RONNIE JAMES DIO

RONNIE JAMES DIO Out To Secure Legacy

The West Australian reports:

RONNIE JAMES DIO's tenure at the front of iconic heavy metal band BLACK SABBATH barely lasted three years from the time he stepped in to replace OZZY OSBOURE to him starting his own band.

But Dio, the man credited with popularising rock's famous "devil horns", still regards that period from 1979 to 1982 as one well worth re-living.

With the release of the album Black Sabbath: The Dio Years, Dio is back on the road with Sabbath originals Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler, and drummer Vinny Appice, playing under the name HEAVEN AND HELL.

As part of their world tour, Heaven And Hell will play a run of dates in Australia starting in Perth on August 2nd.

The group has recorded new songs and unleashed fan favourites, Dio says, in a bid to secure the legacy of the band which formed a short but significant part of his career.

Heaven And Hell was Dio's first album with the band and is considered to have dug Sabbath out of a commercial and creative hole.

It was an appropriate choice of moniker for the re-formed outfit which Dio believes fans will recognise as Sabbath anyway.

The only other album to follow with Dio was Mob Rules in 1981, which was supported by a tour before the singer and Appice left the band to form the group DIO.

Read the full report at The West Australian.

RONNIE JAMES DIO - The Metal Legend Returns Home


The following story is courtesy of www.Theithacajournal.com:

You don't get to the top of the heavy metal heap without a lot of talent and a lot of hard work. Case in point: RONNIE JAMES DIO, long known as one of the genre's leading singers though stints with RAINBOW, BLACK SABBATH and his own band DIO.

The Cortland native grew up playing various venues around Central New York, relying on a blue-collar ethos to build his music career.

“There wasn't a whole lot of opportunity — everything was in New York City, and to go there was pretty foreign thing for people from Cortland, Ithaca and Binghamton, Whitney Point, Dryden to do in those days,” says Dio in a phone interview earlier this week from Los Angeles.

“You cut your teeth in those places, and once you went to New York you usually were pretty well prepared, because there were a lot of places to play back then. Unlike today, where there are hardly any places for a young band to learn their craft at all.
“So it was a great place to grow up, not only from a musical standpoint, but also for the people,” he continues. “People from upstate New York are real solid. They're like people from Chicago or Cleveland. They got one attitude: they work hard and they try to enjoy life to the max.”

Read more here.