DIO TRIVIA
Trivia
Dio first came to Japan in 1985, to play the Super Rock '85 festival. That performance was only ever released in Japan, on VHS; in 2010 Niji Entertainment Group, the label founded by Ronnie James Dio and Wendy Dio, listed its first DVD release among its plans for the following year. In September 1986 the band returned for a Japanese tour that included the Nippon Budokan. A film shot three months earlier, on 17 June 1986 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, shows the band with its new guitarist Craig Goldy, and according to Tower Records it is the only video of "Time to Burn", the studio track from Intermission, being played live.
Ronnie James Dio is credited with spreading the metal horns, index and little finger raised. According to his official website, he said he took the gesture from his Italian grandmother, who used it to ward off the evil eye; in 2001 he doubted he was the first to make it, saying he had simply made it fashionable. Doug Aldrich recalls that because the sign is meant to keep bad spirits away, Dio always pointed it outwards and never turned it back towards himself. Geezer Butler has said he had been making it in the song "Black Sabbath" since 1968, and showed it to Dio when crowds greeted the new singer with Ozzy Osbourne's peace sign, though Butler adds that Dio made it famous and it will always be associated with him. When Gene Simmons applied to trademark the gesture in 2017, he withdrew within two weeks; Wendy Dio said it belonged to everyone.
Dio's first US gold albums came on the same day, 12 September 1984, when the RIAA certified both Holy Diver and The Last in Line. The Last in Line was the first to go platinum, in February 1987, but Holy Diver followed in March 1989 and in May 2022, 39 years after its release, became the band's only double-platinum album. Sacred Heart went gold in October 1985, the 2000 compilation The Very Beast of Dio in March 2009, and the video Holy Diver Live in February 2015.
A Dio song won a Grammy after Ronnie James Dio's death. At the 57th Grammy Awards in February 2015, Tenacious D's cover of "The Last in Line", from the tribute album Ronnie James Dio - This Is Your Life (Rhino, 2014), won Best Metal Performance, in a field that also included Anthrax's version of Black Sabbath's "Neon Knights" from the same album. All the album's proceeds went to the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund, which had received $132,000 from it by then. Wendy Dio said Jack Black rang her in excitement as soon as the win was announced, and that her only regret was that Dio himself was not there to see it.
After Ronnie James Dio's death, donations from fans in his memory led to the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund, co-founded in 2010 by Wendy Dio and sharing its name with the song that opens Holy Diver. At the public memorial, his son Dan Padavona begged fans to get screened regularly, saying his father had ignored the warning signs for years because the show always had to go on. According to Dio's official website the fund has raised more than two million dollars, given to cancer research at the T.J. Martell Foundation and at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where Dio was treated in the last six months of his life, and to a UCLA School of Dentistry project developing a saliva test for early detection. Each year it holds a celebrity bowling tournament, Bowl for Ronnie, and the Ride for Ronnie, in which hundreds of bikers cross Los Angeles to a park concert.
The band took the stage name of Ronnie James Dio, though by Vivian Campbell's account it was never meant to be a solo project. At the end of Campbell's audition in London in September 1982, Dio explained that he had left Black Sabbath and been offered a solo deal, but wanted a band rather than a solo record; the name was for recognition. Dio admitted he could pay next to nothing for the first album, Campbell recalls, but promised that if the band took off, everyone would share fairly once the contract came up for renegotiation after the third. Nothing was signed; they looked each other in the eye and shook hands. Campbell later said he was fired for holding Dio to that promise.
The search for Dio's guitarist began with a phone call at 2am. One night in September 1982 Jimmy Bain rang Vivian Campbell's family home from a London hotel: Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice had left Black Sabbath and needed a guitarist, so could he audition the next evening? Campbell's Belfast band Sweet Savage had opened for Bain's Wild Horses several times, but Bain, too busy partying backstage, had never heard him play. With the fare from Belfast lent by his father, Campbell flew over, and in a North London rehearsal room Dio picked up a bass and played the "Holy Diver" riff; four hours later the 20-year-old had the job. Bain's other candidate, John Sykes, already had a regular wage from Whitesnake, and Dio later told Mick Wall that he had wanted to keep a blend of American and British rock rather than throw together hotshots from the Sunset Strip.
Holy Diver was made at Sound City in Van Nuys, a duplex where a rehearsal room and a recording studio faced each other across a courtyard. Within weeks of Vivian Campbell's audition the four were working there every night, and Campbell recalls that they would finish a song and often record it the same night, without even breaking the equipment down: they simply rolled it across the parking lot to the studio. Friends would drop by, and the atmosphere, he says, was great. Ronnie James Dio called the album one of the proudest things he had ever done.
"Holy Diver" is often heard as a song about Satan, but Ronnie James Dio told Sam Dunn, for the film Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, that its hero is a Christ-like figure on a distant planet. Having died for that world's sins, he is about to leave for yet another world to do the same, and its people beg him to stay with them: Dio meant it as a picture of human selfishness. Years later Dio turned up in cartoon form on South Park to sing it.
"Rainbow in the Dark" came together almost by accident, in about ten minutes. Vivian Campbell says all its music came from a Sweet Savage song he had written at sixteen: he, Jimmy Bain and Vinny Appice were jamming on it when Ronnie James Dio walked into the rehearsal room and began singing a melody over it almost at once, and in a break Bain found the keyboard figure on a small Yamaha, reworking a part from "Criminal Tendencies", a song he had written for his previous band, Wild Horses. Dio himself disliked the result as too poppy for the album and, by his own account, went for a razor blade to cut up the tape until the others talked him out of it; he thanked them over and over afterwards. The single reached No. 46 in the UK and No. 14 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart.
Holy Diver's sleeve shows a priest tangled in chains and drowning in the sea while a demonic creature swings a length of chain above him. The idea was Wendy Dio's, developed by her and Ronnie James Dio; Gene Hunter began fleshing out the design and Randy Berrett painted the finished cover. In 2020 the Dio estate and Z2 Comics announced a graphic novel, Dio - Holy Diver, written by the horror writer Steve Niles and drawn by Scott Hampton, which set out to settle three decades of fan guesswork: why is the priest being thrown into the sea, and who is the real villain? Wendy Dio described it as a story about not judging a picture by how it looks, which is what Dio had written about many times in his songs.
The creature drowning the priest on the Holy Diver sleeve has a name: Murray. Ronnie James Dio told Classic Rock that Murray was more or less the band's logo figure, and that he turns up on the sleeve of The Last in Line too. Giving such a creature a grand name would be silly, Dio said; the funny thing was a monster called Murray. Iron Maiden, after all, had Eddie, and Black Sabbath's flying devil had been called Henry. He had earlier told the same magazine that the band's mechanical stage dragon was really called Dean, though for some reason the English called him Denzil.
The video for "The Last in Line" was directed by Don Coscarelli. In a clip from the 2022 documentary Dio: Dreamers Never Die, Coscarelli recalls bringing Ronnie James Dio a simple idea after first hearing the song, teenagers in hell, and Dio giving it more depth: from birth to death, Dio told him, we all stand in a line, so imagine being the last in it. Then, Coscarelli says, Dio quickly added that of course Murray, the band's demon mascot, had to be in it.
Dio's 1980s shows were built on spectacle. According to Craig Goldy, the Sacred Heart tour brought out an 18-foot dragon that really breathed fire, with lasers shooting from its eyes and setting off explosions wherever they landed; for Dream Evil a giant metal spider came down from the rafters for Goldy to blast with lasers fired from his guitar. Goldy says Ronnie James Dio cut his profit margin nearly in half rather than raise ticket prices, and that Wendy Dio had a big hand in building the Sacred Heart set. When Julien's Auctions offered items from Dio's estate in 2018, the lots included an animatronic sphinx from the Last in Line tour, the Sacred Heart dragon's head and Barry Jackson's painting for the cover of The Last in Line, estimated at $20,000 to $30,000.
In 2021 Geezer Butler said that several Dio titles had come from him. Sacred Heart, he said, was the name of the school he went to; "One Foot in the Grave", later a song on Strange Highways, was a title he had jokingly suggested for a Black Sabbath album; and his habit of adding "Magic" when signing autographs was copied by Ronnie James Dio, who went on to call an album Magica. Butler said he never minded, since Dio made such things famous, and that the only thing he ever raised with him was the horns.
Hear 'n Aid began with a radio interview. Vivian Campbell says that when he and his roommate Jimmy Bain were asked on the Los Angeles station KLOS why nobody from hard rock had been invited onto "We Are the World", Bain joked that they should make their own and call it Hear 'n Aid. The pair wrote the music in the middle of the Sacred Heart sessions and took it to Ronnie James Dio for the weight of his name; Dio turned it down at first, came round after a couple of weeks of persuasion and wrote the lyrics. Vinny Appice recalls that the backing track was cut at Sound City, with Appice and Quiet Riot's Frankie Banali drumming together, live. Campbell spent weeks cold-calling musicians he had never met from a publicist's Rolodex, and on 20 and 21 May 1985 some 40 artists gathered at A&M Studios in Hollywood, where even Spinal Tap turned up.
Getting Hear 'n Aid into the shops took more than half a year. With the participants signed to so many different labels, clearing the rights held up the album until January 1986. It also carried tracks donated by Kiss, Rush, Motörhead, Accept, Scorpions and Dio, and "Stars" reached No. 26 on the UK singles chart in May 1986. Accounts of the money raised differ: Dio's official website says more than two million dollars within a year, Ultimate Classic Rock nearly one million. The record has only ever been issued on vinyl and cassette, never on CD. In April 2026 Wendy Dio said Metal Blade had offered a deal to reissue it on vinyl and CD, alongside a book of photographs.
Vivian Campbell was fired in 1986, midway through the Sacred Heart tour, and Craig Goldy took his place. Those involved tell it differently. Campbell says he was dropped for pressing Ronnie James Dio on the promise that the band would share equitably by the third album, that it was about principle more than money, and that all he wanted was to be paid more than the road crew, not an equal share with Dio. Wendy Dio said in 2011 that it was she, not Ronnie James Dio, who fired him, and that he had wanted as much money as Dio and thought himself as important; in 2022 she added that he had been pushing the band in a more commercial direction, which Dio had always resisted. Jimmy Bain called the firing the biggest mistake of Dio's career. Campbell has since said that he and Dio were both wrong to go after each other through the press.
Rowan Robertson was 17 when he became the guitarist on Lock Up the Wolves. Having read in Kerrang! and Metal Hammer that Dio needed a guitarist, he recorded a solo over "The Last in Line" on a four-track cassette recorder and sent it to Phonogram in London, which sent it back; he then sent it to Dio's fan club in America with a Polaroid of himself in his best Kerrang! pose. Months later, after he had given up hope, Wendy Dio rang to ask how he would feel playing in front of 20,000 people. Two auditions in Los Angeles later he was in, and he co-wrote every song on the album; the riff of "Hey Angel", he says, came out of a jam while Ronnie James Dio was out of the room at a rehearsal studio across from Sound City.
Dio charted higher in Britain than in America. The Last in Line (1984) and Sacred Heart (1985) both entered the UK albums chart at No. 4, and Dream Evil (1987) entered at No. 8, but no Dio album made the top ten of the Billboard 200, where The Last in Line's No. 23 was the best. Holy Diver reached No. 13 in the UK and only No. 56 in the US, yet spent 39 weeks on the Billboard 200. On Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, "The Last in Line" was the band's only top-ten song, at No. 10, while "Holy Diver" itself peaked at No. 40.
"Hungry for Heaven" reached the public before the album it belongs to. The song first appeared on the soundtrack of the 1985 film Vision Quest and entered Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart in March 1985, peaking at No. 30, before being issued as a single from Sacred Heart. In Britain it peaked at No. 72 in October 1985, and at No. 56 when it charted again in May 1986.
In 2001 Tenacious D released a song called "Dio", telling Ronnie James Dio that he had rocked long enough and should pass the torch to them. Jack Black has said it was meant as an ode but could easily have been taken as an insult. Dio recalled being phoned by someone who told him the duo wanted him to quit; he chose to hear it as a tribute from fans who would carry on what he did when the time came. Black first met him in 2002 on the set of the Dio video for "Push", where Dio asked the pair to make a cameo, and in the 2006 film Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny Dio comes to life out of a poster the young Jack Black sings to and tells him to go to Hollywood.
Dio played Donington twice, in 1983 and 1987, and the 1983 show, on the Holy Diver tour, was the band's first ever UK performance. The two shows became the double album Dio at Donington UK: Live 1983 & 1987, the first release from Niji Entertainment Group, the label Ronnie James Dio and Wendy Dio had set up. Dio, its executive producer, had been looking forward to it, but it came out in November 2010, six months after his death, selling 5,800 copies in its first US week and entering the Billboard 200 at No. 98.
In October 2009 Ronnie James Dio told Classic Rock that Dio would play a new song, "Electra", on the European tour starting the following month and release it as a limited single; the band would then record the last two parts of the story begun on Magica in 2000. The tour was cancelled when Dio fell ill, and "Electra" came out in Tournado, a box set made for that tour, in a signed and numbered edition of 1,500. Dio said the song was part of the Magica trilogy and hard to follow on its own, so he had written an explanation of its story. Doug Aldrich, who was to play the tour, recalls that Dio first had him put a solo on another song, then switched to a new idea, "Electra", to get one song finished to promote the tour. "Electra" later appeared on The Very Beast of Dio Vol. 2 in 2012.
Ronnie James Dio's illness brought the band to an end. In November 2009 Wendy Dio announced that the band's UK tour was cancelled and that Dio was in hospital, then that he had early-stage stomach cancer and would begin treatment at the Mayo Clinic at once. He went on to have chemotherapy at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and when Heaven & Hell's summer tour was called off in May 2010 he promised there would be other tours and more music. His last public appearance was on 8 April 2010 at the Revolver Golden Gods Awards at Club Nokia in Los Angeles, where he was named Best Vocalist for his work with Heaven & Hell. He died in Los Angeles on 16 May 2010, aged 67.
Cortland, New York, where Ronnie James Dio grew up, named a street Dio Way in November 1988: a new connecting road near his childhood home on Central Avenue. Dio was inducted into a Cortland hall of fame in 2004, and in 2007 his handprints went into Hollywood's Rock Walk. After his death, more than 1,200 fans filled the Hall of Liberty at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills for a public memorial on 30 May 2010, with hundreds more watching on monitors outside, and at the service it was announced that the Los Angeles City Council had declared 30 May Ronnie James Dio Day.
A statue of Ronnie James Dio stands in Kavarna, a town on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. It was unveiled in the town's central park on 23 October 2010, with Dio drummer Simon Wright and the singer's road manager Steve Mignardi in attendance. More than two metres tall and set among large stones taken from the sea, it took the sculptors Alexander Petrov and Krasimir Krastev-Lomsky two months and was paid for entirely by donations. Dio was reportedly one of the first heavy rock stars to play Kavarna; he performed in Bulgaria at least five times and joined the campaign to free the Bulgarian nurses imprisoned in Libya. According to his official website, fans gather at the statue on his birthday.
In 2012 the early Dio members Vivian Campbell, Vinny Appice, Jimmy Bain and Claude Schnell formed Last in Line with singer Andrew Freeman, naming the band after Dio's second album. Campbell said that since the original band had written most of that material together, they were entitled to play it and were no tribute act. When Last in Line played the Loud Park festival at Saitama Super Arena on 20 October 2013, Ray Haller, Campbell's old bandmate in Sweet Savage, stood in for Bain on bass. Bain died aboard Def Leppard's Hysteria on the High Seas cruise on 23 January 2016, aged 68, of lung cancer according to his bandmates, a month before Last in Line's first album, Heavy Crown, produced by former Dio bassist Jeff Pilson, was due in the shops.
After Ronnie James Dio's death, the last Dio line-up announced in March 2011 that it would carry on as Dio Disciples with former Judas Priest singer Tim "Ripper" Owens. At Wacken Open Air in August 2016 a hologram of Dio, a year in the making by the company Eyellusion, joined them for "We Rock" in front of more than 75,000 surprised fans, singing with Dio's own recorded vocals and even raising the horns. The Dio Returns world tour began in December 2017, and after its first seven shows the hologram was reworked before a US run from the end of May 2019. Craig Goldy said that to him these shows were less concerts than memorial services; Vivian Campbell said Dio Disciples had no credibility as a tribute, since none of its members had been in the original Dio line-up.
Dio: Dreamers Never Die (2022) was the first documentary on Ronnie James Dio fully authorised by his estate. Directed by Don Argott and Demian Fenton, with Wendy Dio among its executive producers, it premiered at SXSW in Austin, was shown in more than 600 cinemas worldwide on just two nights, 28 September and 2 October 2022, and won the Audience Award at the In-Edit festival in Barcelona that October. Wendy Dio said there was enough material for a five-hour film. Vivian Campbell was not interviewed: Fenton explained that Wendy Dio and Campbell still did not work together, and said the scene of Campbell's exit had been recut fifteen times to keep it down the middle.
Ronnie James Dio's autobiography, Rainbow in the Dark, came out on 27 July 2021, eleven years after his death. He wrote it by hand, a bit at a time, and had got almost to the end of his years in Rainbow; once he was ill he jotted down notes of things to include, but he never finished it. Mick Wall, a British journalist who had interviewed him many times, kept urging Wendy Dio to complete it, and to keep it in his own words the two drew on a scrapbook his mother had kept of his interviews, adding her own memories. The book opens and closes with Dio's 1986 concert at Madison Square Garden, and Wendy Dio has said she would like to do a second volume if readers want one.