal, and metal Dio was. Only a handful of guys so directly forged the genre, and Dio is the first one to die. And not by choking to death on his own wine-soaked vomit. Not by the wing of his airplane clipping a tour bus in a coke-fueled prank gone wrong. Not by being murdered by an Odinist after a night of Norwegian church-burning. Dio died of fairly old age, in a hospital bed, from the cancer. Most metalheads will go out that way, or something close to it. The end of Dio presages our own, and makes many of us reflect on a youth already gone. Metal is second only to hymns as a musical memento mori, yet the mortality of its gods still catches us by surprise, and makes us dread the next loss.
Of course, music more than morbidity is the reason for the headbanging head-hanging over Dio’s death. Part of the surprise of his demise was that Dio remained vital to the end, touring on a new album with yet another incarnation of Sabbath. His peers remembered him this week as one of metal’s (few) nice guys off-stage, and one of its creative forces on-.
But if we’re honest, a lot of them snickered at Dio over the years, especially as punk-infused thrash took over, for his lyrical zoo of wizards and demons. And why not—this is a guy who once fronted a band called Elf, and used his own mug as the cover image. He wrote some of metal’s most ridiculous lyrics—which is saying something—as well as some of its greatest (sometimes in the same verse). But I’ve long found Dio the lyricist misunderstood within the genre, let alone outside it. He was no escapist. His fantasy was rooted in the reality of someone who paid real dues. His songs are full of tempered dreams, false freedoms, dubious purities. He wrote a famous Sabbath tune called Heaven and Hell; it’s clearly about the “and.” He told us that we don’t know “if we’re evil or divine,” just that “we’re the last in line.”
But then, who isn’t misunderstood? That’s what death—even, especially, of a famous artist—always highlights. You start thinking about what a person meant to you, and realize you have precious few scraps that you clung to in the first place. And when you are joined by millions of others sharing their memories, strange portraits emerge. I suspect that, as Dio once sang, “The answer lies between the good and bad.”
I didn’t shed any tears over Dio this week. To be honest, I never cared that much about him. I joined the metal militia in its thrash days, when the genre was already flowing in a different path from Dio’s bombastic anthems, and his career was in decline. I knew he was great, but he was personally unimportant to me. I considered him as something like an improved version of Robert Plant.
So I was surprised when I reminisced about my devilish youth and realized how many Dio memories I had. I think that is the true measure of an artist’s, and particularly a musician’s, greatness—the context they provide for our lives.
Dio made a ludicrous camp spectacle of himself in the 1980s—stabbing a giant dragon puppet onstage was among his less silly acts—so it is no surprise that one of my first Dio memories is about his image. A friend and I got hold of a “documentary” video made by Dave Benoit, one of the anti-metal nutjob preachers of the era, who expounded hysterically on the Satanic brainwashing of America’s youth. Apparently finding Dio’s overt imagery—including an album cover of a Doberman-faced demon hurling a terrified, chain-bound priest into a raging sea—too subtle, this preacher went to great lengths to show how one version of the “Dio” band logo could be deconstructed to reveal the hidden word, “evil.” This is all the more hilarious when, as every metalhead knows, the standard “Dio” logo clearly spells “Devil” when flipped upside-down. (Dio himself claimed it’s a coincidence, which was probably a lie; in any case, it was surely purposeful by the artist, and is a brilliant play on the literal meaning of “Dio,” quite in line with Dio’s lyrical themes.) Camp is crucial to metal’s aesthetic, and my friend and I laughed ourselves sick over the preacher taking it seriously at Dio’s expense.
The same friend and I had a joke metal band of our own. We stole a shotgun sound effect from Dio’s Sacred Heart for our own songwriting purposes (kids would call it “sampling” today), and really, what else would you want to listen to on that lame album? It was not Dio’s best moment, but unfortunately happened to be his latest at the time.
Hard-rock radio led me to appreciate Dio more as I took in his lyrical seriousness. One day in the early 1990s, I decided I needed to own the album with Rainbow in the Dark on it. My difficulty in doing so is a testament to the longevity of both Dio and myself. There was no Internet. Metal was enjoying its mainstream heyday, but there were still no guidebooks to heavy metal albums. To know about particular songs, you had to look at the actual album, or find an old magazine review or some well-versed master of metal lore. And record stores were still far from carrying a rich catalogue of metal. So I had to guess that Rainbow in the Dark was on The Last in Line, and back-order it from the local record shop, which, like all record stores, was run by a total dick who everyone was glad to see put out business by mp3s.
I was wrong about the song, but The Last in Line hammered the title track further into my brain, and completed my conversion to the Dio faith. His moral seriousness impressed me as much as his powerful voice. Around the same time, I penned the best song I ever wrote (albeit from a short list). I always thought my vocal influences were obvious—a Dead Kennedys-Metallica mishmash; and my lyrics taken more from poetry and science essays than any pop music. But when I look back and listen to my attempts at soaring, cross-riff melodies and my bombastic, existential/religious themes, I see with crystal clarity I was doing what every metalhead band does. I was trying to write a Dio song.
I went AWOL on my one chance to see Dio play live. I used to think of it as among the best non-shows I’ve attended. Dio and Motorhead were playing in Ohio at the place where Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell later would be shot dead onstage. That stupendous murder was no surprise to me after poking my head in the door at the Dio/Motorhead gig. The place was packed with bikers wearing sweaty denim vests and hunting knives on their belts. It looked like Altamont minus the Stones. Then Motorhead refused to play—because the stage was too small for their drum kit. That was so rock ’n’ roll that I reacted with basic solidarity; they refuse to play, I refuse to attend. Dio was forging ahead—the stage was apparently big enough for his compact self—but my friend and I skipped out. Instead, we drove around listening to Danzig’s Blackacidevil. In our defense, Dio was touring on a really lame shot at nü-metal. But in retrospect, that was like bailing out of a French restaurant to eat spilled fries from the asphalt outside a Mickey D’s drive-thru window.
But in a way, Dio was always much closer to me than any stage would put him. He helped create the much-lauded/much-loathed unity of the metal world—one of the very few places it’s OK to be angry and that gives you motivation to fight another day. Words like “greatness” don’t express what three minutes of a good rock song will do for your soul. “Loneliness” doesn’t touch what it means to lose someone who gave that to you.
I worked a pizza shop one summer—one of the road warriors doing delivery. There were probably a million kids like me that summer—in jeans and a white T, hair past my shoulders, my chest tight with job stress, driving a gas-guzzler that leaked a quart of oil a day, blasting the local hard-rock radio as the only lifeline in a lonely town. One day, as I started up a hill on a state route, Rainbow in the Dark came on, and I cranked the knob. I crested the ridge, looking down on the spiral-banded strip-mined hills of Pennsylvania lying dead under a gunmetal sky. “When there’s lightning!” screamed Dio in the opening line; and on cue, several huge bolts blasted across the clouds.
There was magic in the air. I grinned, threw a devil-horn salute, and took the long way back.
Photo: Detail of the Dio logo on the cover of Holy Diver when turned upside-down. (John Ruch)
Ronnie James Dio, the legendary metal vocalist and songwriter, died five years ago today. The following is an edited version of a memorial essay I wrote at that time.
Heavy metal may hail Satan, but it is performed by popularly elected gods, and this week marked the black art’s first divine death. Ronnie James Dio, who succumbed to cancer on Sunday at 67, was a metal god metaphorically and literally—“Dio” is Italian for “God.”
With a ridiculously tiny body and a stunningly gigantic voice, he looked like a cathedral’s gargoyle and sounded like its pipe organ. His lyrics were the Bible abridged to Ecclesiastes and Revelation, and Lord of the Rings read by skipping to the end. Dio is the reason so many metal vocalists attempt four-octave disquisitions on magical diabolism; he is also the measure by which most of them just sound like piano movers herniating a disc. Metal is blue-collar opera, and Dio was its prima diavolo.
“Metal” is ultimately another term the ad-man and the tribalist have for rock ’n’ roll. Dio knew it; he had at least half a friggin’ dozen songs with “rock ’n’ roll” in the title. Rock is still a young artform in every sense of the word; Chuck Berry, who basically invented it, has now outlived another of its latter-day legends. But within its own frenetic evolutionary pace, rock is a wizened artform, and Dio was one of its transitional fossils. He was cutting doo-wop 45s in the 1950s, singing in a blues-rock band in the 1960s. Metal only came much later, and only after Dio helped invent it from the crucible of psychedelia with the band Rainbow.
Yeah, like the New York Times obit will tell you, Dio popularized metal’s devil-horn salute; but that’s like noting that Hendrix popularized the Strat. Guys like that added to rock’s fashion only because they added to its craft. Dio was a hell of a rock singer, songwriter and arranger. He egomaniacally gave himself “melodies by” credits on his albums, and he deserved it. Kill the King with Rainbow; The Mob Rules with Black Sabbath; Rainbow in the Dark with his own band—it’s cheap to call them great metal songs. They’re great rock songs, period, and whoever the backing band happened to be, they all sound unmistakably Dio.
Not that there’s any shame in being metal, and metal Dio was. Only a handful of guys so directly forged the genre, and Dio is the first one to die. And not by choking to death on his own wine-soaked vomit. Not by the wing of his airplane clipping a tour bus in a coke-fueled prank gone wrong. Not by being murdered by an Odinist after a night of Norwegian church-burning. Dio died of fairly old age, in a hospital bed, from the cancer. Most metalheads will go out that way, or something close to it. The end of Dio presages our own, and makes many of us reflect on a youth already gone. Metal is second only to hymns as a musical memento mori, yet the mortality of its gods still catches us by surprise, and makes us dread the next loss.
Of course, music more than morbidity is the reason for the headbanging head-hanging over Dio’s death. Part of the surprise of his demise was that Dio remained vital to the end, touring on a new album with yet another incarnation of Sabbath. His peers remembered him this week as one of metal’s (few) nice guys off-stage, and one of its creative forces on-.
But if we’re honest, a lot of them snickered at Dio over the years, especially as punk-infused thrash took over, for his lyrical zoo of wizards and demons. And why not—this is a guy who once fronted a band called Elf, and used his own mug as the cover image. He wrote some of metal’s most ridiculous lyrics—which is saying something—as well as some of its greatest (sometimes in the same verse). But I’ve long found Dio the lyricist misunderstood within the genre, let alone outside it. He was no escapist. His fantasy was rooted in the reality of someone who paid real dues. His songs are full of tempered dreams, false freedoms, dubious purities. He wrote a famous Sabbath tune called Heaven and Hell; it’s clearly about the “and.” He told us that we don’t know “if we’re evil or divine,” just that “we’re the last in line.”
But then, who isn’t misunderstood? That’s what death—even, especially, of a famous artist—always highlights. You start thinking about what a person meant to you, and realize you have precious few scraps that you clung to in the first place. And when you are joined by millions of others sharing their memories, strange portraits emerge. I suspect that, as Dio once sang, “The answer lies between the good and bad.”
I didn’t shed any tears over Dio this week. To be honest, I never cared that much about him. I joined the metal militia in its thrash days, when the genre was already flowing in a different path from Dio’s bombastic anthems, and his career was in decline. I knew he was great, but he was personally unimportant to me. I considered him as something like an improved version of Robert Plant.
So I was surprised when I reminisced about my devilish youth and realized how many Dio memories I had. I think that is the true measure of an artist’s, and particularly a musician’s, greatness—the context they provide for our lives.
Dio made a ludicrous camp spectacle of himself in the 1980s—stabbing a giant dragon puppet onstage was among his less silly acts—so it is no surprise that one of my first Dio memories is about his image. A friend and I got hold of a “documentary” video made by Dave Benoit, one of the anti-metal nutjob preachers of the era, who expounded hysterically on the Satanic brainwashing of America’s youth. Apparently finding Dio’s overt imagery—including an album cover of a Doberman-faced demon hurling a terrified, chain-bound priest into a raging sea—too subtle, this preacher went to great lengths to show how one version of the “Dio” band logo could be deconstructed to reveal the hidden word, “evil.” This is all the more hilarious when, as every metalhead knows, the standard “Dio” logo clearly spells “Devil” when flipped upside-down. (Dio himself claimed it’s a coincidence, which was probably a lie; in any case, it was surely purposeful by the artist, and is a brilliant play on the literal meaning of “Dio,” quite in line with Dio’s lyrical themes.) Camp is crucial to metal’s aesthetic, and my friend and I laughed ourselves sick over the preacher taking it seriously at Dio’s expense.
The same friend and I had a joke metal band of our own. We stole a shotgun sound effect from Dio’s Sacred Heart for our own songwriting purposes (kids would call it “sampling” today), and really, what else would you want to listen to on that lame album? It was not Dio’s best moment, but unfortunately happened to be his latest at the time.
Hard-rock radio led me to appreciate Dio more as I took in his lyrical seriousness. One day in the early 1990s, I decided I needed to own the album with Rainbow in the Dark on it. My difficulty in doing so is a testament to the longevity of both Dio and myself. There was no Internet. Metal was enjoying its mainstream heyday, but there were still no guidebooks to heavy metal albums. To know about particular songs, you had to look at the actual album, or find an old magazine review or some well-versed master of metal lore. And record stores were still far from carrying a rich catalogue of metal. So I had to guess that Rainbow in the Dark was on The Last in Line, and back-order it from the local record shop, which, like all record stores, was run by a total dick who everyone was glad to see put out business by mp3s.
I was wrong about the song, but The Last in Line hammered the title track further into my brain, and completed my conversion to the Dio faith. His moral seriousness impressed me as much as his powerful voice. Around the same time, I penned the best song I ever wrote (albeit from a short list). I always thought my vocal influences were obvious—a Dead Kennedys-Metallica mishmash; and my lyrics taken more from poetry and science essays than any pop music. But when I look back and listen to my attempts at soaring, cross-riff melodies and my bombastic, existential/religious themes, I see with crystal clarity I was doing what every metalhead band does. I was trying to write a Dio song.
I went AWOL on my one chance to see Dio play live. I used to think of it as among the best non-shows I’ve attended. Dio and Motorhead were playing in Ohio at the place where Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell later would be shot dead onstage. That stupendous murder was no surprise to me after poking my head in the door at the Dio/Motorhead gig. The place was packed with bikers wearing sweaty denim vests and hunting knives on their belts. It looked like Altamont minus the Stones. Then Motorhead refused to play—because the stage was too small for their drum kit. That was so rock ’n’ roll that I reacted with basic solidarity; they refuse to play, I refuse to attend. Dio was forging ahead—the stage was apparently big enough for his compact self—but my friend and I skipped out. Instead, we drove around listening to Danzig’s Blackacidevil. In our defense, Dio was touring on a really lame shot at nü-metal. But in retrospect, that was like bailing out of a French restaurant to eat spilled fries from the asphalt outside a Mickey D’s drive-thru window.
But in a way, Dio was always much closer to me than any stage would put him. He helped create the much-lauded/much-loathed unity of the metal world—one of the very few places it’s OK to be angry and that gives you motivation to fight another day. Words like “greatness” don’t express what three minutes of a good rock song will do for your soul. “Loneliness” doesn’t touch what it means to lose someone who gave that to you.
I worked a pizza shop one summer—one of the road warriors doing delivery. There were probably a million kids like me that summer—in jeans and a white T, hair past my shoulders, my chest tight with job stress, driving a gas-guzzler that leaked a quart of oil a day, blasting the local hard-rock radio as the only lifeline in a lonely town. One day, as I started up a hill on a state route, Rainbow in the Dark came on, and I cranked the knob. I crested the ridge, looking down on the spiral-banded strip-mined hills of Pennsylvania lying dead under a gunmetal sky. “When there’s lightning!” screamed Dio in the opening line; and on cue, several huge bolts blasted across the clouds.
There was magic in the air. I grinned, threw a devil-horn salute, and took the long way back.