Several Revealing Interviews with Ronnie James Dio
Not only one of the best musicians in heavy metal, but also one of the most brilliant. . .
Today would be the late great Ronnie James Dio’s 79th birthday. He would have been remarkable as a talent just taking his powerful melodic vocals, his amazing and unrelenting showmanship, and his abilities as a lyrics writer into account. He was also a brilliant bandleader. Being able to play a wide range of instruments certainly played a role in that, but in my view Dio’s intellect was a much more significant factor.
I first encountered Dio’s music in 1984, the summer between middle school and high school, when my family spent a good amount of time camping with other families in the local Parents Without Partners group. One of the older kids, Jerry, had a boombox and a bunch of tapes, and we’d blast them as we hiked, played frisbee and football, and flirted with some of the girls. Jerry also snuck a good bit of brandy and sloe gin out of his dad’s liquor cabinet, but that’s a different story. One of those tapes was Masters of Metal volume 1, and among the other stellar songs it contained was Dio’s “Rainbow In The Dark”. A few weeks into high school, I bought Holy Diver, and that was it for me. I was hooked on that voice, the heaviness and hardness of the music, and the range of themes explored in the lyrics. I backtracked into Dio’s albums in his stints with Rainbow and Black Sabbath, and continued on as a fan with each new solo band album.
It was only through the internet, and specifically through watching YouTube videos of interviews with Ronnie James Dio, however, that I came to recognize and realize the scope and the depth of his intellectual abilities. He discusses, often in a very patient and matter-of-fact way, a vast variety of matters, only a portion of which have to do specifically with the music business or his craft. Watching the footage, you notice that Dio adapts his conversation to the level of his interlocutors, and to the communicative situation. He’ll joke around and make a few remarks if that’s all the context allows for. He knows how to cut precisely to the point he wants to make. But when he has an interviewer that opens up space for him to really cut loose, Dio displays incredible insight.
Five Virtues Of Ronnie James Dio
Philosophers through millennia have delineated a number of desirable excellences of the human intellect. There’s no strict consensus among philosophers about how many of these there are, where one ends and another begins, or even what they should be called. Aristotle, for example, laid the tracks for several traditions in picking out what he called “intellectual virtues”, general ways in which we human beings develop and employ our distinctively human capacities well. Other great thinkers use different language and concepts to denote these sorts of things. My reason for mentioning Aristotle here though is that some of the virtues, intellectual and moral, that he talks about are what Ronnie James Dio displayed.
There are five in particular I would like to highlight. More of them could be discussed in terms of Dio, and perhaps I’ll do that some other time. First of all, there is what Aristotle calls technē — “craft”, “skill”, “art” are often how we translate this — and it means a productive or poetic capacity. Understanding and being able to produce an effect well, intentionally, and consistently. I would argue that, among the figures populating the history of classic heavy metal, Dio could be placed in the top rank when it comes to the mastery of the technē mousikē — the overall craft of music (placing him among such other luminaries as Steve Harris, Lemmy Kilmister, or Toni Iommi).
There is another technē Dio is also clearly a master of as well, one which Aristotle thought was so important that he literally wrote the book on it, rhetoric, which is not just an art of persuasion but also one bearing on communication and even the organization of one’s thoughts and material.
Practical wisdom or prudence — phronēsis in Greek — is another “intellectual virtue” Aristotle discusses. This is something that all of us need, but alas not all of us develop or possess, and it goes beyond just good-old-fashioned “common sense”. A person who has and uses practical wisdom understands, within specific contexts, and also in more general manners, what is good and bad for human beings, and how we go wrong in understanding and applying those notions. They can see an “end” or goal within a framework, and determine the best means to achieve it. Again, as you watch the interviews below, you’ll see Dio displaying this trait.
Epistēmē is another intellectual virtue Aristotle discusses. We often translate it as “science” or “knowledge”, but neither of those terms in our present language adequately capture its full range of meaning. I sometimes use the still-not-satisfactory “disciplinary knowledge” to convey it. This is something perhaps more rigorous than technē. Epistēmē aims at being systematic. It employs principles, processes of argument and inquiry, provides answers as to the “why” of things. Again, in my view, Dio reveals himself to be quite “knowledgeable” when he has the opportunity to display it.
And that brings me to a fifth quality, one that Aristotle calls a “moral virtue” rather than an intellectual one — though it can certainly apply to intellectual matters. In Greek, this is megalopsukhia, which can be translated literally as “great-souledness”. More often it gets translated by a word derived from the Latin cognate magnanimitas, “magnanimity”. Many people in the present day use that as a synonym for “generosity”, but magnanimity involves much more that just that trait. The great-souled person, according to Aristotle, is someone who is deserving of great honor, who knows that and rates themself accordingly, and who expects that from their peers — though not from people significantly lower than them in status or ability. Again, there is much more that could be said on this topic with respect to Dio. It is enough though, just to see how he relates himself to an audience or to an interviewer, to get some sense of what magnanimity looks like in a metal context.
A Selection of Excellent and Interesting Interviews
These are far from all of the available interviews with Dio that would be well worth checking out. . . but here’s a decent selection for getting some solid sense of his views, his insights, his reflections, and his wit
This is a famous 1994 interview with a complete neophyte to metal, Joan Quinn. Dio gets asked to explain what “heavy metal” itself is, and gives a well-thought-out in-depth answer, including the insight “without drums and bass, there’s no sense for the guitarist or singer to even be there”.
This is a short interview, early on, in Australia’s Sounds show. One high note: Dio is asked who his three favorite heavy metal bands are, says AC/DC, The Scorpions, and Deep Purple and briefly explains why.
We can’t leave this one out, of course. One of the most raw of the interviews from a tour bus after a show. Among the topics he talks about are Dio the band, his Rainbow connections, the reunions of Black Sabbath. He stresses how he wants to work with musicians who don’t just want to do the same thing, but continue to progress musically. Includes his astute assessments of the music scene of the mid-1990s.
In this early interview (sound only) from his stint with Black Sabbath, Dio discusses a range of topics, including how Elf started out right, the “revolving door” of Rainbow, and his response to Ozzy Osborne disparaging him.
Here’s a very blunt interview with Toazted from 2006, in which Dio critiques what the music industry has turned into in America and how it is different in Europe.
One of Dio’s last interviews. He discusses the “personal touch” as part of the experience of playing to small crowds, his views on playing to massive crowds at festivals like Wacken, and how he keeps from letting praise lead him to pridefulness.
I’m Greg Sadler, among other things the Heavy Metal Philosopher. I’ve been a metalhead since childhood, and continue rocking out now in my 50s. With my co-host Scott Tarulli, I hold a monthly Classic Metal Class. I’m also the president of ReasonIO, the editor of Stoicism Today, and a producer of highly popular YouTube videos on philosophy. I teach at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, produce the Sadler’s Lectures podcast, and co-host the Wisdom for Life radio show
