I’d be happy to do that for you. [laughs]
You do that for me because I don’t do that stuff for myself. I don’t take compliments well. I don’t want to let that get over me. I don’t want to think of myself what other people think about me. The praise that has been lavished on me has been incredible. If I let it go to my head like some people would, I never would get into my door with a head like that. Another reason is that I know what I do. I know if I was good that night. I know if I was good on this thing that I wrote. I know if I performed well. I know all these things because I’m my own worst critic. I’m a very intense person when it comes to my work. So, if someone comes to me and says, ‘You were great tonight!’ Hey, I was probably awful that night, but what was I supposed to do? Am I supposed to say, ‘Oh, shut up. I was terrible tonight.’ No. I’ve learned to blanketly just accept whatever comes along. ‘You were great tonight.’ Well thank you very much. ‘Gee, I didn’t think you sang that one very well tonight.’ Well, ok, I’ll try to do better. That’s just the way it is. If you can deal with it that way, then it makes life a lot easier, because life is not just music. Life goes a lot deeper than that. That’s only a little part of my personality and a little part of my life. I think once I put it into perspective, I was ok.
You mentioned your first band, Elf. Have you grown a lot since those days or do you think that you’ve remained pretty constant?
I think I’ve always remained constant. I think that this is one of the greatest attributes that anyone can ever have. I’ve always had very, very high goals and very, very high standards. With Elf, that was just a chance to go through those standards and refine them. I think the greatest change is that the music has changed that I did from Elf to now. I think was always leaning toward a darker side of music. Elf was kind of a honky-tonk kind of band dictated by the piano more than anything else. Once you have a piano in your band, it’s kind of hard to be gloomy and dark. I don’t know many piano players who can pull that one off. So, the music changed as we went along. It got a little bit darker toward the end of Elf, and then, of course, in Rainbow, it got a bit darker and Sabbath was the ultimate for me. It was my opportunity to be as dark as I wanted to be which really led me to all of the next plateaus with Dio. So, I think mainly the music has changed. The insistence on quality and just the learning process al started right there in Elf. It’s just the natural progression of things.
You said that Black Sabbath was very dark. What was inspiring you at that time? Was it the stuff that you were reading? Are you just a naturally dark person?
Well, things that I read always inspire me. I don’t read to become inspired. I don’t read to write. I read because I enjoy reading. I’m always amazed by the workings of the human mind and when you read a great book, especially a great work of fiction, you realize just how much it took for that person to come up with that idea, and trying to do that myself as a song writer, that’s why I can appreciate what they do with books. I think it’s a little bit more difficult sometimes as a song writer because you don’t have all that time that a writer has to set up the plot, to explain what’s going on, to get the twists and turns. You have your three to six minutes to say what you have to do and you really have to edit everything. A song is almost like an edited book. I’m inspired sometimes by books. I am much more inspired by the music. I’m always inspired by the music and with Sabbath that was the case. It was the first band that I was in that really wanted to do what I wanted to do. They’d already been doing that anyway, real heavy, heavier than hell, darker than hell, and great people. I just loved being with them. We were all of the same ilk from working class families. We just hit it off instantly. Musically, I brought something to the table that they didn’t have before and they brought something to me that I didn’t have before. In their case, they brought to me this heaviness in tracks and riffs that Tony played that were just beyond belief. I brought to them more musicality. Of course, as a vocalist and as a musician, I think that I brought a lot more depth than Ozzy did. And so, I gave them something other than what they’d experienced before. That’s why Heaven and Hell had a lot more ‘musicalness’ in it than the Sabbath albums before. And that’s not a commentary on what they did before, because I think what they did before was wonderful. I thought it was great. It was the beginning of the whole genre as far as I’m concerned. There my inspiration was from the players and the people in that band. Probably a little of the inspiration because Sabbath had not really had an awful lot of success via their two albums they did before we did Heaven and Hell and that was Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die. Those albums were virtually the end of their career and so when we did get together, it looked as though Sabbath was the old farts of the world who weren’t going to have any more success at all. So, it was inspiring to be able to achieve that as well because that was something I, in particular, always insist upon. We must be very intense about getting our success level up there. It just worked. The whole situation was just right. There was a lot to overcome. The inspiration was there from the guys and from the music they played. It was all just the right situation for me at the right time.
Do you feel that the record labels that you’ve dealt with in the past were as supportive of what you were doing as they could have been?
I have found that in almost every instance the record companies that I’ve dealt with were stupid and had no idea what was going on. I think the way the record business has changed is this: Earlier on, the people who were presidents and CEOs of Warner Brothers and Columbia, etc. were fans. They were presidents of those companies because they couldn’t be players, they couldn’t be writers, but they loved music. So, through their own love of music, they got into it from a different end and they became presidents, A&R men, etc. They were there ready to nurture the band that they were going to sign. They signed a band and gave them five years to do something. In some cases, they kept them around for ten years some without much great success but because they believed in the music and they believed that the only way it was going to happen was to give them the time to develop. And then, in came the accountants and the presidents and chairmen of record companies are the people who like to look at the figures and say, ‘The ink is red. We better make it black’ and it’s become a big industry. They’ll give a band one chance and if it doesn’t work – Bang – ‘throw them away. Hey, the pen is out of ink.’ That’s the greatest difference in the record industry. Now, when we began as Sabbath, I must admit, they were quite good to us because we had one friend within the record company and he was cool at the time, but the rest of them didn’t care; didn’t know what the hell we were doing. So, we fooled them by having a successful record right out of the box. The record was really more successful instantly because it got played between concerts. I mean, when you go to a show, between one act and another, they were playing this album Heaven and Hell that obviously the sound man found and said, ‘Well, we ought to play this.’ It became a hit right away just because of that. People started demanding it, then it became a blockbuster because it was a great album, and then we toured and everything went well. In the case of Dio, they didn’t even know we were recording the first album. I was out of Sabbath at the time. I had a solo deal with Warner Brothers which they, the record company, insisted that I sign, not me, contrary to some popular belief that I was doing everything for myself and nothing for that band. That’s an absolute lie. I never have ever written a song in my life that wasn’t for the band that I was in and I never wrote anything on the side saying ‘Well, I’ll do this for myself.’ Never. That’s just not the way I do things. To me, every band I’ve been in, I was going to be in forever, but that doesn’t work. I had to go into it with that attitude. But, when we were doing the Holy Diver album, the record company virtually didn’t even know we were in the studio until we had been in the studio for about two weeks and we got a call from them and they said, ‘Well, what are you doing there?’ ‘Well, we’re making an album via the contract you signed with us.’
‘Oh, well, maybe we better talk about this.’ ‘Well, it’s a bit late. We’re in the studio.’ ‘Oh, well, can you come in tomorrow?’ So, we went in and I met with Ted Templeman. Ted was head of A&R then and a very powerful man there. Unfortunately, they called a meeting for ten o’clock in the morning and I’d been in the studio all night. When Ted came in, he looked like he’d been dragged by a thousand dogs and cats around the parking lot at Warner Brothers. He came in, and I’d known Ted from before, and he said, ‘Ronnie, what are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s your appointment, mate. You made the appointment.’ And he said, ‘Why did they make it at ten o’clock?’ I said, ‘I have no idea, but here we are.’ He said, ‘So, what’s going on?’ I said, ‘We’re in the studio doing an album.’ He goes, ‘How’s it going?’ I said, ‘Great!’ He said, ‘Ok, have a good one.’ I said, ‘Ok.’ We went back in the studio. See, record companies are so foolish. They have this chain of command and unless somebody take responsibility… ‘It’s not my job. I don’t want to touch that.’ So, they needed somebody to say, ‘Ok.’ And they didn’t hear anything we did until probably two days before I was going to go in to mix the whole thing and somebody came down. ‘Oh, can we hear something?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re a bit late, man, because it’s already done. If you want to hear it – fine.’ So, we played some tracks for them. The first track we played for them was “Rainbow in the Dark” and they just flipped out, of course. They said, ‘Oh my god. This is unbelievable.’ Yeah, it’s really unbelievable. And after he left, they still didn’t do anything for us. It hit by the same method as the Sabbath thing. People started to play it between shows and the kids heard it right away. As soon as the kids heard it, they went, ‘Yeah!’ They made it a hit. Radio helped too, of course. Radio people picked up on it because kids called in to request it. But, it was a hit from the people. And believe me, that is the greatest feeling on the face of the earth. As far as record companies go, I don’t feel I’ve ever had any incredible good treatment from them. Right down to the point of leaving Warner Brothers, I didn’t even get a gold watch. I didn’t even want a gold watch. I could have used the watchband or something. We could have used someone to say, ‘It’s time for our tenure to run out. We’re going in a different direction and you’ll have to do something else.’ That’s fine. I understand, I’m not angry at them for making business decisions. I think it was a decision they had to make and I’m more than willing to accept it. But, to not even get a phone call from one person from that company, and believe me, I knew them all. I thought we were all, at least, close; well that’s a lesson you learn. It doesn’t happen that way. People are out there covering their own butts, not yours. That was the hardest part for me. Truthfully, I think we did a hell of a lot more for the record companies than they ever did for us.
I hear that from a lot of people across the board with the bigger companies and even with the smaller companies, but it seems that the trend is now to be self-produced. You go out and do your own press, your own marketing. What about MTV? Do you think MTV gave you any help? I remember seeing some of your videos on there once upon a time.
I think that MTV was very, very good to all of us, but let’s dissect that one for a start. We saw the way MTV went around and went, ‘Aha, that’s enough of that.’ The situation is that MTV is a business organization. They have to go with what’s going to make them money. In this particular case, metal had its run. You watch enough metal videos and you realize that each one was almost exactly the same. The music wasn’t progressing. The videos weren’t progressing. More and more makeup seemed to be plastered on people. I mean, this is heavy metal music. What’s the lipstick crap? And it just got worse and worse. It became the Poison generation. It was bands like that, I think, were what destroyed what we had all started. I think MTV realized that there were a lot of disgruntled people who wanted to hear something new. So, they started to change their format and metal got aimed out. Well, that’s just the way life is. Metal people say, ‘Well, MTV destroyed it.’ How could MTV destroy you? You didn’t write good enough songs, mate. You didn’t do anything right for yourself. There was success before MTV. Why couldn’t there be success after MTV? So, I’m not happy with MTV, never have been. I think that they used the metal genre, which was available at the time, to make their bones, that’s what got MTV off the ground, but times change. Music changed and people’s likes changed. What were they supposed to do, try to force feed people music that they didn’t like? They’d fold. So, I can understand what they had to do. None of us was happy about it at the time, but if you have any type of brain, you realize that it was something the MTV people had to do. It was a great run when it was going. It was great to see yourself on TV every two or three seconds.
Do you still get to make videos?
Yeah, we’ve done that too. We’ve done videos as well. The hard part, of course, is that there aren’t that many outlets anymore. There’s The Box and there are local video things that all help. I mean, any kind of publicity that you can get certainly helps, but it’s nothing like it used to be. I think the most we spent for a video was for a song called “All the Fools Sailed Away” and that cost us almost three hundred thousand dollars to do. It was at the end of all the big MTV metal extravaganza things, so it didn’t get as much attention as the price tag deserved. We do continue to do them. I think it’s a good publicity tool. People get to see what they’re listening to. Sometimes it’s a bad publicity tool. It points to things that aren’t true, especially with the pop-up things. Videos are a different animal and we obviously have gotten well out of it compared to what we used to do.
Let me ask you about the song “Mask of the Great Deceiver” which you sang on Kerry Livgren’s Seeds of Change album. What was it that drew you to that song?
Well, I like the song. Kerry wrote two songs for me, “Mask of the Great Deceiver” and “Live for the King.” I knew Kerry from before. Kerry was the most incredible Satanist that I’d ever known in my life. This man was from the dark side of the dark side, but a great person. I’ll always love Kerry. He’s a great person, but he was studying Satanism. He had a revelation one night and it completely changed his life and he became a born-again Christian. So, when I was contacted, I had no idea what Kerry’s religious preferences were, nor did I care. It didn’t matter to me. A song is a song. I heard the song and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a great, great song. I’d love to do it.’ Eventually, we came around on the financial end of it. I was living in England at the time and I flew into Atlanta, where we did that track, and I sang “Mask of the Great Deceiver” and “Live for the King.” After finishing it, I said, ‘Is that ok, Kerry?’ He goes, ‘It’s exactly what I wanted.’ So, then I found out, after I’d gone home, that Kerry was a born-again Christian and it was really a Christian album. It didn’t matter to me. I sang the song just how I felt it. Obviously, it was right for Kerry, but it was very strange for me to realize that I had done this conception that this was not a Christian album and I approached it… I mean, here’s this guy coming from Black Sabbath. If you look at that album you will find that there are a lot of credits given to people as to where they came from. Paul Hammond was the bass player for Atlanta Rhythm Section. David Pack was the singer in Ambrosia. And then, Ronnie James Dio. You notice that it didn’t say ‘from Black Sabbath.’ Obviously, he was a born-again Christian and didn’t want to put that on the thing. It was a very special session for me. It went so quickly and I stayed a couple of extra days with Kerry and got to know him even better. It was marvelous. That album is always mentioned by people at shows. They’ll always come up with it. I’ll see two or three of them at a show. It’s great to see it.
Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1 Page 12