Dio

In the mid-1980s, for a short period, the heavy metal five-piece Dio ranked among America’s leading concert attractions, thanks to one of the era’s most extravagant live productions, complete with an array of theatrical devices such as lasers, pyrotechnics, and an enormous dragon. Frontman Ronnie James Dio had already gained widespread recognition among metal listeners by serving as vocalist for Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow between 1975 and 1978 and then for Black Sabbath from 1979 to 1982. Ready to establish an independent project at the start of the new decade, he assembled Dio and enlisted a strong supporting cast that included two former colleagues—ex-Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain and ex-Black Sabbath drummer Vinny Appice, Carmine Appice’s brother—alongside ex-Sweet Savage guitarist Vivian Campbell. While the band’s lyrics continued to explore the fantasy themes Ronnie James had favored in his earlier groups—dungeons and dragons, swords and sorcery, damsels in distress—the music itself leaned more toward melody than the work of Rainbow or Sabbath. The outfit achieved immediate success with its 1983 debut album Holy Diver, which yielded widely seen MTV videos for both “Rainbow in the Dark” and the title track.

Keyboardist Claude Schnell joined the lineup for the 1984 follow-up The Last in Line, an album that became Dio’s biggest commercial success on the strength of another heavily rotated video for its anthemic title song and that elevated the group to arena-headliner status. Although 1985’s Sacred Heart also performed well commercially, Campbell grew dissatisfied with the band’s musical direction and departed a year later. Shortly before his exit, the entire Dio lineup helped coordinate Hear ’n Aid, an all-star gathering of heavy metal performers that recorded the charity single “Stars” to combat world hunger; a companion album of previously unreleased live tracks from several prominent hard-rock acts was released as well. Craig Goldy, formerly of Giuffria, replaced Campbell, and the revised roster issued the 1986 live EP Intermission and the 1987 studio album Dream Evil, both of which retained the group’s core audience without broadening it further.

By the time of 1990’s Lock Up the Wolves, Ronnie James Dio remained the sole original member as the lineup continued to shift through subsequent releases such as 1994’s Strange Highways, 1996’s Angry Machines, and 1998’s Inferno: Last in Live; he had taken a brief hiatus from Dio in 1992 to rejoin Black Sabbath for the one-off album Dehumanizer. Two Dio projects appeared in 2000: the concept album Magica, marking the band’s first new studio effort in four years and featuring the return of Bain and Goldy, and the 16-track compilation The Very Beast of Dio. Medieval-themed metal resurfaced two years later with the spring 2002 release Killing the Dragon. Although the album was treated seriously, Ronnie James also began to embrace humor about his own image after years of defending it, enlisting comedy duo Tenacious D for the video of “Push” and adding the clip to the fall reissue of the album.

In the mid-2000s the man and the band delivered the studio album Master of the Moon and the live set Evil or Divine, yet by 2006 Dio was placed on hold when Ronnie James announced he would join Heaven & Hell, a reunion of the singer with his late-era Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Vinny Appice, named after the 1980 Sabbath album that first featured him as frontman. Heaven & Hell toured extensively in the late 2000s and issued both a live recording, Live from Radio City Music Hall, and a studio album, The Devil You Know, but in November 2009 it was revealed that the singer had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, leading Heaven & Hell to cancel their planned summer 2010 dates. Ronnie James Dio died from the illness on May 16, 2010, in Houston, TX.