Ronnie James Dio in Black Sabbath

Having a new lead singer like Dio really helped to light a new fire in the band and give them a new sense of inspiration. They were so burned out by the end of the Ozzy era and they needed something new. And Ronnie being a hard worker himself probably wouldn't have allowed the same mistakes that occurred during that later period of Sabbath's first incarnation (excessive drugs, less focus, weakened songwriting.)

Heaven And Hell is a classic metal album and Mob Rules is very good as well. I think Ronnie inspired that more "epic" sound, closer to what you would hear on Rainbow Rising than Sabbath, along with his fantasy lyrics. I still prefer Ozzy era Sabbath but those two Dio albums are miles better than Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die.

 

Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules are incredible records! And a new band without Ozzy really.

Dehumanizer and The Devil You Know are not as brilliant but still very good!

Big fan here.

 

Wonder where in NJ this was shot...
He's definitely a little over excited, but I can't bag on him too bad.
If I was meeting, have a quick word, and a signature, that'd probably be close to how I'd be feeling inside.

 

Dio definitely revived the sagging fortunes of Black Sabbath for sure.
I give him a lot of credit for trying to sing the Oz tunes, some of them are fairly easy, like War Pigs, others, like Iron Man, deceptively hard to pull off.
Having all the live stuff, and recently listening to it, I've got to say, it really started to bug me listening to Dio add his various vocal ornaments on the end of each line.
Gets old after a few songs, and he just keeps doing it.

I think Iommi wanted to write in more of a verse-chorus-verse song structure style, than the progressive epics that made the original Sabs legendary.
Seems the bass/drums became simpler, more interlocked.

I'd also note that H&H, and Mob Rules were both done by Martin Birch, and I think they're the best, most consistent sounding of all the Sabs albums.

 

I remember hearing 'Neon Knights' on the radio about a week or two before 'H&H's' official release, and saying out loud, "holy ****, that is f'ing awesome!!!". I was a Rainbow fan more than I was a Black Sabbath fan at the time, so it was pretty bizarre to hear RJD fronting Black Sabbath. On the flip side of things, I also loved Graham Bonnet as the new lead for Rainbow, with 'Down To Earth' being better than anything Rainbow ever did with Joe Lynn Turner, in my humble opinion.

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Dio's Ozzy interpretations were pretty bad but they were bearable. Ozzy couldn't cover a Dio/Sabbath song if his life depended on it. The best singer for Sabbath was Ozzy but that doesn't mean he was the most talented. Both eras were great but decidedly different bands with decidedly different approaches.

 

Live Evil.
Or as Geezer referred to it as, Live in the Studio Evil.

The gist here was this, Dio wanted to release a warts and all live album, like he had done with Rainbow.
His reasoning was the band had momentum, put the live record out quick for the holiday season, and have something fresh to go out on the following year.
(So speculating what Iommi and company would have done with some of the Holy Diver material could be an interesting and different topic to kick around)

But that didn't carry the day, Iommi, who's take was that times were hard, so they owed it to the kids to make the best release possible, began extensively re-working everything.
And it didn't work, the album has a distant, American sports arena feel to it, with the audience even lower and artificial sounding, imo.

The Hammersmith show is a completely different animal. Sounds like it was recorded right next to Dio's microphone.
He's very forward in the mix. Odd for live Sabbath, Tony's guitar is a bit lower yet even with the other instruments.
But there's a lot of excitement, the crowd is into it, and that makes it quite a bit better than Live Evil.

I'll also say this about Live Evil, on that tour in early '82, several dates were cancelled due to Iommi's father passing.
So while the band played fairly well, I believe they cut the setlist down, paring back the couple extra MR tunes, just to get through the tour to get it done.
In addition, while Sabbath's crowds were always fairly rough, when Dio came on board, the violence really seemed to escalate in those 2 tours.
(Even Gillian talked about when he was in the band briefly, and experiencing rioting in Canada during the Born Again tour.)
So its good to compare where the band was from Christmas season of 1981, the Hammersmith disk, to where they ended up on Live Evil (summer of 82, and Dio leaving)

 

I'd argue that the violence with Dio compared to that of Ozzy was more to do with the times and attitudes (punk and hardcore crowds) as opposed to the different line ups. A lot more angst and uncertainty in the Dio years due to the Cold War and heightened tensions within the audience due to a multitude of factors (different substances, different stressors, and attitudes).

 

How can anyone deny the power known as Dehumanizer? It is the best thing they did with Dio. So glad I was able to see the Dio fronted line up one time, and even more happy that nothing from the Ozzy years were performed. That said, I think he would have been better suited to the higher register tracks that they generally avoided with Ozzy. Songs like The Writ, She's Gone, etc. Odd thing about Ronnie is that he actually was covering Sabbath back in the Elf days. Whowuddathunkit?

 

Ozzy would never have to cover a Dio/Sabbath tune. That would be like asking Ian Gillan to sing "Burn."

 

Hard to say why that was, but it appears that Ozzy every now and then would get depressed, doubt himself, lose confidence.
Obviously getting sacked was the bottom at the time, and no help. One has to wonder if the Sabs had just taken a break (but that was not the way back then)
then Ozzy may not have gotten the boot. But then again, we wouldn't have had RJD's time in the band, and 2 top notch studio efforts.

As for the playing styles, you're right Randy incorporated a lot of the techniques that Iommi had use (who doesn't....haha) and probably had to considering that he was going to be playing Sab tunes as long as
he was in Ozzy's band. But Randy's tone was that hi-gain distortion style that was riding on in with the EVH wave early in the 80's.
Iommi's high end seemed to be rounded off a bit, but obviously that didn't diminish the power of the sound one bit.

Odd thing to me is, is that Randy incorporated a fair amount of classical note stylings in his soloing, can't think of one Iommi solo up to 1983, that you could say was influenced by classical music.
Aside from the blues influenced first album, that I can think of, every solo that Iommi did up to, and including on Born Again, seems fresh, creative and well thought out, and never outstaying its welcome.

 

Regardless if he was asked, he couldn't do it. Gillan could cover "Burn" with little trouble at all.

 

I absolutely love Sabbath with Dio. However, it doesn't really sound like Black Sabbath to me. For me Black Sabbath is everything with Ozzy and Born Again.

 

Born Again is a wonderful album but it's not Sabbath anymore than the stuff with Dio was. All of it was great stuff but true Sabbath was Osbourne/Iommi/Butler/Ward.

Accept no substitutes.

 

I don't pretend to be a definitive authority on anything, I'm just talking about my own opinion. To my ears Born Again sounds a lot more like the original Sabbath with Ozzy than anything with Dio.

 

Maybe 30 years ago. If he sang it now it would be a train wreck.

 

I'm just goin' where these ears take me.

 

Well yeah. I was talking in their heyday. Hell, Coverdale can't sing it now. He's a joke.

 

I couldn't care less. If all I cared about was chops, I'd listen to opera. No one will ever show up at an Ozzy-led Sabbath concert and wish he'd do "Neon Knights." Dio had to sing Ozzy songs because Black Sabbath made their name with Ozzy. The fact that Dio had better chops than Ozzy is common knowledge but it really is irrelevant. The original Sabbath made at least six stone-cold classic albums that still sound great after forty years. Sabbath with Dio barely managed three. To me, that's as powerful a statement as who was the technically better singer. Maybe if they'd had Dio from the beginning, they would have folded in '72 and been a footnote today. If the point is that Dio's the better singer, I agree, but that doesn't make me value his albums more.

 

I know a guy who got RJD to sign his Elf albums as Ronald Padavona. Thought that was pretty freaking cool of him!

 

I agree. See post #114.

 

I think you're spot on with "different substances".

I think in the 70's Sabbath was a lot of LSD, quaaludes, alcohol, reefer.
So people were messed up, but mainly hurting themselves.

In the 80's...well cocaine showed up for the audience, and you top that on a little weed and hard liquor, and pretty soon at just about every show, it wasn't if, but a matter of when the fight was going to break out.
I remember hearing Geezer talk about it happening all the time, and you could really hear the regret in his voice as he talked about it, because it was against everything the man stood for.
He was the guy that hit and knocked out at a Milwaukee show in 1980 that touched off a riot.

 

This probably comes under the heading Things I Should Not Admit, but I have never managed to get through Dehumanizer, even once. I always get about two tracks into it and I just can't go any further. Is it "powerful?" Yeah, I suppose so, but I like a little melody with my music. Heaven And Hell had great melodies, Mob Rules a little less. If there's melody in Dehumanizer, I can't hear it.

 

There is some classical influence in some of Tony's soloing. Some of the solos on Technical Ecstasy, for example. But I agree with your overall point. In fact his classical stylings tend to be really unusual and mostly used in areas outside lead playing. "Don't Start (Too Late)" obviously. Or the intro he used to play before the song "Black Sabbath" live in the early days (that is some WEIRD stuff). "Supertzar" is another obvious example, and yet it sounds very original and certainly different from what might typically come to mind when one thinks of classical influence on a rock guitarist.

Sabbath used a lot of motifs that originated in classical music, but instead of using the scales it was more applied to compositional structure. From the very beginning, when you think of the title track to their debut, that has classical influence all over it, but it's more in terms of dynamics and structure. The ending (DUH DUH DA DUH DUH) is pure classical, but it's being used in a context which is pure rock. These are the kinds of things which I think keep Sabbath fresh to this day. They were very creative, could be deceptively simple or very tricky, but somehow the influences tended to serve the song at hand, not the other way around.

 

Actually I think it shows how great Iommi/Butler are that they could write music that fit 3 different style vocalists.

But I think you're being a little hard on the speculation of singers doing someone elses stuff.
90% of the time it doesn't work, but you know, while I wouldn't like Ozzy to sing all of "Neon Knights"
I'd sure like him to sing the first line, and then let Geezer take a crack at writing the rest of the lyrics and see where it went.

The highlight above...that's kind of an unfair comparison there.
Original Sabs developed, worked hard, kept growing, became beasts, built a sizeable fan base, then ran out of gas.
Started at zero became superstars.

Dio-Sabs were pretty much fully formed from Day One because everybody simply knew what they were doing, and were great at it.
Took a step back to reconnect with the fan base with H&H, then went right back into sports arenas with MR.
If you think about, maybe despite 3/4 of Sabbath, the first metal supergroup when they asked Dio to join.
I guess it depends on how big (no pun intended) you thought Dio was in Rainbow.