The Ronnie James DIO album-by-album thread

The concert I attended in a tertiary market was precisely nine days prior to this Chicago performance. From what I gathered online at surveying the Tokyo boots, the Japanese tour occurred at the turn of the year, correct?... prior to the release of Long Live Rock & Roll, which, as far as I can determine, was issued in May in the States. It peaked at #89 in its eighth and ninth weeks on the Billboard chart in July 1978.

 

The Japanese tour 78 started on January 11 in Nagoya and the last concert was on February 03 in Tokyo.

 

December 1977 saw the completion of Rainbow's third album and, after the obligatory Christmas break, the On Stage tour resumed on January 11th 1978 with 20-odd dates across Japan. Just like in 1976, demand for the band was high and extra shows had to be added in some cities like Osaka and Tokyo, making for another highly successful tour, marred only by the tragic events at the Sapporo concert on January 27th, when the rushing forward of the crowd resulted in the death of a young female college student and injuries for several others.

The On Stage tour ended with the final show of the Japanese leg on February 3rd in Tokyo, after which the band took a well earned break. Now the focus turned to the launch and promotion of the new album, which was started by the release in late March of the first single off it, title track Long Live Rock 'N' Roll, backed with Sensitive To Light.


(l to r: UK, France, Germany, Holland)

 

April 13th 1978 marked the release of Rainbow's third LP, Long Live Rock 'N' Roll, almost a year later than originally planned. Putting it together had been a long and hard process, with lots of starts and stops and even personnel changes that had made it difficult for the band to keep focus, and Ronnie in particular wasn't pleased with the results or the way things had gone. He expressed his dissatisfaction years later with these words: "It was an unhappy LP from my point of view. I always find it kind of bitsy if I have to listen to it these days; there were some good songs but nothing that stands out."

The album sleeve prominently featured the faces of the three recognisable members of the group (Blackmore suitably placed at the top of the pyramid over Dio and Powell), and relegated Daisley and Stone to the sides in a very telling manner as to their standing within the band. This was made all the more clear when Cozy spoke to the press about their band policy: "It's as democratic as it can be, really. Ritchie, Ronnie and myself run the band, and amongst the three of us it is democratic. It would be unfair to get somebody in and give them a cut of the action straight away. Besides, there are all sorts of legal entanglements; a band, like it or not, is a corporation these days."

The sleeve states both Blackmore and Daisley as being responsible for bass duties (though it doesn't specify who plays on what tracks), and gives David Stone sole credit for the keyboard work. Whether any of Tony Carey's contributions made it into the final mix is anyone's guess at this point. Amusingly enough, among the thank you notes there's the line 'No thanks to Baal'.

 

Stone and Daisley must have really liked the cover of that U.K. single

 

I did not know that Daisley played w/ Rainbow?

 

Long Live Rock 'N' Roll was yet another big success in Europe and managed number 7 in the UK charts, but it became their lowest charting release in America to date, barely cracking the top 90 after the debut LP and Rising had managed a much more respectable 30 and 40, respectively. That fact, coupled with their past experiences touring the United States (where they hadn't visited since mid 1976), seemed to make it all the more obvious that Rainbow would need some serious work to become a viable option in America, or else restrict themselves to the already-conquered European and Japanese markets. Blackmore decided he wanted the challenge, and started focusing on making Rainbow a bigger name in America.

The first step of the plan to win America over was taken in the shape of a four month long tour across the States from early May until late August. They still came out as headliners in many of the towns in their schedule but, conscious of their standing and increasingly worried about the band's finances, they co-headlined with REO Speedwagon in bigger venues. Ritchie explained it thus: "The other markets came first, Europe and all that. We took advantage of it rather than just playing around America as a small-time band. Now the only market left is America and we're the underdog. We're sharing the bill in some places. It's not like starting again but it's just something you do."

To help promote the band, videos were filmed for three songs off the new album in order to get them on American TV. The songs chosen were the latest single, Long Live Rock 'N' Roll, plus L.A. Connection and Gates Of Babylon. The band mimed to the album tracks except for Ronnie, who provided live lead vocals for all three, making them an interesting alternative listen. Years later, Rainbow put out a home video compilation of their promos called The Final Cut, but the Long Live Rock 'N' Roll tracks were sadly omitted. They were eventually released as an extra feature on the Live In Munich 1977 DVD.

 

The setlist for the Long Live Rock 'N' Roll 1978 tour was much shorter than on previous ones, with Sixteenth Century Greensleeves and Catch The Rainbow dropped from the main set, along with their usual encore of Do You Close Your Eyes. Some of the early dates saw the addition of L.A. Connection, but soon that track was pulled off the setlist too, leaving the running order thus: Kill The King, Mistreated, Long Live Rock 'N' Roll, Man On The Silver Mountain, Still I'm Sad.

Their concert of June 24th in Atlanta was recorded by the BBC for their Rock Hour programme, and two songs (Long Live Rock 'N' Roll and Man On The Silver Mountain) off this show were released in 1986 on Finyl Vinyl, a double LP that rounded up live and unreleased tracks from all eras of Rainbow.




Long Live Rock 'N' Roll is a good version, with Dio giving a spirited performance and motivating the crowd, nice bass playing by Daisley and an excellent Blackmore solo, sounding super charged but still making it melodic all the way. It has to be noted that Ritchie had made modifications to his guitar for this tour, and is now sporting the sound that he would use for the next decade and beyond. This is nowhere more apparent than at the start of the next selection, Man On The Silver Mountain, where his new tone is even more aggressive than on previous tours and makes this mighty riff all the harder for it. Ritchie sounds like he's having a good time on this one, throwing in all manner of fills and licks here and there and shifting octaves when it's time to go back to the main riff, and using his bass pedals during his solo improvisation section. Cozy bashes up a storm in his accustomed fashion, especially on the chorus leading up to the guitar blitz, and Dio's voice again seems to know no limits. Included within is a little improvisation they had begun doing on the 1977 tour, at the time leading to rumours that it was a glimpse of one of the finished pieces for their as yet unreleased new album. That snippet came to be known as Night People, and it was still played during the 1978 tour as we can hear in this recording, but it never actually appeared on any Rainbow studio album. Cozy explained why: "All that really was kind of a jam. Ritchie played chords, we all followed and Ronnie came out with whatever came into his head. It never got finished."

 

it would be awesome if they would officially release this as a video and/or as a full live album.

 

I'm not sure it was filmed but yeah, this concert could easily be a bonus disc on a neat Long Live Rock 'N' Roll deluxe edition...


I must inform all of you kind people following this thread that my internet has been wonky of late and it's only getting worse these days... I'm not exceptionally computer savvy so it'll still take me some time to weed out the problem and get it sorted... Just letting you guys know so that, in the event I can't log in at some point, you all know it doesn't mean I've disappeared...

That said, let's carry on with the story!

 

An old friend of Ritchie's came to see Rainbow's show in Chicago at the International Amphitheater on July 2nd, ex-bandmate turned producer Roger Glover. Blackmore reiterated his offer to Glover of coming aboard in a writing capacity, and this time he accepted: "I went to see them live in Chicago and talked to Ritchie. All the past was kind of forgotten; I didn't bring it up and he didn't, and I felt good in a way that he was looking for me to help after what had happened in 1973." Glover was alluding here to his dismissal from Deep Purple, something that had been a big blow and hurt him deeply at the time, since he'd been the main writer in the band along with Ritchie, who subsequently had always spoken of Glover's sacking as a business decision, nothing personal. By 1978, Blackmore was more than aware of Glover's worth and he was pleased to add him to his team, not only for his abilities but also for his personality, as Ritchie himself explained: "Roger is very good with his patience and very good at helping people achieve something. I felt he'd be a barrier between me and Cozy, to stop us fighting and channel our energies more creatively."

But the reasons behind Blackmore turning to Glover for help were only the tip of the iceberg of what was really worrying Ritchie. The Long Live Rock 'N' Roll tour was proving another financial black-hole, with the costs of hauling their fancy electronic rainbow rig around America starting to prove prohibitive, and even though the shows were good and were pleasing their fan-base, they still weren't making much headway in commercial terms with sales of the new album stalling, and that weighed heavily on Blackmore's mind. In an interview some years later, Ronnie mused about their lack of success in America compared to Europe, and put it down to bad timing more than anything else: "We were more of an underground band here. Trends are different in America, and the trend at the time was not for a band like us. But there are no trends in Europe; in Europe, they accept you for what you are. Especially because we were a classical kind of band and because Ritchie had a great reputation, they just jumped right on top of us over there. Over there, we were playing in front of twenty thousand people at a pop. It was a real trendy time and we perhaps didn't fit into the trend. It took a while for Rainbow to be recognised for how good it was. We never had a problem in New York, they were ready for it; but it was harder in the mid-west. New York was much more in tune with what was going on in Europe. I don't think it had anything to do with the material because all these years later, people still yell out 'Play Stargazer! Play Man On The Silver Mountain!' It was just the climate of the times."

 

It’s funny that Bob Daisley wasn’t pulled to write songs as he was a big contributor to Ozzy’s first 2 solo albums which was right after he left Rainbow. It would have been interesting what he could’ve contributed if given the opportunity.

 

The 1978 Long Live Rock 'N' Roll tour fizzled out at the Palladium in New York on August 24th, when the show was stopped halfway through due to severe interference between the electronic rainbow and the PA system. The crowd had to wait a long 90 minutes until Ronnie came back out on stage to announce the show was over and ticket money would be refunded. The next date on their schedule (August 26th, Asbury Park Convention Hall, New Jersey) was to be the last, but it got cancelled when the interference problems couldn't be solved during soundcheck. The band didn't play a note and money was refunded.

The tour now over, it was decided to try and give one last push to the album and another single was released in September, L.A. Connection coupled with Lady Of The Lake.


(UK red vinyl, French cover)

 

Just such a deluxe edition had been planned for release this year in Japan as a 2 CD mini-LP but was cancelled, rescheduled and then cancelled again. THe track listing was never released so I wonder if this was going to be the bonus disc. C'est la vie... what could have been.

ON the other hand, the good news is Rainbow Rising was also scheduled as a similar Mini-LP 2 disc Deluxe edition at that same time and was not cancelled and is on track for release September 8th!

It will include three different mixes (New York, LA, and rough) as well as two tracks from Pirate Sound Tour rehearsal (Stargazer and A Light in the Black)!

 

Yeah... at first the bonus material on that one seemed underwhelming, but now that I've adjusted I'm even kinda looking forward to it... I'd like to have Stargazer with the keyboard intro, and the rehearsals will be completely new to me

 

The 1978 tour hadn't been an altogether happy one, and it only confirmed Blackmore's suspicions that some serious changes were needed. It was already clear to the ruling trio that keyboard player David Stone had to go, as Ronnie put it: "David, though a great player, was just wrong for the band." Also very apparent to everyone had been Ritchie's uneasiness about the whole enterprise, and Dio started making his moves, according to bassist Bob Daisley: "During the last part of the American tour, Ronnie started to get inklings that all was not well in the Ritchie camp with him and the rest of us, and there came a time when Ronnie took me aside to tell me that, in his opinion, Ritchie was considering changing players and that he in turn was looking to set up his own band. So Ronnie started asking me, he said 'Look, if this doesn't last, would you be interested in getting a band together with me?' I said, 'Yeah, if this folds, I'd like to keep going if you're gonna do something.' Ronnie has a world class voice and Rainbow was looking a little shakey for all of us except Ritchie; of course I was interested."

The relationship between Blackmore and Daisley was good, however, as far as he could tell: "Ritchie and I got on very well together. I got on fine with him because I never ever rocked the boat, I just put my head down, got on with it and did a professional job as well as I could." But Blackmore finally took the decision to overhaul the band again, and that meant the bass player would have to go as well. Daisley says that, rather than being told he was out, he just wasn't called anymore: "It ground to a halt. The very last show we did was in New York at the end of the tour, and it was a case of let's wait and see what's gonna happen next, but nothing did! At the end of the tour it was decided that Ritchie was gonna get a new line-up."

This time Blackmore wasn't content with just another line-up change, though. Through 1978 he'd gradually started to lose the drive he'd had at the beginning of the band and that, along with his failure to crack America, eventually made him feel dissatisfied with Rainbow's current musical direction. This is when Roger Glover got to work helping with the writing of new material at Ritchie's instigation, something that allowed Glover to get closure on his traumatic exit from Deep Purple five years prior: "This was his way of saying he was wrong and my value, although he hadn't seen it at the time, he'd seen it since in the work I'd done. Also, I'd kept my nose clean and hadn't spouted off to the press about what a bastard he was, and now that I'd had some success he had a respect for me that hitherto he hadn't. This was what I felt; whether this is true I don't know, but somehow it was a redemption."

In autumn 1978, Blackmore was effectively starting afresh with a new writing partner and this didn't sit well with Ronnie, who saw the writing on the wall: "I saw Ritchie going through some changes that I realised were going to affect me for the worse as well as the others."

 

The last months of 1978 were set aside for writing material for the next Rainbow album, and sessions began with Roger Glover and Ritchie Blackmore working closely together to establish the new direction, which made Ronnie James Dio feel relegated, pretty much being told what to do: "Roger became Ritchie's conduit, so he came to me and told me what Ritchie would like; could I stop writing in such a fantasy orientated way and write some love songs. The new direction was to write about more factual things, it was to be love-song orientated. Now, I don't write that way, I won't write that way; but I tried to persevere in the band even though under those sort of conditions I wasn't much of a contributor to what was going on." Blackmore was adamant about the changes and seriously wanted to produce some commercial songs including actual ballads, which caused a rift between him and Dio, who wasn't that way inclined: "Because of the way I write lyrically, I find it difficult to do ballads. I like to write more from real life and put into another situation." Ritchie wasn't pleased either: "I started finding out he couldn't do a power ballad. He started going into a little girlie voice, and that used to bug me."

Ronnie's dissatisfaction wasn't anything new and had been brewing for quite some time, though. According to Bob Daisley, Dio wasn't exactly getting along with Cozy either, and the personal problems with Blackmore mainly had to do with Ronnie wanting to be recognised as an equal part of the band and not just a sideman: "I set out to be the best I could with the people I was working with. Ritchie took the credit but he also took the flak; that's what happens. My anger was at the fact that Rainbow, through most of its days, had always been looked upon as 'Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow', and we were never told it was going to be that way. In 1976 we were assured that the band would simply be 'Rainbow', but it never happened. I was very disappointed with that; in fact, everyone in the group was, especially Cozy." It actually was this problem within the ranks which prompted the argument that, according to Blackmore, became the turning point in their relationship: "I remember being in the studio and he came in with Cozy, he poked me in the back. 'We're not standing for this. You're in the cover of Circus magazine and it was meant to be the three of us. We're not going to be side-kicks.' I suddenly saw him in a whole different light. That was it; I knew we'd finished then because I couldn't talk to him anymore. I saw him as this angry, bitter little man."

As if personal feuds weren't enough, now musical differences had been added to the equation and the addition of Roger Glover meant the whole writing dynamic had also changed so, in Ronnie's eyes, there was hardly room for him in the band anymore. Another factor that may have come into play at this point, albeit in a more subtle way, is that of managers. Ronnie's wife had become his personal manager, and Blackmore later intimated that this played a part in their falling out: "I was always close to Ronnie until he met up with Wendy, then it got strained after that. She was a nice enough woman, but we didn't really click." The relationship between Dio and Blackmore was a bomb waiting to go off, and Cozy watched as the band disintegrated: "Obviously, they were two very strong characters and inevitably something was bound to give. I think Ronnie wanted his own band, to be the focus of attention, and inevitably there was bound to be a problem at some point. Ronnie was unhappy in Rainbow because he thought he was the star and wanted the limelight. Most guitarists and singers are like that (laughs)."

 

Inevitable. (unfortunately).


Blackmore doesn't have the balls to tell it straight to the face. He simply finds new friends, new writers, new singers, new bass players and carries on trying to achieve his goal. He usually gets the management to tell people or, just excludes them until they leave.

 

That's tragically ironic, because I think that very Circus magazine issue was my introduction to Rainbow and both Ritchie and Ronnie, and prompted me to get the LLR&R album without hearing a note.

 

Another ironic thing is that Ronnie did tons of ballads before Rainbow and in the mid 80's he recorded stuff far more commercial than anything by 79-83 Rainbow.

 

Blackmore and Dio spent their last days together in Rainbow not speaking to each other, until eventually the issue was tackled and it was decided that Ronnie would leave. The split was by mutual agreement and in amicable terms but, despite forever holding Ritchie's musical abilities in high regard, Dio's time and personal relationship with Blackmore left a deep mark in him, a mark he would carry with him for the remainder of his career.

After the split, Blackmore talked about his shift in musical interests: "I was very angry at the time (of the first Rainbow album), but I got to Long Live Rock 'N' Roll and it had all gone, and I suddenly thought 'Where do I go from here?' I wanted to become a little more commercial. I wanted to come across to the public and the fans at the same time. You don't want to lose the hard-core fans, but you do want to capture the other side, the record-buying public." Ronnie couldn't disagree more: "Ritchie decided our future lay in America and that's where the unhappiness and discontent stemmed from. Rainbow became a pop band and that wasn't what Ritchie and I had conceived of at the very beginning. Ritchie was desperately searching for some level of success in the States, and total commerciality was the way to achieve it. It was a shame and he was wrong; Rainbow should have gone harder, heavier."

Ritchie's first choice for substituting Dio was another old band mate, Ian Gillan, and he went as far as flying to England to see him personally to try and convince him to join Rainbow. Gillan was happy with his own band at the time and declined, and so Blackmore began the next phase in the Rainbow saga, one that would see him hire and then fire plenty of musicians over the years in an effort to present his music the way he envisioned it at any given time. Long-serving road manager Colin Hart has no doubts: "Ritchie Blackmore was the driving force behind Rainbow, he controlled the whole ship all the time. He definitely knew exactly what he wanted from the musicians and how he wanted it. That's why he was so fussy." Blackmore himself is hardly apologetic: "It's almost a vampire thing; I feed on the blood of musicians passing through, and when the blood's dried up I get rid of them. I'm looking for the perfect line-up."

Ironically, Ritchie's search for "the perfect line-up" ended in 1984 with the reformation of Deep Purple. But that's another story.

By Christmas 1978, Rainbow had got reduced to Blackmore and Powell, who decided to stay and give the new direction a shot. Cozy would eventually resign in August 1980 after another album and tour, and when he left, the last trace of the old Rainbow was gone with him.

 

Looking forward to the next installment, Javimulder. I've never actually heard how Dio hooked up with Sabbath. . .

 

Ready here as well...

 

Yeah, I knew it, but I forgot.

 

As a longtime fan of Dio, I've read and heard much of this material from other sources, but Javimulder has a unique take, and brings in quotes and other references that are new to me. For example, I had never read Blackmore's "vampire" quote...

I will be following the story of RJD joining Sabbath with as much interest as all the other subscribers to this thread, but I think a splinter thread "Rainbow, Album By Album" would be interesting as well.