Reflections On An Icon

So it's been a week since the passing of Ronnie James Dio, and I'm only now really able to express how deeply saddened I am by this turn of events. Like a lot of Dio's long time fans, I thought we was going to beat the cancer he was diagnosed with last year, record another album with Heaven & Hell, tour the world and live for another hundred years. Unfortunately, it's a week later and the reality is that the metal world has truly lost one of its giants, a forefather of the genre we all know and love. Over the next few weeks on my show, I'll be taking a piece of Dio's career and going into great depth (this week is the early ELF albums and the first Rainbow offering), so I won't go into a biography here. I will say that I've personally been touched by Dio's music more than any other band or artist. Sure, his best work makes me want to bang my head and throw the horns, but it runs deeper than that. I've been a fan for a good chunk of my life and nearly all of my personal memories are indelibly linked to certain songs and albums. And unlike the works of far too many artists, his works were never forgotten and year after year, those cherished albums were in almost constant rotation. It wasn't just the incredible riffs and songs that he seemed to have a special gift of pulling out of others (in my opinion, Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore and certainly Viv Campbell have all done their best work with Dio), or the incredibly vivid stories he was always able to tell with just a few minutes of a song. There was a familiarity in his music that's sorely lacking in most of his contemporaries (and successors), a personal element that meant he wasn't just singing to you, but that you were truly part of the experience. Listening to classic Dio, or Black Sabbath, or Rainbow, feels like you're sitting in a dusty old pub with an old friend you haven't seen for years but with whom the connection's never been lost and can talk with until the dawn.

Keep it Heavy, and smile the next time you see a Rainbow.

\m/(>.<)\m/

-Zombieboy