Strange Highways

Strange Highways is Dio's sixth studio album. Ronnie James Dio had gone back to Black Sabbath in 1992 to record Dehumanizer, and he rebuilt the band with Vinny Appice, who had drummed on that album too. The new guitarist was Tracy G (Tracy Grijalva). Bassist Jeff Pilson, formerly of Dokken, recalled that around the spring of 1993 Dio and Appice came to his door looking for a bass player because Jimmy Bain had not shown up for about a week, and he offered himself. Before they could go and play, the pair spent fifteen minutes fixing his broken sprinklers. Mike Fraser produced, engineered and mixed the record, which was recorded at Rumbo Recorders and mixed at the Record Plant, both in Los Angeles. Ronnie James Dio and Tracy G are credited on all eleven songs, most of which the four members wrote together; "Pain" is credited to the two of them alone. Louder has described a darker mood than on earlier Dio records, set by the opening "Jesus, Mary & the Holy Ghost" and carried into a title track as doom-laden as anything Dio recorded with Sabbath. On release Music Week suggested that the break with Black Sabbath had spurred him to his best album since Heaven and Hell, and in 1997 Dio called it, after Dehumanizer, a musical step forward. Wil Rees, the cover artist of Lock Up the Wolves, illustrated this one too. Vertigo released the album first in Britain and Europe in October 1993, and Music Week listed it among the album releases for the week of 25 to 30 October. Reprise followed in the United States in January 1994; Billboard's review of 19 February named "Evilution" as the lead single and noted the European release of the previous autumn. That week it entered the Billboard 200 at number 142, staying for two weeks. The last night of the European tour, at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on 12 December 1993, was filmed and released by Eagle Rock in 2014 as Live in London: Hammersmith Apollo. Jeff Pilson later called this album and Angry Machines "such fun records to make".