Ronnie James Dio, 1942-2010

I think he would have appreciated the description, "Mephistophelean."

The great Ronnie James Dio is dead. His career in Rock parallels my own years of caring about it: when he was great, I was really into it. And as I cared less and less about rock generally and Heavy Metal specifically, Dio's centrality in the musical universe faded to the margins. Dio, however, stayed great and rocked as hard as ever. He died old and racked with disease, but he was still Great.

Ronnie James Dio sang with Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio. The New York Times obituary describs Dio's "powerful, semioperatic vocal style and attachment to demonic imagery," that "made him one of the best-loved figures in classic heavy metal..."

"No cause was given in the announcement, but Mr. Dio had been suffering from stomach cancer, and recently his band Heaven and Hell canceled its summer tour because of his health. The Houston Chronicle reported that Mr. Dio was being treated at a hospital in Houston."

Now, Dio was a small guy. He was so small, so scrawny, so under-nourished, one wonders if his stomach turned on him after years of neglect. Perhaps whatever inner demons he had won out, despite his best attempts to purge them through song. Or maybe it was the luck of the draw, as everyone who dies, dies from something. I imagine, whatever the case with Dio, he met the Reaper with bravado and a certain familiarity. I bet he had some kind of deal that the lords of death accepted. And Death never strikes a deal.

"Mr. Dio..."—Oh, the New York Times!—".. was born Ronald James Padavona in Portsmouth, N.H., and grew up in Cortland, N.Y. He began his career in rockabilly bands in the late 1950s, but by the mid-1970s, when Ritchie Blackmore, the guitarist of the British band Deep Purple, hired him to sing for his new band, Rainbow, Mr. Dio had become a heavy-metal purist, and he became known as much for his vocal prowess as for his Mephistophelean stage persona."

Now, "Mephistophelean" connotes an apostle from Hell, whose duty is to speak for the Devil. And that Apostle is pained by his relationship to Satan, sometimes depicted as being The Dark Lord's catamite. That doesn't fit Dio: he insisted:

If it seems to be real, it's illusion
For every moment of truth, there's confusion in life
Love can be seen as the answer,
but nobody bleeds for the dancer

You've got to bleed for the dancer!
Look for the answer!

His was a message of goodness, shrouded in darkness and mystery and the confusion from that. Kind of like dreams are the portal to our individual realities, even though they are often frightening and mysterious, and happen at night with our eyes closed.

Well OK, maybe not. But he wasn't about evil. He was about divining answers from all our experience, not just from Dad's and Mom's capitalistic exhortations of discipline and worry. Trust me on this one.

"He is widely credited," the Times continues, "with popularizing the 'devil horn' hand gesture — index and pinky fingers up, everything else clenched in a fist — as a symbol of metal’s occult-like worship of everything scary and heavy."

OK, this obituary writer guy is mad because he was picked on in school, but rejected by the bandana-wristed Def Leppard-ites. And now his Editors, I bet, are sitting on his requests to do restaurant reviews. And Dio pays the price.

"Mr. Dio sang about devils, defiance and the glory of rock ‘n’ roll with a strong, mean voice, punctuating his points with gale-force vibrato, a style derived in part from singers like Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan."

This is erroneous. Dio reclaimed big vocals from Gillian's and other progressive rockers' comic operatics. I want that said.

"When Ozzy Osborne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, Mr. Dio replaced him, and by 1983 he released the album 'Holy Diver' with his own band, Dio. In various lineup configurations, the band Dio continued to release material in the mid-2000s.

"In 2006 he began playing with some of his former band mates in Black Sabbath, naming the group Heaven and Hell after the title of the first Black Sabbath album on which Mr. Dio appeared. Heaven and Hell released one album, “The Devil You Know,” in 2009.

"Other than his wife, no information about his survivors was immediately available on Sunday afternoon."

Translation: "Names of Mr Dio's demon spawn are unavailable as they scatter for crevices in the temporal woodwork."
















Pict1944

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Times