RIP
July 10, 1942 – May 16, 2010
Back in 1980, I forgot to return my Columbia House Record Club notice and ended up receiving Black Sabbath’s “The Mob Rules” in the mail as the monthly featured selection. It ended up being a great decision. This was my first introduction to Black Sabbath and the experience changed my musical taste forever. While the appeal of Black Sabbath has always been Tony Iommi’s riveting guitar riff’s, the vocals were unlike anything I had listened to prior to that time. Of course, many of you must assume I am talking about Ozzy Osbourne. Nope. In 1980 Ozzy was a solo act, having been fired by Iommi a year before. The lead singer of my Black Sabbath was Ronnie James Dio.
Dio only made two albums with Black Sabbath prior to going out on his own as a solo act, known simply as “Dio.” Both Black Sabbath and Dio struggled after that, although Dio did have a minor MTV hit with “Rainbow in the Dark” as I recall. Eventually, I bought the very first Black Sabbath CD’s and realized that the early Osbourne era music blew away anything Black Sabbath or Dio did (or 99% of the heavy metal acts afterward, for that matter) after 1979. But if it wasn’t for Dio, and the second incarnation of the band, I never would have discovered the early stuff.
Anyway, I recently found out that Ronnie James Dio died last month after battling stomach cancer for several months. He was 67. Who would ever have thought that he (rather than Ozzy) would be the first Black Sabbath vocalist to pass away? I am not a metal enthusiast anymore, but the news saddened me nonetheless. I suspect that Dio is largely unknown among the younger crowd today, but his legacy will live on forever among metal fans. Few will ever match his vocal ability – he was the quintessential heavy metal vocalist. But his cheesy stage moves will be copied by heavy metal wannabe’s for years to come. Most notable of those moves was the “devil horns” hand gesture which was popularized by Dio, and which now seems to be a standard move for any real metal singer.
In 2008, Hit Parader ranked the 100 greatest heavy metal vocalists of all time. Here are the top 10. If you are really interested, check out the complete list.
01. Robert Plant
02. Rob Halford
03. Steven Tyler
04. Chris Cornell
05. Bon Scott
06. Freddie Mercury
07. Bruce Dickinson
08. Ozzy Osbourne
09. Paul Rodgers
10. Ronnie James Dio
