The Conversation: 40 Years Of "Holy Diver"

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Dio's seminal "Holy Diver", we sat down to discuss the album, Dio, and all manner of tangential thoughts we had.

Chris C: I don't mean to start with a joke, but forty years sure is a lifetime, isn't it? That's how long Dio's seminal "Holy Diver" has existed, in addition to a couple of less important things..... so maybe it's no wonder it feels like Dio is timeless. Dio was before, Dio was during, and Dio endures after.

Is "Holy Diver" Dio's defining statement? We can start with that question, perhaps. What I can say for sure is that this album is the one where Dio became Dio. He was already Ronnie James Dio, the incredible singer, but the image of Dio as we think of him started here. Dio proves he didn't need an already established guitar hero to be a force, he more or less created power metal with the swords-and-rainbows schtick, and he earned so much good will the resulting decades not living up to this standard wouldn't really matter. Dio was now Dio.

So let's begin our conversation with two questions; 1)Is "Holy Diver" your favorite Dio album?, and 2)What have forty years of "Holy Diver" taught us, both about Dio and the metal scene in general?

D.M: Addressing your questions in order:

1) I mean, yeah.  What else could it be?  Maybe there's a case out there to be made for "The Last in Line," but it feels like that argument would be contrarian more than anything else.  Do "Dream Evil" or "Killing the Dragon" both have a couple good tunes?  Sure.  but "Holy Diver" is the icon, and while it's the obvious answer, that doesn't make it wrong.

2) Ultimately, I think it's hard to separate the legacy of "Holy Diver" from the legacy of Dio as a musical icon, but I don't know that that's a bad thing.  I think it speaks to the heart of what the album was really about.  Dio was Dio before his first solo effort, but he was never going to emerge from the shadow of Black Sabbath or Rainbow (or Ronnie Dio and the Red Caps,) because of either previously established legacies or other top-name personalities involved (thinking specifically of the already established accomplishments of Ritchie Blackmore.)  Dio wasn't RONNIE JAMES DIO, worthy of naming a fantasy football league after (inside joke,) until "Holy Diver."

But to answer the question you actually asked, I think what we learned from the album is something you said in the preface, when you made the reference to swords-and-rainbows (and yes, I see what you did there.)  Prior to this record, the combination of aggressive music and fantastical themes was nigh-unheard of.  Okay, fine, purists would tell me Cirith Ungol, and that's true, but 1) nobody listened to them, and 2) their brand of fantasy was specific to Lord of the Rings (see also: Zeppelin, Led.)  And yeah, there were a lot of progressive rock bands out there that were working in similar veins, like ELO, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, Asia...shit, even the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.  But none of those lived in the metal world.

Metal had certainly found its fill of illustrative doom-and-gloom, evidenced by Black Sabbath and Pentagram, but what "Holy Diver" brought to the table was a sense of...I don't know it levity is the right word, but the idea that you could take on light fantasy with bright melodies, and without singing about the end of the world.

Moreover, and perhaps this is what I'm really trying to say, I think "Holy Diver" ushered in an era where it was okay to, for lack of a better term, to be literate in heavy music.  Now, Dio wasn't alone in this, Iron Maiden made a lot of inroads in the same space, but it also signalled a transition away from the depths of Cold War nuclear fears and into a different era of lyrical thought.

As we continue the conversation, I've been wracking my brain and coming up empty - is Dio the apex of the narrow category of 'replacement singer in a famous band who went on to solo glory?'  He sure as hell beats out Ripper Owens in that argument.

CHRIS C: I asked the question, because on certain days I can go either way with it. "Holy Diver" is fantastic, but so too is "Dream Evil", and I've always had a soft spot for "Master Of The Moon" (there's a point I might come back to there, since I find it fascinating). Depending on my mood, and how much the terrible production of "Dream Evil" bothers me, I will often lean in that direction. "All The Fools Sailed Away" is right up there with the big three songs on "Holy Diver" for me, and it isn't as overplayed. I know I can be a bit of a contrarian a lot of the time, so it's always worth asking if there's an odd opinion here and there.

What I take away from "Holy Diver" more than perhaps anything else is that Dio was always at his best when he had something novel to work with. He was amazing with Blackmore, and left before it could get tired. He was amazing with Iommi, and left before it could get tired. He was amazing with Campbell, and then it did get tired. And then he got tired in general, and recyling the same people for the rest of his life didn't give him the same spark as when he was at the height of his powers. It was almost as if he needed the challenge of proving to himself he could make a new band as good as the ones that came before. Being uncomfortable was what prompted his best work, and it was when he only started to work with people who made him comfortable that Dio became more of a myth of the past.

I think we're both dancing around the subject; was Dio the instigator of 'nerd metal'? You called it literary, but I think nerdy might be a more all-encompassing way of saying it. We've all heard in recent years about how the nerds will take over the world, and while they might be true in technology, Dio might prove it can also be true in metal. And if we're being honest, metal can be far nerdier than we like to think, now can't it? Zeppelin was singing about hedgerows and magic, but Robert Plant was probably stoned out of his mind. Dio sang about a wizard in "Stargazer", and you knew damn well he was putting his heart and soul into it. That's some serious nerd dedication.

Perhaps it is underrated in this regard, but "Rainbow In The Dark" was a big factor is helping metal move into the mainstream. Everyone might have thought that keyboard riff was lame as hell, but it turned that song into an MTV staple. Dio paved the way of the metal pop single, in many ways. I'm sure a lot of people are going to cringe and wish he had never done that, but it's interesting to think about whether the Metallicas of the world would have had an even harder time breaking through if Dio hadn't shown that a metal band could cross over to a degree already.

You ask a hard question there, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's tough to call him a 'replacement singer' when he started out in Rainbow. We could call them a replacement for Deep Purple, but that doesn't seem entirely fair. Second, while Dio is far more successful in terms of sales, I would personally say Bruce Dickinson's "Accident Of Birth", "The Chemical Wedding", and "Tyranny Of Souls" trio is above and beyond any three Dio-the-band albums. But in general, yes, I think Dio would be most people's pick. His solo career is far more important than Sammy Hagar's, for example.

So let's dive into the record. Favorite song? Least favorite song?

D.M: Well, it's hard to know exactly what the right word for Dio is when it comes to nerd metal.  Because, let's just call it what it is, metal has always been saturated with nerd-dom.  With the possible exception of Pantera, virtually every metal act, and the tough-guy ones in particular, are solely populated by downtrodden nerds.  I mean, it takes a certain level of obsession to be good enough at the arts to make a profession of it in any event.  Already we're narrowing down the field of players to those who spend a lot of time with art, who can, with all apologies because I count myself among the injured party, safely be called nerds.  And the more aggressive the music, the higher the bpm goes, the more nonsensical the imagery and themes, the nerdier the audience gets.  I'm thinking of one particular Cannibal Corpse fan that you and I used to happen across in days long gone.  (Sidebar: I think there's a whole corollary discussion here about the nerdiness of metal contributes to its exclusionary fan bases - people who have been excluded finally have the power to exclude, etc.  But I don't know that that's for today.)

But I told you that story to tell you this one - I don't know that Dio was so much the instigator as the vanguard, in some combination with Iron Maiden (once they got Dickinson.)  Dio made it, well, perhaps 'cool' is too strong a word, but 'publicly acceptable' to sing about dragons and wizards and rainbows and use power chords while doing so (that last is an important caveat.)

Getting to your ending questions, I'm going to be cliche' again.  The Big 3 songs on this album are the classics for a reason, and "Stand Up and Shout" is just so good.  It's not only the most straightforward riff with the best giddy-up, it also is the track where Dio seems to be having the most fun.  Nobody think of this as the best Dio performance on the record, but there's an authenticity to it, like Dio is not only telling us but himself that he's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.  The song is even better for the fact that it's the album's opening statement.  In this era of metal, there are a lot of contenders for a list of best album openers, but "Stand Up and Shout" prefaces the whole of "Holy Diver" in a way that even "Hit the Lights" couldn't.  You only get one chance at a first impression, and "Stand Up and Shout" makes a better statement than all of its contemporaries.

On the flip side, I'm going to dodge the question a little, because there are a handful of cuts that I don't personally like, but are probably just victims of the era they were written in.  What I will say is that "Gypsy" is a bad song.  It sounds like a lazy cover of an AC/DC b-side, and it doesn't play to any of Dio's strengths as a vocalist, or the band's that set the table for him.  It's a gross miscalculation that breaks up all the momentum from the first two cuts on the record and takes us out of the magic into a direction we didn't need to go.

How about you?

CHRIS C: I find that rather fascinating about metal and nerd-dom, considering that metal fans love to talk about how cool metal is. Perhaps that plays into why I think metal songs about metal are so lame. To paraphrase an old friend of mine, it goes something like, "I'm not a nerd. You're a nerd, nerd." Sounds ridiculous, but you're right that it is rather common in metal. But when we're talking about music that has always been made by and for outcasts, being cool and popular shouldn't be expected.

I think I lean toward Dio being the main instigator, if for no other reason than he made it far more obvious. Maiden writing about the old tv show "The Prisoner" was definitely nerdy, but it could also be heard without the necessary context as just another metal song. And with them looking more the part, they could skate by to the people who didn't know much about history or the arts (and I think they leaned more into it over the following years, after Dio got a head start in the mainstream). Dio's nerdiness was front-and-center. You can't hear a song about a wizard as anything else, and we have all seen the video for "Holy Diver", right? That's awfully close to being full-on LARP-ing.

Your thesis makes sense to me. It might not be intentional, however. The nerdy metal fans who had always been excluded might not being trying to exclude others from their metal haven, but rather are so uncomfortable with 'their thing' going mainstream that they self-sabotage it. Attention is hard to deal with when you aren't used to getting any.

I will also agree with you that "Gypsy" is probably the worst song on the album. I know it fits the same mold that "Lady Evil" and "Voodoo" did on the two Black Sabbath albums he was coming off of did, but it's rather forgettable. I'm guessing the other songs you don't care for are "Caught In The Middle" and "Invisible", the former of which I actually like a lot. Dio every once in a while was sneaky about throwing a great almost pop song into the mix. "Invisible" would be my choice for second worst.

I was tempted to say "Holy Diver" itself should be on that list, as I have never begun to understand the thought process behind putting that minute-plus of wind and noise as the intro to the track. You want to talk about killing momentum, there's no way to build any of it with that standing in the way. Bands have been throwing those kinds of things on their albums forever, and I just don't get it. Do you?

My favorites are the big three as well. No offense to the rest of the songs, but sometimes classics are classics for a reason. What I hadn't necessarily had at the front of my mind before is how "Holy Diver" is more like a third chapter to the "Heaven & Hell" and "Mob Rules" era than it seems. Structurally, Dio wasn't deviating that far from how those two albums had their tracks laid out. The different sound of the band covered a lot of that up, but they weren't reinventing the wheel.

So here's two big questions; 1)Was "Holy Diver" so great the Dio band was destined to fall apart trying to recapture the magic?, and 2)Which nerd-tastic album we've talked about do you go with; "Holy Diver" or "Number Of The Beast"?

D.M: An ancient memory kindled by our conversation: My dad (still) owns a copy of Black Sabbath's "Master of Reality" on vinyl, but he never listened to it, so I was never curious about it (especially since the cover cool in a minimalist way, but that didn't appeal to fourth-grade me.  It was the '90s, I wanted everything to be lasers and the colors of the San Jose Sharks.) The kid who lived next door to me was a year older than me, and as we hung out, we would compare musical fandom notes.  One day, he came to me and said "I just got this, it has angels smoking cigarettes on the cover, it's called "Heaven and Hell."  I don't recall actually listening to it with him, but it was always in his room on his music rack when we were playing video games.  (Sidebar: he is also the reason why, to this day, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's "1st of Tha Month" occasionally gets stuck in my head.) 

Dude, the "Holy Diver" video.  You know what Dio really was?  Dio wasn't the first nerd in metal.  Not even close.  But he was the first to not feel any kind of shame about it.  And perhaps that was the revolution of the man, even beyond his music.  Without the video for "Holy Diver," I daresay we'd never have gotten the video for Grim Reaper's "Fear No Evil" two years later, which might be the most ridiculous music video ever made (challenged only by Master P's "Make 'em Say Ugh.") That in itself dovetails into another point - there was an era there, contained entirely in the '80s, when artists could make videos like that and it was unquestionably awesome.  There was no judgment, no ironic sense of self, just bombast and bravado and spikes.  Hair metal, of course, ruined the party for everyone by taking this image to its illogical extreme, a saccharine, styrofoam copy of something that was, if not artistically challenging, at least pure in its own way.  What happened to that?  And why has it never come back?  Or has it?  Will we look at Powerwolf videos in the same way twenty years from now?  Is the difference just emerging technology and more affordable production?  Either way, Dio ushered in an era of, for lack of a better term, over-the-top innocence, which I think we could all use in an era where we take ourselves very seriously.

I actually don't mind either of those songs.  My only issue with "Caught in the Middle" is that it sound akin to Judas Priest's "Devil's Child," which predates "Holy Diver" by a year and is a superior song.  I don't know that I personally would reach for them a lot, but they're tight and well-performed, and even if a little ham-fisted, they both are trying to put voice to some forward-thinking messages, especially for 1983.  As I mentioned before, some of the songs on Holy Diver are a product of their era, and that can only be counted against them so much, if at all.  Better question: correlation or causation?  Was Holy Diver the wellspring of what we think of as '80s metal? (Excluding thrash?)

When you address the question of how the band could never recapture that magic, I think it's important to remember that the magic was all within Dio.  The other members of the band, talented though they were, didn't have the ability for musical or thematic manipulation that Dio himself did.  This is evidenced by a simple glance down the members' discography, where they were very accomplished, but always as a replacement for someone else, or as part of a band with a lesser legacy than Dio.  And RJD by this point had already been making rock music in some form for a good long time - the advent of his solo band comes at what would have been the middle or even the end of a more typical established career.  So how much more did Dio have in the creative tank when "Holy Diver" was written?

As for the song "Holy Diver" itself, I've always theorized that it was originally intended to lead the record, until someone stepped in and said "you can't start an album with a minute of silence, it doesn't set the tone, and you've got a perfectly good banger right here that should hit lead off."  By then, the recording was probably done and mastered, and couldn't be altered for the album.

To that end, despite a lot of well-wishing critical acclaim, I wasn't a big fan of the album Dio made under the moniker "Heaven & Hell" late in his life.  To your point, I thought his reunion with Iommi sounded very same-y, and uninspired.

And I know we're here to extol the virtues of "Holy Diver," but I can't lie to you - I ride with "Number of the Beast" on my shield.  There's only one bad song on there ("22 Acacia Avenue," and there's something perfect about the orchestration and arrangement of that album, never mind the talent of the personalities involved.  It's also, to me, aged much better.

CHRIS C: I've got a thought, and it might be wildly ridiculous, but it's the first thing that came to mind to answer your question. Here goes; I think what might have ended that period of metal ridiculousness is the rise of social acceptance. By that, I specifically mean the rise in how open and present gay culture became in our society. When Dio was doing his thing, and Manowar were wearing loincloths, it was still at the tail end of a time when that sort of thing was considered manly. But once gay culture became accepted, and those musicians saw the way their image was copying aspects from the other side of the tracks, it lost a lot of its cool factor. The lameness was always there, but it wouldn't have been obvious to nearly as many people in Middle American that Manowar looked like part of certain fetish cultures. Not like it is now. And given that Halford was borrowing from that scene, and very few people realized it until he came out, I think it bears out.

That's my theory.

I'm not versed well enough in 80s metal to say for sure, but I would put "Holy Diver" as a strong contender for the wellspring. There were elements of those two Sabbath records that starting things out, but I think Viv's guitar tone really crystalized what the 80s were going to sound like. There's a big difference between the metal of the 70s and of the 80s, and the amps themselves were a big part of that. The 80s were all about saturation, and it was a wholly new harmonic world we were dealing with.

Oh man, have you heard the two bands the former Dio guys put together since his passing? They're both just so, so bland. Goldy is a boring guitarist (and I say that even having a couple of his Dio albums among my favorites) without Dio around to pour charisma on them, and his band is the better of the two. For all the animosity that existed between Dio and Viv, to have him start up a band named after "The Last In Line", gather up the old troops, and become a f'n blues rock band by their third album, just goes to show how little he probably ever had to do with the Dio band's success. Between how much bluesy stuff he's done, and how happy he was to play Def Leppard's pop hits for decades, do we really think any of "Holy Diver" was Viv's vision?

Heaven & Hell the band wasn't great, no, which was quite the disappointment. The three songs they did for the Dio-era compilation were great, and the lead single "Bible Black" is one of their best songs ever, but the rest of it fell short. I thought Dio was gearing up for one last great statement, but alas, we didn't get that. I'm assuming your main complaint will be how slow it was, which gets back to the point I was hinting at earlier on. Dio once said he liked doing the slower stuff, because it was easier to write lyrics and melodies with more room to work with. I find that rather interesting, because few people outside of doom tend to like slower songs, but also because he's right. It is harder to write something deep and captivating when you have fewer notes available to you. It's another case where what works for the musician doesn't always work for the audience.

I'm going to have to side with Dio on this one. It's not that "Number Of The Beast" is noticeably weaker in any respect, but "Holy Diver" competes as my favorite Dio album, while you know I love the first four reunion era Maiden albums the most. Something doesn't compute in my mind saying Maiden's fifth(?) best album could be better than perhaps Dio's best.

Before we get too close to wrapping things up, I will ask the associated question which I am going to answer in more depth in a separate essay; Do you prefer Dio the band, Dio with Sabbath, or Dio with Rainbow?

D.M: I freely admit that I avoided The Last in Line (the band) solely on your recommendation that I do so.  Like we said, the other musicians in the band weren't really the reason anybody was listening.  Now, they were certainly more than contract mercenaries like some solo efforts become, but they weren't what was selling tickets.  I mean, when Dokken fell apart, people were interested in what material George Lynch could punch out himself.  I can't recall anyone asking the same about Viv, and let me also admit that I've never once thought about it.  You remember when Fear Factory had all those legal troubles (the first time,) and it ended with Ray Herrera and Christian Olde Wulbers forming their own band, Arkaea, that wasn't good and no one cared about?  This is much the same.

I personally prefer Dio as a solo artist (so, the band, to answer your question,) because it's the only time where I feel like I get the unadulterated picture of Dio's personality on full display.  It's the one place where he didn't have to mix with someone else's vision, and there's an undeniable charm to the way Dio thought about music, presentation and his own voice.  For my money, when I think of Dio, I think immediately of two things 1) the horns, which metal owes him forever, and 2) Dio pacing slowly waving a sword larger than him in the "Holy Diver" video.  (If there's a third thing, it's Dio, the great thespian, pointing to his wrist while singing about time in the "Rainbow in the Dark" video, while not wearing a watch.)  And I say these things in earnest, without a hint of irony, because they make me smile.  I don't get that same feeling from his more collaborative projects.  Dio the band was who RJD was always meant to be.

I'm going to let you take us home, but I do want to ask one question as my getaway: is Dio's ultimately legacy ultimately altered because he is so frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Ozzy (who is, fair or foul, the more reconigizble and famous vocalist?)  Or is Dio able to stand freely on his own, on his own merits?

CHRIS C: I completely understand your reasoning, but I'm going to have to say Dio the band comes in third for me. It might be the purest form of Dio, but his cadre of guitar players just aren't as interesting, on the whole, as Blackmore and Iommi were. That's a style thing, though, much like how I'm probably one of a very select number of people who prefer Roy Z's playing with Bruce Dickinson to what Smith and Murray do. I'm a weirdo.

I don't think Dio suffers in any way from the comparison, because it always comes with the acknowledgement Dio was the better singer. Being so great you could replace a character like Ozzy and be successful is something only a few people could have done. Besides, Dio is in the pantheon of great metal singers. It's pretty much always Dio, Halford, and Dickinson whenever the subject comes up. He might not be as known in the mainstream, but Dio's legacy in the metal world exceeds that of Ozzy. One is a character, the other is a true legend.

Dio will live on, and on, and on. All these years later, no one has ever really topped him. I'm not sure they ever will.