If We're Lucky, We Write Our Own Ending

As a writer, perhaps the hardest part of the process is figuring out the ending. You want to give everyone a satisfying conclusion, but not one the audience can see coming a mile away. You want to tie things up, but you don't want the bow to be so perfect it doesn't look tied by human hands. Finding the balance between a happy ending and a cloying one is incredibly delicate, and more often than not the former cannot avoid being the latter. We want to hold onto optimism that things can be better than they are, so this is natural.

That is fiction, but we live in fact. In life, we do not get to write the ending to our story very often. We don't know when, where, or how the end will come. All we can do is be ready to say we did what we could, what we wanted, and we made peace with our regrets. Some of us will have more issues with that than others.

Saying goodbye, in a musical sense, is much the same. So many artists never fully retire, so they make each album thinking there will be another coming down the line. A true farewell is not so common, which makes evaluating the last statement by an artist a tricky thing. They usually weren't intended to be their final word, so reading messages into them is more about us working through our thoughts about those artists no longer being with us than it is about what they have actually said.

I think about this when I listen to the music of Ronnie James Dio. He stands as a titan of the rock/metal world, but his legacy is a period from 1975-1985, and the remaining time he spent making music is largely considered a long and slow slide into the vast morass of mediocrity.

That changed when Dio reunited with the "Mob Rules" lineup of Black Sabbath in the guise of Heaven & Hell. They were a celebration of music that had gotten lost as the public image of Black Sabbath had been reduced (and we know why) to merely the Ozzy years. The live album/DVD performance at Radio City Music Hall was a document of a great band reminding us how much they accomplished in just three albums, and giving us cause to wonder 'What if?'

Those memories were powerful, and we weren't ready to say farewell to that music just yet. The band made a new album, which may have been intended to be merely the start of a new chapter, but instead became the final testament of Dio's career. For that reason, it is a critically important record. It is also a record that was critically viewed, often depicted as a disappointment that left a sour taste in the mouths of many who were ecstatic over the reunion and tour leading up to the record.

We don't always know what the end will be, but there is something poetic about the last song on Dio's last album being titled "Breaking Into Heaven". After decades of singing about knights, the fight, and the power of metal, Dio's last words were about storming Heaven for an eternal reward.

The song tells a story of angels (demons?) waging an assault to be let back into Heaven, as the doors were closed behind them when they were exiled. It is an allegory about mercy, as the God we are taught about is said to have an infinite supply, and yet so many followers are consumed with the inevitability of Hell. The math of the whole thing never added up. The worst among us could (depending on particular denomination) ask for forgiveness after a life of sin and be forgiven, while a good person who made a mistake before they could atone would be punished. We are all made in God's image, which would mean sin is a part of God's nature, and yet we are treated as needing salvation for being exactly what we were created to be.

According to that theology, there are two endings to our story. Here on earth, we are able to see infinite gradations between the two extremes. When it comes to Ronnie James Dio, I find "The Devil You Know" a fitting epilogue. It was a record where Dio wanted to tell us stories, wanted to pull upon the threads of our minds as much as our metallic heartstrings. The people who criticize it for being slow are missing the point; the album was intended to draw out the drama and watch it slowly drip down the dagger that had been run through our hearts.

Dio was very much one of the bright lights the character in "Stargazer" would have been watching in the night sky. He burned bright, he led the way, and then one day that light was gone. Maybe we noticed it had grown dimmer, but we didn't realize how bright that fire still was against the blackness of the empty sky until it was gone.

Ronnie James Dio was never the biggest star in metal, but he was perhaps the one who was most joyous about being able to make music. His greatest legacy is that being the biggest star doesn't mean you will last longer than any other. The stardust we leave behind is all the same.

Even after fifteen years, we're still finding it everywhere we look.